I am sorry to omit the explanation which follows of the ten lenses composing such a glass, “each of which must be exact in radius and in surface, and all have their axes coincident;” but it would not be intelligible without the figure by which it is illustrated, so I pass to Mr. Kingsley’s No. 3:
“I am tolerably familiar,” he proceeds, “with the actual grinding and polishing of lenses and specula, and have produced by my own hands some by no means bad optical work; and I have copied no small amount of Turner’s work, and I still look with awe at the combined delicacy and precision of his hand; it beats optical work out of sight.[95] In optical work, as in refined drawing, the hand goes beyond the eye,{*} and one has to depend upon the feel; and when one has once learned what a delicate affair touch is, one gets a horror of all coarse work, and is ready to forgive any amount of feebleness, sooner than the boldness which is akin to impudence. In optics the distinction is easily seen when the work is put to trial; but here too, as in drawing, it requires an educated eye to tell the difference when the work is only moderately bad; but with ‘bold’ work nothing can be seen but distortion and fog, and I heartily wish the same result would follow the same kind of handling in drawing; but here, the boldness cheats the unlearned by looking like the precision of the true man. It is very strange how much better our ears are than our eyes in this country: if an ignorant man were to be ‘bold’ with a violin, he would not get many admirers, though his boldness was far below that of ninety-nine out of a hundred drawings one sees.”
{*} In case any of your readers should question the use, in drawing, of work too fine for the touches to be individually, I quote a sentence from my “Elements of Drawing.”{**} “All fine coloring, like fine drawing, is delicate; so delicate, that if at last you see the color you are putting on, you are putting on too much. You ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone by touches which are individually too pale to be seen.”
{**} See the “Elements of Drawing,” Letter III. on Color and Composition, p. 232.
The words which I have italicized[96] in the above extract are those which were surprising to me. I knew that Turner’s was as refined as any optical work, but had no idea of its going beyond it. Mr. Kingsley’s word “awe,” occurring just before, is, however, as I have often felt, precisely the right one. When once we begin at all to understand the work of any truly great executor, such as that of any of the three great Venetians [(Tintoret, Titian, and Veronese)], Correggio, or Turner, the awe of it is something greater than can be felt from the most stupendous natural scenery. For the creation of such a system as a high human intelligence, endowed with its ineffably perfect instruments of eye and hand, is a far more appalling manifestation of Infinite Power than the making either of seas or mountains. After this testimony to the completion of Turner’s work, I need not at length defend myself from the charge of hyperbole in the statement that, “as far as I know, the galleries of Europe may be challenged to produce one sketch[97] that shall equal the chalk study No. 45, or the feeblest of the memoranda in the 71st and following frames;”[98] which memoranda, however, it should have been observed, are stated at the forty-fourth page to be in some respects “the grandest work in gray that he did in his life.”
For I believe that, as manipulators, none but the four men whom I have just named (the three Venetians and Correggio) were equal to Turner; and, as far as I know, none of these four men put their full strength into sketches. But whether they did or not, my statement in the Catalogue is limited by my own knowledge, and as far as I can trust that knowledge: it is not an enthusiastic statement, but an entirely calm and considered one. It may be a mistake, but it is not an hyperbole.
Lastly, you object that the drawings for the “Liber Studiorum” are not included in my catalogue. They are not so, because I did not consider them as, in a true sense, drawings at all; they are merely washes of color laid roughly to guide the mezzotint engraver in his first process; the drawing, properly so called, was all put in by Turner when he etched the plates, or superadded by repeated touchings on the proofs. These brown “guides,” for they are nothing more, are entirely unlike the painter’s usual work, and in every way inferior to it; so that students wishing to understand the composition of the “Liber” must always work from the plates, and not from these first indications of purpose.[99] I have put good impressions of two of the plates in the same room, in order to show their superiority; and for the rest, thought it useless to increase the bulk of the Catalogue by naming subjects which have been published and well known these thirty years.[100]
Permit me, in conclusion, to thank you for drawing attention to the subject of this great national collection; and, again asking your indulgence for trespassing so far upon your space, to subscribe myself,
Very respectfully yours,
J. Ruskin.
[From “The Times,” October 21, 1859.]
THE TURNER GALLERY AT KENSINGTON[101]