The Stones of Venice, Volume 3 (of 3)

by John Ruskin

§ XXX. Lastly: The men who do not play at all: those who are so dull or so morose as to be incapable of inventing or enjoying jest, and in whom care, guilt, or pride represses all healthy exhilaration of the fancy; or else men utterly oppressed with labor, and driven too hard by the necessities of the world to be capable of any species of happy relaxation.

§ XXXI. We have now to consider the way in which the presence or absence of joyfulness, in these several classes, is expressed in art.

1. Wise play. The first and noblest class hardly ever speak through art, except seriously; they feel its nobleness too profoundly, and value the time necessary for its production too highly, to employ it in the rendering of trivial thoughts. The playful fancy of a moment may innocently be expressed by the passing word; but he can hardly have learned the preciousness of life, who passes days in the elaboration of a jest. And, as to what regards the delineation of human character, the nature of all noble art is to epitomize and embrace so much at once, that its subject can never be altogether ludicrous; it must possess all the solemnities of the whole, not the brightness of the partial, truth. For all truth that makes us smile is partial. The novelist amuses us by his relation of a particular incident; but the painter cannot set any one of his characters before us without giving some glimpse of its whole career. That of which the historian informs us in successive pages, it is the task of the painter to inform us of at once, writing upon the countenance not merely the expression of the moment, but the history of the life: and the history of a life can never be a jest.

Whatever part, therefore, of the sportive energy of these men of the highest class would be expressed in verbal wit or humor finds small utterance through their art, and will assuredly be confined, if it occur there at all, to scattered and trivial incidents. But so far as their minds can recreate themselves by the imagination of strange, yet not laughable, forms, which, either in costume, in landscape, or in any other accessaries, may be combined with those necessary for their more earnest purposes, we find them delighting in such inventions; and a species of grotesqueness thence arising in all their work, which is indeed one of its most valuable characteristics, but which is so intimately connected with the sublime or terrible form of the grotesque, that it will be better to notice it under that head.

§ XXXII. 2. Necessary play. I have dwelt much in a former portion of this work, on the justice and desirableness of employing the minds of inferior workmen, and of the lower orders in general, in the production of objects of art of one kind or another. So far as men of this class are compelled to hard manual labor for their daily bread, so far forth their artistical efforts must be rough and ignorant, and their artistical perceptions comparatively dull. Now it is not possible, with blunt perceptions and rude hands, to produce works which shall be pleasing by their beauty; but it is perfectly possible to produce such as shall be interesting by their character or amusing by their satire. For one hard-working man who possesses the finer instincts which decide on perfection of lines and harmonies of color, twenty possess dry humor or quaint fancy; not because these faculties were originally given to the human race, or to any section of it, in greater degree than the sense of beauty, but because these are exercised in our daily intercourse with each other, and developed by the interest which we take in the affairs of life, while the others are not. And because, therefore, a certain degree of success will probably attend the effort to express this humor or fancy, while comparative failure will assuredly result from an ignorant struggle to reach the forms of solemn beauty, the working-man, who turns his attention partially to art, will probably, and wisely, choose to do that which he can do best, and indulge the pride of an effective satire rather than subject himself to assured mortification in the pursuit of beauty; and this the more, because we have seen that his application to art is to be playful and recreative, and it is not in recreation that the conditions of perfection can be fulfilled.

§ XXXIII. Now all the forms of art which result from the comparatively recreative exertion of minds more or less blunted or encumbered by other cares and toils, the art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque. And it is noble or inferior, first, according to the tone of the minds which have produced it, and in proportion to their knowledge, wit, love of truth, and kindness; secondly, according to the degree of strength they have been able to give forth; but yet, however much we may find in it needing to be forgiven, always delightful so long as it is the work of good and ordinarily intelligent men. And its delightfulness ought mainly to consist in those very imperfections which mark it for work done in times of rest. It is not its own merit so much as the enjoyment of him who produced it, which is to be the source of the spectator’s pleasure; it is to the strength of his sympathy, not to the accuracy of his criticism, that it makes appeal; and no man can indeed be a lover of what is best in the higher walks of art, who has not feeling and charity enough to rejoice with the rude sportiveness of hearts that have escaped out of prison, and to be thankful for the flowers which men have laid their burdens down to sow by the wayside.

§ XXXIV. And consider what a vast amount of human work this right understanding of its meaning will make fruitful and admirable to us, which otherwise we could only have passed by with contempt. There is very little architecture in the world which is, in the full sense of the words, good and noble. A few pieces of Italian Gothic and Romanesque, a few scattered fragments of Gothic cathedrals, and perhaps two or three of Greek temples, are all that we possess approaching to an ideal of perfection. All the rest—Egyptian, Norman, Arabian, and most Gothic, and, which is very noticeable, for the most part all the strongest and mightiest—depend for their power on some developement of the grotesque spirit; but much more the inferior domestic architecture of the middle ages, and what similar conditions remain to this day in countries from which the life of art has not yet been banished by its laws. The fantastic gables, built up in scroll-work and steps, of the Flemish street; the pinnacled roofs set with their small humorist double windows, as if with so many ears and eyes, of Northern France; the blackened timbers, crossed and carved into every conceivable waywardness of imagination, of Normandy and old England; the rude hewing of the pine timbers of the Swiss cottage; the projecting turrets and bracketed oriels of the German street; these, and a thousand other forms, not in themselves reaching any high degree of excellence, are yet admirable, and most precious, as the fruits of a rejoicing energy in uncultivated minds. It is easier to take away the energy, than to add the cultivation; and the only effect of the better knowledge which civilized nations now possess, has been, as we have seen in a former chapter, to forbid their being happy, without enabling them to be great.

§ XXXV. It is very necessary, however, with respect to this provincial or rustic architecture, that we should carefully distinguish its truly grotesque from its picturesque elements. In the “Seven Lamps” I defined the picturesque to be “parasitical sublimity,” or sublimity belonging to the external or accidental characters of a thing, not to the thing itself. For instance, when a highland cottage roof is covered with fragments of shale instead of slates, it becomes picturesque, because the irregularity and rude fractures of the rocks, and their grey and gloomy color, give to it something of the savageness, and much of the general aspect, of the slope of a mountain side. But as a mere cottage roof, it cannot be sublime, and whatever sublimity it derives from the wildness or sternness which the mountains have given it in its covering, is, so far forth, parasitical. The mountain itself would have been grand, which is much more than picturesque; but the cottage cannot be grand as such, and the parasitical grandeur which it may possess by accidental qualities, is the character for which men have long agreed to use the inaccurate word “Picturesque.”

§ XXXVI. On the other hand, beauty cannot be parasitical. There is nothing so small or so contemptible, but it may be beautiful in its own right. The cottage may be beautiful, and the smallest moss that grows on its roof, and the minutest fibre of that moss which the microscope can raise into visible form, and all of them in their own right, not less than the mountains and the sky; so that we use no peculiar term to express their beauty, however diminutive, but only when the sublime element enters, without sufficient worthiness in the nature of the thing to which it is attached.

§ XXXVII. Now this picturesque element, which is always given, if by nothing else, merely by ruggedness, adds usually very largely to the pleasurableness of grotesque work, especially to that of its inferior kinds; but it is not for this reason to be confounded with the grotesqueness itself. The knots and rents of the timbers, the irregular lying of the shingles on the roofs, the vigorous light and shadow, the fractures and weather-stains of the old stones, which were so deeply loved and so admirably rendered by our lost Prout, are the picturesque elements of the architecture: the grotesque ones are those which are not produced by the working of nature and of time, but exclusively by the fancy of man; and, as also for the most part by his indolent and uncultivated fancy, they are always, in some degree, wanting in grandeur, unless the picturesque element be united with them.