SECTION III. TIME OF "THE MASTERS."

252. (39.) _Study of the top of the Pilaster next the Castelbarco Tomb._

(R.)

The wild fig leaves are unfinished; for my assistant having

unfortunately shown his solicitude for their preservation too

energetically to some street boys who were throwing stones at them,

they got a ladder, and rooted them up the same night. The purple

and fine-grained white marbles of the pilaster are entirely

uninjured in surface by three hundred years' exposure. The coarse

white marble above has moldered, and is gray with lichens.

(40.) _Study of the base of the same Pilaster, and connected Facade._

(R.)

Showing the effect of differently colored marbles arranged in

carefully inequal masses.

253. (41.) _Interior Court of the Ducal Palace of Venice, with Giant's

Stair._ (R.)

Sketched in 1841, and perhaps giving some characters which more

finished drawing would lose.

(42.) _The Piazza d' Erbe, Verona._ (R.)

Sketched in 1841, showing general effect and pretty grouping of the

later Veronese buildings.

(43.) _Piazza de' Signori, Verona._

Sketched last year. Note the bill advertising Victor Hugo's "Homme

qui rit," pasted on the wall of the palace.

The great tower is of the Gothic time. Note its noble sweep of

delicately ascending curves sloped inwards.

(44.) _Gate of Ruined School of St. John, Venice._ (Photograph.)

Exquisite in floral sculpture, and finish of style.

(45.) _Hawthorn Leaves, from the base of Pilaster, in the Church of St.

Maria dé Miracoli, Venice._ (R.)

In the finest style of floral sculpture. It cannot be surpassed for

perfectness of treatment; especially for the obtaining of life and

softness, by broad surfaces and fine grouping.

(46.) _Basrelief from one of the Inner Doors of the Ducal Palace._

Very noble, and typical of the pure style.

(47.) _St. John Baptist and other Saints._ (Cima da Conegliano.)

Consummate work; but the photograph, though well taken, darkens it

terribly.

(48.) _Meeting of Joachim and Anna._ (Vettor Carpaccio.) (Photograph.)

(49.) _Madonna and Saints._ (John Bellini.) Portrait. (Mantegna.)

(Photographs.)

(50.) _Madonna._ (John Bellini.)

With Raphael's "Della Seggiola." Showing the first transition from

the style of the "Masters" to that of modern times.

_The Photographs in the above series are all from the Pictures

themselves._

CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.[15]

A PREFACE.

254. The writer of this book has long been my friend, and in the early

days of friendship was my disciple.

But, of late, I have been his; for he has devoted himself earnestly to

the study of forms of Christian Art which I had little opportunity of

examining, and has been animated in that study by a brightness of

enthusiasm which has been long impossible to me. Knowing this, and that

he was able perfectly to fill what must otherwise have been a rudely

bridged chasm in my teaching at Oxford, I begged him to give these

lectures, and to arrange them for press. And this he has done to please

me; and now that he has done it, I am, in one sense, anything but

pleased: for I like his writing better than my own, and am more jealous

of it than I thought it was in me to be of any good work--how much less

of my friend's! I console myself by reflecting, or at least repeating to

myself and endeavoring to think, that he could not have found out all

this if I had not shown him the way. But most deeply and seriously I am

thankful for such help, in a work far too great for my present strength;

help all the more precious because my friend can bring to the

investigation of early Christian Art, and its influence, the integrity

and calmness of the faith in which it was wrought, happier than I in

having been a personal comforter and helper of men, fulfilling his life

in daily and unquestionable duty; while I have been, perhaps wrongly,

always hesitatingly, persuading myself that it was my duty to do the

things which pleased me.

255. Also, it has been necessary to much of my analytical work that I

should regard the art of every nation as much as possible from their own

natural point of view; and I have striven so earnestly to realize belief

which I supposed to be false, and sentiment which was foreign to my

temper, that at last I scarcely know how far I think with other people's

minds, and see with anyone's eyes but my own. Even the effort to recover

my temporarily waived conviction occasionally fails; and what was once

secured to me becomes theoretical like the rest.

But my old scholar has been protected by his definitely directed life

from the temptations of this speculative equity; and I believe his

writings to contain the truest expression yet given in England of the

feelings with which a Christian gentleman of sense and learning should

regard the art produced in ancient days, by the dawn of the faiths which

still guide his conduct and secure his peace.

256. On all the general principles of Art, Mr. Tyrwhitt and I are

absolutely at one; but he has often the better of me in his acute

personal knowledge of men and their ways. When we differ in our thoughts

of things, it is because we know them on contrary sides; and often his

side is that most naturally seen, and which it is most desirable to see.

There is one important matter, for instance, on which we are thus

apparently at issue, and yet are not so in reality. These lectures show,

throughout, the most beautiful and just reverence for Michael Angelo,

and are of especial value in their account of him; while the last

lecture on Sculpture,[16] which I gave at Oxford, is entirely devoted to

examining the modes in which his genius failed, and perverted that of

other men. But Michael Angelo is great enough to make praise and blame

alike necessary, and alike inadequate, in any true record of him. My

friend sees him as a traveler sees from a distance some noble mountain

range, obscure in golden clouds and purple shade; and I see him as a

sullen miner would the same mountains, wandering among their precipices

through chill of storm and snow, and discerning that their strength was

perilous and their substance sterile. Both of us see truly, both

partially; the complete truth is the witness of both.

257. The notices of Holbein, and the English whom he painted (see

especially the sketch of Sir Thomas Wyatt in the sixth lecture), are to

my mind of singular value, and the tenor of the book throughout, as far

as I can judge--for, as I said, much of it treats of subjects with which

I am unfamiliar--so sound, and the feeling in it so warm and true, and

true in the warmth of it, that it refreshes me like the sight of the

things themselves it speaks of. New and vivid sight of them it will give

to many readers; and to all who will regard my commendation I commend

it; asking those who have hitherto credited my teaching to read these

lectures as they would my own; and trusting that others, who have

doubted me, will see reason to put faith in my friend.

PISA, _30th April, 1872._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: Preface to the above-named book, by the Rev. St. John

Tyrwhitt. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1872.--ED.]

[Footnote 16: See Mr. Ruskin's pamphlet on "The Relation of Michael

Angelo to Tintoret," being (although separately printed) the seventh

lecture of the course (1872) published as _Aratra Pentelici_--ED.]

ART SCHOOLS OF MEDIÆVAL CHRISTENDOM.[17]

A PREFACE.

258. The number of British and American travelers who take unaffected

interest in the early art of Europe is already large, and is daily

increasing; daily also, as I thankfully perceive, feeling themselves

more and more in need of a guidebook containing as much trustworthy

indication as they can use of what they may most rationally spend their

time in examining. The books of reference published by Mr. Murray,

though of extreme value to travelers, who make it their object to see

(in his, and their, sense of the word) whatever is to be seen, are of

none whatever, or may perhaps be considered, justly, as even of quite

the reverse of value, to travelers who wish to see only what they may in

simplicity understand, and with pleasure remember; while the histories

of art, and biographies of artists, to which the more earnest student in

his novitiate must have recourse, are at once so voluminous, so vague,

and so contradictory, that I cannot myself conceive his deriving any

other benefit from their study than a deep conviction of the difficulty

of the subject, and of the incertitude of human opinions.

259. It seemed to me, on reading the essays collected in this volume, as

they appeared in the periodical[18] for which they were written, that

the author not only possessed herself a very true discernment of the

qualities in mediæval art which were justly deserving of praise, but had

unusually clear understanding of the degree in which she might expect to

cultivate such discernment in the general mind of polite travelers; nor

have I less admired her aptitude in collation of essentially

illustrative facts, so as to bring the history of a very widely

contemplative range of art into tenable compass and very graceful and

serviceable form. Her reading, indeed, has been, with respect to many

very interesting periods of religious workmanship, much more extensive

than my own; and when I consented to edit the volume of collected

papers, it was not without the assurance of considerable advantage to

myself during the labor of revising them.

260. The revision, however, I am sorry to say, has been interrupted and

imperfect, very necessarily the last from the ignorance I have just

confessed of more than one segment of the great illuminated field of

early religious art, to which the writer most wisely has directed equal

and symmetrical attention, and interrupted partly under extreme pressure

of other occupation, and partly in very fear of being tempted to oppress

the serenity of the general prospect, which I think these essays are

eminently calculated to open before an ingenious reader, with the stormy

chiaroscuro of my own preference and reprobation. I leave the work,

therefore, absolutely Miss Owen's, with occasional note of remonstrance,

but without retouch, though it must be distinctly understood that when I

allow my name to stand as the editor of a book, it is in no mere

compliment (if my editorship could indeed be held as such) to the genius

or merit of the author; but it means that I hold myself entirely

responsible, in main points, for the accuracy of the views advanced, and

that I wish the work to be received, by those who have confidence in my

former teaching, as an extension and application of the parts of it

which I have felt to be incomplete.

OXFORD, _November 27, 1875._

NOTE.--The "notes of remonstrance" or approbation

scattered through the volume are not numerous. They are given

below, preceded in each case by the (italicized) statement or

expression: giving rise to them:--

(1) P. 73. "_The peculiar characteristic of the Byzantine churches

is the dome._" "Form derived first from the Catacombs. See Lord

Lindsay."

(2) P. 89. "_The octagon baptistry at Florence, ascribed to Lombard

kings...._" "No; it is Etruscan work of pure descent."

(3) _Id._ "_S. Michele, of Pavia, pure Lombard of seventh century,

rebuilt in tenth._" "Churches were often rebuilt with their

original sculptures. I believe many in this church to be Lombard.

See next page."

(4) P. 95. "_The revolution begun by Rafaelle has ended in the

vulgar painting, the sentimental prints, and the colored

statuettes, which have made the religious art of the nineteenth

century a by-word for its feebleness on the one side, its

superstition on the other._" "Excellent; but my good scholar has

not distinguished vulgar from non-vulgar naturalism. Perhaps she

will as I read on."

[Compare the last note in the book, pp. 487-8, where Miss Owen's

statement that "_the cause of Rafaelle's popularity ... has been

that predominance of exaggerated dramatic representation, which in

his pictures is visible above all moral and spiritual qualities,_"

is noted to be "Intensely and accurately true."]

(5) P. 108. "_It may be ... it is scarcely credible._" "What does

it matter what may be or what is scarcely credible? I hope the

reader will consider what a waste of time the thinking of things is

when we can never rightly know them."

(6) P. 109. On the statement that "_no vital school of art has ever

existed save as the expression of the vital and unquestioned faith

of a people,_" followed by some remarks on external helps to

devotion, there is a note at the word "people." "Down to this line

this page is unquestionably and entirely true. I do not answer for

the rest of the clause, but do not dispute it."

(7) P. 113. _S. Michele at Lucca._ "The church is now only a modern

architect's copy."

(8) P. 129. "_There is a good model of this pulpit_" (Niccola's in

the Pisan Baptistry) "_in the Kensington Museum, through which we

may learn much of the rise of Gothic sculpture._" "You cannot do

anything of the kind. Pisan sculpture can only be studied in the

original marble; half its virtue is in the chiseling."

(9) P. 136. "_S. Donato's shrine_" (by Giovanni Picano) "_in Arezzo

Cathedral is one of the finest monuments of the Pisan school._"

"No. He tried to be too fine, and overdid it. The work is merely

accumulated commonplace."

(10) P. 170. On Giotto drawing without compasses a circle with a

crayon, "_not a brush, with which, as Professor Ruskin explained,

the feat would have been impossible. See 'Giotto and his Works in

Padua.'_" "Don't; but practice with a camel's-hair brush till you

can do it. I knew nothing of brush-work proper when I wrote that

essay on Padua."

(11) P. 179. In the first of the bas-reliefs of Giotto's tower at

Florence, "_Noah lies asleep, or, as Professor Ruskin maintains,

drunk._" "I don't 'maintain' anything of the sort; I _know_ it. He

is as drunk as a man can be, and the expression of drunkenness

given with deliberate and intense skill, as on the angle of the

Ducal Palace at Venice."

(12) P. 179. On Giotto's "_astronomy, figured by an old man_" on

the same tower. "Above which are seen, by the astronomy of his

heart, the heavenly host represented above the stars."

(13) P. 190. "_The Loggia dei Langi_" (at Florence) ... "_the round

arches, new to those times ... See Vasari._" "Vasari is an ass with

precious things in his panniers; but you must not ask his opinion

on any matter. The round arches new to those times had been the

universal structure form in all Italy, Roman or Lombard, feebly and

reluctantly pointed in the thirteenth century, and occasionally, as

in the Campo Santo of Pisa, and Orcagna's own Or San Michele,

standing within three hundred yards of the Loggia arches 'new to

those times,' filled with tracery, itself composed of intersecting

round arches. Now, it does not matter two soldi to the history of

art who _built_, but who designed and carved the Loggia. It is out

and out the grandest in Italy, and its archaic virtues themselves

are impracticable and inconceivable. I don't vouch for its being

Orcagna's, nor do I vouch for the Campo Santo frescoes being his. I

have never specially studied him; nor do I know what men of might

there were to work with or after him. But I know the Loggia to be

mighty architecture of Orcagna's style and time, and the Last

Judgment and Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo to be the sternest

lessons written on the walls of Tuscany, and worth more study alone

than English travelers usually give to Pisa, Lucca, Pistoja, and

Florence altogether."

(14) P. 468. "_The Gothic style for churches never took root in

Venice._" "Not quite correct. The Ducal Palace traceries are shown

in the 'Stones of Venice' (vol. ii.) to have been founded on those

of the Frari."

(15) P. 471. Mantegna. "_No feeling had he for vital beauty of

human face, or the lower creatures of the earth._" To this Miss

Owen adds in a note, "Professor Ruskin reminds me to notice here,

in qualification, Mantegna's power of painting inanimate forms, as,

_e. g._, in the trees and leaves of his Madonna of the National

Gallery. 'He is,' says Professor Ruskin, 'the most wonderful

leaf-painter of Lombardy.'"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 17: Preface to the above-named book by Miss A. C. Owen, edited

by Mr. Ruskin. London: Mozley & Smith, 1876.--ED.]

[Footnote 18: _The Monthly Packet._--ED.]

THE EXTENSION OF RAILWAYS IN THE LAKE DISTRICT.[19]

A PROTEST.

261. The evidence collected in the following pages, in support of their

pleading, is so complete, and the summary of his cause given with so

temperate mastery by Mr. Somervell, that I find nothing to add in

circumstance, and little to re-enforce in argument. And I have less

heart to the writing even of what brief preface so good work might by

its author's courtesy be permitted to receive from me, occupied as I so

long have been in efforts tending in the same direction, because, on

that very account, I am far less interested than my friend in this local

and limited resistance to the elsewhere fatally victorious current of

modern folly, cruelty, and ruin. When the frenzy of avarice is daily

drowning our sailors, suffocating our miners, poisoning our children,

and blasting the cultivable surface of England into a treeless waste of

ashes,[20] what does it really matter whether a flock of sheep, more or

less, be driven from the slopes of Helvellyn, or the little pool of

Thirlmere filled with shale, or a few wild blossoms of St. John's vale

lost to the coronal of English spring? Little to anyone; and--let me say

this, at least, in the outset of all saying--_nothing_ to _me_. No one

need charge me with selfishness in any word or action for defense of

these mossy hills. I do not move, with such small activity as I have yet

shown in the business, because I live at Coniston (where no sound of the

iron wheels by Dunmail Raise can reach me), nor because I can find no

other place to remember Wordsworth by, than the daffodil margin of his

little Rydal marsh. What thoughts and work are yet before me, such as he

taught, must be independent of any narrow associations. All my own dear

mountain grounds and treasure-cities, Chamouni, Interlachen, Lucerne,

Geneva, Venice, are long ago destroyed by the European populace; and

now, for my own part, I don't care what more they do; they may drain

Loch Katrine, drink Loch Lomond, and blow all Wales and Cumberland into

a heap of slate shingle; the world is wide enough yet to find me some

refuge during the days appointed for me to stay in it. But it is no less

my duty, in the cause of those to whom the sweet landscapes of England

are yet precious, and to whom they may yet teach what they taught me, in

early boyhood, and would still if I had it now to learn,--it is my duty

to plead with what earnestness I may, that these sacred sibylline books

may be redeemed from perishing.

262. But again, I am checked, because I don't know how to speak to the

persons who _need_ to be spoken to in this matter.

Suppose I were sitting, where still, in much-changed Oxford, I am happy

to find myself, in one of the little latticed cells of the Bodleian

Library, and my kind and much-loved friend, Mr. Coxe, were to come to me

with news that it was proposed to send nine hundred excursionists

through the library every day, in three parties of three hundred each;

that it was intended they should elevate their minds by reading all the

books they could lay hold of while they stayed;--and that practically

scientific persons accompanying them were to look out for and burn all

the manuscripts that had any gold in their illuminations, that the said

gold might be made of practical service; but that he, Mr. Coxe, could

not, for his part, sympathize with the movement, and hoped I would write

something in deprecation of it! As I should then feel, I feel now, at

Mr. Somervell's request that I would write him a preface in defense of

Helvellyn. What could I say for Mr. Coxe? Of course, that nine hundred

people should see the library daily, instead of one, is only fair to the

nine hundred, and if there is gold in the books, is it not public

property? If there is copper or slate in Helvellyn, shall not the public

burn or hammer it out--and they say they will, of course--in spite of

us? What does it signify to _them_ how we poor old quiet readers in this

mountain library feel? True, we know well enough,--what the nine hundred

excursionist scholars don't--that the library can't be read quite

through in a quarter of an hour; also, that there is a pleasure in real

reading, quite different from that of turning pages; and that gold in a

missal, or slate in a crag, may be more precious than in a bank or a

chimney-pot. But how are these practical people to credit us,--these,

who cannot read, nor ever will; and who have been taught that nothing is

virtuous but care for their bellies, and nothing useful but what goes

into them?

263. Whether to be credited or not, the real facts of the matter, made

clear as they are in the following pages, can be briefly stated for the

consideration of any candid person.

The arguments in favor of the new railway are in the main four, and may

be thus answered.

1. "There are mineral treasures in the district capable of development."

_Answer._ It is a wicked fiction, got up by whosoever has got it up,

simply to cheat shareholders. Every lead and copper vein in Cumberland

has been known for centuries; the copper of Coniston does not pay; and

there is none so rich in Helvellyn. And the main central volcanic rocks,

through which the track lies, produce neither slate nor hematite, while

there is enough of them at Llanberis and Dalton to roof and iron-grate

all England into one vast Bedlam, if it honestly perceives itself in

need of that accommodation.

2. "The scenery must be made accessible to the public."

_Answer._ It is more than accessible already; the public are pitched

into it head-foremost, and necessarily miss two-thirds of it. The Lake

scenery really begins, on the south, at Lancaster, where the Cumberland

hills are seen over Morecambe Bay; on the north, at Carlisle, where the

moors of Skiddaw are seen over the rich plains between them and the

Solway. No one who loves mountains would lose a step of the approach,

from these distances, on either side. But the stupid herds of modern

tourists let themselves be emptied, like coals from a sack, at

Windermere and Keswick. Having got there, what the new railway has to do

is to shovel those who have come to Keswick to Windermere, and to shovel

those who have come to Windermere to Keswick. And what then?

3. "But cheap and swift transit is necessary for the working population,

who otherwise could not see the scenery at all."

_Answer._ After all your shrieking about what the operatives spend in

drink, can't you teach them to save enough out of their year's wages to

pay for a chaise and pony for a day, to drive Missis and the Baby that

pleasant twenty miles, stopping when they like, to unpack the basket on

a mossy bank? If they can't enjoy the scenery that way, they can't any

way; and all that your railroad company can do for them is only to open

taverns and skittle grounds round Grasmere, which will soon, then, be

nothing but a pool of drainage, with a beach of broken gingerbeer

bottles; and their minds will be no more improved by contemplating the

scenery of such a lake than of Blackpool.

4. What else is to be said? I protest I can find nothing, unless that

engineers and contractors must live. Let them live, but in a more useful

and honorable way than by keeping Old Bartholomew Fair under Helvellyn,

and making a steam merry-go-round of the lake country.

There are roads to be mended, where the parish will not mend them,

harbors of refuge needed, where our deck-loaded ships are in helpless

danger; get your commissions and dividends where you know that work is

needed, not where the best you can do is to persuade pleasure-seekers

into giddier idleness.

264. The arguments brought forward by the promoters of the railway may

thus be summarily answered. Of those urged in the following pamphlet in

defense of the country as it is, I care only myself to direct the

reader's attention to one (see pp. 27, 28), the certainty, namely, of

the deterioration of moral character in the inhabitants of every

district penetrated by a railway. Where there is little moral character

to be lost, this argument has small weight. But the Border peasantry of

Scotland and England, painted with absolute fidelity by Scott and

Wordsworth (for leading types out of this exhaustless portraiture, I may

name Dandie Dinmont and Michael), are hitherto a scarcely injured race,

whose strength and virtue yet survive to represent the body and soul of

England before her days of mechanical decrepitude and commercial

dishonor. There are men working in my own fields who might have fought

with Henry the Fifth at Agincourt without being discerned from among his

knights; I can take my tradesmen's word for a thousand pounds; my garden

gate opens on the latch to the public road, by day and night, without

fear of any foot entering but my own, and my girl-guests may wander by

road, or moorland, or through every bosky dell of this wild wood, free

as the heather bees or squirrels.

What effect, on the character of such a population, will be produced by

the influx of that of the suburbs of our manufacturing towns, there is

evidence enough, if the reader cares to ascertain the facts, in every

newspaper on his morning table.

265. And now one final word concerning the proposed beneficial effect on

the minds of those whom you send to corrupt us.

I have said I take no selfish interest in this resistance to the

railroad. But I do take an unselfish one. It is precisely because I

passionately wish to improve the minds of the populace, and because I am

spending my own mind, strength, and fortune, wholly on that object, that

I don't want to let them see Helvellyn while they are drunk. I suppose

few men now living have so earnestly felt--none certainly have so

earnestly declared--that the beauty of nature is the blessedest and most

necessary of lessons for men; and that all other efforts in education

are futile till you have taught your people to love fields, birds, and

flowers. Come then, my benevolent friends, join with me in that

teaching. I have been at it all my life, and without pride, do solemnly

assure you that I know how it is to be managed. I cannot indeed tell

you, in this short preface, how, completely, to fulfill so glorious a

task. But I can tell you clearly, instantly, and emphatically, in what

temper you must set about it. _Here_ are you, a Christian, a gentleman,

and a trained scholar; _there_ is your subject of education--a Godless

clown, in helpless ignorance. You can present no more blessed offering

to God than that human creature, raised into faith, gentleness, and the

knowledge of the works of his Lord. But observe this--you must not hope

to make so noble an offering to God of that which doth cost you nothing!

You must be resolved to labor, and to lose, yourself, before you can

rescue this overlabored lost sheep, and offer it alive to its Master. If

then, my benevolent friend, you are prepared to take out your two pence,

and to give them to the hosts here in Cumberland, saying--"Take care of

him, and whatsoever thou spendest more, I will repay thee when I come to

Cumberland myself," on _these_ terms--oh my benevolent friends, I am

with you, hand and glove, in every effort you wish to make for the

enlightenment of poor men's eyes. But if your motive is, on the

contrary, to put two pence into your own purse, stolen between the

Jerusalem and Jericho of Keswick and Ambleside, out of the poor drunken

traveler's pocket;--if your real object, in your charitable offering,

is, not even to lend unto the Lord by _giving_ to the poor, but to lend

unto the Lord by making a dividend out of the poor;--then, my pious

friends, enthusiastic Ananias, pitiful Judas, and sanctified Korah, I

will do my best in God's name, to stay your hands, and stop your

tongues.

BRANTWOOD, _22nd June, 1876._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 19: Preface to a pamphlet (1876) entitled "A Protest against

the Extension of Railways in the Lake District," compiled by Robert

Somervell (Windermere, J. Garnett; London, Simpkin, Marshall & Co.). The

pamphlet also contained a printed announcement as follows:--"The author

of 'Modern Painters' earnestly requests all persons who may have taken

interest in his writings, or who have any personal regard for him, to

assist him now in the circulation of the inclosed paper, drawn up by his

friend Mr. Somervell, for the defense of the Lake District of England,

and to press the appeal, so justly and temperately made in it, on the

attention of their personal friends."--ED.]

[Footnote 20: See--the illustration being coincidently given as I

correct this page for press--the description of the horrible service,

and history of the fatal explosion of dynamite, on the once lovely

estates of the Duke of Hamilton, in the _Hamilton Advertiser_ of 10th

and 17th June.]

THE STUDY OF BEAUTY AND ART IN LARGE TOWNS.[21]

266. I have been asked by Mr. Horsfall to write a few words of

introduction to the following papers. The trust is a frank one, for our

friendship has been long and intimate enough to assure their author that

my feelings and even practical convictions in many respects differ from

his, and in some, relating especially to the subjects here treated of,

are even opposed to his; so that my private letters (which, to speak

truth, he never attends to a word of) are little more than a series of

exhortations to him to sing--once for all--the beautiful Cavalier ditty

of "Farewell, Manchester," and pour the dew of his artistic benevolence

on less recusant ground. Nevertheless, as assuredly he knows much more

of his own town than I do, and as his mind is evidently made up to do

the best he can for it, the only thing left for me to do is to help him

all I can in the hard task he has set himself, or, if I can't help, at

least to bear witness to the goodness of the seed he has set himself to

sow among thorns. For, indeed, the principles on which he is working are

altogether true and sound; and the definitions and defense of them, in

this pamphlet, are among the most important pieces of Art teaching which

I have ever met with in recent English literature; in past

Art-literature there cannot of course be anything parallel to them,

since the difficulties to be met and mischiefs to be dealt with are

wholly of to-day. And in all the practical suggestions and

recommendations given in the following pages I not only concur, but am

myself much aided as I read them in the giving form to my own plans for

the museum at Sheffield; nor do I doubt that they will at once commend

themselves to every intelligent and candid reader. But, to my own mind,

the statements of principle on which these recommendations are based are

far the more valuable part of the writings, for these are true and

serviceable for all time, and in all places; while in simplicity and

lucidity they are far beyond any usually to be found in essays on Art,

and the political significance of the laws thus defined is really, I

believe, here for the first time rightly grasped and illustrated.

267. Of these, however, the one whose root is deepest and range widest

will be denied by many readers, and doubted by others, so that it may be

well to say a word or two farther in its interpretation and defense--the

saying, namely, that "faith cannot dwell in hideous towns," and that

"familiarity with beauty is a most powerful aid to belief." This is a

curious saying, in front of the fact that the primary force of

infidelity in the Renaissance times was its pursuit of carnal beauty,

and that nowadays (at least, so far as my own experience reaches) more

faith may be found in the back streets of most cities than in the fine

ones. Nevertheless the saying is wholly true, first, because carnal

beauty is not true beauty; secondly, because, rightly judged, the fine

streets of most modern towns are more hideous than the back ones;

lastly--and this is the point on which I must enlarge--because

universally the first condition to the believing there is Order in

Heaven is the Sight of Order upon Earth; Order, that is to say, not the

result of physical law, but of some spiritual power prevailing over it,

as, to take instances from my own old and favorite subject, the ordering

of the clouds in a beautiful sunset, which corresponds to a painter's

invention of them, or the ordering of the colors on a bird's wing, or of

the radiations of a crystal of hoarfrost or of sapphire, concerning any

of which matters men, so called of science, are necessarily and forever

silent, because the distribution of colors in spectra and the relation

of planes in crystals are final and causeless facts, _orders_, that is

to say, not _laws_. And more than this, the infidel temper which is

incapable of perceiving this spiritual beauty has an instant and

constant tendency to delight in the reverse of it, so that practically

its investigation is always, by preference, of forms of death or disease

and every state of disorder and dissolution, the affectionate analysis

of vice in modern novels being a part of the same science. And, to keep

to my own special field of study--the order of clouds,--there is a

grotesquely notable example of the connection between infidelity and the

sense of ugliness in a paper in the last _Contemporary Review_, in which

an able writer, who signs Vernon Lee, but whose personal view or purpose

remains to the close of the essay inscrutable, has rendered with

considerable acuteness and animation the course of a dialogue between

one of the common modern men about town who are the parasites of their

own cigars and two more or less weak and foolish friends of hesitatingly

adverse instincts: the three of them, however, practically assuming

their own wisdom to be the highest yet attained by the human race; and

their own diversion on the mountainous heights of it being by the aspect

of a so-called "preposterous" sunset, described in the following

terms:--

* * * * *

A brilliant light, which seemed to sink out of the landscape all its

reds and yellows, and with them all life; bleaching the yellowing

cornfields and brown heath; but burnishing into demoniac[22] energy of

color the pastures and oak woods, brilliant against the dark sky, as if

filled with green fire.

Along the roadside the poppies, which an ordinary sunset makes flame,

were quite extinguished, like burnt-out embers; the yellow hearts of the

daisies were quite lost, merged into their shining white petals. And,

striking against the windows of the old black and white checkered farm

(a ghastly skeleton in this light), it made them not flare, nay, not

redden in the faintest degree, but reflect a brilliant speck of white

light. Everything was unsubstantial, yet not as in a mist, nay, rather

substantial, but flat, as if cut out of paper and pasted on the black

branches and green leaves, the livid, glaring houses, with roofs of

dead, scarce perceptible rod (as when an iron turning white-hot from

red-hot in the stithy grows also dull and dim).

"It looks like the eve of the coming of Antichrist, as described in

mediæval hymns," remarked Vere: "the sun, before setting nevermore to

rise, sucking all life out of the earth, leaving it but a mound of livid

cinders, barren and crumbling, through which the buried nations will

easily break their way when they rise."

* * * * *

As I have above said, I do not discern the purpose of the writer of this

paper; but it would be impossible to illustrate more clearly this

chronic insanity of infidel thought which makes all nature spectral;

while, with exactly correspondent and reflective power, whatever _is_

dreadful or disordered in external things reproduces itself in disease

of the human mind affected by them.

* * * * *

268. The correspondent relations of beauty to morality are illustrated

in the following pages in a way which leaves little to be desired, and

scarcely any room for dissent; but I have marked for my own future

reference the following passages, of which I think it will further the

usefulness of the book that the reader should initially observe the

contents and connection.[23]

1 (p. 15, line 6--10). Our idea of beauty in all things depends on what

we believe they ought to be and do.

2 (p. 17, line 8--17). Pleasure is most to be found in safe and pure

ways, and the greatest happiness of life is to have a great many

_little_ happinesses.

3 (p. 24, line 10--30). The wonder and sorrow that in a country

possessing an Established Church, no book exists which can be put into

the hands of youth to show them the best things that can be done in

life, and prevent their wasting it.

4 (p. 28, line 21--36). There is every reason to believe that

susceptibility to beauty can be gained through proper training in

childhood by almost everyone.

5 (p. 29, line 33--35). But if we are to attain to either a higher

morality or a strong love of beauty, such attainment must be the result

of a strenuous effort and a strong will.

6 (p. 41, line 16--22). Rightness of form and aspect must first be shown

to the people in things which interest them, and about the rightness of

appearance in which it is possible for them to care a great deal.

7 (p. 42, line 1--10). And, therefore, rightness of appearance of the

bodies, and the houses, and the actions of the people of these large

towns, is of more importance than rightness of appearance in what is

usually called art, and pictures of noble action and passion and of

beautiful scenery are of far greater value than art in things which

cannot deeply affect human thought and feeling.

The practical suggestions which, deduced from these principles, occupy

the greater part of Mr. Horsfall's second paper, exhibit an untried

group of resources in education; and it will be to myself the best

encouragement in whatever it has been my hope to institute of Art School

at Oxford if the central influence of the University may be found

capable of extension by such means, in methods promoting the general

happiness of the people of England.

BRANTWOOD, _28th June, 1883._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: Introduction by Mr. Ruskin to a pamphlet entitled "The

Study of Beauty and Art in Large Towns, two papers by T. C. Horsfall"

(London, Macmillan & Co., 1883). The first of the two papers was

originally read at the Congress at Nottingham of the Social Science

Association, and the second at the Manchester Field Naturalists'

Society.--ED.]

[Footnote 22: See "Art of England."]

[Footnote 23: The passages referred to are as follows:--

1. "Our idea of what beauty is in human being's, in pictures, in houses,

in chairs, in animals, in cities, in everything, in short, which we know

to have a use, in the main depends on what we believe that human beings,

pictures, and the rest ought to be and do.

2. "Every bank in every country lane, every bush, every tree, the sky by

day and by night, every aspect of nature, is full of beautiful form or

color, or of both, for those whose eyes and hearts and brains have been

opened to perceive beauty. Richter has somewhere said that man's

_greatest_ defect is that he has such a lot of _small_ ones. With equal

truth it may be said that the greatest happiness man can have is to have

a great many little happinesses, and therefore a strong love of beauty,

which enables almost every square inch of unspoiled country to give us

pleasant sensations, is one of the best possessions we can have.

3. "It must be evident to everyone who watches life carefully that

hardly anyone reaches the objects which all should live for who does not

strive to reach them, and that at present not one person in a hundred so

much as knows what are the objects which should be sought in life. It is

astounding, therefore, that in a country which possesses an Established

Church, richly endowed universities, and even several professors of

education, no book exists which can be put into the hands of every

intelligent youth, and of every intelligent father and mother, showing

what our wisest and best men believe are the best things which can be

done in life, and what is the kind of training which makes the doing of

these things most easy. It is often said that each of us can profit only

by his own experience, but no one believes that. No one can see how many

well-meaning persons mistake means for ends and drift into error and

sin, simply because neither they nor their parents have known what

course should be steered, and what equipment is needed, in the voyage of

life,--no one can see this and doubt that a 'guidebook to life,'

containing the results of the comparison of the experiences of even

half-a-dozen able and sincere men, would save countless people from

wasting their lives as most lives are now wasted.

4. "That which is true with regard to music is true with regard to

beauty of form and color. Because a great many grown-up people, in spite

of great efforts, find it impossible to sing correctly or even to

perceive any pleasantness in music, it used to be commonly supposed that

a great many people are born without the power of gaining love of, and

skill in, music. Now it is known that it is a question of early

training, that in every thousand children there are very few,--not, I

believe, on an average, more than two or three,--who cannot gain the

power of singing correctly and of enjoying music, if they are taught

well in childhood while their nervous system can still easily form

habits and has not yet formed the habit of being insensible to

differences of sound.

"There is every reason to believe that susceptibility to beauty of form

and color can also be gained through proper training in childhood by

almost everyone.

5. "In such circumstances as ours there is no such thing as 'a _wise_

passiveness.' If we are to attain to a high morality or to strong love

of beauty, attainment must be the result of strenuous effort, of strong

will.

6. "The principle I refer to is, that, as art is the giving of right or

beautiful form, or of beautiful or right appearance, if we desire to

make people take keen interest in art, if we desire to make them love

good art, we must show it them when applied to things which themselves

are very interesting to them, and about the rightness of appearance of

which it is therefore possible for them to care a great deal.

7. "Success in bringing the influence of art to bear on the masses of

the population in large towns, or on any set of people who have to earn

their bread and have not time to acquire an unhealthy appetite for

nonsense verses or nonsense pictures, will certainly only be attained by

persons who know that art is important just in proportion to the

importance of that which it clothes, and who themselves feel that

rightness of appearance of the bodies, and the houses, and the actions,

in short of the whole life, of the population of those large towns which

are now, or threaten soon to be, 'England,' is of far greater importance

than rightness of appearance in all that which is usually called 'art,'

and who feel, to speak of only the fine arts, that rightness of

appearance in pictures of noble action and passion, and of beautiful

scenery, love of which is almost a necessary of mental health, is of far

greater importance than art can be in things which cannot deeply affect

human thought and feeling."--ED.]

* * * * *

NOTES ON NATURAL SCIENCE.

THE COLOR OF THE RHINE. 1834.

THE STRATA OF MONT BLANC. 1834.

THE INDURATION OF SANDSTONE. 1836.

THE TEMPERATURE OF SPRING AND RIVER WATER. 1836.

METEOROLOGY. 1839.

* * *

TREE TWIGS. 1861.

STRATIFIED ALPS OF SAVOY. 1863.

INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTION AND ANIMATED LIFE. 1871.

* * * * *

INQUIRIES ON THE CAUSES OF THE COLOR OF THE WATER OF THE RHINE.[24]

269. I do not think the causes of the color of transparent water have

been sufficiently ascertained. I do not mean that effect of color which

is simply optical, as the color of the sea, which is regulated by the

sky above or the state of the atmosphere, but I mean the settled color

of transparent water, which has, when analyzed, been found pure. Now,

copper will tinge water green, and that very strongly; but water thus

impregnated will not be transparent, and will deposit the copper it

holds in solution upon any piece of iron which may be thrown into it.

There is a lake in a defile on the northwest flank of Snowdon, which is

supplied by a stream which previously passes over several veins of

copper; this lake is, of course, of a bright verdigris green, but it is

not transparent. Now the coloring effect, of which I speak, is well seen

in the water of the Rhone and Rhine. The former of these rivers, when it

enters the Lake of Geneva, after having received the torrents descending

from the mountains of the Valais, is fouled with mud, or white with the

calcareous matter which it holds in solution. Having deposited this in

the Lake Leman[25] (thereby gradually forming an immense delta), it

issues from the lake perfectly pure, and flows through the streets of

Geneva so transparent, that the bottom can be seen twenty feet below the

surface, jet so blue, that you might imagine it to be a solution of

indigo. In like manner, the Rhine, after purifying itself in the Lake of

Constance, flows forth, colored of a clear green, and this under all

circumstances and in all weathers. It is sometimes said that this arises

from the torrents which supply these rivers generally flowing from the

glaciers, the green and blue color of which may have given rise to this

opinion; but the color of the ice is purely optical, as the fragments

detached from the mass appear white. Perhaps some correspondent can

afford me information on the subject.

J. R.[26]

_March, 1834._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 24: From London's _Magazine of Natural History_ (London,

Longmans & Co., 1834), vol. vii., No. 41, pp. 438-9, being its author's

earliest contribution to literature.--ED.]

[Footnote 25: This lake, however, if the poet have spoken truly, is not

very feculent:--

"Lake Leman woos me with its crystal face,

The mirror where the stars and mountains view

The stillness of their aspect in each trace

Its clear depth yields of their far height and hue."

BYRON.]

[Footnote 26: In the number of the magazine in which this note appeared

was an article by "E. L." on the perforation of a leaden pipe by rats,

upon which, in a subsequent number (Vol. vii., p. 592), J. R. notes as

follows: "E. S. has been, surely, too inattentive to proportions: there

is an inconsistency in the dimensions of a leaden pipe about 1-1/4 in. in

external diameter, with a bore of about 3/4 in. in diameter; thus leaving

a solid circumference of metal varying from 1/2 in. to 3/4 in. in

thickness.--_J. R._, _Sept. 1834._"--ED.]

FACTS AND CONSIDERATIONS ON THE STRATA OF MONT BLANC, AND ON SOME

INSTANCES OF TWISTED STRATA OBSERVABLE IN SWITZERLAND.[27]

270. The granite ranges of Mont Blanc are as interesting to the

geologist as they are to the painter. The granite is dark red, often

inclosing veins of quartz, crystallized and compact, and likewise

well-formed crystals of schorl. The average elevation of its range of

peaks, which extends from Mont Blanc to the Tète Noire, is about 12,000

English feet above the level of the sea. [The highest culminating point

is 15,744 feet.] The Aiguille de Servoz, and that of Dru, are excellent

examples of the pyramidal and spiratory formation which these granite

ranges in general assume. They rise out of immense fields of snow, but,

being themselves too steep for snow to rest upon, form red, bare, and

inaccessible peaks, which even the chamois scarcely dares to climb.

Their bases appear sometimes abutted (if I may so speak) by mica slate,

which forms the southeast side of the Valley of Chamonix, whose flanks,

if intersected, might appear as (in _fig._ 72), _a_, granite, forming on

the one side (B) the Mont Blanc, on the other (C) the Mont Breven; _b_,

mica slate resting on the base of Mont Blanc, and which contains

amianthus and quartz, in which capillary crystals of titanium occur;

_c_, calcareous rock; _d_, alluvium, forming the Valley of Chamonix. I

should have mentioned that the granite appears to contain a small

quantity of gold, as that metal is found among the granite débris and

siliceous sand of the river Arve [_Bakewell_, i. 375]; and I have two

or three specimens in which chlorite (both compact and in minute

crystals) occupies the place of mica.

J. R.

_March_, 1834.

* * * * *

With this paper were printed some observations on it by the Rev. W. B.

Clarke, after which (p. 648) appears the following note by J. R.

* * * * *

271. "TWISTED STRATA.--The contortions of the limestone at the

fall of the Nant d'Arpenaz, on the road from Geneva to Chamonix, are

somewhat remarkable. The rock is a hard dark brown limestone, forming

part of a range of secondary cliffs, which rise from 500 feet to 1000

feet above the defile which they border. The base itself is about 800

feet high. The strata bend very regularly except at _e_ and _f_,[28]

where they appear to have been fractured.

* * * * *

_To what Properties in Nature is it owing that the Stones in Buildings,

formed originally of the frailest Materials, gradually become indurated

by Exposure to the Atmosphere and by Age, and stand the Wear and Tear of

Time and Weather every bit as well, in some instances much better, than

the hardest and most compact Limestones and Granite?_[29]

272. In addition to the fact mentioned by Mr. Hunter[30] relative to the

induration of soft sandstone, I would adduce an excellent example of the

same effect in the cathedral of Basle, in Switzerland. The cathedral is

wholly built of a soft coarse-grained sandstone, of so deep a red as to

resemble long-burned brick. The numerous and delicate ornaments and fine

tracery on the exterior are in a state of excellent preservation, and

present none of the moldering appearance so common in old cathedrals

that are built of stone which, when quarried, was much harder than this

sandstone. The pavement in the interior is composed of the same

material; and, as almost every slab is a tomb, it is charged with the

arms, names, and often statues in low relief, of those who lie below,

delicately sculptured in the soft material. Yet, though these sculptures

have been worn for ages by the feet of multitudes, they are very little

injured; they still stand out in bold and distinct relief: not an

illegible letter, not an untraceable ornament is to be found; and it is

said, and I believe with truth, that they have now grown so hard as not

to be in the least degree farther worn by the continual tread of

thousands; and that the longer the stone is exposed to the air, the

harder it becomes. The cathedral was built in 1019.

273. The causes of the different effects of air on stone must be

numerous, and the investigation of them excessively difficult. With

regard, first, to rocks _en masse_, if their structure be crystalline,

or their composition argillaceous, the effect of the air will, I think,

ordinarily, be found injurious. Thus, in granite, which has a kind of

parallelogrammatic cleavage, water introduces itself into the fissures,

and the result, in a sharp frost, will be a disintegration of the rocks

_en masse_; and, if the felspar be predominant in the composition of the

granite, it will be subject to a rapid decomposition. The morvine of

some of the Chamouni and Allée Blanche glaciers is composed of a white

granite, being chiefly composed of quartz and felspar, with a little

chlorite. The sand and gravel at the edge of these glaciers appears far

more the result of decomposition than attrition. All finely foliated

rocks, slates, etc., are liable to injury from frost or wet weather. The

road of the Simplon, on the Italian side, is in some parts dangerous in,

or after, wet weather, on account of the rocks of slate continually

falling from the overhanging mountains above; this, however, is mere

disintegration, not decomposition. Not so with the breccias of Central

Switzerland. The rock of Righi is composed of pebbles of different

kinds, joined by a red argillaceous gluten. When this rock has not been

exposed to the air, it is very hard: you may almost as easily break the

pebbles as detach them from their matrix; but, when exposed for a few

years to wind and weather, the matrix becomes soft, and the pebbles may

be easily detached. I was struck with the difference between this rock

and a breccia at Epinal, in France, where the matrix was a red

sandstone, like that of the cathedral at Basle. Here, though the rock

had every appearance of having been long exposed to the air, it was as

hard as iron; and it was utterly impossible to detach any of the pebbles

from the bed: it was difficult even to break the rock at all. I cannot

positively state that the gluten in these sandstones is calcareous, but

I suppose it to have been so. Compact calcareous rock, as far as I

remember, appears to be subject to no injury from the weather. Many

churches in Italy, and almost the whole cities of Venice and Genoa, are

built of very fine marble; and the perfection of the delicate carvings,

however aged, is most remarkable. I remember a church, near Pavia,

coated with the finest and most expensive marbles; a range of

beautifully sculptured medallions running round its base, though old,

were as distinct and fine in their execution as if they had just come

out of the sculptor's studio. If, therefore, the gluten of the sandstone

be either calcareous or siliceous, it will naturally produce the effect

above alluded to, though it is certainly singular that the stone should

be soft when first quarried. Sandstone is a rock in which you seldom see

many cracks or fissures in the strata: they are generally continuous and

solid. Now, there may be a certain degree of density in the mass, which

could not be increased without producing, as in granite, fissures

running through it: the particles may be supposed to be held in a

certain degree of tension, and there may be a tendency to what the

French call _assaissement_ (I do not know the English term), which is,

nevertheless, resisted by the stone _en masse_; and a quantity of water

may likewise be held, not in a state of chemical combination, but in one

of close mixture with the rock. On being broken or quarried, the

_assaissement_ may take place, the particles of stone may draw closer

together, the attraction become stronger; and, on the exposure to the

air, the water, however intimately combined, will, in a process of

years, be driven off, occasioning the consolidation of the calcareous,

and the near approach of the siliceous, particles, and a consequent

gradual induration of the whole body of the stone. I offer this

supposition with all diffidence; there may be many other causes, which

cannot be developed until proper experiments have been made. It would be

interesting to ascertain the relative hardness of different specimens of

sandstone, taken from different depths in a bed, the surface of which

was exposed to the air, as of specimens exposed to the air for different

lengths of time.

J. R.

HERNE HILL, _July 25, 1836._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: London's _Magazine of Natural History_, Vol. vii., pp.

644-5. The note was illustrated by engravings from two sketches by the

author of the Aiguille de Servoz and of the Aiguille Dru, and by a

diagram explanatory of its last sentence but one.--ED.]

[Footnote 28: "A small neat copy of a sketch carefully taken on the

spot," which, according to the editor of the magazine, accompanied this

communication, was not, however, published. See the magazine.--ED.]

[Footnote 29: Loudon's _Magazine of Natural History_, Vol. ix., No. 65,

pp. 488-90.--ED.]

[Footnote 30: The question here discussed was originally asked in the

magazine (Vol. ix., pp. 379-80) by Mr. W. Perceval Hunter with reference

to the condition of Bodiam Castle, in Sussex.--ED.]

OBSERVATIONS ON THE CAUSES WHICH OCCASION THE VARIATION OF TEMPERATURE

BETWEEN SPRING AND RIVER WATER.--BY J. R.[31]

274. The difference in temperature between river and spring water, which

gives rise to the query of your correspondent Indigena (p. 491),[32] may

be the result of many causes, the principal of which is, however,

without doubt, the interior heat of the earth. It is a well known fact,

that this heat increases in a considerable ratio as we descend, making a

difference of several degrees between the temperature of the earth at

its surface and at depths of 500 or 600 feet; raising, of course, the

temperature of all springs which have their source at even moderate

depths, and entirely securing them from the effects of frost, which, it

is well known, cannot penetrate the earth to a greater depth than 3 or 4

ft.

275. Many instances might be given of the strong effect of this interior

heat. The glaciers of the Alps, for instance, frequently cover an extent

of three or four square leagues, with a mass of ice 400, 500, or even

600 feet deep, thus entirely preventing the access of exterior heat to

the soil; yet the radiation of heat from the ground itself is so

powerful as to dissolve the ice very rapidly, and to occasion streams of

no inconsiderable size beneath the ice, whose temperature, in summer,

is, I believe, as far as can be ascertained, not many degrees below that

of streams exposed to the air; and the radiation of heat from the water

of these streams forms vaults under the ice, which are frequently 40 ft.

or 50 ft. above the water; and which are formed, as a glance will show,

not by the force of the stream, which would only tear itself a broken

cave sufficient for its passage, but by the heat which radiates from it,

and gives the arch its immense height, and beautifully regular form.

These streams continue to flow in winter as well as in summer, although

in less quantity; and it is this process which chiefly prevents the

glacier from increasing in size; for the melting at the surface is, in

comparison, very inconsiderable, even in summer, the wind being cold,

the sun having little power, and slight frosts being frequent during the

night. It is also this melting beneath the ice (subglacial, suppose we

call it) which loosens the ice from the ground, and occasions, or rather

permits, the perpetual downward movement, with which

"The glacier's cold and restless mass

Moves onward day by day."

276. But more forcible and striking evidence is afforded by experiments

made in mines of great depth. Between 60 ft. and 80 ft. down, the

temperature of the earth is, I believe, the same at all times and in all

places; and below this depth it gradually increases. Near Bex, in the

Valais, there is a perpendicular shaft 677 ft. deep, or about 732 ft.

English, with water at the bottom, the temperature of which was

ascertained by Saussure. He does not tell us whether he used Réaumur's

or the centesimal thermometer; but the result of his experiment was

this:--In a lateral gallery, connected with the main shaft, but

deserted, and, therefore, unaffected by breath or the heat of lamps, at

321 ft. 10 in. below the surface, the temperature of the water and the

air was exactly the same, 11-1/2°; or, if the centesimal thermometer was

used, 52-4/5 Fahr.; if Réaumur's, 57-7/8 Fahr.

277. In another gallery, 564 feet below the surface, the water and air

had likewise the same temperature, 12-1/2°, either 54-4/5 or 6O-1/4

Fahr. The water at the bottom, 677 feet, was 14°, 57-1/2 or 63-1/4 Fahr.

The ratio in which the heat increases, therefore, increased as we

descend, since a difference of 113 feet between the depth of the bottom

of the shaft and the lowest gallery makes a greater difference in

temperature than the difference of 243 feet between the lowest and upper

gallery. This heat is the more striking when it is considered that the

water is impregnated with salt; indeed, Saussure appears inclined to

consider it accidental, perhaps occasioned by the combustion of pyrites,

or other causes in the interior of the mountain ("Voyages dans les

Alpes," tom. iv., c. 50). All experiments of this kind, indeed, are

liable to error, from the frequent occurrence of warm springs, and other

accidental causes of increase in temperature. The water at the bottom of

deep lakes is always found several degrees colder than the atmosphere,

even when the water at the surface is warmer: but that may be accounted

for by the difference in the specific gravity of water at different

temperatures; and, as the heat of the sun and atmosphere in summer is

greater than the mean heat of the earth at moderate depths, the water at

the bottom, even if it becomes of the same heat with the earth, must be

colder than that at the surface, which, from its exposure to the sun,

becomes frequently warmer than the air. The same causes affect the

temperature of the sea; and the greater saturation of the water below

with salt renders it yet more susceptible of cold. Under-currents from

the poles, and the sinking of the water of low temperature, which

results from the melting of the icebergs which float into warmer

latitudes, contribute still farther to lower the temperature of the deep

sea. If, then, the temperature of the sea at great depths is found not

many degrees lower than that at the surface, it would be a striking

proof of the effect produced by the heat of the earth; but I am not

aware of the results of the experiments which have been made on this

subject.

278. We must, then, rest satisfied with the well-ascertained fact, that

the temperature of the earth, even at depths of a few feet, never

descends, in temperate latitudes, to the freezing point; and that at the

depth of 60 feet it is always the same, in winter much higher, in summer

considerably lower, than that of the atmosphere. Spring water, then,

which has its source at a considerable depth, will, when it first rises,

be of this mean temperature; while, after it has flowed for some

distance, it becomes of the temperature of the atmosphere, or, in

summer, even warmer, owing to the action of the sun, both directly and

reflected or radiated from its bottom. Besides this equable temperature

in the water itself, spring or well water is usually covered; and, even

if exposed, if the well is very deep, the water will not freeze, or at

least very slightly; for frost does not act with its full power, except

where there is a free circulation of air. In open ponds, wherever bushes

hang over the water, the ice is weak. Indigena's supposition, that there

are earthy particles in river water, which render it more susceptible of

cold than spring water, cannot be true; for then the relative

temperatures would be the same in winter and in summer, which is not the

case; and, besides, there are frequently more earthy particles in

mineral springs, or even common land springs, than in clear river water,

provided it has not been fouled by extraneous matter; for it has a

tendency to deposit the earthy particles which it holds in suspension.

279. It is evident, also, that the supposition of Mr. Carr (Vol. v., p.

395) relative to anchor frosts, that the stones at the bottom acquire a

greater degree of cold, or, to speak more correctly, lose more heat,

than the water, is erroneous. J. G. has given the reasons at p. 770; and

the glaciers of Switzerland afford us an example. When a stone is

deposited on a glacier of any considerable size, but not larger than 1

foot or 18 inches in diameter, it becomes penetrated with the heat of

the sun, melts the ice below it, and sinks into the glacier. But this

effect does not cease, as might be supposed, when the stone sinks

beneath the water which it has formed; on the contrary, it continues to

absorb heat from the rays of the sun, to keep the water above it liquid

by its radiation, and to sink deeper into the body of the glacier, until

it gets down beyond the reach of the sun's rays, when the water of the

well which it has formed is no longer kept liquid, and the stone is

buried in the ice. In summer, however, the water is kept liquid; and

circular wells, formed in this manner, are of frequent occurrence on the

glaciers, sometimes, in the morning, covered by a thin crust of ice.

Thus, the stones at the bottom of streams must tend to raise, rather

than lower, this temperature. Is it possible that, in the agitation of a

stream at its bottom, if violent, momentary and minute vacua may be

formed, tending to increase the intensity of the cold?

HERNE HILL, _Sept. 2, 1836._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 31: London's _Magazine of Natural History_, vol. ix., pp.

533-536.--ED.]

[Footnote 32: The query was as follows:--

_An Inquiry for the Cause of the Difference in Temperature of River

Water and Spring Water, both in Summer and Winter._--In the summer time

the river water is much warmer than that from a spring; during the

severe frosts of winter it is colder; and when the stream is covered

over with ice, the spring, that is, well or pump water is unaffected by

frost. Does this difference proceed from the exposure of the surface of

the river water, in summer, to the sun's direct influence, and, in

winter, to that of frost; while the well water, being covered, is

protected from their power? Or is there in river water, from the earthy

particles it contains, a greater susceptibility of heat and

cold?--_Indigena_. _April 19, 1836._--ED.]

METEOROLOGY.[33]

280. The comparison and estimation of the relative advantages of

separate departments of science is a task which is always partially

executed, because it is never entered upon with an unbiased mind; for,

since it is only the accurate knowledge of a science which can enable us

to present its beauty, or estimate its utility, the branches of

knowledge with which we are most familiar will always appear the most

important. The endeavor, therefore, to judge of the relative _beauty_ or

_interest_ of the sciences is utterly hopeless. Let the astronomer boast

of the magnificence of his speculations, the mathematician of the

immutability of his facts, the chemist of the infinity of his

combinations, and we will admit that they all have equal ground for

their enthusiasm. But the highest standard of estimation is that of

utility. The far greater proportion of mankind, the uninformed, who are

unable to perceive the beauty of the sciences whose benefits they

experience, are the true, the just, the only judges of their relative

importance. It is they who feel what impartial men of learning know,

that the mass of general knowledge is a perfect and beautiful body,

among whose members there should be no schism, and whose prosperity must

always be greatest when none are partially pursued, and none unduly

rejected. We do not, therefore, advance any proud and unjustifiable

claims to the superiority of that branch of science for the furtherance

of which this society has been formed over all others; but we zealously

come forward to deprecate the apathy with which it has long been

regarded, to dissipate the prejudices which that apathy alone could have

engendered, and to vindicate its claims to an honorable and equal

position among the proud thrones of its sister sciences. We do not bring

meteorology forward as a pursuit adapted for the occupation of tedious

leisure, or the amusement of a careless hour. Such qualifications are no

inducements to its pursuit by men of science and learning, and to these

alone do we now address ourselves. Neither do we advance it on the

ground of its interest or beauty, though it is a science possessing both

in no ordinary degree. As to its beauty, it may be remarked that it is

not calculated to harden the mind it strengthens, and bind it down to

the measurement of magnitudes and estimation of quantities, destroying

all higher feelings, all finer sensibilities: it is not to be learned

among the gaseous exhalations of the deathful laboratory; it has no

dwelling in the cold caves of the dark earth; it is not to be followed

up among the charnel houses of creation. But it is a science of the pure

air, and of the bright heaven; its thoughts are amidst the loveliness of

creation; it leads the mind, as well as the eye, to the morning mist,

and the noonday glory, and the twilight-cloud, to the purple peace of

the mountain heaven, to the cloudy repose of the green valley; now

expatiating in the silence of stormless ether, now on the rushing of the

wings of the wind. It is indeed a knowledge which must be felt to be, in

its very essence, full of the soul of the beautiful. For its interest,

it is universal, unabated in every place, and in all time. He, whose

kingdom is the heaven, can never meet with an uninteresting space, can

never exhaust the phenomena of an hour; he is in a realm of perpetual

change, of eternal motion, of infinite mystery. Light and darkness, and

cold and heat, are to him as friends of familiar countenance, but of

infinite variety of conversation; and while the geologist yearns for the

mountain, the botanist for the field, and the mathematician for the

study, the meteorologist, like a spirit of a higher order than any,

rejoices in the kingdoms of the air.

281. But, as we before said, it is neither for its interest, nor for its

beauty, that we recommend the study of meteorology. It involves

questions of the highest practical importance, and the solution of which

will be productive of most substantial benefit to those classes who can

least comprehend the speculations from which these advantages are

derived. Times and seasons and climates, calms and tempests, clouds and

winds, whose alternations appear to the inexperienced mind the confused

consequences of irregular, indefinite, and accidental causes, arrange

themselves before the meteorologist in beautiful succession of

undisturbed order, in direct derivation from definite causes; it is for

him to trace the path of the tempest round the globe, to point out the

place whence it arose, to foretell the time of its decline, to follow

the hours around the earth, as she "spins beneath her pyramid of night,"

to feel the pulses of ocean, to pursue the course of its currents and

its changes, to measure the power, direction, and duration of mysterious

and invisible influences, and to assign constant and regular periods to

the seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and

night, which we know shall not cease, till the universe be no more. It

may be thought we are exaggerating the effects of a science which is yet

in its infancy. But it must be remembered that we are not speaking of

its attained, but of its attainable power: it is the young Hercules for

the fostering of whose strength the Meteorological Society has been

formed.

282. There is one point, it must now be observed, in which the science

of meteorology differs from all others. A Galileo, or a Newton, by the

unassisted workings of his solitary mind, may discover the secrets of

the heavens, and form a new system of astronomy. A Davy in his lonely

meditations on the crags of Cornwall, or in his solitary laboratory,

might discover the most sublime mysteries of nature, and trace out the

most intricate combinations of her elements. But the meteorologist is

impotent if alone; his observations are useless; for they are made upon

a point, while the speculations to be derived from them must be on

space. It is of no avail that he changes his position, ignorant of what

is passing behind him and before; he desires to estimate the movements

of space, and can only observe the dancing of atoms; he would calculate

the currents of the atmosphere of the world, while he only knows the

direction of a breeze. It is perhaps for this reason that the cause of

meteorology has hitherto been so slightly supported; no progress can be

made by the most gigantic efforts of a solitary intellect, and the

co-operation demanded was difficult to obtain, because it was necessary

that the individuals should think, observe, and act simultaneously,

though separated from each other by distances on the greatness of which

depended the utility of the observations.

283. The Meteorological Society, therefore, has been formed, not for a

city, nor for a kingdom, but for the world. It wishes to be the central

point, the moving power of a vast machine, and it feels that unless it

can be this, it must be powerless; if it cannot do all, it can do

nothing. It desires to have at its command, at stated periods, perfect

systems of methodical and simultaneous observations,--it wishes its

influence and its power to be omnipotent over the globe, so that it may

be able to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere at

every point on its surface. Let it not be supposed that this is a

chimerical imagination, the vain dream of a few philosophical

enthusiasts. It is co-operation which we now come forward to request, in

full confidence, that if our efforts are met with a zeal worthy of the

cause, our associates will be astonished, _individually_, by the result

of their labors in a body. Let none be discouraged because they are

alone, or far distant from their associates. What was formerly weakness

will now have become strength. Let the pastor of the Alps observe the

variations of his mountain winds; let the voyagers send us notes of the

changes on the surface of the sea; let the solitary dweller in the

American prairie observe the passages of the storms, and the variations

of the climate; and each, who alone would have been powerless, will find

himself a part of one mighty mind, a ray of light entering into one vast

eye, a member of a multitudinous power, contributing to the knowledge,

and aiding the efforts, which will be capable of solving the most deeply

hidden problems of nature, penetrating into the most occult causes, and

reducing to principle and order the vast multitude of beautiful and

wonderful phenomena by which the wisdom and benevolence of the Supreme

Deity regulates the course of the times and the seasons, robes the globe

with verdure and fruitfulness, and adapts it to minister to the wants,

and contribute to the felicity, of the innumerable tribes of animated

existence.

OXFORD UNIVERSITY.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 33: From the "Transactions of the Meteorological Society,"

Vol. i., pp. 56-9 (London, 1839). The full title of the paper was

"Remarks on the Present State of Meteorological Science." The Society

was instituted in 1823, but appears to have published no previous

transactions.--ED.]

ON TREE TWIGS.[34]

284. The speaker's purpose was to exhibit the development of the common

forms of branch, in dicotyledonous trees, from the fixed type of the

annual shoot. Three principal modes of increase and growth might be

distinguished in all accumulative change, namely:--

1. Simple aggregation, having no periodical or otherwise defined limit,

and subject only to laws of cohesion and crystallization, as in

inorganic matter.

2. Addition of similar parts to each other, under some law fixing their

limits and securing their unity.

3. Enlargement, or systematic change in arrangement, of a typical form,

as in the growth of the members of an animal.

285. The growth of trees came under the second of these heads. A tree

did not increase in stem or boughs as the wrist and hand of a child

increased to the wrist and hand of a man; but it was built up by

additions of similar parts, as a city is increased by the building of

new rows of houses.

Any annual shoot was most conveniently to be considered as a single rod,

which would always grow vertically if possible.

Every such rod or pillar was, in common timber trees, typically either

polygonal in section, or rectangular.

If polygonal, the leaves were arranged on it in a spiral order, as in

the elm or oak.

If rectangular, the leaves were arranged on it in pairs, set alternately

at right angles to each other.

Intermediate forms connected each of these types with those of

monocotyledonous trees. The structure of the _arbor vitæ_ might be

considered as typically representing the link between the rectangular

structure and that of monocotyledons; and that of the pine between the

polygonal structure and that of monocotyledons.

Every leaf during its vitality secreting carbon from the atmosphere,

with the elements of water, formed a certain quantity of woody tissue,

which extended down the outside of the tree to the ground, and farther

to the extremities of the roots. The mode in which this descending

masonry was added appeared to depend on the peculiar functions of

cambium, and (the speaker believed) was as yet unexplained by botanists.

286. Every leaf, besides forming this masonry all down the tree,

protected a bud at the base of its own stalk. From this bud, unless

rendered abortive, a new shoot would spring next year. Now, supposing

that out of the leaf-buds on each shoot of a pentagonal tree, only five

at its extremity or on its side were permitted to develop themselves,

even under this limitation the number of shoots developed from a single

one in the seventh year would be 78,125. The external form of a

healthily grown tree at any period of its development was therefore

composed of a mass of sprays, whose vitality was approximately

distributed over the _surface_ of the tree to an equal depth. The

branches beneath at once supported, and were fed by, this orbicular

field, or animated external garment of vegetation, from every several

leaf of which, as from an innumerable multitude of small green

fountains, the streams of woody fiber descended, met, and united as

rivers do, and gathered their full flood into the strength of the stem.

287. The principal errors which had been committed by artists in drawing

trees had arisen from their regarding the bough as ramifying

irregularly, and somewhat losing in energy towards the extremity;

whereas the real boughs threw their whole energy, and multiplied their

substance, towards the extremities, ranking themselves in more or less

cup-shaped tiers round the trunk, and forming a compact united surface

at the exterior of the tree.

288. In the course of arrival at this form, the bough, throughout its

whole length, showed itself to be influenced by a force like that of an

animal's instinct. Its minor curves and angles were all subjected to one

strong ruling tendency and law of advance, dependent partly on the aim

of every shoot to raise itself upright, partly on the necessity which

each was under to yield due place to the neighboring leaves, and obtain

for itself as much light and air as possible. It had indeed been

ascertained that vegetable tissue was liable to contractions and

expansion (under fixed mechanical conditions) by light, heat, moisture,

etc. But vegetable tissue in the living branch did not contract nor

expand under external influence alone. The principle of life manifested

itself either by contention with, or felicitous recognition of, external

force. It accepted with a visible, active, and apparently joyful

concurrence, the influences which led the bough towards its due place in

the economy of the tree; and it obeyed reluctantly, partially, and with

distorted curvatures, those which forced it to violate the typical

organic form. The attention of painters of foliage had seldom been drawn

with sufficient accuracy to the lines either of branch curvature, or

leaf contour, as expressing these subtle laws of incipient volition; but

the relative merit of the great schools of figure design might, in

absence of all other evidence, be determined, almost without error, by

observing the precision of their treatment of leaf curvature. The

leaf-painting round the head of Ariosto by Titian, in the National

Gallery, might be instanced.

289. The leaf thus differed from the flower in forming and protecting

behind it, not only the bud in which was the form of a new shoot like

itself, but a piece of permanent work, and produced substance, by which

every following shoot could be placed under different circumstances from

its predecessor. Every leaf labored to solidify this substance during

its own life; but the seed left by the flower matured only as the flower

perished.

This difference in the action and endurance of the flower and leaf had

been applied by nearly all great nations as a type of the variously

active and productive states of life among individuals or commonwealths.

Chaucer's poem of the "Flower and Leaf" is the most definite expression

of the mediæval feeling in this respect, while the fables of the rape of

Proserpine and of Apollo and Daphne embody that of the Greeks. There is

no Greek goddess corresponding to the Flora of the Romans. Their Flora

is Persephone, "the bringer of death." She plays for a little while in

the Sicilian fields, gathering flowers, then snatched away by Pluto,

receives her chief power as she vanishes from our sight, and is crowned

in the grave. Daphne, on the other hand, is the daughter of one of the

great Arcadian river gods, and of the earth; she is the type of the

river mist filling the rocky vales of Arcadia; the sun, pursuing this

mist from dell to dell, is Apollo pursuing Daphne; where the mist is

protected from his rays by the rock shadows, the laurel and other

richest vegetation spring by the river-sides, so that the laurel-leaf

becomes the type, in the Greek mind, of the beneficent ministry and

vitality of the rivers and the earth, under the beams of sunshine; and

therefore it is chosen to form the signet-crown of highest honor for

gods or men, honor for work born of the strength and dew of the earth

and informed by the central light of heaven; work living, perennial, and

beneficent.

J. R.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 34: Read by Mr. Ruskin at the weekly evening meeting of the

Royal Institution (see _Proceedings_, vol. iii., pp. 358-60), April 19,

1861.--ED.]

ON THE FORMS OF THE STRATIFIED ALPS OF SAVOY.[35]

290. The purpose of the discourse was to trace some of the influences

which have produced the present external forms of the stratified

mountains of Savoy, and the probable extent and results of the future

operation of such influences.

The subject was arranged under three heads:--

I. The Materials of the Savoy Alps.

II. The Mode of their Formation.

III. The Mode of their subsequent Sculpture.

291. I. _Their Materials._--The investigation was limited to those Alps

which consist, in whole or in part, either of Jura limestone, of

Neocomian beds, or of the Hippurite limestone, and include no important

masses of other formations. All these rocks are marine deposits; and the

first question to be considered with respect to the development of

mountains out of them is the kind of change they must undergo in being

dried. Whether prolonged through vast periods of time, or hastened by

heat and pressure, the drying and solidification of such rocks involved

their contraction, and usually, in consequence, their being traversed

throughout by minute fissures. Under certain conditions of pressure,

these fissures take the aspect of slaty cleavage; under others, they

become irregular cracks, dividing all the substance of the stone. If

these are not filled, the rock would become a mere heap of débris, and

be incapable of establishing itself in any bold form. This is provided

against by a metamorphic action, which either arranges the particles of

the rock, throughout, in new and more crystalline conditions, or else

causes some of them to separate from the rest, to traverse the body of

the rock, and arrange themselves in its fissures; thus forming a cement,

usually of finer and purer substance than the rest of the stone. In

either case the action tends continually to the purification and

segregation of the elements of the stone. The energy of such action

depends on accidental circumstances: first, on the attractions of the

component elements among themselves; secondly, on every change of

external temperature and relation. So that mountains are at different

periods in different stages of health (so to call it) or disease. We

have mountains of a languid temperament, mountains with checked

circulations, mountains in nervous fevers, mountains in atrophy and

decline.

292. This change in the structure of existing rocks is traceable through

continuous gradations, so that a black mud or calcareous slime is

imperceptibly modified into a magnificently hard and crystalline

substance, inclosing nests of beryl, topaz, and sapphire, and veined

with gold. But it cannot be determined how far, or in what localities,

these changes are yet arrested; in the plurality of instances they are

evidently yet in progress. It appears rational to suppose that as each

rock approaches to its perfect type the change becomes slower; its

perfection being continually neared, but never reached; its change being

liable also to interruption or reversal by new geological phenomena. In

the process of this change, rocks expand or contract; and, in portions,

their multitudinous fissures give them a ductility or viscosity like

that of glacier-ice on a larger scale. So that many formations are best

to be conceived as glaciers, or frozen fields of crag, whose depth is to

be measured in miles instead of fathoms, whose crevasses are filled with

solvent flame, with vapor, with gelatinous flint, or with crystallizing

elements of mingled natures; the whole mass changing its dimensions and

flowing into new channels, though by gradations which cannot be

measured, and in periods of time of which human life forms no

appreciable unit.

293. II. _Formation._--Mountains are to be arranged, with respect to

their structure, under two great classes--those which are cut out of the

beds of which they are composed, and those which are formed by the

convolution or contortion of the beds themselves. The Savoy mountains

are chiefly of this latter class. When stratified formations are

contorted, it is usually either by pressure from below, which raises one

part of the formation above the rest, or by lateral pressure, which

reduces the whole formation into a series of waves. The ascending

pressure may be limited in its sphere of operation; the lateral one

necessarily affects extensive tracts of country, and the eminences it

produces vanish only by degrees, like the waves left in the wake of a

ship. The Savoy mountains have undergone both these kinds of violence in

very complex modes and at different periods, so that it becomes almost

impossible to trace separately and completely the operation of any given

force at a given point.

294. The speaker's intention was to have analyzed, as far as possible,

the action of the forming forces in one wave of simple elevation, the

Mont Salève, and in another of lateral compression, the Mont Brezon: but

the investigation of the Mont Salève had presented unexpected

difficulty. Its façade had been always considered to be formed by

vertical beds, raised into that position during the tertiary periods;

the speaker's investigations had, on the contrary, led him to conclude

that the appearance of vertical beds was owing to a peculiarly sharp and

distinct cleavage, at right angles with the beds, but nearly parallel to

their strike, elsewhere similarly manifested in the Jurassic series of

Savoy, and showing itself on the fronts of most of the precipices formed

of that rock. The attention of geologists was invited to the

determination of this question.

The compressed wave of the Brezon, more complex in arrangement, was more

clearly defined. A section of it was given, showing the reversed

position of the Hippurite limestone in the summit and lower precipices.

This limestone wave was shown to be one of a great series, running

parallel with the Alps, and constituting an undulatory district,

chiefly composed of chalk beds, separated from the higher limestone

district of the Jura and Lias by a long trench or moat, filled with

members of the tertiary series--chiefly nummulite limestones and flysch.

This trench might be followed from Faverges, at the head of the lake of

Annecy, across Savoy. It separated Mont Vergi from the Mont Dorons, and

the Dent d'Oche from the Dent du Midi; then entered Switzerland,

separating the Moleson from the Diablerets; passed on through the

districts of Thun and Brientz, and, dividing itself into two, caused the

zigzagged form of the lake of Lucerne. The principal branch then passed

between the high Sentis and the Glarnisch, and broke into confusion in

the Tyrol. On the north side of this trench the chalk beds were often

vertical, or cast into repeated folds, of which the escarpments were

mostly turned away from the Alps; but on the south side of the trench,

the Jurassic, Triassic, and Carboniferous beds, though much distorted,

showed a prevailing tendency to lean towards the Alps, and turn their

escarpments to the central chain.

295. Both these systems of mountains are intersected by transverse

valleys, owing their origin, in the first instance, to a series of

transverse curvilinear fractures, which affect the forms even of every

minor ridge, and produce its principal ravines and boldest rocks, even

where no distinctly excavated valleys exist. Thus, the Mont Vergi and

the Aiguilles of Salouvre are only fragmentary remains of a range of

horizontal beds, once continuous, but broken by this transverse system

of curvilinear cleavage, and worn or weathered into separate summits.

The means of this ultimate sculpture or weathering were lastly to be

considered.

* * * * *

296. III. _Sculpture._--The final reductions of mountainform are owing

either to disintegration, or to the action of water, in the condition of

rain, rivers, or ice, aided by frost and other circumstances of

temperature and atmosphere.

All important existing forms are owing to disintegration, or the action

of water. That of ice had been curiously over-rated. As an instrument of

sculpture, ice is much less powerful than water; the apparently

energetic effects of it being merely the exponents of disintegration. A

glacier did not produce its moraine, but sustained and exposed the

fragments which fell on its surface, pulverizing these by keeping them

in motion, but producing very unimportant effects on the rock below; the

roundings and striation produced by ice were superficial; while a

torrent penetrated into every angle and cranny, undermining and wearing

continually, and carrying stones, at the lowest estimate, six hundred

thousand times as fast as the glacier. Had the quantity of rain which

has fallen on Mont Blanc in the form of snow (and descended in the

ravines as ice) fallen as rain, and descended in torrents, the ravines

would have been much deeper than they are now, and the glacier may so

far be considered as exercising a protective influence. But its power of

carriage is unlimited, and when masses of earth or rock are once

loosened, the glacier carries them away, and exposes fresh surfaces.

Generally, the work of water and ice is in mountain surgery like that of

lancet and sponge--one for incision, the other for ablution. No

excavation by ice was possible on a large scale, any more than by a

stream of honey; and its various actions, with their limitations, were

only to be understood by keeping always clearly in view the great law of

its motion as a viscous substance, determined by Professor James Forbes.

297. The existing forms of the Alps are, therefore, traceable chiefly to

denudation as they rose from the sea, followed by more or less violent

aqueous action, partly arrested during the glacial periods, while the

produced diluvium was carried away into the valley of the Rhine or into

the North Sea. One very important result of denudation had not yet been

sufficiently regarded; namely, that when portions of a thick bed (as the

Rudisten-kalk) had been entirely removed, the weight of the remaining

masses, pressing unequally on the inferior beds, would, when these were

soft (as the Neocomian marls), press them up into arched conditions,

like those of the floors of coal-mines in what the miners called

"creeps." Many anomalous positions of the beds of Spatangenkalk in the

district of the Lake of Annecy were in all probability owing to this

cause: they might be studied advantageously in the sloping base of the

great Rochers de Lanfon, which, disintegrating in curved, nearly

vertical flakes, each a thousand feet in height, were nevertheless a

mere outlying remnant of the great horizontal formation of the Parmelan,

and formed, like it, of very thin horizontal beds of Rudisten-kalk,

imposed on shaly masses of Neocomian, modified by their pressure. More

complex forms of harder rock were wrought by the streams and rains into

fantastic outlines; and the transverse gorges were cut deep where they

had been first traced by fault or distortion. The analysis of this

aqueous action would alone require a series of discourses; but the sum

of the facts was that the best and most interesting portions of the

mountains were just those which were finally left, the centers and

joints, as it were, of the Alpine anatomy. Immeasurable periods of time

would be required to wear these away; and to all appearances, during the

process of their destruction, others were rising to take their place,

and forms of perhaps far more nobly organized mountain would witness the

collateral progress of humanity.

J. R.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 35: Read by Mr. Ruskin at the weekly evening meeting of the

Royal Institution (see _Proceedings_, vol. iv., pp. 142-46), June 5,

1863.--ED.]

THE RANGE OF INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTION PROPORTIONED TO THE RANK IN

ANIMATED LIFE.[36]

A THEOREM.

298. I suppose this theorem to be a truism; but I venture to state it,

because it is surely desirable that it should be recognized as an axiom

by metaphysicians, and practically does not seem to me yet to have been

so. I say "animated life" because the word "life" by itself might have

been taken to include that of vegetables; and I say "animated" instead

of "spiritual" life because the Latin "anima," and pretty Italian

corruption of it, "alma," involving the new idea of nourishment of the

body as by the Aliment or Alms of God, seems to me to convey a better

idea of the existence of conscious creatures than any derivative of

"spiritus," "pneuma," or "psyche."

I attach, however, a somewhat lower sense to the word "conception" than

is, I believe, usual with metaphysicians, for, as a painter, I belong to

a lower rank of animated being than theirs, and can only mean by

conception what I know of it. A painter never conceives anything

absolutely, and is indeed incapable of conceiving anything at all,

except as a phenomenon or sensation, or as the mode or locus of a

phenomenon or sensation. That which is not an appearance, or a feeling,

or a mode of one or the other, is to him nothing.

299. For instance, he would deny the definition of the phenomenon which

he is himself first concerned in producing--a line--as "length without

breadth." He would say, "That which has no breadth is nothing, and

nothing cannot be long." He would define a line as a narrow and long

phenomenon, and a mathematician's idea of it as an idea of the

direction of such a phenomenon.

The act of conception or imagination with him, therefore, is merely the

memory, simple or combined, of things that he has seen or felt. He has

no ray, no incipience of faculty beyond this. No quantity of the

sternest training in the school of Hegel, would ever enable him to think

the Absolute. He would persist in an obstinate refusal to use the word

"think" at all in a transitive sense. He would never, for instance, say,

"I think the table," but "I think the table is turning," or is not, as

the case might be. And if he were to be taught in any school whatever to

conceive a table, his first demand would be that he should be shown one,

or referred to other things that had the qualities of one in

illustrative degree.

300. And even respecting the constant methods or laws of phenomena, he

cannot raise the statement of them into an act of conception. The

statement that two right lines can never inclose a space merely appears

to him another form of verbal definition, or, at the grandest, a

definition in prophetic extent, saying in other words that a line which

incloses, or ever may inclose, a space, is not, and never will be, a

right one. He would admit that what he now conceives as two things,

doubled, would always be what he now conceives as four things. But

assuming the existence of a world in which, whenever two things were

actually set in juxtaposition with other two things, they became

actually three times, or actually five, he supposes that the practice of

arithmetic, and laws of it, would change in relation to this new

condition in matter; and he accepts, therefore, the statement that twice

two are four only as an accident of the existing phenomena of matter.

301. A painter therefore may, I think, be looked upon as only

representing a high order of sensational creatures, incapable of any but

physical ideas and impressions; and I continue my paper, therefore, only

in the name of the docile, and therefore improvable, part of the Brute

Creation.

And in their name I would suggest that we should be much more docile

than we are if we were never occupied in efforts to conceive things

above our natures. To take an instance, in a creature somewhat lower

than myself. I came by surprise the other day on a cuttle-fish in a pool

at low tide. On being touched with the point of my umbrella, he first

filled the pool with ink, and then finding himself still touched in the

darkness, lost his temper, and attacked the umbrella with much psyche or

anima, hugging it tightly with all his eight arms, and making efforts,

like an impetuous baby with a coral, to get it into his mouth. On my

offering him a finger instead, he sucked that with two or three of his

arms with an apparently malignant satisfaction, and on being shaken off,

retired with an air of frantic misanthropy into the cloud of his ink.

302. Now, it seems to me not a little instructive to reflect how

entirely useless such a manifestation of a superior being was to his

cuttle-fish mind, and how fortunate it was for his fellow-octopods that

he had no command of pens as well as ink, nor any disposition to write

on the nature of umbrellas or of men.

It may be observed, further, that whatever ideas he was able to form

respecting either were positively false--so contrary to truth as to be

worse than none, and simply dangerous to himself, so far as he might be

induced to act upon them--that, namely, an umbrella was an eatable

thing, or a man a conquerable one, that the individual man who looked at

him was hostile to him or that his purposes could be interfered with by

ejection of ink. Every effort made by the fish under these convictions

was harmful to himself; his only wisdom would have been to lie quietly

and unreflectively in his pool.

And with us painters also, the only result of any efforts we make to

acquaint ourselves with the subjects of metaphysical inquiry has been an

increased sense of the prudence of lying placidly and unreflectively in

our pools, or at least limiting ourselves to such gentle efforts of

imagination as may be consistent with the as yet imperfectly developed

powers, I do not say even of cephalopodic, but of Ascidian nervous

centers.

303. But it may be easily imagined how pleasantly, to persons thus

subdued in self-estimation, the hope presents itself which is involved

in the Darwinian theory, that their pools themselves may be capable of

indefinite extension, and their natures of indefinite development--the

hope that our descendants may one day be ashamed of us, and debate the

question of their parentage with astonishment and disgust.

And it seems to me that the aim of elementary metaphysical study might

henceforth become more practical than that of any other science. For in

hitherto taking little cognizance of the limitation of thought by the

structure of the body, we have surely also lost sight of the power of

certain modes of thought over the processes of that structure. Taking,

for instance, the emotion of anger, of which the cephalopoda are indeed

as capable as we are, but inferior to us in being unable to decide

whether they do well to be angry or not, I do not think the chemical

effect of that emotion on the particles of the blood, in decomposing and

otherwise paralyzing or debilitating them, has been sufficiently

examined, nor the actual quantity of nervous energy which a fit of anger

of given violence withdraws from the body and restores to space, neither

the correlative power of volition in restraining the passion, or in

directing the choice of salutary thought, as of salutary herbs on

streams. And even we painters, who dare not call ourselves capable of

thought, are capable of choice in more or less salutary vision. In the

degree in which we lose such power of choice in vision, so that the

spectral phenomena which are the materials of our industry present

themselves under forms beyond our control, we become insane; and

although for all our best work a certain degree of this insanity is

necessary, and the first occurring conceptions are uncommanded, as in

dreams, we have, when in health, always instantaneous power of accepting

some, refusing others, perfecting the outlines and colors of those we

wish to keep, and arranging them in such relations as we choose.

304. And unquestionably the forms of the body which painters

instinctively recognize as best, and call "beautiful," are so far under

the command of the plastic force of voluntary thought, that the

original and future authority of such a plastic force over the whole of

creation cannot but seem to painters a direct, though not a certain

influence; and they would at once give their adherence to the statement

made many years since in his opening lectures in Oxford by the present

Regius Professor of Medicine (as far as I can recollect approximately,

in these terms)--that "it is quite as logical, and far more easy, to

conceive of original anima as adapting itself to forms of substance,

than of original substance as adapting to itself modes of mind."

305. It is surely, therefore, not too much to expect of future schools

of metaphysicians that they will direct mankind into methods of thought

which will be at once happy, unerring, and medicinal, and therefore

entirely wise; that they will mark the limits beyond which uniformity

must be dangerous, and speculation vain; and that they will at no

distant period terminate the acrimony of theologians, and the

insolences, as well as the sorrows, of groundless faith, by showing that

it is appointed for us, in common with the rest of the animal creation,

to live in the midst of an universe the nature of which is as much

better than we can believe, as it is greater than we can understand.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 36: Contemporary Review, June, 1871.--ED.]

* * * * *

LITERATURE.

FICTION--FAIR AND FOUL.

(_Nineteenth Century, June, August, Sept., Nov. 1880, and Oct. 1881._)

FAIRY STORIES.

(_Preface to "German Popular Stories," 1868._)

* * * * *

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.