We turn our eyes, therefore, as boldly and as quickly as may be, from
these serene fields and skies of mediæval art, to the most
characteristic examples of modern landscape. And, I believe, the first
thing that will strike us, or that ought to strike us, is _their
cloudiness_.
Out of perfect light and motionless air, we find ourselves on a sudden
brought under sombre skies, and into drifting wind; and, with fickle
sunbeams flashing in our face, or utterly drenched with sweep of rain,
we are reduced to track the changes of the shadows on the grass, or
watch the rents of twilight through angry cloud. And we find that
whereas all the pleasure of the mediæval was in _stability,
definiteness_, and _luminousness_, we are expected to rejoice in
darkness, and triumph in mutability; to lay the foundation of
happiness in things which momentarily change or fade; and to expect
the utmost satisfaction and instruction from what it is impossible to
arrest, and difficult to comprehend.
We find, however, together with this general delight in breeze and
darkness, much attention to the real form of clouds, and careful
drawing of effects of mist; so that the appearance of objects, as seen
through it, becomes a subject of science with us; and the faithful
representation of that appearance is made of primal importance, under
the name of aërial perspective. The aspects of sunset and sunrise,
with all their attendant phenomena of cloud and mist, are watchfully
delineated; and in ordinary daylight landscape, the sky is considered
of so much importance, that a principal mass of foliage, or a whole
foreground, is unhesitatingly thrown into shade merely to bring out
the form of a white cloud. So that, if a general and characteristic
name were needed for modern landscape art, none better could be
invented than "the service of clouds."
And this name would, unfortunately, be characteristic of our art in
more ways than one. In the last chapter, I said that all the Greeks
spoke kindly about the clouds, except Aristophanes; and he, I am sorry
to say (since his report is so unfavourable), is the only Greek who
had studied them attentively. He tells us, first, that they are "great
goddesses to idle men"; then, that they are "mistresses of disputings,
and logic, and monstrosities, and noisy chattering"; declares that
whoso believes in their divinity must first disbelieve in Jupiter, and
place supreme power in the hands of an unknown god "Whirlwind"; and,
finally, he displays their influence over the mind of one of their
disciples, in his sudden desire "to speak ingeniously concerning
smoke."[112]
There is, I fear, an infinite truth in this Aristophanic judgment
applied to our modern cloud-worship. Assuredly, much of the love of
mystery in our romances, our poetry, our art, and, above all, in our
metaphysics, must come under that definition so long ago given by the
great Greek, "speaking ingeniously concerning smoke." And much of the
instinct, which, partially developed in painting, may be now seen
throughout every mode of exertion of mind,--the easily encouraged
doubt, easily excited curiosity, habitual agitation, and delight in
the changing and the marvellous, as opposed to the old quiet serenity
of social custom and religious faith,--is again deeply defined in
those few words, the "dethroning of Jupiter," the "coronation of the
whirlwind."
Nor of whirlwind merely, but also of darkness or ignorance respecting
all stable facts. That darkening of the foreground to bring out the
white cloud, is, in one aspect of it, a type of the subjection of all
plain and positive fact, to what is uncertain and unintelligible. And,
as we examine farther into the matter, we shall be struck by another
great difference between the old and modern landscape, namely, that in
the old no one ever thought of drawing anything but as well _as he
could_. That might not be _well_, as we have seen in the case of
rocks; but it was as well as he _could_, and always distinctly. Leaf,
or stone, or animal, or man, it was equally drawn with care and
clearness, and its essential characters shown. If it was an oak tree,
the acorns were drawn; if a flint pebble, its veins were drawn; if an
arm of the sea, its fish were drawn; if a group of figures, their
faces and dresses were drawn--to the very last subtlety of expression
and end of thread that could be got into the space, far off or near.
But now our ingenuity is all "concerning smoke." Nothing is truly
drawn but that; all else is vague, slight, imperfect; got with as
little pains as possible. You examine your closest foreground, and
find no leaves; your largest oak, and find no acorns; your human
figure, and find a spot of red paint instead of a face; and in all
this, again and again, the Aristophanic words come true, and the
clouds seem to be "great goddesses to idle men."
The next thing that will strike us, after this love of clouds, is the
love of liberty. Whereas the mediæval was always shutting himself into
castles, and behind fosses, and drawing brickwork neatly, and beds of
flowers primly, our painters delight in getting to the open fields and
moors; abhor all hedges and moats; never paint anything but free-growing
trees, and rivers gliding "at their own sweet will"; eschew formality
down to the smallest detail; break and displace the brickwork which
the mediæval would have carefully cemented; leave unpruned the
thickets he would have delicately trimmed; and, carrying the love of
liberty even to license, and the love of wildness even to ruin, take
pleasure at last in every aspect of age and desolation which emancipates
the objects of nature from the government of men;--on the castle wall
displacing its tapestry with ivy, and spreading, through the garden,
the bramble for the rose.
Connected with this love of liberty we find a singular manifestation
of love of mountains, and see our painters traversing the wildest
places of the globe in order to obtain subjects with craggy foregrounds
and purple distances. Some few of them remain content with pollards
and flat land; but these are always men of third-rate order; and the
leading masters, while they do not reject the beauty of the low
grounds, reserve their highest powers to paint Alpine peaks or Italian
promontories. And it is eminently noticeable, also, that this pleasure
in the mountains is never mingled with fear, or tempered by a spirit
of meditation, as with the mediæval; but it is always free and
fearless, brightly exhilarating, and wholly unreflective; so that the
painter feels that his mountain foreground may be more consistently
animated by a sportsman than a hermit; and our modern society in
general goes to the mountains, not to fast, but to feast, and leaves
their glaciers covered with chicken-bones and egg-shells.
Connected with this want of any sense of solemnity in mountain
scenery, is a general profanity of temper in regarding all the rest of
nature; that is to say, a total absence of faith in the presence of
any deity therein. Whereas the mediæval never painted a cloud, but
with the purpose of placing an angel in it; and a Greek never entered
a wood without expecting to meet a god in it; we should think the
appearance of an angel in the cloud wholly unnatural, and should be
seriously surprised by meeting a god anywhere. Our chief ideas about
the wood are connected with poaching. We have no belief that the
clouds contain more than so many inches of rain or hail, and from our
ponds and ditches expect nothing more divine than ducks and
watercresses.
Finally: connected with this profanity of temper is a strong tendency
to deny the sacred element of colour, and make our boast in blackness.
For though occasionally glaring or violent, modern colour is on the
whole eminently sombre, tending continually to grey or brown, and by
many of our best painters consistently falsified, with a confessed
pride in what they call chaste or subdued tints; so that, whereas a
mediæval paints his sky bright blue and his foreground bright green,
gilds the towers of his castles, and clothes his figures with purple
and white, we paint our sky grey, our foreground black, and our
foliage brown, and think that enough is sacrificed to the sun in
admitting the dangerous brightness of a scarlet cloak or a blue
jacket.
These, I believe, are the principal points which would strike us
instantly, if we were to be brought suddenly into an exhibition of
modern landscapes out of a room filled with mediæval work. It is
evident that there are both evil and good in this change; but how much
evil, or how much good, we can only estimate by considering, as in the
former divisions of our inquiry, what are the real roots of the habits
of mind which have caused them.
And first, it is evident that the title "Dark Ages," given to the
mediæval centuries, is, respecting art, wholly inapplicable. They
were, on the contrary, the bright ages; ours are the dark ones. I do
not mean metaphysically, but literally. They were the ages of gold;
ours are the ages of umber.
This is partly mere mistake in us; we build brown brick walls, and
wear brown coats, because we have been blunderingly taught to do so,
and go on doing so mechanically. There is, however, also some cause
for the change in our own tempers. On the whole, these are much
_sadder_ ages than the early ones; not sadder in a noble and deep way,
but in a dim wearied way,--the way of ennui, and jaded intellect, and
uncomfortableness of soul and body. The Middle Ages had their wars and
agonies, but also intense delights. Their gold was dashed with blood;
but ours is sprinkled with dust. Their life was inwoven with white and
purple: ours is one seamless stuff of brown. Not that we are without
apparent festivity, but festivity more or less forced, mistaken,
embittered, incomplete--not of the heart. How wonderfully, since
Shakspere's time, have we lost the power of laughing at bad jests! The
very finish of our wit belies our gaiety.
The profoundest reason of this darkness of heart is, I believe, our
want of faith. There never yet was a generation of men (savage or
civilized) who, taken as a body, so wofully fulfilled the words
"having no hope, and without God in the world,"[113] as the present
civilized European race. A Red Indian or Otaheitan savage has more
sense of a Divine existence round him, or government over him, than
the plurality of refined Londoners and Parisians: and those among us
who may in some sense be said to believe, are divided almost without
exception into two broad classes, Romanist and Puritan; who, but for
the interference of the unbelieving portions of society, would, either
of them, reduce the other sect as speedily as possible to ashes; the
Romanist having always done so whenever he could, from the beginning
of their separation, and the Puritan at this time holding himself in
complacent expectation of the destruction of Rome by volcanic fire.
Such division as this between persons nominally of one religion, that
is to say, believing in the same God, and the same Revelation, cannot
but become a stumbling-block of the gravest kind to all thoughtful and
far-sighted men,--a stumbling-block which they can only surmount under
the most favourable circumstances of early education. Hence, nearly
all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the
best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the
plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what
practical work lies ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men
are in this last class; our popular authors either set themselves
definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and
benevolence (Thackeray, Dickens), or give themselves up to bitter and
fruitless statement of facts (De Balzac), or surface-painting (Scott),
or careless blasphemy, sad or smiling (Byron, Béranger). Our earnest
poets and deepest thinkers are doubtful and indignant (Tennyson,
Carlyle); one or two, anchored, indeed, but anxious or weeping
(Wordsworth, Mrs. Browning); and of these two, the first is not so
sure of his anchor, but that now and then it drags with him, even to
make him cry out,--
Great God, I had rather be
A Pagan suckled in some creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.[114]
In politics, religion is now a name; in art, a hypocrisy or affectation.
Over German religious pictures the inscription, "See how Pious I am,"
can be read at a glance by any clear-sighted person. Over French and
English religious pictures the inscription, "See how Impious I am," is
equally legible. All sincere and modest art is, among us, profane.[115]
This faithlessness operates among us according to our tempers,
producing either sadness or levity, and being the ultimate root alike
of our discontents and of our wantonnesses. It is marvellous how full
of contradiction it makes us: we are first dull, and seek for wild and
lonely places because we have no heart for the garden; presently we
recover our spirits, and build an assembly room among the mountains,
because we have no reverence for the desert. I do not know if there be
game on Sinai, but I am always expecting to hear of some one's shooting
over it.
There is, however, another, and a more innocent root of our delight in
wild scenery.
All the Renaissance principles of art tended, as I have before often
explained, to the setting Beauty above Truth, and seeking for it
always at the expense of truth. And the proper punishment of such
pursuit--the punishment which all the laws of the universe rendered
inevitable--was, that those who thus pursued beauty should wholly lose
sight of beauty. All the thinkers of the age, as we saw previously,
declared that it did not exist. The age seconded their efforts, and
banished beauty, so far as human effort could succeed in doing so,
from the face of the earth, and the form of man. To powder the hair,
to patch the cheek, to hoop the body, to buckle the foot, were all
part and parcel of the same system which reduced streets to brick
walls, and pictures to brown stains. One desert of Ugliness was extended
before the eyes of mankind; and their pursuit of the beautiful, so
recklessly continued, received unexpected consummation in high-heeled
shoes and periwigs,--Gower Street, and Gaspar Poussin.[116]
Reaction from this state was inevitable, if any true life was left in
the races of mankind; and, accordingly, though still forced, by rule
and fashion, to the producing and wearing all that is ugly, men steal
out, half-ashamed of themselves for doing so, to the fields and
mountains; and, finding among these the colour, and liberty, and
variety, and power, which are for ever grateful to them, delight in
these to an extent never before known; rejoice in all the wildest
shattering of the mountain side, as an opposition to Gower Street,
gaze in a rapt manner at sunsets and sunrises, to see there the blue,
and gold, and purple, which glow for them no longer on knight's armour
or temple porch; and gather with care out of the fields, into their
blotted herbaria, the flowers which the five orders of architecture
have banished from their doors and casements.
The absence of care for personal beauty, which is another great
characteristic of the age, adds to this feeling in a twofold way:
first, by turning all reverent thoughts away from human nature; and
making us think of men as ridiculous or ugly creatures, getting
through the world as well as they can, and spoiling it in doing so;
not ruling it in a kingly way and crowning all its loveliness. In the
Middle Ages hardly anything but vice could be caricatured, because
virtue was always visibly and personally noble: now virtue itself is
apt to inhabit such poor human bodies, that no aspect of it is
invulnerable to jest; and for all fairness we have to seek to the
flowers, for all sublimity, to the hills.
The same want of care operates, in another way, by lowering the
standard of health, increasing the susceptibility to nervous or
sentimental impressions, and thus adding to the other powers of nature
over us whatever charm may be felt in her fostering the melancholy
fancies of brooding idleness.
It is not, however, only to existing inanimate nature that our want of
beauty in person and dress has driven us. The imagination of it, as it
was seen in our ancestors, haunts us continually; and while we yield
to the present fashions, or act in accordance with the dullest modern
principles of economy and utility, we look fondly back to the manners
of the ages of chivalry, and delight in painting, to the fancy, the
fashions we pretend to despise, and the splendours we think it wise to
abandon. The furniture and personages of our romance are sought, when
the writer desires to please most easily, in the centuries which we
profess to have surpassed in everything; the art which takes us into
the present times is considered as both daring and degraded; and while
the weakest words please us, and are regarded as poetry, which recall
the manners of our forefathers, or of strangers, it is only as
familiar and vulgar that we accept the description of our own.
In this we are wholly different from all the races that preceded us.
All other nations have regarded their ancestors with reverence as
saints or heroes; but have nevertheless thought their own deeds and
ways of life the fitting subjects for their arts of painting or of
verse. We, on the contrary, regard our ancestors as foolish and
wicked, but yet find our chief artistic pleasures in descriptions of
their ways of life.
The Greeks and mediævals honoured, but did not imitate their
forefathers; we imitate, but do not honour.
With this romantic love of beauty, forced to seek in history, and in
external nature, the satisfaction it cannot find in ordinary life, we
mingle a more rational passion, the due and just result of newly
awakened powers of attention. Whatever may first lead us to the
scrutiny of natural objects, that scrutiny never fails of its reward.
Unquestionably they are intended to be regarded by us with both
reverence and delight; and every hour we give to them renders their
beauty more apparent, and their interest more engrossing. Natural
science--which can hardly be considered to have existed before modern
times--rendering our knowledge fruitful in accumulation, and exquisite
in accuracy, has acted for good or evil, according to the temper of
the mind which received it; and though it has hardened the
faithlessness of the dull and proud, has shown new grounds for
reverence to hearts which were thoughtful and humble. The neglect of
the art of war, while it has somewhat weakened and deformed the
body,[117] has given us leisure and opportunity for studies to which,
before, time and space were equally wanting; lives which once were
early wasted on the battle-field are now passed usefully in the study;
nations which exhausted themselves in annual warfare now dispute with
each other the discovery of new planets; and the serene philosopher
dissects the plants, and analyzes the dust, of lands which were of old
only traversed by the knight in hasty march, or by the borderer in
heedless rapine.
The elements of progress and decline being thus strangely mingled in
the modern mind, we might beforehand anticipate that one of the
notable characters of our art would be its inconsistency; that efforts
would be made in every direction, and arrested by every conceivable
cause and manner of failure; that in all we did, it would become next
to impossible to distinguish accurately the grounds for praise or for
regret; that all previous canons of practice and methods of thought
would be gradually overthrown, and criticism continually defied by
successes which no one had expected, and sentiments which no one could
define.
Accordingly, while, in our inquiries into Greek and mediæval art, I
was able to describe, in general terms, what all men did or felt, I
find now many characters in many men; some, it seems to me, founded on
the inferior and evanescent principles of modernism, on its
recklessness, impatience, or faithlessness; others founded on its
science, its new affection for nature, its love of openness and
liberty. And among all these characters, good or evil, I see that
some, remaining to us from old or transitional periods, do not
properly belong to us, and will soon fade away, and others, though not
yet distinctly developed, are yet properly our own, and likely to grow
forward into greater strength.
For instance: our reprobation of bright colour is, I think, for the
most part, mere affectation, and must soon be done away with.
Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety, will indeed always express themselves
through art in brown and grey, as in Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and
Salvator; but we are not wholly vulgar, dull, or impious; nor, as
moderns, are we necessarily obliged to continue so in any wise. Our
greatest men, whether sad or gay, still delight, like the great men of
all ages, in brilliant hues. The colouring of Scott and Byron is full
and pure; that of Keats and Tennyson rich even to excess. Our
practical failures in colouring are merely the necessary consequences
of our prolonged want of practice during the periods of Renaissance
affectation and ignorance; and the only durable difference between old
and modern colouring, is the acceptance of certain hues, by the
modern, which please him by expressing that melancholy peculiar to his
more reflective or sentimental character, and the greater variety of
them necessary to express his greater science.
Again: if we ever become wise enough to dress consistently and
gracefully, to make health a principal object in education, and to
render our streets beautiful with art, the external charm of past
history will in great measure disappear. There is no essential reason,
because we live after the fatal seventeenth century, that we should
never again be able to confess interest in sculpture, or see
brightness in embroidery; nor, because now we choose to make the night
deadly with our pleasures, and the day with our labours, prolonging
the dance till dawn, and the toil to twilight, that we should never
again learn how rightly to employ the sacred trusts of strength,
beauty, and time. Whatever external charm attaches itself to the past,
would then be seen in proper subordination to the brightness of
present life; and the elements of romance would exist, in the earlier
ages, only in the attraction which must generally belong to whatever
is unfamiliar; in the reverence which a noble nation always pays to
its ancestors; and in the enchanted light which races, like
individuals, must perceive in looking back to the days of their
childhood.
Again: the peculiar levity with which natural scenery Is regarded by a
large number of modern minds cannot be considered as entirely
characteristic of the age, inasmuch as it never can belong to its
greatest intellects. Men of any high mental power must be serious,
whether in ancient or modern days: a certain degree of reverence for
fair scenery is found in all our great writers without exception,--even
the one who has made us laugh oftenest, taking us to the valley of
Chamouni, and to the sea beach, there to give peace after suffering,
and change revenge into pity.[118] It is only the dull, the uneducated,
or the worldly, whom it is painful to meet on the hillsides; and
levity, as a ruling character, cannot be ascribed to the whole nation,
but only to its holiday-making apprentices, and its House of Commons.
We need not, therefore, expect to find any single poet or painter
representing the entire group of powers, weaknesses, and inconsistent
instincts which govern or confuse our modern life. But we may expect
that in the man who seems to be given by Providence as the type of the
age (as Homer and Dante were given, as the types of classical and
mediæval mind), we shall find whatever is fruitful and substantial to
be completely present, together with those of our weaknesses, which
are indeed nationally characteristic, and compatible with general
greatness of mind, just as the weak love of fences, and dislike of
mountains, were found compatible with Dante's greatness in other
respects.
Farther: as the admiration of mankind is found, in our times, to have
in great part passed from men to mountains, and from human emotion to
natural phenomena, we may anticipate that the great strength of art
will also be warped in this direction; with this notable result for
us, that whereas the greatest painters or painter of classical and
mediæval periods, being wholly devoted to the representation of
humanity, furnished us with but little to examine in landscape, the
greatest painters or painter of modern times will in all probability
be devoted to landscape principally: and farther, because in
representing human emotion words surpass painting, but in representing
natural scenery painting surpasses words, we may anticipate also that
the painter and poet (for convenience' sake I here use the words in
opposition) will somewhat change their relations of rank in
illustrating the mind of the age; that the painter will become of more
importance, the poet of less; and that the relations between the men
who are the types and firstfruits of the age in word and work,--namely,
Scott and Turner,--will be, in many curious respects, different from
those between Homer and Phidias, or Dante and Giotto.[119]
[112] _Clouds_, 316-318; 380 ff.; 320-321.
[113] _Ephesians_ ii, 12.
[114] Wordsworth's "The world is too much with us."
[115] Pre-Raphaelitism, of course, excepted, which is a new phase
of art, in no wise considered in this chapter. Blake was sincere,
but full of wild creeds, and somewhat diseased in brain. [Ruskin.]
[116] Gower Street, a London street selected as typical of modern
ugliness.
Gaspar Poussin [1613-75], a French landscape painter, of the
pseudo-classical school.
[117] Of course this is meant only of the modern citizen or
country-gentleman, as compared with a citizen of Sparta or old
Florence. I leave it to others to say whether the "neglect of the
art of war" may or may not, in a yet more fatal sense, be predicated
of the English nation. War, _without_ art, we seem, with God's help,
able still to wage nobly. [Ruskin.]
[118] See _David Copperfield_, chap. 55 and 58. [Ruskin.]
[119] Ruskin proceeds to discuss Scott as he has discussed Homer.
The chapter on Turner that follows here is an almost equally good
illustration of Ruskin's ideas.