th. Truth About Ruskin H. HEATHCOTE STATHAM -Ricº. 3 CENTS subscription. - Y - THE TRUTH ABOUT RUS (IN sº e. By H. HEATHCOTE STATHAM Office of publication. Rooms 2128-29-30-31, Park Row Building THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN. No one with any enthusiasm for art, any perception of the vast interest of human life, or any sensibility to beauty and eloquence of literary utterance, can questicn that by the death of John Ruskin we have lost one of the most remarkable per- sonalities of the century which is just closing, and one which seems all the more remarkable from the strange contrast which it presents to the predominant thought and habit of our time. Amid a generation whose higher aspirations and achievements have been mainly scientific, and its lower, and far too pre- dominant one, that of money-making and the worship of the golden calf, Ruskin stands out as a kind of inspired prophet, preaching passionately, Cassandra-like, to unwilling ears that there is a higher aim in life than what we have been seeking after; that neither mere knowledge nor mere riches will make a nation happy or truly great; that we are forgetting the beauty of life, and destroying the beauty of our own country in filling it with mills and railways and engineering works, erected in the pursuit of the deity of dividends. How far this latter part of the charge is true or reasonable we will consider just now; there is a fallacy which we may dismiss for the moment; but Ruskin's generation cannot turn round on him and say: “I deny your major.” Even from a man of genius so different from Ruskin—so comparatively calm, logi- cal, and impartial in criticism, as Matthew Arnold—there * Originally printed in the “Fortnightly Review,” March, 1900. 3 4. THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN came, in a moment of strong feeling, the same cry over the downfall of noble sentiment and noble aspiration in England: We, too, say that she flags; We, too, say that she now- Scarce comprehending the voice Of her greatest, golden-mouth’d sons Of a former age any more– Stupidly travels her round Of mechanic business, and lets Slow die out of her life Glory, and genius, and joy." The lines might stand as a concentrated expression of Rus- kin's message to his generation, if we could for a moment think of him in connection with such an idea as concentration of expression. But his very power over his readers arises in part from the opposite quality; from the fulness and richness of language and metaphor and illustration which he has always at his command, and which seems to have a flow as spontaneous and apparently inexhaustible as the current of a river in flood. He never for a moment drops into literary common- place; he cannot write a short sentence on any subject pre- sented to him without reminding one of Sterling’s character- istic expression in acknowledging two letters from Carlyle— “Letters which, unlike other people’s, have the writer’s sig- nature in every word, as well as at the end.” Still more ex- traordinary is his intellectual mobility; the manner in which, on the mere hint of a passing reference to something only slightly connected with the main subject, he is off on a new episode and a fresh coruscation of fancies and illustrations, so that the reader is carried away without even caring to consider whither he is being carried: if he be one of the mi- nority who are in the habit of thinking of the meaning of what “Heine's Grave.” THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSIKIN 5 they read, he may be conscious that he has been inveigled into a region of paradoxes; but the paradoxes are, at all events, in the highest degree picturesque and enlivening. Ruskin was, in fact, a great prose-poet who took the whole of life, art, and nature for his subject; and, when we consider the immense extent of his writings, the variety of subjects of which they treat, and the unfailing picturesqueness and origi- nality of his utterances upon every subject, it must be admitted that his collective writings present the most extraordinary literary phenomenon of the century, both for eloquence and for passionate earnestness of conviction on whatever point he is for the moment dealing with. No such intense and im- passioned counterblast to the gospel of nil admirari has perhaps ever been promulgated. Everything is vital, everything is interesting, everything is suggestive to him—for the moment, at all events, that he is dealing with it. With a writer of this temperament, a certain disproportion of emphasis is in- evitable; but, as long as we read him as a literary enjoy- ment, this is a pardonable defect; it contributes to the in- cisiveness and interest of writing which merits that best praise which can be given to literary work—that it is never for an instant dull. But, when we find Ruskin set up not only as a picturesque and poetic writer, but as a great teacher and critic of art and life, then we have to consider his writings from another point of view. We have to ask not only how does he affect us, but what does he profess to teach us? And a sober analysis of his writings on art (taking that side of them first) shows that, in the broadest sense, he had no settled or per- manent convictions at all. It was said of a late great states- man that he was a most conscientious man, but that, unfortu- nately, he had so many consciences. It may be said of Rus- 6 THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN kin that, while (as observed just now) he wrote always with passionate earnestness of conviction, he had so many convic- tions. It would be difficult to find in his writings on art any positions permanently and consistently maintained except two, —viz., a hatred of railways and of Renaissance architecture. Over and over again we find him so carried away by his desire to make a strong point of the idea which at the moment was predominant in his mind that he appears to have totally for- gotten that he had laid down the reverse proposition on another occasion. Moreover, the desire to make an effective point, to make the most of a suggestion of the moment, is constantly betraying him into rhetorical flourishes which are entirely inconsistent with fact. One of the most character- istic examples is furnished by a passage in the Oxford Lec- tures of 1884. A friend, rather incautiously, had remarked to him that the conventional arrangement of the hair over the forehead of an archaic Greek bust formed a zigzag “just like the Norman arch at Iffley Church.” The remark was prob- ably a joke, but Ruskin laid hold of it at once and presented it seriously to his audience as an instance of symbolical orna- ment derived from Greek sculpture by the Norman builders— “who, looking to the Greeks as their absolute masters in sculpture, and recognizing, also, during the crusades, the hieroglyphic use of the zigzag for water by the Egyptians, may have adopted this easily-attained decoration at once as the sign of the element over which they reigned, and of the power of the Greek goddess who ruled both it and them.”(1) Such a forced derivation for a form of ornament which, like the so-called “Greek fret,” is part of the origines of orna- ment recurring all over the world among primitive peoples, is really too absurd. “ Modern Painters” is a book full of eloquence and en- THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN 7 thusiasm, full of suggestiveness, and in some portions, such as the chapter on cloud forms, really instructive in regard to the problem of the translation of the appearances of nature into painting. But the contradictions of principle in it are so barefaced and preposterous as to nullify any value which it could be supposed to have, and which the author evidently considered it to have, as a didactic treatise on art. His whole claim to respect as a teacher on art is itself based on a barefaced logical fallacy. It is as ridiculous for any one to speak positively about painting who has not given a great part of his life to its study, as it would be for a person who had never studied chemistry to give a lecture on the affinities of elements. But it is also as ridiculous for a person to speak hesitatingly about laws of painting who has conscientiously given his time to their ascertainment, as it would be for Mr. Faraday to announce, in a dubious manner, that iron had an affinity with oxygen, and to put the question to the vote of his audience whether it had or not. This is a glaring instance of the fallacy of “ambiguous middle term ''': the word “law º' used in a double sense. A “ law '' in chemistry is a discovered and demonstrable fact: a so-called “ law '' in painting, as far as there is such a thing, can be at best nothing more than a consensus of opin- ion based on the practice of the best painters: and it is on the ground of such a fallacy that Ruskin claimed the position of being an ex cathedrá and infallible teacher on art. And the infallible teacher contradicts himself over and over again. He tells us, in “ Modern Painters”: One rule in art, at all events, has no exception; all great art is delicate art, and all coarse art is bad art. * There are laws of perspective, it is true, but perspective is a science, not an art; a man may master it without having any art in his composition. As far as regards art it is merely a means to an end; and it is certainly not what Ruskin referred to in this passage. THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN But what do we find in the essay on ‘‘ Pre-Raphaelitism” ” I only wish people understood this much of sculpture, as well as of paint- ing, and could see that the finely-finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to the workman's hammer. Read separately, each sentence might be taken to be the ex- pression of a deeply-felt conviction; read together, they sub- side into mere rhetoric. We are told that the foreground of one of Turner’s drawings is so minutely finished that it must be magnified to show all its detail; that the mussel- shells in the foreground of one of his Scarborough scenes are carefully drawn, some open, some shut, ‘‘ though none of them are as large as the letters of this type ’’; that a fore- ground must contain the most delicate detail of the picture, be- ing the part nearest to the eye, etc. But, when it comes to the question of tº e manifest and undeniable shortcomings of Turner’s foreground figures, then we are told that it is impos- sible that the eye, looking at the distant landscape, should be able to see more of the foreground figures than Turner chooses to give; it being one “law,” apparently, that Turner could do no wrong. Then what becomes of the microscopic mussel- shells and the theory of the necessity for minuteness of detail in the foreground? One might quote instance after instance of this kind of contradictory teaching—each statement be- lieved in by the writer, no doubt, at the moment of writing it; but the most extraordinary lapse of all in “ Modern Painters” is the dictum as to the objects of landscape-painting, con- trasted with the description of Turner’s own practice. The object of landscape-painting, we are told, is the faithful rep- resentation of nature in all her detail—“ rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing”; and again: Every alteration of the features of nature has its origin in powerless indo- THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN 9 lence or blind audacity; in the folly which forgets or the insolence which desecrates works which it is the pride of angels to know, and their privilege to love. Passing over the questionable taste of this assumption of intimacy with the angelic perceptions, compare this with the long description of Turner’s treatment of a scene on the de- scent of the St. Gothard, in Vol. IV. of “ Modern Painters.” It is too long to quote here; it is sufficient to say that he de- scribes, with entire approval, how Turner altered the whole scene to suit his own pictorial idea; “the whole place is al- tered in scale '': the trees at the base of a precipitous rock are omitted, because they dwarfed the scale of the precipice; the mountains in the distance ‘‘ he raises . . . putting three or four ranges instead of one’’; ‘‘the few trees in the hollow of the glen he feels to be contrary to the spirit of the stones, and fells them, as he did the others’’—and so on; complacently describing his idolized and ideal landscape artist as doing everything which he has elsewhere described as “powerless indolence or blind audacity!” The fact is that Ruskin never could make up his mind whether to espouse the realist or the idealist view of land- scape-painting, because he had committed himself to the championship both of the Pre-Raphaelites and of Turner. The Pre-Raphaelites were avowed realists; Turner, without any avowing (for he never theorized about his art), was an ideal- ist, using the materials of nature for the creation of poetic landscape; hence Ruskin was, no doubt, in a critical dilemma * The sentence about "rejecting nothing” was published in the first vol- ume of “Modern Painters,” in 1846; the description of Turner's St. Gothard picture in 1856; and the passage, “Every alteration in the features of nature,” etc., in the preface to the second edition of “Modern Painters” in 1867. There can, therefore, be no pretext that there was a progressive devel- opment of opinion. 10 THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSIKIN in the endeavor to make out that both were right, and sacri- ficed his own consistency in the attempt, a sacrifice which probably did not trouble him much, since he appears to have resolutely shut his eyes to it. What is the oddest and most incomprehensible part of the matter, however, is that his admirers also resolutely shut their eyes to it; when these ex- traordinary contradictions of teaching are pointed out, they sniff superciliously at the critic, think him, and perhaps call him, a “Philistine,” and seem to imply that it does not mat- ter in Ruskin. It does not affect Ruskin’s power as a great prose-poet; it does not, perhaps, materially affect his in- fluence as an enthusiast who has done much to imbue his gen- eration with a love for and an interest in art; but it does very materially affect his position as a critical guide or teacher on art. If a man is to be regarded as a teacher, surely he must, in the first place, know what he thinks himself, and what principles he is going to teach. To swear by the words of a master who has hardly uttered any decisive principle in one place which he has not contradicted somewhere else is mere blind folly of adulation. When we come to consider Ruskin as a critic of architec- ture, the case is rather different. He has done more than anyone else to waken in the public an interest in architec- ture. But here, again, he is an entirely false guide, not so much from inconsistency as from an inadequate grasp of the subject. “The Stones of Venice” is, in its way, a wonder- ful book, full of splendid passages, full of suggestiveness; but, whether as a text-book or analysis of architecture in gen- eral, or of Venetian architecture in particular, it is one tre- mendous paradox from beginning to end. The writer is, to quote Matthew Arnold’s phrase, in the position of “a critic who is not at the centre of his subject.” The declared object THE TRUTHºABOUT RUSKIN Il of the whole book is to show the superiority and the truth of Gothic architecture as compared with Renaissance. With this object he makes two assumptions, which are both at vari- ance alike with architectural history and architectural fact. He assumes that Venice was, in her decay, the special strong- hold of Renaissance architecture. “It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only, that effectual blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance.’’ ‘‘ She was in her decline the source of the Renaissance.” This is absolutely untrue, historically. Florence was the real source of the Renaissance, more than any other single city can be said to have been. Then, in order to show the superiority of Gothic, he takes as a standard the Venetian Gothic, which was, in fact, a pictu- resque, but bastard, style, having none of the logical complete- ness of true Gothic. The real home of Gothic architecture is in France and England; in France in the first instance, but in England putting on a form quite as complete and logical as that of France, and having special beauties of its own, differ- ing from those of French work. Hence, in taking Venetian architecture as his type, he is led into offering, as models of the style, an architecture which, however picturesque, is incom- plete and out of balance, and into manipulating his critical view to suit it. He represents as central and essential feat- ures which are in reality accidental. He mistakes some of the essential features of arched construction, in consequence of taking the inferior arched construction of Venice for his examples; he represents as constructive arches examples which are only ornamental arches, -i.e., arched forms which are not of real arch construction; and his analysis of the statics of the arch is unscientific, and in some points even puerile. He gives the weak and inferior profiles of Venetian mouldings as types of Gothic moulding, whereas the only 12 THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN good Gothic mouldings are to be found in France and England, the English type being the finest and most perfect of all. He imagines he has found a new definition of the ‘‘ Order” in architecture, sweeping away the whole prestige of the Classic Orders by the assertion that there are only two orders in archi- tecture–those with a convex and those with a concave capital; showing that he does not even realize what is the essential quality of the Classic Order. As a generalization of types of capital his analysis would do well enough; but the ‘‘ Order ’’ is not merely a form of capital; it is essentially the whole relation and proportion of column and superstructure, and that is the reason why the study of the Classic Orders is still the best training for architectural students, as it means the study of proportion and relative character in all the details of the design. Every reader of the “ Stones of Venice ’’ must find it full of matter for delight, but people are mistaken if they think they get any reliable lessons in architecture from it. The persistent belittling of everything English in it, in order to exaggerate the excellence of Venetian architecture, is car- ried to a point that is perfectly absurd; and the illustration of “Two Types of Towers,” one labelled “ British '' and the other “ Venetian,” is worse than absurd.: it is dishonest. He contrasts with the Venice Campanile one of the poorest and smallest of English towers of the early Gothic revival, and invites the reader to accept them as fair specimens of the two styles. Such an illustration is no less than a lithographed falsehood. The “Lectures on Architecture,” without the poetic elo- quence of the “ Stones of Venice,” may fairly be said to be one of the most mischievous books on the subject that has ever been written. It is a medley of false criticism and false analogies. Greek architecture, for instance, is condemned as THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN 13 ugly because the openings are square-headed, whereas the fact that leaves are pointed at the end shows clearly that the pointed form of the Gothic arch is the one appointed by Provi- dence to please the eye; and a sketch is given of a spray of leaves designed ‘‘ on Greek principles,” with square ends; the fact that the Greeks executed some of the most beautiful decorative foliage ever seen being conveniently ignored. But when he wants to bring out his favorite thesis that sculptors and painters are the best architects, then we are told that the greatest architects on record were Phidias, Giotto, and Mi- chael Angelo. It is now considered very doubtful whether Giotto had anything to do with the Campanile which has gone by his name (Milizia rejects him entirely); Michael Angelo's dome belongs to what Ruskin himself called “the pestilent Renaissance ’’; and, if Phidias was in any real sense the “architect” of the Parthenon (which is more than doubtful), he owes his pre-eminence to a building in Greek architecture, which the author in the same set of lectures has denounced as ugly and cºntrary to the principles of nature! But per- haps the climax of reasoning in this tilt against classic archi- tecture occurs in the following remarkable passage: If you really make up a party of pleasure, and get rid of the forms and fashions of public propriety for an hour or two, where do you go for it? Where do you go to eat strawberries and cream 2 To Roslin Chapel, I be- lieve” [the lectures were delivered in Edinburgh]; “not to the portico of the last-built institution. What do you see your children doing, obeying their natural and true instincts? What are your daughters drawing on cardboard screens, as soon as they can use a pencil? Not Parthenon fronts, I think, but the ruins of Melrose Abbey, or Linlithgow Palace, or Lochleven Castle, their own pure Scotch hearts leading them straight to the right things, in spite of all they are told to the contrary. Such a passage is really quite beyond comment. The book on architecture which is likely to keep its place 14 THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN is “ The Seven Lamps." the art, which it is not, notwithstanding its array of “apho- risms,” but as a source of inspiration. Here Ruskin has done nobly, in spite of some fallacies in detail. No one, whether architect or not, can read its glowing pages without feeling his sense of the greatness and nobility of the art extended and am- not as a guide to, or analysis of, plified, and his aspirations quickened. And this is really the way in which Ruskin has served art. He has little depend- able or logical teaching to give in regard to art, but he has made thousands of persons care for it as they never cared for it before, and never would but for him. He is the first, and perhaps we might say the only writer on art so far, who has possessed sufficient literary genius and sufficient enthusiasm to make himself read and felt by the people at large. It is true that much of what he has said was by no means new to those who cared or thought at all about art; and ordinary readers are too apt to think that perceptions about art and nature, which they have first gathered from him, are equally new to every one else. But that such perceptions have been brought home to the mind of the ordinary reader is in itself a great thing, and it is for that mainly that his generation owe a debt of gratitude to him. In his general attitude towards his own time Ruskin presents a curious contrast. His writings are full of great and noble ideals in regard to social life, and the duty of mankind to one another; he has said many things which much needed to be said, and for which the world should be better and wiser. But his theory of life, as far as it can be gathered from the collective evidence of his writings, was in many respects hopelessly at variance with facts. He could see that the pres- ent age, and especially in his own country, was painfully in- different to the beautiful eleinent in life. But he could not see THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN 15 that, in spite of this, it is in many ways a great and remarka- ble age in the history of the country; that science has im- mensely ameliorated the life of man in many important points; that education is better and more widely spread than it has ever been before; and that, whatever the effect of railway and engineering works in partially spoiling the face of the coun- try, the increased means of intercommunication opened up dur- ing the present century has been one of the most powerful con- tributors to human progress, and in the main to human happi- ness. As to the matter of railways, it may be said that, al- though a railway in the process of making always spoils a site for the time, once made and in being, and the embankments and cuttings harmonized by vegetation, the supposed injury done to the landscape by them has been very much exagger- ated. The moving train is even a picturesque incident in the scene. Nor could Ruskin see that great engineering works, such as bridges and viaducts, are really the natural and char- acteristic products of the conditions of modern life, and that they have a grandeur of their own, when they are simply the expression of construction on a great scale. In regard to such structures he, like many other critics, missed the real point against the engineers. Structures like the Forth bridge; the St. Lawrence bridge, with its vast pointed masonry but- tresses to break up the masses of ice coming down every spring; the Menai tubular bridge, with the simple practical design of its piers, -all these are impressive works, the out- come of the requirements of the day. The real complaint against the engineers is that they will not now be content with simple structure, but try to treat it ‘‘ ornamentally,” as they think, without having studied what design means, and pro- duce such absurdities as the Tower bridge and (it is to be feared) the coming Vauxhall bridge. Otherwise, engineering 16 THE TRUTH ABOUT RUSKIN structures are the great building productions of the nineteenth century, by which, among other things, it will be remembered, just as cathedrals were the great structures of the thirteenth century. The age of cathedrals, and of gabled streets, and of varied costumes, each fitted to the rank and occupation of the wearer (the latter was one of Ruskin's ideals), may have been much more picturesque than the present age, but we can no more go back to it than a man can go back to the garb and the amusements of his childhood. It seems rather odd that so little has been made, either by Ruskin himself or his admirers, of his own incontestable gifts as an artist. He might unquestionably have been a land- scape painter of no ordinary calibre, had he chosen to devote himself to that art, and as an architectural draughtsman he was perhaps unequalled when at his best. His colored drawing of part of St. Mark’s, hung some years ago at the Society of Water-colors Exhibition, was one of the most beautiful draw- ings of the kind ever seen; his tinted elevation of part of the Ducal Palace is perhaps the only drawing of it in existence which fully realizes the character of the detail. It is one of the most curious among the many paradoxes connected with him that, while he once emphatically declared that a man can hardly draw anything without benefiting himself and others, and can hardly write anything without doing mischief, he should nevertheless have chosen to comparatively neglect his artistic capabilities in order to become one of the most volu- minous writers of his age.