Part 6
The overloaded modern map is a work of reference--it is a dictionary, not a book. Ruskin felt that it was useless for educational or literary purposes, and he was continually trying to improve away the detail and to substitute graphic statistics. One line of this attempt was in the direction of models. Beck's raised map of Switzerland (1853) was often in use, but it was spoilt for him by the shining surface, which catches high lights and distracts the eye: all models ought to be painted in dead colours, except the water, which needs the shine for the sake of transparency.
So, in 1881, when he was working at the physical geology of the Coniston neighbourhood, he tried to make a model of the hills and dales, to see how the strike and dip of strata and the faults and dykes in the rock came out in relation to ups and downs, lake-basins and crags, and so forth. He found modelling too tedious to carry out himself, and, with characteristic oddness in his employment of means to ends, he set his gardener, the late Dawson Herdson, on the job. Herdson made a very fair general sketch in clay of the Old Man, and the main features as seen from the Coniston side; but he had not pegged out his distances, and when Dow Crag was built up into emphatic gloom, and Leverswater hollowed into depth, the smaller heights had no space left for them, and the effect was altogether too willow-patterned. Then Ruskin put another of his employes to work, and after much labour the model now in the Coniston Museum was evolved.
This was intended to be photographed or engraved in a side-light, as one of a series of physical maps. Another was to have been Savoy, for which Ruskin made the sketch here shown. The black Lake of Geneva is dark blue in his drawing; the valleys are green, and the mountains roughly knocked in with lamp-black and Chinese white, tinted over with yellow for limestone, pink for Mont Blanc protogine, and red for gneiss. Rough as the sketch is, you see the structure of the Alps, the lie of the land, at a glance. Towns, roads, and all the rest should be shown, he said, on separate plans.
Towards this purpose he collected bird's-eye views in great variety, from Maclure and Macdonald's lithograph of the Soudan, to quaint old panoramas, of which one--the mountains seen from the Buet--is quite like a William Blake design of Heaven and Hell, and fit to serve as a background to all the mythologies. Also, for their pleasant picturesqueness, he liked the queer productions of ancient cartographers, such as Edmund Squib's funny map of China (1655), and a seventeenth-century production called "The New Map of Muscovy," and "The Course of the Great River Wolga," by A. Olearius; with pictures of Russian peasants along the banks, and the camels of "the Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet." Such maps have the charm of graphic expression; they don't pretend to be gazetteers, but they take you about the country with the entertainment of a traveller's tale.
They are decorative also; that was another appeal to Ruskin. William Morris has shown in the illustrations to the Saga Library how maps can become picturesque designs, and this was much on the lines that Ruskin would have followed. He might not have inserted dragons of the deep, nor, as in Drayton's "Polyolbion," nymphs and shepherds on the hills and lakes, out of all proportion and possibility; but he thought a map could be far more explanatory and ornamental than the usual school atlas.
His attempt at a diagrammatic history of France, sketched on a page of note-paper, was engraved for "Our Fathers have Told Us"--his projected school history of the "Nice Things that have Happened." You see--and for lack of space I must leave it for your further insight--how he designed to show the roses of Provence and the lilies of France in this garden of Gaul, at one time feebly struggling, then blowing fully and freely spreading, then broken in upon by the wild beast of war; the lily bed trampled and ruined; Aquitaine wasted to blankness, and so forth. Worked out completely, an atlas of history on this plan might be as pretty as any picture-book. A child accustomed to such maps would have little trouble in remembering the outlines of national growth, and the whole tedious business of dates and uncouth names would be infinitely lightened. Perhaps, some day, Ruskin's hint will be taken, and his suggestions will bear fruit.
He never cared for worship and admiration, when they did not mean the understanding of his aims, and the carrying out of his work. He knew his gift was to irrigate, as he said--to suggest and stimulate. People called him an egoist; but how wise in its humility was the close of his preface to "Loves Meinie!"--"It has been throughout my trust, that if Death should write on these, 'What this man began to build, he was not able to finish,' God may also write on them, not in anger but in aid, 'A stronger than he cometh.'" And for much that he has left to do, no greater strength is needed, but only the glory of going on.
VIII
RUSKIN'S DRAWINGS
VIII
RUSKIN'S DRAWINGS
In his introduction to the Catalogue of a Ruskin Exhibition at Boston, U.S.A., in 1879, Professor Charles Eliot Norton wrote a paragraph which, as the verdict of a severely discriminating--though friendly--critic, is worth reading more than once again. He said: "The character of this collection is unique. These drawings are not the work of an artist by profession; there is not a 'picture' among them. They are the studies of one who, by patience and industry, by single-minded devotion to each special task, and by concentrated attention upon it, has trained an eye of exceptional keenness and penetration, and a hand of equally exceptional delicacy and firmness of touch, to be the responsive instruments of faculties of observation and perception such as have seldom been bestowed on artist or on poet. Few of these drawings were undertaken as an end in themselves, but most of them as means by which to acquire exact knowledge of the facts of nature, or to obtain the data from which to deduce a principle in art, or to preserve a record of the work of periods in which art gave better expression to the higher interests and motives of life than at the present day. These studies may consequently afford lessons to the proficients in art not less than to the fresh beginners. The beauty of some of them will be obvious to an untrained eye; but no one may hope to appreciate them at their worth who will not, in a respectful and modest spirit, give time and patience to their study."
In his childhood, long before he thought of drawing from Nature, he had learnt great neatness of hand by amusing himself with copying out his juvenile verses to look like print, by drawing maps and by making facsimiles of George Cruikshank's etchings in his "Grimm's Goblins." His father used to sketch a little in the pre-historic style, and was fond of pictures; but they never dreamed of making John an artist. At last, when he was thirteen, and his adopted sister, Mary, was taking drawing lessons at school with much satisfaction to the family, he, too, was allowed to "learn drawing." Mr. Runciman, his master, gave him "copies"--the old, bold pencil copies--which he tried to imitate in a kind of stipple, at first, but soon picked up the manner, and in a year, as we find from old letters, was talking like a book about perspective and composition, and going to begin painting "on grey paper, with a few of the simplest colours, in order to learn the effects of light and shade." Mr. Runciman must have been a good teacher, for this method of his, on grey paper with a few simple colours, to get light and shade, is exactly what John Ruskin learnt thoroughly after awhile, and taught energetically in his turn all his life. But Mr. Runciman could not bring him to paint in oil, and does not seem to have had much of a system; for one of John Ruskin's letters in verse to his father, written early in 1834, says:
"I cannot bear to paint in oil. C. Fielding's tints alone for me! The other costs me double toil, And wants some fifty coats to be Splashed on each spot successively."
In his later years he used to say that the practical reason why he never went on with oil painting was that he had to draw--and to keep his drawings--among books and papers, and oils were messy, and did not smell nice. But no doubt the real fact was that his drawings were mainly meant for book-illustration, done for the engraver, and intended, on a small scale, to get as much form as possible. All his experiments in oil seem to have been suppressed; though his water-colour practice, especially in later times, was to use Chinese white, and often a good deal of it, very nearly as if it had been flake white.
After some feeble attempts by himself at sketching from Nature, in 1831 and 1832, he went abroad with his parents for the summer of 1833, and drew diligently. He had received for a birthday present the volume of Rogers's "Italy," with Turner's vignettes, and intended to make something like it, in a book of verses neatly copied out, with vignettes reproduced in fine pen-work from his sketches on the spot. Whenever the carriage stopped he would snatch a sketch, and whenever they put up for the night he would write up his poetical diary. Coming home, he began his great work, but school lessons interfered; not before he had half filled the blank book, and pasted in a number of neat and pretty vignettes, of which the best is _The Jungfrau from Lauterbrunnen_, reproduced in "The Poems of John Ruskin," on the same scale.
Meanwhile, he had come under the influence of Samuel Prout, whose work his father admired; and on the next tour, in 1835, Turner was forgotten in the attempt to be Prout. The drawings of this "great year," as he called it, when they are put in order, show a wonderful progress from the first stiff and timid studies, fresh from the attempt to copy Prout's lithographs, to a free and quite masterly adaptation of Prout's "line and dot" manner. By the time he reached the Oberland and Venice, he had "got his hand in," and the subject went down upon the paper with ease and decision, always abstracted and mannered, but with a feeling after style which was entirely Ruskin. Both in drawing and in writing, much as he talked of truth and simplicity, he was, first and foremost, the stylist: and through half his life the conscious imitator of other men's styles--Hooker or Carlyle, Prout or Turner. But there was always more of Ruskin than of his model; and even in those juvenile essays, when style so completely overwhelms fact, as in some sketches at Venice or Innsbruck, there is a precocious completeness and charm, as in the art of youthful nations, early Greeks, pre-Norman English, or pre-Renaissance Italians.
The pen-drawings of this year have less interest, for they were made from the originals to illustrate another intended manuscript, and the life, of course, went out of them. Some of these pen-drawings, as well as some of the original and superior pencil-drawings, are published in facsimile in the "Poems" and "Poetry of Architecture" (large editions of 1891 and 1893). Other facsimiles are given in "Studies in Both Arts" and "Verona." The plates in these volumes very fairly represent Ruskin's handiwork at different periods, and are indispensable to any one who wishes to study it. Plates in "Modern Painters" and "Stones of Venice," nearly all by engravers _after_ his work, do not represent it in the same authentic manner.
Before he had completed his new book he wanted more skill in colour, and took lessons from Copley Fielding, with no great result, except that the style which he had gained by practice abroad was lost in trying after new models. The sketches of his period as an Oxford undergraduate are comparatively tame and commonplace (1836-1839), though he did some neat bits for Mr. Loudon's wood engraver to spoil in the papers on "The Poetry of Architecture," in the _Architectural Magazine_, which were his first published writings on art.
In 1840 he broke down in health, after winning the Newdigate prize for poetry at Oxford, and before taking his degree. His parents went with him in the autumn to spend the winter abroad, as a cure for consumption. He did the best for himself, according to new lights on the subject of hygiene, by spending nearly all his time sketching in the open air. Through France to the Loire and Auvergne, round the Riviera to Pisa and Florence and Rome, we can trace him by his drawings, made now on a new method. David Roberts had been showing his Syrian sketches, hard pencil on grey paper, with yellow lights in body colour, and the new style caught young Ruskin's attention before he started for his journey, so that he set out with the resolve of being Roberts now. The same decision of line shows itself on this much larger scale; he always seems to know what he wants, and to get it without trouble; though when one remembers that these half-imperial drawings were done by an ailing lad, supposed to be within danger of death, it is not a little remarkable to see in them such evidences of tenacity and pluck.
At the beginning of 1841 they moved on to Naples, and made excursions to Salerno, Amalfi and the neighbourhood, always with a drawing to bring back; and when he was on his way home, through North Italy, he wrote triumphantly to a friend that he had "got forty-seven large and thirty-four small sketches."
But what he could do with the stimulus of travel he could not do again in the reaction after it was over. He was not quite well yet, and went to Leamington to be under a doctor, in dull lodgings, and without any mountains. Still he drew. By this time he had dropped David Roberts, and taken up Turner, whose art he had already thought of defending against the magazine critics. It was in these circumstances that he made the _Amboise_, from a sketch of the year before, and certain vignettes for engraving, which were published in "Friendship's Offering," with his poems. In the new Library edition, vol. ii., photographs from the original _Amboise_, and from the old engraving after it, are given, well worth comparing.
He was not naturally a colourist. In later life he found out for himself the ways and means of producing bits of very sweet opalescent colour, but at any time was capable of relapsing into gaudiness, in hours of fatigue or ill-health; and throughout his earlier life he was much more at home in light and shade, or in work with the point. It was not that he did not see and enjoy colour. To judge by his writings, one would think that he lived for it, almost: and the splendid passage in the first volume of "Modern Painters," so often quoted for its word-painting of colour, was written from his diary-notes on the way back from Naples in 1841. He made a drawing of the scene he described; one would expect at least an attempt at "purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle"; but it is merely washed with faint tints over an elaborate outline of the architecture.
So the passing mood in sickness, which had led him to try after Turnerian colour, left him in health, for the more attainable method of Turner's "Liber Studiorum," and he began, in 1842, to make this his own. A slight pencil blocking out, firm and emphatic quill-pen to represent the etched line, and brushwork in brown, rarely in black, sometimes with a little colour, over paper usually grey--this was after all the manner that suited him best, and very nearly what Mr. Runciman had talked about, ten years before. By degrees, year after year, the pen work became finer, and the colour more predominant; the solid white, used at first for high lights, invaded the tints and gave a mystery to the outline, and in ten years more he had found out his central style, a manner quite his own, producing beautiful results but inimitable by engraving, whether the old style of steel-plate or the new style of photographic process. That style in turn developed into the delicate and often dainty water-colour painting of his later years--passing by the way through a phase in which the pencil took the place of the pen, useful for getting notes of architectural detail and mountain form--and never quite abandoned, though the pencil drawings of the later period became a distinct series, free and emphatic and suggestive, apart from the more laborious elaboration of his last paintings.
In 1845 he went alone, unaccompanied by parents and family, to Italy, and found adventures. He made the acquaintance of the primitive masters at Lucca and Florence, and copied a little; then to the Alps to look for Turner's subjects in the Alpine sketches of 1842, which had so taken his heart. Turner did not like it; it was dangerous to have a writing young man looking behind the scenes of imaginative picture production; but Ruskin found out Turner, and was all the more enthusiastic for the discovery. He drew the Pass of Faido, and saw what Turner had seen, and what he had invented, more wonderful than any transcript from Nature; and afterwards filled half a volume with the endeavour to expound the same. Then, with his versatility of sympathy, he met J. D. Harding, who was not so much his teacher as a valued friend, and together they went to Venice. One sketch-book leaf of this time is particularly interesting--with a pen and tint drawing of a mill at Baveno on one side, and a slapdash sunset on the other, almost Harding. These are photogravured in the "Poems."
The drawings of 1846 were the first serious mountain studies, afterwards used for "Modern Painters," though many things intervened. Sickness at first, and the visit to Crossmount in the Highlands, recorded in some drawings, not his best; and then "Seven Lamps of Architecture," for which he studied in Normandy in 1848, and etched the plates himself in soft ground--strong, sketchy plates which were thought a failure at the time, and re-engraved in a queer imitation of the originals by a professional engraver for the next edition. Then he set to work upon "Stones of Venice."
He had already some material, but most of the drawings were made in two winters, November 1849 to March 1850, and September 1851 to June 1852. Many of the best have been dispersed, some are in America, but enough remain to show what a busy time it was, and how much downright drawing went to the making of that book: how much _more_ drawing, and of how much finer quality than one can guess at from reading the book. The large plates in "Examples of the Architecture of Venice" were not only from his sketches, but from carefully prepared working drawings. For a mezzotint, like the _St. Mark's Portico_ or the _Arch of Ca' Contarini Porta di Ferro_, he drew the outline separately for etching, and made another drawing with the tint for the completed engraving. To do a subject over again seemed no grievance with him, and there are many examples of his patience in trying the identical view in different aspects or lights, or even redrawing it from Nature without alteration, merely to get a result more to his mind. That the result was worth while in the end we need not stop to declare. "Stones of Venice" was a revelation to architects and the public, and for a long while exerted an enormous influence upon English taste. Suppose, for a moment, such a book had been written, with all the enthusiasm and learning in the world, by a man who could not draw!
The later volumes of "Modern Painters," which followed this, owed their success in great measure to the same cause. The engravings, beautiful as they are, hardly show the originals; though from the book one knows that its author had dwelt upon the aspects of Nature with more than a tourist's glance, and that he had struggled with the problems of art with more than an amateur's attention. His Aiguilles and Matterhorns, his Aspen and his mossy stones, his repeated studies from Turner and the Old Masters, down to the enlargements from illuminated missals, all tell the same tale of passionate interest in the subject and penetrative insight into the situation. They are not, as Professor Norton says, pictures; but incomplete as they are, there is in them an appeal to which most of those who love pictures will respond.
During the progress of "Modern Painters," Mr. Ruskin planned a "History of Swiss Towns," for which he spent several summers in gathering material. His drawings for this series were more full of detail, handled with extremest fineness in some parts and with great breadth, often carelessness, in others; intended for completion and engraving when time should serve. But this time never came. He was led into the interests in political and social economy which, in these later years, with a public tired of hearing about Ruskin and art, have given him a place among the prophets. He was led into further studies of the geology of scenery, lightly touched in "Modern Painters," and, during long residence in Savoy and Switzerland, drew Alps chiefly for their cleavages, and threw the drawings aside. He was led into botanical and mineral researches, and Egyptology and Greek coins, and other by-ways, always, however, drawing as he went, but drawing subjects less interesting to the general onlooker. But from this backwater he emerged into a new and more developed style which began to show results in 1866, on a long summer tour in the Oberland, when he made the sketch _On the Reuss below Lucerne_, in "Poetry of Architecture"--a combination of such breadth and delicacy as he had hardly attained before, and much fine work with the point.
Next year but one, 1868, his ancient love for French Gothic took him to Abbeville. There the new style had full scope in the delicate drawings of that date, a long way in advance of old "Seven Lamps" period: and the same kind of work was continued in the next year at Verona (May to September), a summer of very busy painting in the company of his two assistants, Mr. William Ward and the late Mr. J. W. Bunney.
The Abbeville drawings were shown in a semi-public manner at a little exhibition to illustrate his lecture on the "Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme," at the Royal Institution, January 29, 1869; and the Verona drawings at a similar lecture at the same place on February 4, 1870. The catalogue of the latter is printed in "On the Old Road," vol. i., part 2, with twenty pieces marked as his own.
In this year he entered on his duties as Slade Professor at Oxford, and before long had established a drawing-school there, which took up a great part of his attention. Of this period is a sketch "Done with my pupils afield," and he used sometimes to draw in the school, and often to draw for the school. A _Candle_, finely shaded, and various botanical studies, were meant as "copies" or as examples of the treatment he proposed to his students; and the catalogue of the Ruskin Drawing School at Oxford contains a very large number of items by himself, from the great _St. Catherine_, after Luini, to little memoranda of plant forms. Several of these examples of his hand have been engraved in Mr. E. T. Cook's "Studies in Ruskin."