Lectures on Landscape, John Ruskin [ebooks that read to you txt] 📗

93. Next to this drawing of Psyche I place two of Turner's most beautiful classical landscapes. At once you are out of the open daylight, either in sunshine admitted partially through trembling leaves, or in the last rays of its setting, scarcely any more warm on the darkness of the ilex wood. In both, the vegetation, though beautiful, is absolutely wild and uncared for, as it seems, either by human or by higher powers, which, having appointed for it the laws of its being, leave it to spring into such beauty as is consistent with disease and alternate with decay.

ÆSACUS AND HESPERIE.

From the painting by Turner.

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In the purest landscape, the human subject is the immortality of the soul by the faithfulness of love: in both the Turner landscapes it is the death of the body by the impatience and error of love. The one is the first glimpse of Hesperia to Æsacus:[13]

in a few moments to lose her forever. The other is a mythological subject of deeper meaning, the death of Procris.

94. I just now referred to the landscape by John Bellini in the National Gallery as one of the six best existing of the purist school, being wholly felicitous and enjoyable. In the foreground of it indeed is the martyrdom of Peter Martyr; but John Bellini looks upon that as an entirely cheerful and pleasing incident; it does not disturb or even surprise him, much less displease in the slightest degree.

Now, the next best landscape[14] to this, in the National Gallery, is a Florentine one on the edge of transition to the Greek feeling; and in that the distance is still beautiful, but misty, not clear; the flowers are still beautiful, but—intentionally—of the color of blood; and in the foreground lies the dead body of Procris, which disturbs the poor painter greatly; and he has expressed his disturbed mind about it in the figure of a poor little brown—nearly black—Faun, or perhaps the god Faunus himself, who is much puzzled by the death of Procris, and stoops over her, thinking it a woeful thing to find her pretty body lying there breathless, and all spotted with blood on the breast.

95. You remember I told you how the earthly power that is necessary in art was shown by the flight of Dædalus to the 'ερπετον Minos. Look for yourselves at the story of Procris as related to Minos in the fifteenth chapter of the third book of Apollodorus; and you will see why it is a Faun who is put to wonder at her, she having escaped by artifice from the Bestial power of Minos. Yet she is wholly an earth-nymph, and the son of Aurora must not only leave her, but himself slay her; the myth of Semele desiring to see Zeus, and of Apollo and Coronis, and this having all the same main interest. Once understand that, and you will see why Turner has put her death under this deep shade of trees, the sun withdrawing his last ray; and why he has put beside her the low type of an animal's pain, a dog licking its wounded paw.

96. But now, I want you to understand Turner's depth of sympathy farther still. In both these high mythical subjects the surrounding nature, though suffering, is still dignified and beautiful. Every line in which the master traces it, even where seemingly negligent, is lovely, and set down with a meditative calmness which makes these two etchings capable of being placed beside the most tranquil work of Holbein or Dürer. In this "Cephalus" especially, note the extreme equality and serenity of every outline. But now here is a subject of which you will wonder at first why Turner drew it at all. It has no beauty whatsoever, no specialty of picturesqueness; and all its lines are cramped and poor.

The crampness and the poverty are all intended. This is no longer to make us think of the death of happy souls, but of the labor of unhappy ones; at least, of the more or less limited, dullest, and—I must not say homely, but—unhomely life of the neglected agricultural poor.

It is a gleaner bringing down her one sheaf of corn to an old watermill, itself mossy and rent, scarcely able to get its stones to turn. An ill-bred dog stands, joyless, by the unfenced stream; two country boys lean, joyless, against a wall that is half broken down; and all about the steps down which the girl is bringing her sheaf, the bank of earth, flowerless and rugged, testifies only of its malignity; and in the black and sternly rugged etching—no longer graceful, but hard, and broken in every touch—the master insists upon the ancient curse of the earth—"Thorns also and Thistles shall it bring forth to thee."

97. And now you will see at once with what feeling Turner completes, in a more tender mood, this lovely subject of his Yorkshire stream, by giving it the conditions of pastoral and agricultural life; the cattle by the pool, the milkmaid crossing the bridge with her pail on her head, the mill with the old millstones, and its gleaming weir as his chief light led across behind the wild trees.

MILL NEAR GRANDE CHARTREUSE.

From the painting by Turner.

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98. And not among our soft-flowing rivers only; but here among the torrents of the Great Chartreuse, where another man would assuredly have drawn the monastery, Turner only draws their working mill. And here I am able to show you, fortunately, one of his works painted at this time of his most earnest thought; when his imagination was still freshly filled with the Greek mythology, and he saw for the first time with his own eyes the clouds come down upon the actual earth.

L'AIGUILLETTE, VALLEY OF CLUSES.

From the painting by Turner.

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99. The scene is one which, in old times of Swiss traveling, you would all have known well; a little cascade which descends to the road from Geneva to Chamouni, near the village of Maglans, from under a subordinate ridge of the Aiguille de Varens, known as the Aiguillette. You, none of you, probably, know the scene now; for your only object is to get to Chamouni and up Mont Blanc and down again; but the Valley of Cluse, if you knew it, is worth many Chamounis; and it impressed Turner profoundly. The facts of the spot are here given in mere and pure simplicity; a quite unpicturesque bridge, a few trees partly stunted and blasted by the violence of the torrent in storm at their roots, a cottage with its mill-wheel—this has lately been pulled down to widen the road—and the brook shed from the rocks and finding its way to join the Arve. The scene is absolutely Arcadian. All the traditions of the Greek Hills, in their purity, were founded on such rocks and shadows as these; and Turner has given you the birth of the Shepherd Hermes on Cyllene, in its visible and solemn presence, the white cloud, Hermes Eriophoros forming out of heaven upon the Hills; the brook, distilled from it, as the type of human life, born of the cloud and vanishing into the cloud, led down by the haunting Hermes among the ravines; and then, like the reflection of the cloud itself, the white sheep, with the dog of Argus guarding them, drinking from the stream.

100. And now, do you see why I gave you, for the beginning of your types of landscape thought, that "Junction of Tees and Greta" in their misty ravines; and this glen of the Greta above, in which Turner has indeed done his best to paint the trees that live again after their autumn—the twilight that will rise again with twilight of dawn—the stream that flows always, and the resting on the cliffs of the clouds that return if they vanish; but of human life, he says, a boy climbing among the trees for his entangled kite, and these white stones in the mountain churchyard, show forth all the strength and all the end.

101. You think that saying of the Greek school—Pindar's summary of it, "τι δε τις; τι δ'ου τις;"[15]—a sorrowful and degrading lesson. See at least, then, that you reach the level of such degradation. See that your lives be in nothing worse than a boy's climbing for his entangled kite. It will be well for you if you join not with those who instead of kites fly falcons; who instead of obeying the last words of the great Cloud-Shepherd—to feed his sheep, live the lives—how much less than vanity!—of the war-wolf and the gier-eagle. Or, do you think it a dishonor to man to say to him that Death is but only Rest? See that when it draws near to you, you may look to it, at least for sweetness of Rest; and that you recognize the Lord of Death coming to you as a Shepherd gathering you into his Fold for the night.