Lectures on Landscape by John Ruskin (free ebook reader for android .TXT) 📖

matched the color of the iron-stained rocks in the bed of the Ticino; and any of you who care for color at all cannot but take more or less pleasure in the black and greens and warm browns opposed throughout. But the essential value of the work is not in these. It is, first, in the expression of enormous scale of mountain and space of air, by gradations of shade in these colors, whatever they may be; and, secondly, in the perfect rounding and cleaving of the masses alike of mountain and stone. I showed you one of the stones themselves, as an example of uninteresting outline. If I were to ask you to paint it, though its color is pleasant enough, you would still find it uninteresting and coarse compared to that of a flower, or a bird. But if I can engage you in an endeavor to draw its true forms in light and shade, you will most assuredly find it not only interesting, but in some points quite beyond the most subtle skill you can give to it.

32. You have heard me state to you, several times, that all the masters who valued accurate form and modeling found the readiest way of obtaining the facts they required to be firm pen outline, completed by a wash of neutral tint. This method is indeed rarely used by Raphael or Michael Angelo in the drawings they have left us, because their studies are nearly all tentative—experiments in composition, in which the imperfect or careless pen outline suggested all they required, and was capable of easy change without confusing the eye. But the masters who knew precisely before they laid touch on paper what they were going to do—and this may be, observe, either because they are less or greater than the men who change; less, in merely drawing some natural object without attempt at composition, or greater in knowing absolutely beforehand the composition they intend; it may be, even so, that what they intend, though better known, is not so good:—but at all events, in this anticipating power Tintoret, Holbein and Turner stand, I think, alone as draughtsmen; Tintoret rarely sketching at all, but painting straight at the first blow, while Holbein and Turner sketch indeed, but it is as with a pen of iron and a point of diamond.

33. You will find in your educational series[6] many drawings illustrative of the method; but I have enlarged here the part that is executed with the pen, out of this smaller drawing, that you may see with what fearless strength Holbein delineates even the most delicate folds of the veil on the head, and of the light muslin on the shoulders, giving them delicacy, not by the thinness of his line, but by its exquisite veracity.

The eye will endure with patience, or even linger with pleasure, on any line that is right, however coarse; while the faintest or finest that is wrong will be forcibly destructive. And again and again I have to recommend you to draw always as if you were engraving, and as if the line could not be changed.

34. The method used by Turner in the Liber Studiorum is precisely analogous to that of Holbein. The lines of these etchings are to trees, rocks, or buildings, absolutely what these of Holbein are; not suggestions of contingent grace, but determinations of the limits of future form. You will see the explanatory office of such lines by placing this outline over my drawing of the stone, until the lines coincide with the limits of the shadow. You will find that it intensifies and explains the forms which otherwise would have escaped notice, and that a perfectly gradated wash of neutral tint with an outline of this kind is all that is necessary for grammatical statement of forms. It is all that the great colorists need for their studies; they would think it wasted time to go farther; but, if you have no eye for color, you may go farther in another manner, with enjoyment.

35. Now to go back to Turner.

The first great object of the Liber Studiorum, for which I requested you in my sixth Lecture[7] to make constant use of it, is the delineation of solid form by outline and shadow. But a yet more important purpose in each of the designs in that book is the expression of such landscape powers and character as have especial relation to the pleasures and pain of human life—but especially the pain. And it is in this respect that I desired you (Sect. 172) to be assured, not merely of their superiority, but of their absolute difference in kind from photography, as works of disciplined design.

 

NEAR BLAIR ATHOL.

From the painting by Turner.

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36. I do not know whether any of you were interested enough in the little note in my catalogue on this view near Blair Athol, to look for the scene itself during your summer rambles. If any did, and found it, I am nearly certain their impression would be only that of an extreme wonder how Turner could have made so little of so beautiful a spot. The projecting rock, when I saw it last in 1857, and I am certain, when Turner saw it, was covered with lichens having as many colors as a painted window. The stream—or rather powerful and deep Highland river, the Tilt—foamed and eddied magnificently through the narrowed channel; and the wild vegetation in the rock crannies was a finished arabesque of living sculpture, of which this study of mine, made on another stream, in Glenfinlas, only a few miles away, will give you a fair idea. Turner has absolutely stripped the rock of its beautiful lichens to bare slate, with one quartz vein running up through it; he has quieted the river into a commonplace stream; he has given, of all the rich vegetation, only one cluster of quite uninteresting leaves and a clump of birches with ragged trunks. Yet, observe, I have told you of it, he has put into one scene the spirit of Scotland.

 

DUMBLANE ABBEY.

From the painting by Turner.

[View mezzotint version]

 

37. Similarly, those of you who in your long vacations have ever stayed near Dumblane will be, I think, disappointed in no small degree by this study of the abbey, for which I showed you the sketch at last Lecture. You probably know that the oval window in its west end is one of the prettiest pieces of rough thirteenth-century carving in the kingdom; I used it for a chief example in my lectures at Edinburgh; and you know that the lancet windows, in their fine proportion and rugged masonry, would alone form a study of ruined Gothic masonry of exquisite interest.

Yet you find Turner representing the lancet window by a few bare oval lines like the hoop of a barrel; and indicating the rest of the structure by a monotonous and thin piece of outline, of which I was asked by one of yourselves last term, and quite naturally and rightly, how Turner came to draw it so slightly—or, we may even say, so badly.

38. Whenever you find Turner stopping short, or apparently failing in this way, especially when he does the contrary of what any of us would have been nearly sure to do, then is the time to look for your main lesson from him. You recollect those quiet words of the strongest of all Shakespeare's heroes, when any one else would have had his sword out in an instant:

"Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them ...
Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it
Without a prompter."[8]

Now you must always watch keenly what Turner's cue is. You will see his hand go to his hilt fast enough, when it comes. Dumblane Abbey is a pretty piece of building enough, it is true; but the virtue of the whole scene, and meaning, is not in the masonry of it. There is much better masonry and much more wonderful ruin of it elsewhere; Dumblane Abbey—tower and aisles and all—would go under one of the arches of buildings such as there are in the world. Look at what Turner will do when his cue is masonry,—in the Coliseum. What the execution of that drawing is you may judge by looking with a magnifying glass at the ivy and battlements in this, when, also, his cue is masonry. What then can he mean by not so much as indicating one pebble or joint in the walls of Dumblane?

 

 

39. I was sending out the other day, to a friend in America, a chosen group of the Liber Studiorum to form a nucleus for an art collection at Boston. And I warned my friend at once to guard his public against the sore disappointment their first sight of these so much celebrated works would be to them. "You will have to make them understand," I wrote to him, "that their first lesson will be in observing not what Turner has done, but what he has not done. These are not finished pictures, but studies; endeavors, that is to say, to get the utmost result possible with the simplest means; they are essentially thoughtful, and have each their fixed purpose, to which everything else is sacrificed; and that purpose is always imaginative—to get at the heart of the thing, not at its outside."

40. Now, it is true, there are beautiful lichens at Blair Athol, and good building at Dumblane; but there are lovely lichens all over the cold regions of the world, and there is far more interesting architecture in other countries than in Scotland. The essential character of Scotland is that of a wild and thinly inhabited rocky country, not sublimely mountainous, but beautiful in low rock and light streamlet everywhere; with sweet copsewood and rudely growing trees. This wild land possesses a subdued and imperfect school of architecture, and has an infinitely tragic feudal, pastoral, and civic history. And in the events of that history a deep tenderness of sentiment is mingled with a cruel and barren rigidity of habitual character, accurately corresponding to the conditions of climate and earth.

41. Now I want you especially to notice, with respect to these things, Turner's introduction of the ugly square tower high up on the left. Your first instinct would be to exclaim, "How unlucky that was there at all! Why, at least, could not Turner have kept it out of sight?" He has quite gratuitously brought it into sight; gratuitously drawn firmly the three lines of stiff drip-stone which mark its squareness and blankness. It is precisely that blank vacancy of decoration, and setting of the meager angles against wind and war, which he wants to force on your notice, that he may take you thoroughly out of Italy and Greece, and put you wholly into a barbarous and frost-hardened land; that once having its gloom defined he may show you all the more intensely what pastoral purity and innocence of life, and loveliness of nature, are underneath the banks and braes of Doune, and by every brooklet that feeds the Forth and Clyde.

That is the main purpose of these two studies. How it is obtained by various incidents in the drawing of stones, and trees, and figures, I will show you another time. The chief element in both is the sadness and depth of their effect of subdued though clear light in sky and stream.

42. The sadness of their effect, I