Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

great city, for whose sake, and by whose in- continually; the main fact with which we have gratitude, their grey hairs had been brought to do is the gradual transport, by the Po and down with bitterness to the grave. The re- its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of mains of their Venice lie hidden behind the the finer sediment to the sea. The character cumbrous masses which were the delight of the of the Lombardic plain is most strikingly exnation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-pressed by the ancient walls of its cities, comgrown court, and silent pathway, and lightless posed for the most part of large rounded canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail over them for ever. It must be our tasks to glean and gather them forth, and restore out of them some faint image of the lost city; more gorgeous a thousandfold than that which now exists, yet not created in the day-dream of the prince, nor by the ostentation of the noble, but built by iron hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity of nature and the fury of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be grasped by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank inquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene, whose restless tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the city, but long denied her dominion.

Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses
of brick; and was curiously illustrated in 1848,
by the ramparts of these same pebbles thrown
up four or five feet high round every field, to
check the Austrian cavalry in the battle under
the walls of Verona.
The finer dust among
which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up
by the rivers, fed into continual strength by the
Alpine snow, so that, however pure their
waters may be when they issue from the lakes
at the foot of the great chain, they become of
the colour and opacity of clay before they reach
the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is
at once thrown down as they enter the sea,
forming a vast belt of low land along the
eastern coast of Italy. The powerful stream
of the Po of course builds forward the fastest;
on each side of it, north and south, there is a
tract of marsh, fed by more feeble streams,
and less liable to rapid change than the delta
of the central river. In one of these tracts is
built RAVENNA, and in the other VENICE.

When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no feature by which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping loop formed by the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain What circumstances directed the peculiar arupon itself causes a vast difference in the char- rangement of this great belt of sediment in the acter of the distribution of its débris on its earliest times, it is not here the place to inopposite sides. The rock fragments and sedi- quire. It is enough for us to know that from ment which the torrents on the other side of the mouths of the Adige to those of the Piave the Alps bear into the plains are distributed there stretches, at a variable distance of from over a vast extent of country, and, though here three to five miles from the actual shore, a bank and there lodged in beds of enormous thickness, of sand, divided into long islands by narrow soon permit the firm substrata to appear from channels of sea. The space between this bank underneath them; but all the torrents which and the true shore consists of the sedimentary descend from the southern side of the High deposits from these and other rivers, a great Alps, and from the northern slope of the Apen-plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighnines, meet concentrically in the recess or bourhood of Venice, by the sea at high water, mountain bay which the two ridges enclose; to the depth in most places of a foot or a foot every fragment which thunder breaks out of and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at their battlements, and every grain of dust low tide, but divided by an intricate network which the summer rain washes from their pas- of narrow and winding channels, from which tures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep the sea never retires. In some places, accordof the Lombardie plain; and that plain must ing to the run of the currents, the land has have risen within its rocky barriers as a cup risen into marshy islets, consolidated, some by fills with wine, but for two contrary influences art, and some by time, into ground firm enough which continually depress, or disperse from its to be built upon, or fruitful enough to be culsurface, the accumulation of the ruins of ages. tivated: in others, on the contrary, it has not I will not tax the reader's faith in modern reached the sea level; so that, at the average low science by insisting on the singular depression water, shallow lakelets glitter among its irreguof the surface of Lombardy, which appears for larly exposed fields of seaweed. In the midst many centuries to have taken place steadily and of the largest of these, increased in importance 9 Compare what Huxley says on the chalk formation of Europe, p. 670.

8 I. e.. Ruskin's task. in this intended work on Venetian architecture and sculpture.

by the confluence of several large river channels when every plot of higher ground bears some towards one of the openings in the sea bank, fragment of fair building: but, in order to the city of Venice itself is built, on a crowded know what it was once, let the traveller follow cluster of islands; the various plots of higher in his boat at evening the windings of some ground which appear to the north and south of unfrequented channel far into the midst of this central cluster, have at different periods the melancholy plain; let him remove, in his been also thickly inhabited, and now bear, ac-imagination, the brightness of the great city cording to their size, the remains of cities, vil- that still extends itself in the distance, and the lages, or isolated convents and churches, scat- walls and towers from the islands that are tered among spaces of open ground, partly near; and so wait, until the bright investiture waste and encumbered by ruins, partly under and sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn cultivation for the supply of the metropolis. from the waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation. They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilder

The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet (varying considerably with the seasons); but this fall, on so flat a shore, is enough to cause continual movement in the waters, and in the main canals to produce a reflux which frequently runs like a mill stream. At high water no land is visible for many miles to the north or south of Venice, except in the form of small islands crowned with towers or gleaming with villages: there is a channel, some three miles wide, between the city and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide between it and the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic, but which is so low as hardly to dis-ness, let it be remembered what strange prepturb the impression of the city's having been built in the midst of the ocean, although the secret of its true position is partly, yet not painfully, betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deep-water channels, which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs of huge sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and crowded waves that flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the uplifted level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark plain of seaweed, of gloomy green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or five feet deep, and often SO choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear sea water like the ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves blue gashes upon the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick weed that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning to and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is often profoundly oppressive, even at this day,

aration had been made for the things which no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole existence and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or compelled, by the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the sea. Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary sea-port. Had there been no tide, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the wateraccess to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible: even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps; and the highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow the entrance halls. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily intercourse, must have been done away with. The

streets of the city would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed. The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast between this faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the romantic conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he have felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among their shallows, there was indeed a preparation, and the only preparation possible, for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendour.

THE MEDIAEVAL AND THE MODERN WORKMAN.

FROM VOLUME II, CHAPTER VI

in company with much error. Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last-a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do any thing worth doing; and the engine-turned pre

ness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.

Now, in the make and nature of every man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in manual labour, there are some powers for bet-cision is lost at once. Out come all his roughter things: some tardy imagination, torpid capacity of emotion, tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the worst; and in most cases it is all our own fault that they are tardy or torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take them in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honour them in their imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this is what we have to do with all our labourers; to look for the thoughtful part of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever faults and errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in them cannot manifest itself, but

And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tem

pered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin which, after the worm's work on it, is to see God,2 into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with,-this it is to be slave-masters indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords' lightest words were worth men's lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.

Never

wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old, the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it. I know not if a day is ever to come when the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when men will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty,-liberty from care. The man who says to one, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh,3 has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him. The movements of the one are hindered by the bur den on his shoulder; of the other, by the bridle on his lips: there is no way by which the burden may be lightened; but we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it. To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world. There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds Let me not be thought to speak wildly or of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is extravagantly. It is verily this degradation of raised by it. Which had, in reality, most of the operative into a machine, which, more than the serf nature in him, the Irish peasant who any other evil of the times, is leading the mass was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, with his musket muzzle thrust through the destructive struggling for a freedom of which|ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, they cannot explain the nature to themselves. | who 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up Their universal outery against wealth, and his own life and the lives of his seven sons for against nobility, is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to

And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.

1 A slave in ancient Sparta, owned by the state, and attached to the soil.

2 See Job, xix, 26.

his chief?-as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, "Another for Hector! ''4 And therefore, in all ages and all countries, reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint, but rejoicingly; and famine, and peril, and sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and

[blocks in formation]

which its operation is admissible, even in changing or strangely combining what is brought within its sphere.

kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received, them, and nature prompted, and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls For hitherto we have spoken as if every withering within them, unthanked, to find their change wilfully wrought by the imagination was whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to an error; apparently implying that its only be counted off into a heap of mechanism, num- proper work was to summon up the memories bered with its wheels, and weighed with its of past events, and the anticipations of future hammer strokes;-this nature bade not,-this ones, under aspects which would bear the God blesses not, this humanity for no long|sternest tests of historical investigation, or abtime is able to endure.

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:-Divided into mere segments of men-broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,-sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is, we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that ery is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.

we

FROM MODERN PAINTERS

stract reasoning. And in general this is, indeed, its noblest work. Nevertheless, it has also permissible functions peculiarly its own, and certain rights of feigning, and adorning, and fancifully arranging, inalienable from its nature. Everything that is natural is, within certain limits, right; and we must take care not, in over-severity, to deprive ourselves of any refreshing or animating power ordained to be in us for our help.

(A). It was noted in speaking above of the Angelican1 or passionate ideal, that there was a certain virtue in it dependent on the expres sion of its loving enthusiasm.

(B). In speaking of the pursuit of beauty as one of the characteristics of the highest art, it was also said that there were certain ways of showing this beauty by gathering together, without altering, the finest forms, and marking them by gentle emphasis.

(C). And in speaking of the true uses of imagination it was said that we might be allowed to create for ourselves, in innocent play, fairies and naiads, and other such fictitious

creatures.

Now this loving enthusiasm, which seeks for a beauty fit to be the object of eternal love; this inventive skill, which kindly displays what exists around us in the world; and this playful energy of thought which delights in various conditions of the impossible, are three forms of idealism more or less connected with the three tendencies of the artistical mind which I had occasion to explain in the chapter on the Nature of Gothic, in the Stones of Venice. It was there pointed out, that, the things around us containing mixed good and evil, certain men chose the good and left the evil (thence properly called Purists); others received both good and evil together (thence properly called Naturalists); and others had a tendency to choose the evil and leave the good, whom, for convenience' sake, I termed Sensualists. I do

OF THE TRUE IDEAL:-FIRST, PURIST. PART IV, not mean to say that painters of fairies and CHAPTER VI

naiads must belong to this last and lowest

Having thus glanced at the principal modes in which the imagination works for evil, we must 1 So named by Ruskin because Fra Angelico (1387rapidly note also the principal directions in

1455), famous for his paintings of angels, was "the central master of the school."

« AnteriorContinuar »