He was one day making a drawing of Plymouth harbour, with some ships at the distance of a mile or two, seen against the light. Having shown this drawing to a naval officer, the naval officer observed with surprise, and objected with very justifiable indignation, that the ships of the line had no port-holes. “No,” said Turner, “certainly not. If you will walk up to Mount Edgecumbe, and look at the ships against the sunset, you will find you can’t see the port-holes.” “Well, but,” said the naval officer, still indignant, “you know the port-holes are there.” “Yes,” said Turner, “I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know is there.” ’
If, when in Amiens, you take the direction of the slaughter-house, you will get a prospect no different from that in the engraving. You will see the distance arrange, in the deceptive but happy manner of an artist, monuments which, if you then draw closer, will resume their earlier, quite different positions; you will see it, for example, inscribe the shape of one of the town’s water installations on the façade of the cathedral, and create a plane out of a three-dimensional geometry.
But if you nevertheless find this landscape, tastefully composed by your perspective, somewhat different from that recounted by Ruskin’s drawing, you may lay the blame above all on the changes brought about in the appearance of the town by the almost twenty years which have elapsed since Ruskin stayed there, and as he himself said of another location which he loved: ‘Since I last composed, or meditated there, various improvements have taken place.’
But at least this engraving in The Bible of Amiens will have associated the banks of the Somme and the cathedral more closely together in your memory than your eyes no doubt could have done, no matter at what point in the town you had been placed.
It will prove to you better than anything I could have said that Ruskin made no separation between the beauty of the cathedrals and the charm of the country out of which they arose, and which everyone who visits them can savour still in the particular poetry of the country and the misty or golden recollection of the afternoon he spent there. Not only is the first chapter of The Bible of Amiens called ‘By the Rivers of Waters’, but the book that Ruskin planned to write on Chartres cathedral was to be entitled. ‘The Springs of Eure’.
So it was not only in his drawings that he set churches on the edge of rivers and associated the grandeur of the Gothic cathedrals to the gracefulness of their French settings.2 We would be more keenly alive to the individual charm of a landscape if we did not have at our disposal those seven-league boots which are the great expresses and were obliged, as in the old days, in order to get to some remote spot, to pass through countrysides more and more like that we are making for, like zones of graduated harmony which, by making it less easily penetrable by what is different from itself, and protecting it gently and mysteriously against brotherly resemblances, not only envelop it in nature but also prepare it in our minds.
These studies of Ruskin’s of Christian art were for him like the verification and counter-proof of his ideas on Christianity and of other ideas I have been unable to indicate here but the most celebrated of which I shall allow Ruskin himself to define in a moment: his horror of machinism and of industrial art.
‘All beautiful things were made when the men of the Middle Ages believed in the pure, joyous and beautiful lesson of Christianity.’ After that he saw art as having declined along with faith, and dexterity as having taken the place of feeling.
When he saw the power to realize beauty that was the privilege of the ages of faith, his belief in the goodness of faith could only grow stronger. Each volume of his last book, Our Fathers Have Told Us (only the first was written), was to have comprised four chapters, the last of them devoted to the masterpiece that was the fruition of the faith whose study had been the aim of the first three chapters.
Thus did the Christianity that had been the cradle of Ruskin’s aesthetic feeling receive its supreme consecration. And having mocked at his Protestant reader, at the moment when he led her before the statue of the Madonna, ‘who must understand that neither Madonna-worship, nor Lady-worship of any sort … ever did any human creature any harm’, or before the statue of St Honoré, after lamenting that this saint was ‘little talked of now in his Parisian faubourg’, he might have said as at the end of Val d’Arno: ‘And if you will fix your minds only on the conditions of human life which the Giver of it demands, “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” you will find that such obedience is always acknowledged by temporal blessing.
If, turning from the manifest miseries of cruel ambition, and manifest wanderings of insolent belief, you summon to your thoughts rather the state of unrecorded multitudes, who laboured in silence, and adored in humility, as the snows of Christendom brought memory of the Birth of Christ, or her spring sunshine, of His Resurrection, you may know that the promise of the Bethlehem angels has been literally fulfilled; and will pray that your English fields, joyfully as the banks of Arno, may still dedicate their pure lilies to St Mary of the Flowers.’
Finally, Ruskin’s medieval studies confirmed, together with his belief in the goodness of faith, his belief in the need for work to be free, joyous and personal, without interference from machinism. This you will best understand if I transcribe here a passage highly characteristic of Ruskin. He is talking of a small figure, a few centimetres high, lost amidst hundreds of minuscule figures, in the portal of the Booksellers in Rouen cathedral.
‘… the fellow is vexed and puzzled in his malice; and his hand is pressed hard on his cheek bone, and the flesh of the cheek is wrinkled under the eye by the pressure. The whole, indeed, looks wretchedly coarse, when it is seen on a scale in which it is naturally compared with delicate figure etchings; but considering it as a mere filling of an interstice on the outside of a cathedral gate, and as one of more than three hundred (for in my estimate I did not include the outer pedestals), it proves very noble vitality in the art of the time …
‘We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done by halves and shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all. Perhaps all that we have to do is meant for nothing more than an exercise of the heart and of the will, and is useless in itself; but, at all events, the little use it has may well be spared if it is not worth putting our hands and our strength to.
It does not become our immortality to take an ease inconsistent with its authority, nor to suffer any instruments with which it can dispense, to come between it and the things it rules: and he who would form the creations of his own mind by any other instrument than his own hand, would also, if he might, give grinding organs to Heaven’s angels, to make their music easier.
There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sensuality enough in human existence, without our turning the few glowing moments of it into mechanism; and since our life must at the best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and rolling of the Wheel.’
I will confess that rereading this passage at the time of Ruskin’s death I was seized with a desire to see the little man he speaks of. And I went to Rouen as if in obedience to some testamentary thought, as if in dying Ruskin had somehow entrusted to his readers that poor creature whose life he had restored by speaking of him and who had, without knowing it, just lost for ever someone who had done as much for him as his original sculptor.
But when I came close to the immense cathedral, before the door where the saints were warming themselves in the sun, higher up, from the galleries of radiant kings up to the very topmost heights of stone that I supposed to be uninhabited but where, in one place, a sculpted hermit led his isolated life, allowing the birds
