Turner and Ruskin

Turner Richmond, Yorkshire

Turner’s painting of Richmond, Yorkshire is quite different from anything a more conventional artist would have seen had they stood alongside Turner as he looked out over that landscape. Yet I am certain it is true of that Yorkshire landscape.

Turner’s champion, John Ruskin, wrote:
I am in the habit of looking to the Yorkshire drawings as indicating one of the culminating points in Turner’s career. … [they] have the most heart in them, the most affectionate, simple, unwearied, serious finishing of truth. There is in them little seeking after effect, but a strong love of place …

Ruskin’s identification of love and truth makes no objective sense. So in order to grasp Ruskin’s evaluation of the picture I need to emancipate myself from conventional representations. However I also need to avoid going to the opposite extreme by insisting that some knowledge of the history of art is required to appreciate the picture. Ruskin was right to insist that the painting has to be understood in its relationship to the landscape around Richmond. The picture cannot be understood either as a particular configuration of facts, or, by simply looking at other pictures and their place in the history of art.

For Ruskin the picture is true just so far as it is an event that arises from Turner’s affection for the Yorkshire landscape. The picture is true insofar as it is an index of the power of that landscape. And the relationship between the picture and the landscape is mediated by Turner’s strong love of place.

Ruskin championed Turner because he saw that Turner’s mind neither imposed itself on his subjects, nor was it a tabula rasa. Turner gave a voice to the landscape; he searched out an intonation and the place was changed by it. This demonstrates Ruskin’s religious sense of ‘mind’; he wrote: ‘Minds are not such pure Venice glass. The truth of nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness, as it is to him who does, infinity.’ (MP, 1, 2, 2)

For Ruskin, particular truths are concealed by literal representations of nature. He wrote:
‘The deceptive imitation of nature is inconsistent with real truth; for the very means by which the old masters attained the apparent accuracy of tone which is so satisfying to the eye, compelled them to give up all idea of real relations of retirement, and to represent a few successive and marked stages of distance, like the scenes of a theatre, instead of the imperceptible, multitudinous, symmetrical retirement of nature …’

‘Turner starts from the beginning with a totally different principle. He boldly takes pure white for his highest light, and lampblack for his deepest shade; and between these he makes every degree of shade indicative of a separate degree of distance … .’ (MP, 1,2,1)

For Ruskin the truth of nature corresponded to the truth he found in Turner’s landscapes. The truth of Gothic Architecture corresponded to the truth he found in the bible. He read the cathedral porches at Amiens with the same affection as he read the bible. If we are to grasp Ruskin idea of truth we need to discover how Ruskin read nature, Turner, Gothic architecture and the bible.

In Of Kings’ Treasuries Ruskin gives a lesson on how to read. He takes as his text a passage from Milton’s Lycidas. Milton speaks of:

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,
The golden opes, the iron shuts amain, [i.e.with conclusive force]

Ruskin comments: Milton makes one, of gold, the key of heaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison in which the wicked teachers are to be bound….

For Ruskin, as for Plato, the key of heaven is beauty, which has the power to disclose the architecture of the good. Truth is not an objectivity that holds its subject spellbound, but something whose power signifies a sovereign subjectivity. Ruskin insisted on the power of things. He wrote:
The word ‘Blue,’ say certain philosophers, means the sensation of colour which the human eye receives in looking at the open sky, or at a bell gentian. …Now be it observed that the word ‘Blue’ does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation: and the power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, … (MP, 3, 4, 12)

For Ruskin the power of the beloved awakes the moral being of the lover to the light of God. The beloved is a microcosm that reflects the light of the macrocosm. The key of the prison shuts out the light by insisting upon an image whose only ground is the will of a separate subject to discipline others. The prison key effaces the image of God with the image produced by the self.

This contrasts with the golden key in which the self is effaced. Ruskin wrote:
And then I learned the real meaning of the word Beautiful. With all that I had seen before – there had become mingled the associations of humanity – the exertion of human power – the action of human mind. The image of self had not been effaced in that of God. … It was then only that I understood to become nothing might be to become more than Man; …

Ruskin had faith in the natural order of God. In this order nothing is separate:
everything is part of an organic whole:
the appearance of separation or isolation in anything, and of self-dependence, is an appearance of imperfection; …

The way in which everything relies upon the power of everything else to develop its perspective is the basis of an inter-subjectivity which is essential to the development of the soul. No subject that participates in this inter-subjectivity is sufficiently strong to know others without betraying what Ruskin called the ‘pathetic fallacy’. He wrote:

The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away … by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. … Now so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces. … there being a point at which all feverish and wild fancy becomes just and true.

Those events which have the power to disturb us by disclosing a light we have not seen before are the spectacles identified by Plato. The spectacle gives rise to feelings for ‘a light that never was on sea or land’. For Plato, and I think for Ruskin, the practical imperative of the human mind, or the body’s desire for pleasure, can blind it to spectacles that disclose the truth. Only the enlightened can adopt the contemplative gaze of theoria, a gaze which discloses a beauty independent of its perceiver, and which in turn gestures toward the glory of God. We may read either to establish the prison house, or with an appetite for those spectacles that in disturbing us emancipate us from subjective prejudice and constitute steps in the life of the soul.

Truth can either by identified with those determinations and judgements grounded in the intentions of the speaker, or with those spectacles that reveal other intentions. For Ruskin it is impossible to determine the literal truth of Shakespeare, or of Dante, but we perceive the truth of their intention with feelings of affection. We need to bring to their texts a feeling for what is meaningful and to find in them a way of carrying that meaning forward.