[96] “The Two paths” reprint has “put in italics.”
[97] The following note is here added to the reprint in “The Two Paths:” “A sketch, observe—not a printed drawing. Sketches are only proper subjects of comparison with each other when they contain about the same quantity of work: the test of their merit is the quantity of truth told with a given number of touches. The assertion in the Catalogue which this letter was written to defend was made respecting the sketch of Rome, No. 101.”
[98] No. 45 was a “Study of a Cutter.” Mr. Ruskin’s note to it in the Catalogue is partly as follows: “I have never seen any chalk sketch which for a moment could be compared with this for soul and power.... I should think that the power of it would be felt by most people; but if not, let those who do not feel its strength, try to copy it.” See the Catalogue under No. 45, as also under No. 71, referred to above.
[99] In a letter to Mr. Norton written in the same year as this one to the Literary Gazette, Mr. Ruskin thus speaks of the value of these plates: “Even those who know most of art may at first look be disappointed with the Liber Studiorum. For the nobleness of these designs is not more in what is done than in what is not done in them. Every touch in these plates is related to every other, and has no permission of withdrawn, monastic virtue, but is only good in its connection with the rest, and in that connection infinitely and inimitably good. The showing how each of these designs is connected by all manner of strange intellectual chords and nerves with the pathos and history of this old English country of ours, and with the history of European mind from earliest mythology down to modern rationalism and irrationalism—all this was what I meant to try and show in my closing work; but long before that closing I felt it to be impossible.”—Extract from a letter of Mr. Ruskin, 1858, quoted in the “List of Turner Drawings, etc.,” already mentioned, p. 5.
[100] The Literary Gazette of November 20, 1858, contains a reply to this letter, but as it did not provoke a further letter from Mr. Ruskin, it is not noticed in detail here.
[101] There was at the date of this and the following letter an exhibition of Turner drawings at the South Kensington Museum. These pictures have, however, been since removed to the National Gallery, and the only works of Turner now at Kensington, are some half dozen oil paintings belonging to the Sheepshanks collection, and about the same number of water-color drawings, which form part of the historical series of British water-color paintings.
[102] This refers to a letter signed “E. A. F.” which appeared in The Times of October 19, 1859, advising the adoption of Mr. Gilbert Scott’s Gothic design for the Foreign Office in preference to any Classic design. The writer entered at some length into the principles of Gothic and Classic architecture, which he briefly summed up in the last sentence of his letter: “Gothic, then, is national; it is constructively real; it is equally adapted to all sorts of buildings; it is convenient; it is cheap. In none of these does Italian surpass it; in most of them it is very inferior to it.” See the letters on the Oxford Museum as to the adaptability of Gothic—included in Section vi. of these Letters on Art. With regard to the cheapness of Gothic, the correspondent of The Times had pointed out that while it may be cheap and yet thoroughly good so far as it goes, Italian must always be costly.
[103] Hardly a debate. Lord Francis Hervey had recently (June 30, 1876) put a question in the House of Commons to Lord Henry Lennox (First Commissioner of Works) as to whether it was the fact that many of Turner’s drawings were at that time stowed in the cellars of the National Gallery, and had never been exhibited. The Daily Telegraph in a short article on the matter (July 1, 1876) appealed to Mr. Ruskin for his opinion on the exhibition of these drawings.
[104] Now I trust, under Mr. Poynter and Mr. Sparkes, undergoing thorough reform.{*}
{*} Mr. Poynter, R.A., was then, as now, Director, and Mr. Sparkes Head Master, of the Art School at the South Kensington Museum.