Arrows of the Chace, vol. 1/2

A jewelled casket, every jewel of which was itself sacred. Not a slab of it, nor a shaft, but has been brought from the churches descendants of the great Seven of Asia, or from the Christian-Greek of Corinth, Crete, and Thrace, or the Christian-Israelite in Palestine—the central archivolt copied from that of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the opposing lions or phœnixes of its sculptures from the treasury of Atreus and the citadel of Tyre.

Thus, beyond all measure of value as a treasury of art, it is also, beyond all other volumes, venerable as a codex of religion. Just as the white foliage and birds on their golden ground are descendants, in direct line, from the ivory and gold of Phidias, so the Greek pictures and inscriptions, whether in mosaic or sculpture, throughout the building, record the unbroken unity of spiritual influence from the Father of light—or the races whose own poets had said “We also are his offspring”—down to the day when all their gods, not slain, but changed into new creatures, became the types to them of the mightier Christian spirits; and Perseus became St. George, and Mars St. Michael, and Athena the Madonna, and Zeus their revealed Father in Heaven.

In all the history of human mind, there is nothing so wonderful, nothing so eventful, as this spiritual change. So inextricably is it interwoven with the most divine, the most distant threads of human thought and effort, that while none of the thoughts of St. Paul or the visions of St. John, can be understood without our understanding first the imagery familiar to the Pagan worship of the Greeks; on the other hand, no understanding of the real purport of Greek religion can be securely reached without watching the translation of its myths into the message of Christianity.

Both by the natural temper of my mind, and by the labor of forty years given to this subject in its practical issues on the present state151 of Christendom, I have become, in some measure, able both to show and to interpret these most precious sculptures; and my health has been so far given back to me that if I am at this moment aided, it will, so far as I can judge, be easily possible for me to complete the work so long in preparation. There will yet, I doubt not, be time to obtain perfect record of all that is to be destroyed. I have entirely honest and able draughtsmen at my command; my own resignation152 of my Oxford Professorship has given me leisure; and all that I want from the antiquarian sympathy of England is so much instant help as may permit me, while yet in available vigor of body and mind, to get the records made under my own overseership, and registered for sufficient and true. The casts and drawings which I mean to have made will be preserved in a consistent series in my Museum at Sheffield, where I have freehold ground enough to build a perfectly lighted gallery for their reception. I have used the words “I want,” as if praying this thing for myself. It is not so. If only some other person could and would undertake all this, Heaven knows how gladly I would leave the task to him. But there is no one else at present able to do it: if not now by me, it can never be done more.—And so I leave it to the reader’s grace.

J. Ruskin.

All subscriptions to be sent to Mr. G. Allen, Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent.

POSTSCRIPT.153

By the kindness of the Society of Painters in Water-colors I am permitted this year, in view of the crisis of the fate of the façade of St. Mark’s, to place in the exhibition-room of the Society ten photographs, illustrative of its past and present state. I have already made use of them, both in my lectures at Oxford and in the parts of Fors Clavigera intended for Art-teaching at my Sheffield Museum; and all but the eighth are obtainable from my assistant, Mr. Ward (2 Church Terrace, Richmond), who is my general agent for photographs, either taken under my direction (as here, Nos. 4, 9, and 10), or specially chosen by me for purposes of Art Education. The series of views here shown are all perfectly taken, with great clearness, from the most important points, and give, consecutively, complete evidence respecting the façade.

They are arranged in the following order:

This last photograph is not of St. Mark’s but is of the inscription which I discovered, in 1877, on the Church of St. James of the Rialto. It is of the 9th or 10th century (according to the best antiquarians of Venice), and is given in this series, first, to confirm the closing paragraph in my notes on the Prout drawings in Bond Street;154 and secondly to show the perfect preservation even of the hair-strokes in letters carved in the Istrian marble used at Venice a thousand years ago. The inscription on the cross is—

“Sit crux vera salus huic tua Christe loco.”(Be Thy Cross, O Christ, the true safety of this place.)

And on the band beneath—

“Hoc circa templum sit jus mercantibus æquum,Pondera nec vergant nec sit conventio prava.”(Around this temple let the merchants’ law be just,Their weights true, and their contracts fair.)

The bearing of this inscription on the relations of Antonio to Shylock may perhaps not be perceived by a public which now—consistently and naturally enough, but ominously—considers Shylock a victim to the support of the principles of legitimate trade, and Antonio a “speculator and sentimentalist.” From the series of photographs of St. Mark’s itself, I cannot but think even the least attentive observer must receive one strong impression—that of the singular preservation of the minutest details in its sculpture. Observe, this is a quite separate question from the stability of the fabric. In our northern cathedrals the stone, for the most part, moulders away; and the restorer usually replaces it by fresh sculpture, on the faces of walls of which the mass is perfectly secure. Here, at St. Mark’s, on the contrary, the only possible pretence for restoration has been, and is, the alleged insecurity of the masses of inner wall—the external sculptures remaining in faultless perfection, so far as unaffected by direct human violence. Both the Greek and Istrian marbles used at Venice are absolutely defiant of hypæthral influences, and the edges of their delicatest sculpture remain to this day more sharp than if they had been cut in steel—for then they would have rusted away. It is especially, for example, of this quality that I have painted the ornament of the St. Jean d’Acre pillars, No. 107, which the reader may at once compare with the daguerreotype (No. 108) beside it, which are exhibited, with the Prout and Hunt drawings, at the Fine Art Society’s rooms.155 These pillars are known to be not later than the sixth century, yet wherever external violence has spared their decoration it is sharp as a fresh-growing thistle. Throughout the whole façade of St. Mark’s, the capitals have only here and there by casualty lost so much as a volute or an acanthus leaf, and whatever remains is perfect as on the day it was set in its place, mellowed and subdued only in color by time, but white still, clearly white; and gray, still softly gray; its porphyry purple as an Orleans plum, and the serpentine as green as a greengage. Note also, that in this throughout perfect decorated surface there is not a loose joint. The appearances of dislocation, which here and there look like yielding of masonry, are merely carelessness in the replacing or resetting of the marble armor at the different times when the front has been retouched—in several cases quite wilful freaks of arrangement. The slope of the porphyry shaft, for instance, on the angle at the left of my drawing, looks like dilapidation. Were it really so, the building would be a heap of ruins in twenty-four hours. These porches sustain no weight above—their pillars carry merely an open gallery; and the inclination of the red marble pilasters at the angle is not yielding at all, but an originally capricious adjustment of the marble armor. It will be seen that the investing marbles between the arch and pilaster are cut to the intended inclination, which brings the latter nearly into contact with the upper archivolt; the appearance of actual contact being caused by the projection of the dripstone. There are, indeed, one or two leaning towers in Venice whose foundations have partly yielded; but if anything were in danger on St. Mark’s Place, it would be the campanile—three hundred feet high—and not the little shafts and galleries within reach—too easy reach—of the gaslighter’s ladder. And the only dilapidations I have myself seen on this porch, since I first drew it forty-six years ago, have been, first, those caused by the insertion of the lamps themselves, and then the breaking away of the marble net work of the main capital by the habitual clattering of the said gaslighter’s ladder against it. A piece of it which I saw so broken off, and made an oration over to the passers-by in no less broken Italian, is in my mineral cabinet at Brantwood.

Before leaving this subject of the inclined angle, let me note—usefully, though not to my present purpose—that the entire beauty of St. Mark’s campanile depends on this structure, there definitely seen to be one of real safety. This grace and apparent strength of the whole mass would be destroyed if the sides of it were made vertical. In Gothic towers, the same effect is obtained by the retiring of the angle buttresses, without actual inclination of any but the coping lines.

In the Photograph No. 5 the slope of the angles in the correspondent portico, as it stood before restoration, is easily visible and measurable, the difference being, even on so small a scale, full the twentieth of an inch between the breadth at base and top, at the angles, while the lines bearing the inner arch are perfectly vertical.

There was, indeed, as will be seen at a glance, some displacement of the pillars dividing the great window above, immediately to the right of the portico. But these pillars were exactly the part of the south front which carried no weight. The arch above them is burdened only by its own fringes of sculpture; and the pillars carried only the bit of decorated panelling, which is now bent—not outwards, as it would have been by pressure, but inwards. The arch has not subsided; it was always of the same height as the one to the right of it (the Byzantine builders throwing their arches always in whatever lines they chose); nor is there a single crack or displacement in the sculpture of the investing fringe.

In No. 3 (to the right hand in the frame) there is dilapidation and danger enough certainly; but that is wholly caused by the savage and brutal carelessness with which the restored parts are joined to the old. The photograph bears deadly and perpetual witness against the system of “making work,” too well known now among English as well as Italian operatives; but it bears witness, as deadly, against the alleged accuracy of the restoration itself. The ancient dentils are bold, broad, and cut with the free hand, as all good Greek work is; the new ones, little more than half their size, are cut with the servile and horrible rigidity of the modern mechanic.

This quality is what M. Meduna, in the passage quoted from his defence of himself156 in the Standard, has at once the dulness and the audacity actually to boast of as “plus exacte”!

Imagine a Kensington student set to copy a picture by Velasquez, and substituting a Nottingham lace pattern, traced with absolute exactness, for the painter’s sparkle and flow and flame, and boasting of his improvements as “plus exacte”! That is precisely what the Italian restorer does for his original; but, alas! he has the inestimable privilege also of destroying the original as he works, and putting his student’s caricature in its place! Nor are any words bitter or contemptuous enough to describe the bestial stupidities which have thus already replaced the floor of the church, in my early days the loveliest in Italy, and the most sacred.

In the Photograph No. 7 there is, and there only, one piece of real dilapidation—the nodding pinnacle propped on the right. Those pinnacles stand over the roof gutters, and their bracket supports are, of course, liable to displacement, if the gutters get choked by frost or otherwise neglected. The pinnacle is not ten feet high, and can be replaced and secured as easily as the cowl on a chimney-pot. The timbers underneath were left there merely to give the wished-for appearance of repairs going on. They defaced the church front through the whole winter of 1876. I copied the bills stuck on them one Sunday, and they are printed in the 78th number of Fors Clavigera, the first being the announcement of the Reunited agencies for information on all matters of commercial enterprise and speculation, and the last the announcement of the loss of a cinnamon-colored little bitch, with rather long ears (coll’ orecchie piùtosto lunghe). I waited through the winter to see how much the Venetians really cared for the look of their church; but lodged a formal remonstrance in March with one of the more reasonable civic authorities, who presently had them removed. The remonstrance ought, of course, to have come from the clergy; but they contented themselves with cutting flower-wreaths on paper to hang over the central door at Christmas-time. For the rest, the pretence of rottenness in the walls is really too gross to be answered. There are brick buildings in Italy by tens of thousands, Roman, Lombardic, Gothic, on all scales and in all exposures. Which of them has rotted or fallen, but by violence? Shall the tower of Garisenda stand, and the Campanile of Verona, and the tower of St. Mark’s, and, forsooth, this little fifty feet of unweighted wall be rotten and dangerous?

Much more I could say, and show; but the certainty of the ruin of poor Bedlamite Venice is in her own evil will, and not to be averted by any human help or pleading. Her Sabba delle streghe has truly come; and in her own words (see Fors, letter 77th): “Finalmente la Piazza di S. Marco sarà invasa e completamente illuminata dalle Fiamme di Belzebù. Perchè il Sabba possa riuscire più completo, si raccomanda a tutti gli spettatori di fischiare durante le fiamme come anime dannate.”

Meantime, in what Saturday pause may be before this Witches’ Sabbath, if I have, indeed, any English friends, let them now help me, and my fellow-workers, to get such casts, and colorings, and measurings, as may be of use in time to come. I am not used to the begging tone, and will not say more than that what is given me will go in mere daily bread to the workers, and that next year, if I live, there shall be some exposition of what we have got done, with the best account I can render of its parts and pieces. Fragmentary enough they must be,—poor fallen plumes of the winged lion’s wings,—yet I think I can plume a true shaft or two with them yet.

Some copies of the second edition of this circular had printed at the top of its last and otherwise blank page the words, “Present State of Subscription Lists:—,” a printer’s error, mistaken by some readers for a piece of dry humor.

Subscriptions were collected by Mr. G. Allen, as above intimated, and also by Mr. F. W. Pullen, secretary to the Ruskin Society of Manchester, under the authority of the following letter, which was printed and distributed by him: “November 29, 1879.—Dear Mr. Pullen: I am very glad to have your most satisfactory letter, and as gladly give you authority to receive subscriptions for drawings and sculptures of St. Mark’s. Mr. Bunney’s large painting of the whole west façade, ordered by me a year and a half ago, and in steady progress ever since, is to be completed this spring. It was a £500 commission for the Guild, but I don’t want to have to pay it with Guild capital. I have the power of getting casts, also, in places where nobody else can, and have now energy enough to give directions, but can no more pay for them out of my own pocket. Ever gratefully yours, J. R. As a formal authority, this had better have my full signature—John Ruskin.” In a further letter to Manchester on the subject, Mr. Ruskin wrote as follows: “It is wholly impossible for me at present to take any part in the defence—at last, though far too late—undertaken by the true artists and scholars of England—of the most precious Christian building in Europe; … nor is there any occasion that I should, if only those who care for me will refer to what I have already written, and will accept from me the full ratification of all that was said by the various speakers, all without exception men of the most accurate judgment and true feeling, at the meeting held in Oxford. All that I think it necessary for you to lay, directly from myself, before the meeting you are about to hold, is the explicit statement of two facts of which I am more distinctly cognizant from my long residences in Italy at different periods, and in Venice during these last years, than any other person can be—namely, the Infidel—(malignantly and scornfully Infidel and anti-religionist) aim of Italian ‘restoration’—and the totality of the destruction it involves, of whatever it touches.” So again, in a second and despairing letter, he wrote: “You cannot be too strongly assured of the total destruction involved, in the restoration of St. Mark’s.... Then the plague of it all is, What can you do? Nothing would be effectual, but the appointment of a Procurator of St. Mark’s, with an enormous salary, dependent on the Church’s being let alone. What you can do by a meeting at Manchester, I have no notion. The only really practical thing that I can think of would be sending me lots of money to spend in getting all the drawings I can of the old thing before it goes. I don’t believe we can save it by any protests.” See the Birmingham Daily Mail, Nov. 27, 1879. The reader is also referred to “Fors Clavigera,” New Series, Letter the Fourth, pp. 125-6.

The meeting in Oxford alluded to above was held in the Sheldonian Theatre on November 15, 1879. Amongst the principal speakers were the Dean of Christ Church (in the chair), Dr. Acland, the Professor of Fine Art (Mr. W. B. Richmond), Mr. Street, Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Burne Jones.

LETTERS ON SCIENCE

I.

GEOLOGICAL

[From “The Reader,” November 12, 1864.]

THE CONFORMATION OF THE ALPS

Denmark Hill, 10th November, 1864.

My attention has but now been directed to the letters in your October numbers on the subject of the forms of the Alps.157 I have, perhaps, some claim to be heard on this question, having spent, out of a somewhat busy life, eleven summers and two winters (the winter work being especially useful, owing to the definition of inaccessible ledges of strata by new-fallen snow) in researches among the Alps, directed solely to the questions of their external form and its mechanical causes; while I left to other geologists the more disputable and difficult problems of relative ages of beds.

I say “more disputable” because, however complex the phases of mechanical action, its general nature admits, among the Alps, of no question. The forms of the Alps are quite visibly owing to the action (how gradual or prolonged cannot yet be determined) of elevatory, contractile, and expansive forces, followed by that of currents of water at various temperatures, and of prolonged disintegration—ice having had small share in modifying even the higher ridges, and none in causing or forming the valleys.

The reason of the extreme difficulty in tracing the combination of these several operative causes in any given instance, is that the effective and destructive drainage by no means follows the leading fissures, but tells fearfully on the softer rocks, sweeping away inconceivable volumes of these, while fissures or faults in the harder rocks of quite primal structural importance may be little deepened or widened, often even unindicated, by subsequent aqueous action. I have, however, described at some length the commonest structural and sculptural phenomena in the fourth volume of “Modern Painters,” and I gave a general sketch of the subject last year in my lecture158 at the Royal Institution (fully reported in the Journal de Genève of 2d September, 1863), but I have not yet thrown together the mass of material in my possession, because our leading chemists are only now on the point of obtaining some data for the analysis of the most important of all forces—that of the consolidation and crystallization of the metamorphic rocks, causing them to alter their bulk and exercise irresistible and irregular pressures on neighboring or incumbent beds.

But, even on existing data, the idea of the excavation of valleys by ice has become one of quite ludicrous untenableness. At this moment, the principal glacier in Chamouni pours itself down a slope of twenty degrees or more over a rock two thousand feet in vertical height; and just at the bottom of this ice-cataract, where a water-cataract of equal power would have excavated an almost fathomless pool, the ice simply accumulates a heap of stones, on the top of which it rests.

The lakes of any hill country lie in what are the isolated lowest (as its summits are the isolated highest) portions of its broken surface, and ice no more engraves the one than it builds the other. But how these hollows were indeed first dug, we know as yet no more than how the Atlantic was dug; and the hasty expression by geologists of their fancies in such matters cannot be too much deprecated, because it deprives their science of the respect really due to it in the minds of a large portion of the public, who know, and can know, nothing of its established principles, while they can easily detect its speculative vanity. There is plenty of work for us all to do, without losing time in speculation; and when we have got good sections across the entire chain of the Alps, at intervals of twenty miles apart, from Nice to Innspruch, and exhaustive maps and sections of the lake-basins of Lucerne, Annecy, Como, and Garda, we shall have won the leisure, and may assume the right, to try our wits on the formative question.

J. Ruskin.159

[From “The Reader,” November 26, 1864.]

CONCERNING GLACIERS

Denmark Hill, November 21.

I am obliged to your Scottish correspondent for the courtesy with which he expresses himself towards me; and, as his letter refers to several points still (to my no little surprise) in dispute among geologists, you will perhaps allow me to occupy, in reply, somewhat more of your valuable space than I had intended to ask for.

I say “to my no little surprise,” because the great principles of glacial action have been so clearly stated by their discoverer, Forbes, and its minor phenomena (though in an envious temper, which, by its bitterness, as a pillar of salt, has become the sorrowful monument of the discovery it denies)160 so carefully described by Agassiz, that I never thought there would be occasion for much talk on the subject henceforward. As much as seems now necessary to be said I will say as briefly as I can.

What a river carries fast at the bottom of it, a glacier carries slowly at the top of it. This is the main distinction between their agencies. A piece of rock which, falling into a strong torrent, would be perhaps swept down half a mile in twenty minutes, delivering blows on the rocks at the bottom audible like distant heavy cannon,161 and at last dashed into fragments, which in a little while will be rounded pebbles (having done enough damage to everything it has touched in its course)—this same rock, I say, falling on a glacier, lies on the top of it, and is thereon carried down, if at fullest speed, at the rate of three yards in a week, doing usually damage to nothing at all. That is the primal difference between the work of water and ice; these further differences, however, follow from this first one.

Though a glacier never rolls its moraine into pebbles, as a torrent does its shingle, it torments and teases the said morain very sufficiently, and without intermission. It is always moving it on, and melting from under it, and one stone is always toppling, or tilting, or sliding over another, and one company of stones crashing over another, with staggering shift of heap behind. Now, leaving out of all account the pulverulent effect of original precipitation to glacier level from two or three thousand feet above, let the reader imagine a mass of sharp granite road-metal and paving-stones, mixed up with boulders of any size he can think of, and with wreck of softer rocks (micaceous schists in quantities, usually), the whole, say, half a quarter of a mile wide, and of variable thickness, from mere skin-deep mock-moraine on mounds of unsuspected ice—treacherous, shadow-begotten—to a railroad embankment, passenger-embankment, one eternal collapse of unconditional ruin, rotten to its heart with frost and thaw (in regions on the edge of each), and withering sun and waste of oozing ice; fancy all this heaved and shovelled, slowly, by a gang of a thousand Irish laborers, twenty miles downhill. You will conjecture there may be some dust developed on the way?—some at the hill bottom? Yet thus you will have but a dim idea of the daily and final results of the movements of glacier moraines—beautiful result in granite and slate dust, delivered by the torrent at last in banks of black and white slime, recovering itself, far away, into fruitful fields, and level floor for human life.