FullReads

‘Not a doubt of it, my dear Claude; but it will not do for every one to try Mr. Ruskin’s tools. Neither you nor I possess that almost Roman severity, that stern precision of conception and expression, which enables him to revel in the most gorgeous language, without ever letting it pall upon the reader’s taste by affectation or over- lusciousness. His style is like the very hills along which you have been travelling, whose woods enrich, without enervating, the grand simplicity of their forms.’

‘The comparison is just,’ said Claude. ‘Mr. Ruskin’s style, like those very hills, and like, too, the Norman cathedrals of which he is so fond, is rather magnified than concealed by the innumerable multiplicity of its ornamental chasing and colouring.’

‘And is not that,’ I asked, ‘the very highest achievement of artistic style?’

‘Doubtless. The severe and grand simplicity, of which folks talk so much, is great indeed; but only the greatest as long as men are still ignorant of Nature’s art of draping her forms with colour, chiaroscuro, ornament, not at the expense of the original design, but in order to perfect it by making it appeal to every faculty instead of those of form and size alone.’

‘Still you will allow the beauty of a bare rock, a down, a church spire, a sheet or line of horizontal water,–their necessity to the completion of a landscape. I recollect well having the value of a stern straight line in Nature brought home to me, when, during a long ride in the New Forest, after my eye had become quite dulled and wearied with the monotonous softness of rolling lawns, feathery heath, and rounded oak and beech woods, I suddenly caught sight of the sharp peaked roof of Rhinefield Lodge, and its row of tall stiff poplar-spires, cutting the endless sea of curves. The relief to my eye was delicious. I really believe it heightened the pleasure with which I reined in my mare for a chat with old Toomer the keeper, and the noble bloodhound who eyed me from between his master’s legs.’

‘I can well believe it. Simple lines in a landscape are of the same value as the naked parts of a richly-clothed figure. They act both as contrasts and as indications of the original substratum of the figure; but to say that severe simplicity is the highest ideal is mere pedantry and Manicheism.’

‘Oh, everything is Manicheism with you, Claude!’

‘And no wonder, while the world is as full of it now as it was in the thirteenth century. But let that pass. This craving after so-called classic art, whether it be Manicheism or not, is certainly a fighting against God,–a contempt of everything which He has taught us artists since the introduction of Christianity. I abominate this setting up of Sculpture above Painting, of the Greeks above the Italians,–as if all Eastern civilization, all Christian truth, had taught art nothing,–as if there was not more real beauty in a French cathedral or a Venetian palazzo than in a dozen Parthenons, and more soul in one Rafaelle, or Titian either, than in all the Greek statues of the Tribune or Vatican.’

‘You have changed your creed, I see, and, like all converts, are somewhat fierce and fanatical. You used to believe in Zeuxis and Parrhasius in old times.’

‘Yes, as long as I believed in Fuseli’s “Lectures;” but when I saw at Pompeii the ancient paintings which still remain to us, my faith in their powers received its first shock; and when I re-read in the Lectures of Fuseli and his school all their extravagant praises of the Greek painters, and separated their few facts fairly out from among the floods of rant on which they floated, I came to the conclusion that the ancients knew as little of colour or chiaroscuro as they did of perspective, and as little of spiritual expression as they did of landscape-painting. What do I care for the birds pecking at Zeuxis’s grapes, or Zeuxis himself trying to draw back Parrhasius’s curtain? Imitative art is the lowest trickery. There are twenty men in England now capable of the same sleight of hand; and yet these are recorded as the very highest triumphs of ancient art by the only men who have handed down to us any record of it.’