Art in England: Notes and Studies

by Dutton Cook

'I find it convenient in this volume, and I wish I had thought of the expedient before, whenever I get into a difficulty to leave the reader to work it out;' and in another we are stopped by such a half-indolent half-arrogant, 'No Thoroughfare' as this. He has been discoursing on the leaf,—then follows an inquiry into the conditions of the stem. Then he tells us:—

'I intended to have given a figure to show the results of the pressure of the weight of all the leafage on a great lateral bough in modifying its curves, the strength of timber being greatest where the leverage of the mass tells most. But I find nobody ever reads things which it takes any trouble to understand, so that it is no use to write them.'

In a higher tone he had once announced the aim and principle of his book, claiming for it a difference from most books, and 'a chance of being in some respects better for the difference, in that it had not been written either for fame, or for money, or for conscience' sake, but of necessity.' 'I saw an injustice done and tried to remedy it. I heard a falsehood taught and was compelled to deny it. Nothing else was possible to me.' In that good time there was no question as to whether people would or would not take the trouble to understand. They were taught what the teacher deemed to be true, and the risk was on their own heads if they neglected the teaching. It was of use to write then, intelligibly or unintelligibly, truly and wholly; but this was before Mr. Ruskin had strayed very much from his road, or broken off, breathless and worn out, from a journey, doubled by aberrations, rendered wearisome by the most wilful wandering, and stopped at last,—not perfected.

In extenuation of the delay in the completion of the work, the author pleads his many employments during five years:—his book on the Elements of Drawing; his addresses at Manchester, and his examination, 'with more attention than they deserved,' of some of the theories of political economy referred to in those addresses; the Manchester Exhibition, 'chiefly in its magnificent Reynolds' constellation;' a visit to Scotland, to look at Dunblane and Jedburgh, and other favourite sites of Turner's; and the arrangement of the Turner drawings, the property of the nation, for the trustees of the National Gallery. To this last task Mr. Ruskin set himself with characteristic enthusiasm. In the lower room of the National Gallery, when he began his work, there were 'upwards of nineteen thousand pieces of paper drawn upon by Turner in one way or other,'—many on both sides, some with four, five, or six subjects on each side,—'some in chalk, which the touch of the finger would sweep away, others in ink rotted into holes, others eaten away by damp and mildew, and falling into dust at the edges, in cases and bags of fragile decay, others worm-eaten, some mouse-eaten, many torn halfway through, numbers doubled (quadrupled I should say) into four, being Turner's favourite mode of packing for travelling; nearly all rudely flattened out from the bundles in which Turner had finally rolled them up and squeezed them into his drawers in Queen Anne Street' In the edges of these flattened bundles lay the 'dust of thirty years' accumulation, black, dense, and sooty.' With two assistants, Mr. Ruskin was at work, all the autumn and winter of 1857, 'every day all day long, and often far into the night.' Then, by way of resting himself, Mr. Ruskin proceeded to hunt down Turner subjects along the course of the Rhine on the north of Switzerland. He crossed Lombardy afterwards, and found, unexpectedly, some good Paul Veroneses at Turin. He had been troubled by many questions respecting the 'real motives of Venetian work,' which he had planned to work out in the Louvre; but 'seeing that Turin was a good place wherein to keep out of people's way,' he settled there instead. 'With much consternation, but more delight,' he discovered that he 'had never got to the roots of the moral power of the Venetians;' that for this a stern course of study was required of him. The book was given up for the year.

'The winter was spent mainly in trying to get at the mind of Titian.' The issue necessitated his going in the spring to Berlin, 'to see,' as he tells us, 'Titian's portrait of Lavinia there, and to Dresden to see the Tribute Money, the elder Lavinia, and girl in white with the flag-fan. Another portrait at Dresden, of a lady in a dress of rose and gold, by me unheard of before, and one of an admiral at Munich, had like to have kept me in Germany all the summer.' How expositive is all this of the unstable fashion of Mr. Ruskin's temper and writings!

It is not to be marvelled at that the term 'Ruskinism' should be evolved from a system of opinions so impassioned and earnest, so thorough and deep-rooted, and, at the time at which they were first broached, so singular and courageous, as those of the author of Modern Painters. When Mr. Ruskin took up his pen, the 'old masters' were the religion, and the creed, and the idols, of the connoisseurs. It was of landscape he was particularly writing, but his fiery condemnation in one sentence of such names as 'Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Cuyp, Berghem, Both, Ruysdael, Hobbima, Teniers (in his landscapes), Paul Potter, Canaletti, and the various Van-Somethings and Back-Somethings, more especially and malignantly those who had libelled the sea,' carried dismay into the hearts of collectors, and he was denounced as guilty of an art sacrilege scarcely more marvellous for its impiety than its daring. His opinions, however, have passed through a burning fiery furnace of criticism, and have survived the ordeal. Earnestness is half success; and the truth that was the substratum of that earnestness has accomplished the rest. 'Ruskinism,' in its least invective and censorious form, has a host of followers and disciples. Take as its text the noble view of it contained in the following words descriptive of the book:—'It declares the perfectness and eternal beauty of the works of God, and tests all works of man by concurrence with or subjection to that.'

Time, that has given and changed the plan, has also been at work with certain of the judgments of the book. (It is with the fifth volume we are especially dealing,—for this may fairly be regarded as the 'summing up' of the divers opinions scattered through the earlier portions of the work.) The author of a book long in hand becomes himself the president of a court of appeal, in which his own earlier sentences are to be reversed or confirmed. It is one of the results of the heat and passion of first opinions that they seem to be harshly and cruelly framed when the time comes to tone down and qualify them; and the question arises, was it indispensable to be so savage,—was it absolutely necessary that what seemed to be the sword of justice should be wielded so angrily and without the slightest tempering of mercy? Still is there worth in the author's apology, 'that the oscillations of temper and progressions of discovery ought not to diminish the reader's confidence in the book;' 'that unless important changes are occurring in his opinions continually all his life long, not one of those opinions can be on any questionable subject true; all true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment, therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree, not of a cloud.'

So, then, come repentance and recantation. Mr. Ruskin's 'boy veneration for Rubens's physical art power,' and the 'strong expression of admiration for him, which to his great regret occur in the first volume,' are now solemnly withdrawn. Rubens is now only a 'healthy, worthy, kind-hearted, courtly-phrased animal.' But the fault lies as much at the door of the time, as at that of the man. The Reformation had come and gone. The reformers had cast out the errors, and rent in twain the fallacies of the Roman Catholic Church. Then came a standing still; a paralysis of religion. The Evangelicals despised the arts; effete and insincere Roman Catholicism had lost its hold on men. The painters sunk into rationalism; they became men of the world, 'with no belief in spiritual existence, no interests or affections beyond the grave.' They painted religious subjects, of course; these were duly supplied as per order, especially martyrdom; they liked the vigorous cruelty of them, and painted atrocities with gusto, deeming they were illustrating religion; and they painted 'virgins in blue,' and 'St. Johns in red,' as many as were wanted,—but all utterly cold, and soul-less, and irreverential. 'Happily,' remarks Mr. Ruskin, 'there is just this difference between the men of this modern period and the Florentines or Venetians, that whereas the latter never exert themselves fully except on a sacred subject, the Flemish and Dutch masters are always languid unless they are profane. Leonardo is only to be seen in the 'Cena'; Titian only in the 'Assumption'; but Rubens only in the 'Battle of the Amazons'; and Vandyck only at court; and he adds, his indignation mounting as he proceeds, 'absolutely now at last we find ourselves without sight of God in all the world!'

In another place Mr. Ruskin's old enemy, Salvator, receives more lenient treatment than of yore. True, he still regards him as a lost spirit, rendering Michelet's, 'Ce damné Salvator' tenderly as 'that condemned Salvator.' But Mr. Ruskin now perceives in him the 'last traces of spiritual life in the art of Europe, the last man to whom the thought of a spiritual existence presented itself as a conceivable reality. All succeeding men, however powerful,—Rembrandt, Rubens, Vandyck, Reynolds,—would have mocked at the idea of a spirit. They were men of the world, they are never in earnest, and they are never appalled. But Salvator was capable of pensiveness, of faith, and of fear.' 'He would have acknowledged religion had he seen any that was true, anything rather than that baseness which he did see.' 'If there is no other religion than this of popes and cardinals, let us to the robber's ambush and the dragon's den.' 'A little early sympathy, a word of true guidance, perhaps had saved him. What says he of himself? "Despiser of wealth and of death." Two grand scorns; but, oh! condemned Salvator, the question is not for man what he can scorn, but what he can love!' Again further on,—'In Salvator you have an awakened conscience and some spiritual power contending with evil, but conquered by it and brought into captivity to it.' Generally there is in this last volume a disposition to judge of the painter's art merits, especially in relation to his faculty of imitation, with more kindness and respect than in the earlier volumes.

This tendency to greater calmness and generosity of view in the case of Salvator (not to recite evidences of similar nature in other cases) is a sign of healthful mental progression. Opinions taken up in the first instance, possibly as much from impulse as conviction, grown from floating speculations into recognised realities, require to be defended less strenuously than in the early doubtful phase of their being, and still less need for their support virulent onslaughts upon antagonistic views. It is no longer necessary to degrade some painters utterly for the proper exaltation of some others; or it may be better to say, to deify one by the damnification of the whole balance of the fraternity. There have been victims enough on the shrine of Turner, and his manes are now appeased and his wrongs avenged. What need of further holocausts? So Mr. Ruskin loosens his grip and half sheaths his knife, and becomes more merciful and pitiful, though yet unable to do full justice to those who oppose him: for it is one of his marked peculiarities that he is unable to shift his point of view. He judges always by his own modern ex post facto standard; he cannot see with Salvator's eyes, or with the eyes of his contemporaries, and determine how fully he met the requirements of his age and time, how honestly he won the applause of the men about him. Mr. Ruskin asks two questions only—'Are these works accurate renderings of nature, as I by education and study now know nature to be?' and next, 'Are these high art in its purest, and most ideal, and most godly form?' By such Procrustean measurements he adjusts his decisions, and so misses the swarthy romance, the dramatic coarse fire of Salvator, and fails to appreciate the vigorous, affluent, gorgeous majesty of Rubens, before whose luxurious pageant canvas it always seems that, of right, pompous coronation music should be played, and multitudes huzza and banners wave. Perhaps some such feelings as these Mr. Ruskin himself at one time experienced, until, shocked by what he deemed the excessive mundaneness, the intense unspirituality of the great Fleming,—he revolted to the thoughtful, attenuated poetry of Angelico and the early Italian painters, to be in time again driven by the too intense asceticism and archaic debility of this school, to the robust excellence and the more real and material, though pure and refined, beauty of the Venetians. With them he has now found his golden mean.