Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 431, September 1851
But although the eye is cognisant of form as well as colour, it is in the sensation of colour that we must seek the primitive pleasure derived from this organ. And probably the first reason why form pleases is this, that the boundaries of form are also the lines of contrast of colour. It is a general law of all sensation that, if it be continued, our susceptibility to it declines. It was necessary that the eye should be always open. Its susceptibility is sustained by the perpetual contrast of colours. Whether the contrast is sudden, or whether one hue shades gradually into another, we see here an original and primary source of pleasure. A constant variety, in some way produced, is essential to the maintenance of the pleasure derived from colour.
It is not incumbent on us to inquire how far the beauty of form may be traceable to the sensation of touch; – a very small portion of it we suspect. In the human countenance, and in sculpture, the beauty of form is almost resolvable into expression; though possibly the soft and rounded outline may in some measure be associated with the sense of smoothness to the touch. All that we are concerned to show is, that there is here in colour, diffused as it is over the whole world, and perpetually varied, a beauty at once showered upon the visible object. We hear it said, if you resolve all into association, where will you begin? You have but a circle of feelings. If moral sentiment, for instance, be not itself the beautiful, why should it become so by association. There must be something else that is the beautiful, by association with which it passes for such. We answer, that we do not resolve all into association; that we have in this one gift of colour, shed so bountifully over the whole world, an original beauty, a delight which makes the external object pleasant and beloved; for how can we fail, in some sort, to love what produces so much pleasure?
We are at a loss to understand how any one can speak with disparagement of colour as a source of the beautiful. The sculptor may, perhaps, by his peculiar education, grow comparatively indifferent to it: we know not how this may be; but let any man, of the most refined taste imaginable, think what he owes to this source, when he walks out at evening, and sees the sun set amongst the hills. The same concave sky, the same scene, so far as its form is concerned, was there a few hours before, and saddened him with its gloom; one leaden hue prevailed over all; and now in a clear sky the sun is setting, and the hills are purple, and the clouds are radiant with every colour that can be extracted from the sunbeam. He can hardly believe that it is the same scene, or he the same man. Here the grown-up man and the child stand always on the same level. As to the infant, note how its eye feeds upon a brilliant colour, or the living flame. If it had wings, it would assuredly do as the moth does. And take the most untutored rustic, let him be old, and dull, and stupid, yet, as long as the eye has vitality in it, will he look up with long untiring gaze at this blue vault of the sky, traversed by its glittering clouds, and pierced by the tall green trees around him.
Is it any marvel now that round the visible object should associate tributary feelings of pleasure? How many pleasing and tender sentiments gather round the rose! Yet the rose is beautiful in itself. It was beautiful to the child by its colour, its texture, its softly-shaded leaf, and the contrast between the flower and the foliage. Love, and poetry, and the tender regrets of advanced life, have contributed a second dower of beauty. The rose is more to the youth and to the old man than it was to the child; but still to the last they both feel the pleasure of the child.
The more commonplace the illustration, the more suited it is to our purpose. If any one will reflect on the many ideas that cluster round this beautiful flower, he will not fail to see how numerous and subtle may be the association formed with the visible object. Even an idea painful in itself may, by way of contrast, serve to heighten the pleasure of others with which it is associated. Here the thought of decay and fragility, like a discord amongst harmonies, increases our sentiment of tenderness. We express, we believe, the prevailing taste when we say that there is nothing, in the shape of art, so disagreeable and repulsive as artificial flowers. The waxen flower may be an admirable imitation, but it is a detestable thing. This partly results from the nature of the imitation; a vulgar deception is often practised upon us: what is not a flower is intended to pass for one. But it is owing still more, we think, to the contradiction that is immediately afterwards felt between this preserved and imperishable waxen flower, and the transitory and perishable rose. It is the nature of the rose to bud, and blossom, and decay; it gives its beauty to the breeze and to the shower; it is mortal; it is ours; it bears our hopes, our loves, our regrets. This waxen substitute, that cannot change or decay, is a contradiction and a disgust.
Amongst objects of man's contrivance, the sail seen upon the calm waters of a lake or a river is universally felt to be beautiful. The form is graceful, and the movement gentle, and its colour contrasts well either with the shore or the water. But perhaps the chief element of our pleasure is all association with human life, with peaceful enjoyment —
"This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing,
To waft me from distraction."
Or take one of the noblest objects in nature – the mountain. There is no object except the sea and the sky that reflects to the sight colours so beautiful, and in such masses. But colour, and form, and magnitude, constitute but a part of the beauty or the sublimity of the mountain. Not only do the clouds encircle or rest upon it, but men have laid on it their grandest thoughts: we have associated with it our moral fortitude, and all we understand of greatness or elevation of mind; our phraseology seems half reflected from the mountain. Still more, we have made it holy ground. Has not God himself descended on the mountain? Are not the hills, once and for ever, "the unwalled temples of our earth?" And still there is another circumstance attendant upon mountain scenery, which adds a solemnity of its own, and is a condition of the enjoyment of other sources of the sublime – solitude. It seems to us that the feeling of solitude almost always associates itself with mountain scenery. Mrs Somerville, in the description which she gives or quotes, in her Physical Geography, of the Himalayas, says —
"The loftiest peaks being bare of snow gives great variety of colour and beauty to the scenery, which in these passes is at all times magnificent. During the day, the stupendous size of the mountains, their interminable extent, the variety and the sharpness of their forms, and, above all, the tender clearness of their distant outline melting into the pale blue sky, contrasted with the deep azure above, is described as a scene of wild and wonderful beauty. At midnight, when myriads of stars sparkle in the black sky, and the pure blue of the mountains looks deeper still below the pale white gleam of the earth and snow-light, the effect is of unparalleled sublimity, and no language can describe the splendour of the sunbeams at daybreak, streaming between the high peaks, and throwing their gigantic shadows on the mountains below. There, far above the habitation of man, no living thing exists, no sound is heard; the very echo of the traveller's footsteps startles him in the awful solitude and silence that reigns in those august dwellings of everlasting snow."
No one can fail to recognise the effect of the last circumstance mentioned. Let those mountains be the scene of a gathering of any human multitude, and they would be more desecrated than if their peaks had been levelled to the ground. We have also quoted this description to show how large a share colour takes in beautifying such a scene. Colour, either in large fields of it, or in sharp contrasts, or in gradual shading – the play of light, in short, upon this world – is the first element of beauty.
Here would be the place, were we writing a formal treatise upon this subject, after showing that there is in the sense of sight itself a sufficient elementary beauty, whereto other pleasurable reminiscences may attach themselves, to point out some of these tributaries. Each sense – the touch, the ear, the smell, the taste – blend their several remembered pleasures with the object of vision. Even taste, we say, although Mr Ruskin will scorn the gross alliance. And we would allude to the fact to show the extreme subtilty of these mental processes. The fruit which you think of eating has lost its beauty from that moment – it assumes to you a quite different relation; but the reminiscence that there is sweetness in the peach or the grape, whilst it remains quite subordinate to the pleasure derived from the sense of sight, mingles with and increases that pleasure. Whilst the cluster of ripe grapes is looked at only for its beauty, the idea that they are pleasant to the taste as well steals in unobserved, and adds to the complex sentiment. If this idea grow distinct and prominent, the beauty of the grape is gone – you eat it. Here, too, would be the place to take notice of such sources of pleasure as are derived from adaptation of parts, or the adaptation of the whole to ulterior purposes; but here especially should we insist on human affections, human loves, human sympathies. Here, in the heart of man, his hopes, his regrets, his affections, do we find the great source of the beautiful – tributaries which take their name from the stream they join, but which often form the main current. On that sympathy with which nature has so wonderfully endowed us, which makes the pain and pleasure of all other living things our own pain and pleasure, which binds us not only to our fellow-men, but to every moving creature on the face of the earth, we should have much to say. How much, for instance, does its life add to the beauty of the swan! – how much more its calm and placid life! Here, and on what would follow on the still more exalted mood of pious contemplation – when all nature seems as a hymn or song of praise to the Creator – we should be happy to borrow aid from Mr Ruskin; his essay supplying admirable materials for certain chapters in a treatise on the beautiful which should embrace the whole subject.
No such treatise, however, is it our object to compose. We have said enough to show the true nature of that theory of association, as a branch of which alone is it possible to take any intelligible view of Mr Ruskin's Theoria, or "Theoretic Faculty." His flagrant error is, that he will represent a part for the whole, and will distort and confuse everything for the sake of this representation. Viewed in their proper limitation, his remarks are often such as every wise and good man will approve of. Here and there too, there are shrewd intimations which the psychological student may profit by. He has pointed out several instances where the associations insisted upon by writers of the school of Alison have nothing whatever to do with the sentiment of beauty; and neither harmonise with, nor exalt it. Not all that may, in any way, interest us in an object, adds to its beauty. "Thus," as Mr Ruskin we think very justly says, "where we are told that the leaves of a plant are occupied in decomposing carbonic acid, and preparing oxygen for us, we begin to look upon it with some such indifference as upon a gasometer. It has become a machine; some of our sense of its happiness is gone; its emanation of inherent life is no longer pure." The knowledge of the anatomical structure of the limb is very interesting, but it adds nothing to the beauty of its outline. Scientific associations, however, of this kind, will have a different æsthetic effect, according to the degree or the enthusiasm with which the science has been studied.
It is not our business to advocate this theory of association of ideas, but briefly to expound it. But we may remark that those who adopt (as Mr Ruskin has done in one branch of his subject – his Æsthesis) the rival theory of an intuitive perception of the beautiful, must find a difficulty where to insert this intuitive perception. The beauty of any one object is generally composed of several qualities and accessories – to which of these are we to connect this intuition? And if to the whole assemblage of them, then, as each of these qualities has been shown by its own virtue to administer to the general effect, we shall be explaining again by this new perception what has been already explained. Select any notorious instance of the beautiful – say the swan. How many qualities and accessories immediately occur to us as intimately blended in our minds with the form and white plumage of the bird! What were its arched neck and mantling wings if it were not living? And how the calm and inoffensive, and somewhat majestic life it leads, carries away our sympathies! Added to which, the snow-white form of the swan is imaged in clear waters, and is relieved by green foliage; and if the bird makes the river more beautiful, the river, in return, reflects its serenity and peacefulness upon the bird. Now all this we seem to see as we look upon the swan. To which of these facts separately will you attach this new intuition? And if you wait till all are assembled, the bird is already beautiful.
We are all in the habit of reasoning on the beautiful, of defending our own tastes, and this just in proportion as the beauty in question is of a high order. And why do we do this? Because, just in proportion as the beauty is of an elevated character, does it depend on some moral association. Every argument of this kind will be found to consist of an analysis of the sentiment. Nor is there anything derogatory, as some have supposed, in this analysis of the sentiment; for we learn from it, at every step, that in the same degree as men become more refined, more humane, more kind, equitable, and pious, will the visible world become more richly clad with beauty. We see here an admirable arrangement, whereby the external world grows in beauty, as men grow in goodness.
We must now follow Mr Ruskin a step farther into the development of his Theoria. All beauty, he tell us, is such, in its high and only true character, because it is a type of one or more of God's attributes. This, as we have shown, is to represent one class of associated thought as absorbing and displacing all the rest. We protest against this egregious exaggeration of a great and sacred source of our emotions. With Mr Ruskin's own piety we can have no quarrel; but we enter a firm and calm protest against a falsification of our human nature, in obedience to one sentiment, however sublime. No good can come of it – no good, we mean, to religion itself. It is substantially the same error, though assuming a very different garb, which the Puritans committed. They disgusted men with religion, by introducing it into every law and custom, and detail of human life. Mr Ruskin would commit the same error in the department of taste, over which he would rule so despotically: he is not content that the highest beauty shall be religious; he will permit nothing to be beautiful, except as it partakes of a religious character. But there is a vast region lying between the "animal pleasantness" of his Æsthesis and the pious contemplation of his Theoria. There is much between the human animal and the saint; there are the domestic affections and the love they spring from, and hopes, and regrets, and aspirations, and the hour of peace and the hour of repose – in short, there is human life. From all human life, as we have seen, come contributions to the sentiment of the beautiful, quite as distinctly traced as the peculiar class on which Mr Ruskin insists.
If any one descanting upon music should affirm, that, in the first place, there was a certain animal pleasantness in harmony or melody, or both, but that the real essence of music, that by which it truly becomes music, was the perception in harmony or melody of types of the Divine attributes, he would reason exactly in the same manner on music as Mr Ruskin does on beauty. Nevertheless, although sacred music is the highest, it is very plain that there is other music than the sacred, and that all songs are not hymns.
Chapter v. of the present volume bears this title —Of Typical Beauty. First, of Infinity, or the type of the Divine Incomprehensibility.– A boundless space will occur directly to the reader as a type of the infinite; perhaps it should be rather described as itself the infinite under one form. But Mr Ruskin finds the infinite in everything. That idea which he justly describes as the incomprehensible, and which is so profound and baffling a mystery to the finite being, is supposed to be thrust upon the mind on every occasion. Every instance of variety is made the type of the infinite, as well as every indication of space. We remember that, in the first volume of the Modern Painters, we were not a little startled at being told that the distinguishing character of every good artist was, that "he painted the infinite." Good or bad, we now see that he could scarcely fail to paint the infinite: it must be by some curious chance that the feat is not accomplished.
"Now, not only," writes Mr Ruskin, "is this expression of infinity in distance most precious wherever we find it, however solitary it may be, and however unassisted by other forms and kinds of beauty; but it is of such value that no such other forms will altogether recompense us for its loss; and much as I dread the enunciation of anything that may seem like a conventional rule, I have no hesitation in asserting that no work of any art, in which this expression of infinity is possible, can be perfect or supremely elevated without it; and that, in proportion to its presence, it will exalt and render impressive even the most tame and trivial themes. And I think if there be any one grand division, by which it is at all possible to set the productions of painting, so far as their mere plan or system is concerned, on our right and left hands, it is this of light and dark background, of heaven-light and of object-light… There is a spectral etching of Rembrandt, a presentation of Christ in the Temple, where the figure of a robed priest stands glaring by its gems out of the gloom, holding a crosier. Behind it there is a subdued window-light seen in the opening, between two columns, without which the impressiveness of the whole subject would, I think, be incalculably diminished. I cannot tell whether I am at present allowing too much weight to my own fancies and predilections; but, without so much escape into the outer air and open heaven as this, I can take permanent pleasure in no picture.
"And I think I am supported in this feeling by the unanimous practice, if not the confessed opinion, of all artists. The painter of portrait is unhappy without his conventional white stroke under the sleeve, or beside the arm-chair; the painter of interiors feels like a caged bird unless he can throw a window open, or set the door ajar; the landscapist dares not lose himself in forest without a gleam of light under its farthest branches, nor ventures out in rain unless he may somewhere pierce to a better promise in the distance, or cling to some closing gap of variable blue above." – (P. 39.)
But if an open window, or "that conventional white stroke under the sleeve," is sufficient to indicate the Infinite, how few pictures there must be in which it is not indicated! and how many "a tame and trivial theme" must have been, by this indication, exalted and rendered impressive! And yet it seems that some very celebrated paintings want this open-window or conventional white stroke. The Madonna della Sediola of Raphael is known over all Europe; some print of it may be seen in every village; that virgin-mother, in her antique chair, embracing her child with so sweet and maternal an embrace, has found its way to the heart of every woman, Catholic or Protestant. But unfortunately it has a dark background, and there is no open window – nothing to typify infinity. To us it seemed that there was "heaven's light" over the whole picture. Though there is the chamber wall seen behind the chair, there is nothing to intimate that the door or the window is closed. One might in charity have imagined that the light came directly through an open door or window. However, Mr Ruskin is inexorable. "Raphael," he says, "in his full, betrayed the faith he had received from his father and his master, and substituted for the radiant sky of the Madonna del Cardellino the chamber wall of the Madonna della Sediola, and the brown wainscot of the Baldacchino."
Of other modes in which the Infinite is represented, we have an instance in "The Beauty of Curvature."
"The first of these is the curvature of lines and surfaces, wherein it at first appears futile to insist upon any resemblance or suggestion of infinity, since there is certainly, in our ordinary contemplation of it, no sensation of the kind. But I have repeated again and again that the ideas of beauty are instinctive, and that it is only upon consideration, and even then in doubtful and disputable way, that they appear in their typical character; neither do I intend at all to insist upon the particular meaning which they appear to myself to bear, but merely on their actual and demonstrable agreeableness; so that in the present case, which I assert positively, and have no fear of being able to prove – that a curve of any kind is more beautiful than a right line – I leave it to the reader to accept or not, as he pleases, that reason of its agreeableness which is the only one that I can at all trace: namely, that every curve divides itself infinitely by its changes of direction." – (P. 63.)
Our old friend Jacob Boehmen would have been delighted with this Theoria. But we must pass on to other types. Chapter vi. treats of Unity, or the Type of the Divine Comprehensiveness.
"Of the appearances of Unity, or of Unity itself, there are several kinds, which it will be found hereafter convenient to consider separately. Thus there is the unity of different and separate things, subjected to one and the same influence, which may be called Subjectional Unity; and this is the unity of the clouds, as they are driven by the parallel winds, or as they are ordered by the electric currents; this is the unity of the sea waves; this, of the bending and undulation of the forest masses; and in creatures capable of Will it is the Unity of Will, or of Impulse. And there is Unity of Origin, which we may call Original Unity, which is of things arising from one spring or source, and speaking always of this their brotherhood; and this in matter is the unity of the branches of the trees, and of the petals and starry rays of flowers, and of the beams of light; and in spiritual creatures it is their filial relation to Him from whom they have their being. And there is Unity of Sequence," &c. —
down another half page. Very little to be got here, we think. Let us advance to the next chapter. This is entitled, Of Repose, or the Type of Divine Permanence.
It will be admitted on all hands that nothing adds more frequently to the charms of the visible object than the associated feeling of repose. The hour of sunset is the hour of repose. Most beautiful things are enhanced by some reflected feeling of this kind. But surely one need not go farther than to human labour, and human restlessness, anxiety, and passion, to understand the charm of repose. Mr Ruskin carries us at once into the third heaven: —
"As opposed to passion, changefulness, or laborious exertion, Repose is the especial and separating characteristic of the eternal mind and power; it is the 'I am' of the Creator, opposed to the 'I become' of all creatures; it is the sign alike of the supreme knowledge which is incapable of surprise, the supreme power which is incapable of labour, the supreme volition which is incapable of change; it is the stillness of the beams of the eternal chambers laid upon the variable waters of ministering creatures."
We must proceed. Chapter viii. treats Of Symmetry, or the Type of Divine Justice. Perhaps the nature of this chapter will be sufficiently indicated to the reader, now somewhat informed of Mr Ruskin's mode of thinking, by the title itself. At all events, we shall pass on to the next chapter, ix. —Of Purity, or the Type of Divine Energy. Here, the reader will perhaps expect to find himself somewhat more at home. One type, at all events, of Divine Purity has often been presented to his mind. Light has generally been considered as the fittest emblem or manifestation of the Divine Presence,
"That never but in unapproachëd light
Dwelt from eternity."
But if the reader has formed any such agreeable expectation he will be disappointed. Mr Ruskin travels on no beaten track. He finds some reasons, partly theological, partly gathered from his own theory of the Beautiful, for discarding this ancient association of Light with Purity. As the Divine attributes are those which the visible object typifies, and by no means the human, and as Purity, which is "sinlessness," cannot, he thinks, be predicted of the Divine nature, it follows that he cannot admit Light to be a type of Purity. We quote the passage, as it will display the working of his theory: —
"It may seem strange to many readers that I have not spoken of purity in that sense in which it is most frequently used, as a type of sinlessness. I do not deny that the frequent metaphorical use of it in Scripture may have, and ought to have, much influence on the sympathies with which we regard it; and that probably the immediate agreeableness of it to most minds arises far more from this source than from that to which I have chosen to attribute it. But, in the first place, if it be indeed in the signs of Divine and not of human attributes that beauty consists, I see not how the idea of sin can be formed with respect to the Deity; for it is the idea of a relation borne by us to Him, and not in any way to be attached to His abstract nature; while the Love, Mercifulness, and Justice of God I have supposed to be symbolised by other qualities of beauty: and I cannot trace any rational connection between them and the idea of Spotlessness in matter, nor between this idea nor any of the virtues which make up the righteousness of man, except perhaps those of truth and openness, which have been above spoken of as more expressed by the transparency than the mere purity of matter. So that I conceive the use of the terms purity, spotlessness, &c., on moral subjects, to be merely metaphorical; and that it is rather that we illustrate these virtues by the desirableness of material purity, than that we desire material purity because it is illustrative of those virtues. I repeat, then, that the only idea which I think can be legitimately connected with purity of matter is this of vital and energetic connection among its particles."
We have been compelled to quote some strange passages, of most difficult and laborious perusal; but our task is drawing to an end. The last of these types we have to mention is that Of Moderation, or the Type of Government by Law. We suspect there are many persons who have rapidly perused Mr Ruskin's works (probably skipping where the obscurity grew very thick) who would be very much surprised, if they gave a closer attention to them, at the strange conceits and absurdities which they had passed over without examination. Indeed, his very loose and declamatory style, and the habit of saying extravagant things, set all examination at defiance. But let any one pause a moment on the last title we have quoted from Mr Ruskin – let him read the chapter itself – let him reflect that he has been told in it that "what we express by the terms chasteness, refinement, and elegance," in any work of art, and more particularly "that finish" so dear to the intelligent critic, owe their attractiveness to being types of God's government by law! – we think he will confess that never in any book, ancient or modern, did he meet with an absurdity to outrival it.
We have seen why the curve in general is beautiful; we have here the reason given us why one curve is more beautiful than another: —
"And herein we at last find the reason of that which has been so often noted respecting the subtilty and almost invisibility of natural curves and colours, and why it is that we look on those lines as least beautiful which fall into wide and far license of curvature, and as most beautiful which approach nearest (so that the curvilinear character be distinctly asserted) to the government of the right line, as in the pure and severe curves of the draperies of the religious painters."
There is still the subject of "vital beauty" before us, but we shall probably be excused from entering further into the development of "Theoria." It must be quite clear by this time to our readers, that, whatever there is in it really wise and intelligible, resolves itself into one branch of that general theory of association of ideas, of which Alison and others have treated. But we are now in a condition to understand more clearly that peculiar style of language which startled us so much in the first volume of the Modern Painters. There we frequently heard of the Divine mission of the artist, of the religious office of the painter, and how Mr Turner was delivering God's message to man. What seemed an oratorical climax, much too frequently repeated, proves to be a logical sequence of his theoretical principles. All true beauty is religious; therefore all true art, which is the reproduction of the beautiful, must be religious also. Every picture gallery is a sort of temple, every great painter a sort of prophet. If Mr Ruskin is conscious that he never admires anything beautiful in nature or art, without a reference to some attribute of God, or some sentiment of piety, he may be a very exalted person, but he is no type of humanity. If he asserts this, we must be sufficiently courteous to believe him; we must not suspect that he is hardly candid with us, or with himself; but we shall certainly not accept him as a representative of the genus homo. He finds "sermons in stones," and sermons always; "books in the running brooks," and always books of divinity. Other men not deficient in reflection or piety do not find it thus. Let us hear the poet who, more than any other, has made a religion of the beauty of nature. Wordsworth, in a passage familiar to every one of his readers, runs his hand, as it were, over all the chords of the lyre. He finds other sources of the beautiful not unworthy his song, besides that high contemplative piety which he introduces as a noble and fit climax. He recalls the first ardours of his youth, when the beautiful object itself of nature seemed to him all, in all: —