If nature is a book,
it follows that it must contain a language. As Ruskin often reminds
us, there are many kinds of language other than speech. Painting
and sculpture and architecture are languages as well; to appreciate
them properly we have to learn how to read them, just as we do with
literature. That this is the case is sometimes obvious. Most people
would recognise that Turner's Slave Ship has a 'message' for
us. Authorities on medieval art agree that the great French
cathedrals are complex 'documents' that convey elaborate scholastic
arguments. Yet the Slave Ship, in Ruskin's famous
description, is also in some sense a window on the world. The
framing of the scene and the integration of its symbols focus and
intensify the meaning of the event which it depicts. One might
compare Shakespeare's view of the play as something which holds
'the mirror up to nature'.
For meaning to be
present in picture or play, there must also in some sense be
meaning in nature, and Ruskin asserts that God's judgement on the
slavers is 'written upon the sky in lines of blood'. The
writing is partly the calligraphy of paint, partly an inscription
by the hand of God as revealed, in effect, to Turner as a
prophet.
The distinction
between art and nature is not absolute for Ruskin. It is a
distinction between two creators of vastly differing power. Nature,
quite as much as art, was created to please and instruct. When we
create works of art, we imitate and emulate the
Creator:
All great art is the
expression of man's delight in God's work, not in his own.
But observe, he is not himself his own work: he is himself
precisely the most wonderful piece of God's workmanship extant. (
Ruskin's italics)
In Modem
Painters IV, when Ruskin meditates in a sequence of chapters on
the 'materials' of which the earth is made, he even goes so far as
to suggest, not just that mountains are works of divine sculpture,
but that God has prepared sculptural materials for humans to cut
and carve. 'The earth was without form and void', says the book of
Genesis. Then the waters were gathered in one place and the dry
land appeared. 'The command that the waters should be
gathered'', says Ruskin, 'was the command that the earth
should be sculptured', Ruskin's italics). A few pages on,
when he has embarked on his account of the materials of mountains,
he gives these three reasons for the 'appointed frailness of
mountains':
The first, and the
most important, that successive soils might be supplied to the
plains ... and that men might be furnished with a material for
their works of architecture and sculpture, at once soft enough to
be subdued, and hard enough to be preserved; the second, that some
sense of danger might always be connected with the most precipitous
forms, and thus increase their sublimity; and the third, that a
subject of perpetual interest might be opened to the human mind in
observing the changes of form brought about by time on these
monuments of creation.
It is an amazingly
heterogeneous set of reasons. God here has in mind not only the
essential economy of the natural order, but the human need to
create and appreciate beauty. A few pages further on still, we find
Ruskin reflecting on the kinds of sculpture that are achievable in
specific kinds of stone. For example:
The sculptor of
granite is forced to confine himself to, and to seek for, certain
types of form capable of expression in his material; he is
naturally driven to make his figures simple in surface, and
colossal in size, that they may bear his blows; and this simplicity
and magnitude are exactly the characters necessary to show the
granitic or porphyritic colour to the best advantage. And thus we
are guided, almost forced, by the laws of nature, to do right in
art.
There is here in
embryo a Ruskinian doctrine that he never finally formulated in
words, though it was to become increasingly more central to his
thought. Modernist critics have called it 'truth to material', but
Ruskin had already given expression to the concept in, for
instance, The Stones of Venice II (1853):
To the Gothic
workman the living foliage became an object of intense affection,
and he struggled to render all its characters with as much accuracy
as was compatible with the laws of design and the nature of his
material.
The latter was quite
as important for Ruskin as the former. Good sculpture expressed
both the subject depicted and the material in which it was
executed. Both the leaf and the stone, after all, are products of
nature.
