John Ruskin

1819-1900

watching their opportunity, they murdered him.

SOME SEA PICTURES OF TURNER

(From Modern Painters,' Part I, 1843)

As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no difference; it was the chance of the sea, and the ill reward of a humane action--a 5 melancholy end for such a man-like the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-like" on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor brawl or ambuscade. But so it was with all these men. They were cut off in the flower of 10 their days, and few of them laid their bones in the sepulchres of their fathers. They knew the service which they had chosen, and they did not ask the wages for which they had not laboured. Life with them was no summer 15 air. The water from its prolonged agitation

Few people, comparatively, have ever seen the effect on the sea of a powerful gale continued without intermission for three or four days and nights, and to those who have not, I believe it must be unimaginable, not from the mere force or size of surge, but from the complete annihilation of the limit between sea and

is beaten, not into mere creaming foam, but into masses of accumulated yeast, which hang in ropes and wreaths from wave to wave, and where one curls over to break, form a festoon like a drapery, from its edge; these are taken up in wind, not in dissipating dust, but bodily, in writhing, hanging, coiling masses, which make the air white and thick as with snow, only the flakes are a foot or two long each; the surges themselves are full of foam in their very bodies, underneath, making them white all through, as the water is under a great cataract; and their masses, being thus half water and half air, are torn to pieces by the wind whenever they rise, and carried away in roaring smoke, which chokes and strangles like actual water. Add to this that when the air has been exhausted of its moisture by long rain, the spray of the sea is caught by it as described above (Section III. chap. vi., § 13), and covers its surface not merely with the smoke of finely divided water, but with boiling mist; imagine also the low rain-clouds brought down to the very level of the sea, as I have

holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what their Master sent was welcome. Beautiful is old age-beautiful as the slowdropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man, Nature has fulfilled 20 her work; she loads him with her blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and surrounded by his children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings. 25 God forbid we should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which 30 no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is won; and-strange that it should be so-this is the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose 35 life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do the really highest work in this earth-whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves-one and 40 often seen them, whirling and flying in rags

and fragments from wave to wave; and finally, conceive the surges themselves in their utmost pitch of power, velocity, vastness, and madness, lifting themselves in precipices and peaks,

all, their fate has been the same-the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink. And so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth century. Their life was a long battle, either with the elements or with men; 45 furrowed with the whirl of ascent, through all and it was enough for them to fulfil their work, and to pass away in the hour when God had nothing more to bid them do. They did not complain, and why should we complain for them? Peaceful life was not what they desired, 50 and an honourable death had no terrors for them.

"Seeing," in Gilbert's own brave words, "that death is inevitable, and the fame of virtue is immortal; wherefore in this behalf 55 mutare vel timere sperno."

7 A great general and statesman of Thebes.

8 Sir Humphrey Gilbert the great explorer, who was lost in a storm off the Azores in 1583. V. p. 179, and n. 1, supra. I scorn either to change or to fear.

this chaos; and you will understand that there is indeed no distinction left between the sea and air; that no object, nor horizon, nor any landmark or natural evidence of position is left; that the heaven is all spray, and the ocean all cloud, and that you can see no farther in any direction than you could see through a cataract. Suppose the effect of the first sunbeam sent from above to show this annihilation to itself, and you have the sea picture of the Academy, 1842-the Snowstorm, one of

1 Modern Painters, a book in five volumes, was undertaken as an answer to the critics of Turner's paintings, in it Ruskin desired to demonstrate Turner's essential truth to nature.

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and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight,and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.1

the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist, and light, that has ever been put on canvas, even by Turner. Of course it was not understood; his finest works never are; but there was some apology for the public's not comprehending this, for few people have had the opportunity of seeing the sea at such a time, and when they have, cannot face it. To hold by a mast or a rock, and watch it, is a prolonged endurance of drowning which few 10 centrated knowledge of a life; its color is people have the courage to go through. To those who have, it is one of the noblest lessons of nature.

I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this. Its daring conception-ideal in the highest sense of the word-is based on the purest truth, and wrought out with the con

absolutely perfect, not one false or morbid hue in any part or line, and so modulated that every square inch of canvas is a perfect composition; its drawing as accurate as fearless; the ship buoyant, bending, and full of motion; its tones as true as they are wonderful; and the whole picture dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions-(completing the perfect system of all truth, which we have shown to be formed by Turner's works)—the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable sea.

THE LAMP OF MEMORY

(From The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849)

I. Among the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude, as

But I think the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly 15 ever painted by man, is that of the Slave Ship, the chief Academy picture of the exhibition of 1840. It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain-clouds 20 are partially moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving 25 of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, 30 having been marked by more than ordinary the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic 35 forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits 40 majestic concord in the rise of the long low them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamplike fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images 45 yet restrained; and the far reaching ridges of of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows

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fulness of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain,' above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura. It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, of the Alps; where there is the sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep and

lines of piny hills; the first utterance of those mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their strength is as

pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast

of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist 50 monotony. The destructive forces and the

of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky

stern expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn. No frost-ploughed, dustencumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures; no splintered heaps of ruin

in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in 55 break the fair ranks of her forest; no pale,

that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror,

2J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), an English landscape painter.

"She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard. The near sea is encumbered with corpses."-Ruskin.

defiled, or furious rivers send their rude and "The multitudinous scas incarnadine." Macb. II. ii.

1 A river in the eastern part of France, rising in the Jura mountains.

A small town on the river Ain,

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precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the foursquare keep of Granson."

II. It is as the centralisation and protectress of this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember

less all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!-how many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition of the old Babel builders was well directed for this world: there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort in

changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind along their well-known beds; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too; and all were coming forth in clusters crowded for very love; there was room enough for all, but they crushed their leaves into all 10 manner of strange shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into nebulæ; and there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal processions of the Mois de 15 without her. How cold is all history, how lifeMarie, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the edges-ivy as light and lovely as the vine; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny 20 places; and in the more open ground, the vetch, and comfrey, and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden softness 25 cludes the former, and is mightier in its reality: of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs; and, on the 30 opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plu- 35 mage from above; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to con- 40 tience to present endurance, there are two duceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were

it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life. The age of Homer is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. Not so that of Pericles: and the day is coming when we shall confess, that we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled fragments of her sculpture than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians. And if indeed there be any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy in the thought of being remembered hereafter, which can give strength to present exertion, or pa

ties respecting national architecture whose importance it is impossible to overrate: the first, to render the architecture of the day, historical; and, the second, to preserve, as the

SCIENCE AND MODERN PROGRESS

(From Modern Painters, Part IV, 1856) The great mechanical impulses of the age, of which most of us are so proud, are a mere

cast upon it when he endeavoured, in order 45 most precious of inheritances, that of past ages. more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music; the hills became op- 50 pressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually re- 55 newed, creation is reflected from things more

May (Month of Mary) held sacred to the Virgin.

A plant of the Borage family.

A shrub bearing fragrant flowers.

The fort of Jour in the Jura, near the boundary of Switzerland.

7 An ancient village on the Lake of Neuchâtel in Switzerland.

8 Gen., xi. 4. "And they said one to another, Go to. let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."

Pericles became the ruler of Athens after he had ostracized Cimon. The Age of Pericles is noted for the adornment of the city and for its brilliant culture.

passing fever, half-speculative, half-childish. People will discover at last that royal roads to anything can no more be laid in iron than they can in dust; that there are, in fact, no royal roads to anywhere worth going to, that if there were, it would that instant cease to be worth going to,-I mean so far as the things to be obtained are in any way estimable in terms of price. For there are two classes of precious things in the world: those that God gives us for 10 nothing-sun, air, and life (both mortal life and immortal); and the secondarily precious things, worldly wine and milk, can only be bought for definite money; they can never be cheapened. No cheating nor bargaining will 15 ever get a single thing out of nature's "establishment" at half price. Do we want to be strong?-we must work. To be hungry?-we must starve. To be happy?—we must be kind. To be wise?-we must look and think. 20 No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour, nor making of stuffs a thousand yards a minute, will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever 25 so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. And they will at last, and soon too, find out that their grand inventions for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, conquer nothing; for space and time are, in 30 their own essence, unconquerable, and besides did not want any sort of conquering; they wanted using. A fool always wants to shorten space and time; a wise man wants to lengthen both. A fool wants to kill space and kill time: 35 possible to man have been just as possible to a wise man, first to gain them, then to animate them. Your railroad, when you come to understand it, is only a device for making the world smaller: and as for being able to talk from place to place, that is, indeed, well and convenient; 40 ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to

cate that, we could have done it in less than 1800 years, without steam. Most of the good religious communication that I remember has been done on foot; and it cannot easily be done 5 faster than at foot pace. Is it science? But what science of motion, meat, and medicine? Well; when you have moved your savage, and dressed your savage, fed him with white bread, and shown him how to set a limb,-what next? Follow out that question. Suppose every obstacle overcome; give your savage every advantage of civilization to the full: suppose that you have put the Red Indian in tight shoes; taught the Chinese how to make Wedgewood's ware, and to paint it with colors that will rub off; and persuaded all Hindoo women that it is more pious to torment husbands into graves than to burn themselves at the burial,what next? Gradually, thinking on from point to point, we shall come to perceive that all true happiness and nobleness are near us, and yet neglected by us; and that till we have learned how to be happy and noble, we have not much to tell, even to Red Indians. The delights of horse-racing and hunting, of assemblies in the night instead of the day, of costly and wearisome music, of costly and burdensome dress, of chagrined contention for place or power, or wealth, or the eyes of the multitude; and all the endless occupation without purpose, and idleness without rest, of our vulgar world, are not, it seems to me, enjoyments we need be ambitious to communicate. And all real and wholesome enjoyments

but suppose you have originally nothing to say. We shall be obliged at last to confess, what we should long ago have known, that the really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; 45 and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.

him, since first he was made of the earth, as they are now; and they are possible to him chiefly in peace. To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over

love, to hope, to pray,-these are the things that make men happy; they have always had the power of doing these, they never will have power to do more. The world's prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things: but upon iron, or glass, or electricity, or steam, in no wise.

And I am Utopian and enthusiastic enough to believe, that the time will come when the

"Well; but railroads and telegraphs are so useful for communicating knowledge to savage 50 world will discover this. It has now made its

experiments in every possible direction but the right one; and it seems that it must, at last, try the right one, in a mathematical necessity. It has tried fighting, and preaching, and fast

nations." Yes, if you have any to give them. If you know nothing but railroads, and can communicate nothing but aqueous vapor and gunpowder,-what then? But if you have any other thing than those to give, then the 55 ing, buying and selling, pomp and parsimony, railroad is of use only because it communicates that other thing, and the question is,what that other thing may be. Is it religion? I believe if we had really wanted to communi

pride and humiliation,-every possible manner of existence in which it could conjecture there was any happiness or dignity; and all the while, as it bought, sold, and fought, and

fasted, and wearied itself with policies, and ambitions, and self-denials, God had placed its real happiness in the keeping of the little mosses of the wayside, and of the clouds of the firmament. Now and then a weary king, or a tormented slave, found out where the true kingdoms of the world were, and possessed himself, in a furrow or two of garden ground, of a truly infinite dominion. But the world

not work, and the wasteful person who lays nothing by, at the end of the same time will be doubly poor-poor in possession, and dissolute in moral habit; and he will then naturally 5 covet the money which the other has saved. And if he is then allowed to attack the other, and rob him of his well earned wealth, there is no more any motive for saving, or any reward for good conduct; and all society is there

rapine. Therefore the first necessity of social life is the clearness of national conscience in enforcing the law-that he should keep who has Justly Earned.

would not believe their report, and went on 10 upon dissolved, or exists only in systems of trampling down the mosses, and forgetting the clouds, and seeking happiness in its own way, until, at last, blundering and late, came natural science; and in natural science not only the observation of things, but the finding out of 15 new uses for them. Of course the world, having a choice left to it, went wrong as usual, and thought that these mere material uses were to be the sources of its happiness. It got the clouds packed into iron cylinders, and made 20 it carry its wise self at their own cloud pace. It got weaveable fibres out of the mosses, and made clothes for itself, cheap and fine,-here was happiness at last. To go as fast as the clouds, and manufacture everything out of 25 and more or less cowardly. It is physically anything,-here was paradise, indeed!

And now, when in a little while it is unparadised again, if there were any other mistake that the world could make, it would of course make it. But I see not that there is any other; 30 and, standing fairly well at its wits' end, having found that going fast, when it is used to it, is no more paradisiacal than going slow; and that all the prints and cottons in Manchester cannot make it comfortable in its mind, I do 35 verily believe it will come, finally to understand that God paints the clouds and shapes the moss-fibres, that men may be happy in seeing Him at His work, and that in resting quietly beside Him, and watching His work- 40 ing, and according to the power He has communicated to ourselves, and the guidance He grants, in carrying out His purposes of peace and charity among all His creatures, are the only real happinesses that ever were, or will be, 45 possible to mankind.

MONEY

That law I say, is the proper basis of distinction between rich and poor. But there is also a false basis of distinction; namely, the power held over those who are earning wealth by those who already possess it, and only use it to gain more. There will be always a number of men who would fain set themselves to the accumulation of wealth as the sole object of their lives. Necessarily that class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in intellect,

impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts; just as it is for him to make his dinner the principal object of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their lives. So all healthily-minded people, like making money ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it: but the main object of their life is not money; it is something better than money. A good soldier, for instance, mainly wishes to do his fighting well. He is glad of his pay-very properly so, and justly grumbles when you keep him ten years without it-still, his main notion of life is to win battles, not to be paid for winning them. So of clergymen. They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, of course; but yet, if they are brave and well-educated, the pew-rent is not the sole object of their lives, and the baptismal fee is not the sole purpose of the baptism; the clergyman's object is essentially to baptize and preach, not to be paid for preaching. So of doctors. They like fees no doubt, ought to 50 like them; yet if they are brave and well-educated the entire object of their lives is not fees. They, on the whole, desire to cure the sick; and, if they are good doctors, and the choice were fairly put to them-would rather cure their patient, and lose their fee, than kill him, and get it. And so with all other brave and rightly trained men; their work is first, their fee second-very important always, but still, second. But in every nation, as I said, there are

(From The Crown of Wild Olive, 1866) The lawful basis of wealth is, that a man who works should be paid the fair value of his work; and that if he does not choose to spend it today, he should have free leave to keep it, 55 and spend it tomorrow. Thus, an industrious man working daily, attains at last the possession of an accumulated sum of wealth, to which he has absolute right. The idle person who will