Mountain beauty, cloud beauty, leaf beauty – what is all of this doing in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters? Why all of the diagrams of striated cliffs and parts of trees (Chapter 4: “The Bud,” Ch. 5: “The Leaf,” Ch. 6: “The Branch”)?
To judge a painting of a peak or tree, the critics must understand peaks and trees. He must see them as they are and understand what he is seeing, not see them as they are conventionally represented. For most people, including Ruskin, this requires a scientific understanding of natural phenomena. A few geniuses, like J. M. W. Turner or Titian, see everything intuitively, or through their own eye training. Ruskin and I have to work harder. Most landscape painters, including some of the supposed greats, do not understand what they are seeing. That is Ruskin’s argument.
A piece of Modern Painters like Volume 4 (“Mountain Beauty”), Chapter 16 (“Resulting Forms: Thirdly, Precipices”) is really about what the title claims, precipices, those of the Swiss Alps, and how they are formed by erosion and the movement of tectonic plates. Ruskin does not know of the existence of the plates, but he does a good job of identifying the gaps in his own knowledge, allowing me to fill some of them in a little.
Sometimes Ruskin’s writing – I will stay with the precipices – is cleanly precise, as with this glacier: “Higher up, the ice opens into broad white fields and furrows, hard and dry, scarcely fissured at all.” But then the glacier becomes something else as Ruskin invokes an empty street “of tombs in a buried city,”
the whole scene so changeless and soundless; so removed, not merely from the presence of men, but even from their thoughts; so destitute of all life of tree or herb, and so immeasurable in its lonely brightness of majestic death, that it looks like a world from which not only the human, but the spiritual, presences had perished, and the last of its archangels, building the great mountains for their monuments, had laid themselves down in the sunlight to an eternal rest, each in his white shroud.
Ruskin has interwoven some kind of fantasy novel with his precipices. Soon he is hiking up the Matterhorn, pausing to listen to the Alps, “these wrinkled hills in their snowy, cold, grey-haired old age, at first so silent, then, as we keep quiet at their feet, muttering and whispering to us garrulously, in broken and dreaming fits, as it were, about their childhood” before imagining them as their components, “little flakes of mica-sand… almost too small for sight.” If one of these flakes “could have a mind given to it” (yes, if!) as it passed through the ages, “laid, (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity, in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all atoms” – Ruskin is, remember, following a sentient grain of sand:
what would it have thought, had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of God should hew that Alpine tower; that against I – poor, helpless, mica flake! – the wild north winds should rage in vain; beneath it – low-fallen mica flake! – the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around it – weak, wave-drifted mica flake! – the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire?
The grain of sand ends up on the tip of the Matterhorn is what happened there, for those who lost the thread. This is not exactly how geology is taught now (or then), but it is effective in its own way.
One of the great pleasures of reading Ruskin, is what this sort of thing is. Unpaintable, the author declares in the next paragraph, “beyond [the landscape painter’s] power – even beyond Turner’s.” I believe Ruskin is right about that.