The Life of John Ruskin

by W. G. Collingwood

CHAPTER X

THE GRADUATE OF OXFORD (1841-1842)

Ready for work again, and in reasonable health of mind and body, John Ruskin sat down in his little study at Herne Hill in November, 1841, with his private tutor, Osborne Gordon. There was eighteen months' leeway to make up, and the dates of ancient history, the details of schematized Aristotelianism, soon slip out of mind when one is sketching in Italy. But he was more serious now about his work, and aware of his deficiencies. To be useful in the world, is it not necessary first to understand all possible Greek constructions? So said the voice of Oxford; but our undergraduate was saved, both now and afterwards, from this vain ambition. "I think it would hardly be worth your while," said Gordon.

He could not now go in for honours, for the lost year had superannuated him. So in April he went up for a pass. In those times, when a pass-man showed unusual powers, they could give him an honorary class; not a high class, because the range of the examination was less than in the honour-school. This candidate wrote a poor Latin prose, it seems; but his divinity, philosophy, and mathematics were so good that they gave him the best they could—an honorary double fourth—upon which he took his B.A. degree, and could describe himself as "A Graduate of Oxford."

The continued weakness of his health kept him from taking steps to enter the Church; and his real interest in art was not crowded out even by the last studies for his examination. While he was working with Gordon, in the autumn of 1841, he was also taking lessons from J.D. Harding; and the famous study of ivy, his first naturalistic sketching, to which we must revert, must have been done a week or two before going up for his examination.

The lessons from Harding were a useful counter-stroke to the excessive and exaggerated Turnerism in which he had been indulging through his illness. The drawings of Amboise, the coast of Genoa, and the Glacier des Bois, though published later, were made before he had exchanged fancy for fact; and they bear, on the face of them, the obvious marks of an unhealthy state of mind. Harding, whose robust common-sense and breezy mannerism endeared him to the British amateur of his generation, was just the man to correct any morbid tendency. He had religious views in sympathy with his pupil, and he soon inoculated Ruskin with his contempt for the minor Dutch school—those bituminous landscapes, so unlike the sparkling freshness that Harding's own water-colour illustrated, and those vulgar tavern scenes, painted, he declared, by sots who disgraced art alike in their works and in their lives.

Until this epoch, John Ruskin had found much that interested him in the Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century. He had classed them all together as the school of which Rubens, Vandyck and Rembrandt were the chief masters, and those as names to rank with Raphael and Michelangelo and Velasquez. He was a humorist, not without boyish delight in a good Sam-Wellerism, and so could be amused with the "drolls," until Harding appealed to his religion and morality against them. He was a chiaroscurist, and not naturally offended by their violent light and shade, until George Richmond showed him the more excellent way in colour, the glow of Venice, first hinting it at Rome in 1840, and then proving it in London in the spring of 1842 from Samuel Rogers' treasures, of which the chief (now in the National Gallery) was the "Christ appearing to the Magdalen."

Much as the author of "Modern Painters" owed to these friends and teachers, and to the advantages of his varied training, he would never have written his great work without a further inspiration. Harding's especial forte was his method of drawing trees. He looked at Nature with an eye which, for his period, was singularly fresh and unprejudiced; he had a strong feeling for truth of structure as well as for picturesque effect, and he taught his pupils to observe as well as to draw. But in his own practice he rested too much on having observed; formed a style, and copied himself if he did not copy the old masters; Hence he held to rules of composition and conscious graces of arrangement; and while he taught naturalism in study, he followed it up with teaching artifice in practice.

Turner, who was not a drawing-master, lay under no necessity to formulate his principles and stick to them. On the contrary, his style developed like a kaleidoscope. He had been in Switzerland and on the Rhine in 1841, "painting his impressions," making water-colour notes from memory of effects that had struck him. From one of these, "Splügen," he had made a finished picture, and now wished to get commissions for more of the same class. Ruskin was greatly interested in this series, because they were not landscapes of the ordinary type, scenes from Nature squeezed into the mould of recognised artistic composition, nor, on the other hand, mere photographic transcripts; but dreams, as it were, of the mountains and sunsets, in which Turner's wealth of detail was suggested, and his knowledge of form expressed, together with the unity which comes of the faithful record of a single impression.

The lesson was soon enforced upon Ruskin's mind by example. One day, while taking his student's constitutional, he noticed a tree-stem with ivy upon it, which seemed not ungraceful, and invited a sketch. As he drew he fell into the spirit of its natural arrangement, and soon perceived how much finer it was as a piece of design than any conventional rearrangement would be. Harding had tried to show him how to generalize foliage; but in this example he saw that not generalization was needed to get its beauty, but truth.