The Crown of Wild Olive
chiefly clay-built cottages, ranged in a somewhat monotonous line, the
roofs so green with moss that at first we hardly discern the houses from
the fields and trees. The village street is closed at the end by a
wooden gate, indicating the little traffic there is on the road through
it, and giving it something the look of a large farmstead, in which a
right of way lies through the yard. The road which leads to this gate is
full of ruts, and winds down a bad bit of hill between two broken banks
of moor ground, succeeding immediately to the few enclosures which
surround the village; they can hardly be called gardens; but a decayed
fragment or two of fencing fill the gaps in the bank; and a
clothes-line, with some clothes on it, striped blue and red, and a
smock-frock, is stretched between the trunks of some stunted willows; a
_very_ small haystack and pigstye being seen at the back of the cottage
beyond. An empty, two-wheeled, lumbering cart, drawn by a pair of horses
with huge wooden collars, the driver sitting lazily in the sun, sideways
on the leader, is going slowly home along the rough road, it being about
country dinner-time. At the end of the village there is a better house,
with three chimneys and a dormer window in its roof, and the roof is of
stone shingle instead of thatch, but very rough. This house is no doubt
the clergyman's; there is some smoke from one of its chimneys, none
from any other in the village; this smoke is from the lowest chimney at
the back, evidently that of the kitchen, and it is rather thick, the
fire not having been long lighted. A few hundred yards from the
clergyman's house, nearer the shore, is the church, discernible from the
cottage only by its low-arched belfry, a little neater than one would
expect in such a village; perhaps lately built by the Puseyite
incumbent;[265] and beyond the church, close to the sea, are two
fragments of a border war-tower, standing on their circular mound, worn
on its brow deep into edges and furrows by the feet of the village
children. On the bank of moor, which forms the foreground, are a few
cows, the carter's dog barking at a vixenish one: the milkmaid is
feeding another, a gentle white one, which turns its head to her,
expectant of a handful of fresh hay, which she has brought for it in her
blue apron, fastened up round her waist; she stands with her pail on her
head, evidently the village coquette, for she has a neat bodice, and
pretty striped petticoat under the blue apron, and red stockings. Nearer
us, the cowherd, barefooted, stands on a piece of the limestone rock
(for the ground is thistly and not pleasurable to bare feet);--whether
boy or girl we are not sure; it may be a boy, with a girl's worn-out
bonnet on, or a girl with a pair of ragged trowsers on; probably the
first, as the old bonnet is evidently useful to keep the sun out of our
eyes when we are looking for strayed cows among the moorland hollows,
and helps us at present to watch (holding the bonnet's edge down) the
quarrel of the vixenish cow with the dog, which, leaning on our long
stick, we allow to proceed without any interference. A little to the
right the hay is being got in, of which the milkmaid has just taken her
apronful to the white cow; but the hay is very thin, and cannot well be
raked up because of the rocks; we must glean it like corn, hence the
smallness of our stack behind the willows, and a woman is pressing a
bundle of it hard together, kneeling against the rock's edge, to carry
it safely to the hay-cart without dropping any. Beyond the village is a
rocky hill, deep set with brushwood, a square crag or two of limestone
emerging here and there, with pleasant turf on their brows, heaved in
russet and mossy mounds against the sky, which, clear and calm, and as
golden as the moss, stretches down behind it towards the sea. A single
cottage just shows its roof over the edge of the hill, looking seaward;
perhaps one of the village shepherds is a sea captain now, and may have
built it there, that his mother may first see the sails of his ship
whenever it runs into the bay. Then under the hill, and beyond the
border tower, is the blue sea itself, the waves flowing in over the sand
in long curved lines, slowly; shadows of cloud and gleams of shallow
water on white sand alternating--miles away; but no sail is visible, not
one fisherboat on the beach, not one dark speck on the quiet horizon.
Beyond all are the Cumberland mountains, clear in the sun, with rosy
light on all their crags.
I should think the reader cannot but feel the kind of harmony there is
in this composition; the entire purpose of the painter to give us the
impression of wild, yet gentle, country life, monotonous as the
succession of the noiseless waves, patient and enduring as the rocks;
but peaceful, and full of health and quiet hope, and sanctified by the
pure mountain air and baptismal dew of heaven, falling softly between
days of toil and nights of innocence.
All noble composition of this kind can be reached only by instinct: you
cannot set yourself to arrange such a subject; you may see it, and seize
it, at all times, but never laboriously invent it. And your power of
discerning what is best in expression, among natural subjects, depends
wholly on the temper in which you keep your own mind; above all, on your
living so much alone as to allow it to become acutely sensitive in its
own stillness. The noisy life of modern days is wholly incompatible with
any true perception of natural beauty. If you go down into Cumberland by
the railroad, live in some frequented hotel, and explore the hills with
merry companions, however much you may enjoy your tour or their
conversation, depend upon it you will never choose so much as one
pictorial subject rightly; you will not see into the depth of any. But
take knapsack and stick, walk towards the hills by short day's
journeys--ten or twelve miles a day--taking a week from some
starting-place sixty or seventy miles away: sleep at the pretty little
wayside inns, or the rough village ones; then take the hills as they
tempt you, following glen or shore as your eye glances or your heart
guides, wholly scornful of local fame or fashion, and of everything
which it is the ordinary traveller's duty to see or pride to do. Never
force yourself to admire anything when you are not in the humour; but
never force yourself away from what you feel to be lovely, in search of
anything better: and gradually the deeper scenes of the natural world
will unfold themselves to you in still increasing fulness of passionate
power; and your difficulty will be no more to seek or to compose
subjects, but only to choose one from among the multitude of melodious
thoughts with which you will be haunted, thoughts which will of course
be noble or original in proportion to your own depth of character and
general power of mind: for it is not so much by the consideration you
give to any single drawing, as by the previous discipline of your powers
of thought, that the character of your composition will be determined.
Simplicity of life will make you sensitive to the refinement and modesty
of scenery, just as inordinate excitement and pomp of daily life will
make you enjoy coarse colours and affected forms. Habits of patient
comparison and accurate judgment will make your art precious, as they
will make your actions wise; and every increase of noble enthusiasm in
your living spirit will be measured by the reflection of its light upon
the works of your hands.
Faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[234] I give Rossetti this preeminence, because, though the leading
Pre-Raphaelites have all about equal power over colour in the abstract,
Rossetti and Holman Hunt are distinguished above the rest for rendering
colour under effects of light; and of these two, Rossetti composes with
richer fancy and with a deeper sense of beauty, Hunt's stern realism
leading him continually into harshness. Rossetti's carelessness, to do
him justice, is only in water-colour, never in oil.
[235] All the degradation of art which was brought about, after the rise
of the Dutch school, by asphaltum, yellow varnish, and brown trees,
would have been prevented, if only painters had been forced to work in
dead colour. Any colour will do for some people, if it is browned and
shining; but fallacy in dead colour is detected on the instant. I even
believe that whenever a painter begins to _wish_ that he could touch any
portion of his work with gum, he is going wrong.
It is necessary, however, in this matter, carefully to distinguish
between translucency and lustre. Translucency, though, as I have said
above, a dangerous temptation, is, in its place, beautiful; but lustre,
or _shininess_, is always, in painting, a defect. Nay, one of my best
painter-friends (the "best" being understood to attach to both divisions
of that awkward compound word), tried the other day to persuade me
thatlustre was an ignobleness in _anything_; and it was only the fear of
treason to ladies' eyes, and to mountain streams, and to morning dew,
which kept me from yielding the point to him. One is apt always to
generalise too quickly in such matters; but there can be no question
that lustre is destructive of loveliness in colour, as it is of
intelligibility in form. Whatever may be the pride of a young beauty in
the knowledge that her eyes shine (though perhaps even eyes are most
beautiful in dimness), she would be sorry if her cheeks did; and which
of us would wish to polish a rose?
[236] But not shiny or greasy. Bristol board, or hot-pressed imperial,
or grey paper that feels slightly adhesive to the hand, is best. Coarse,
gritty, and sandy papers are fit only for blotters and blunderers; no
good draughtsman would lay a line on them. Turner worked much on a thin
tough paper, dead in surface; rolling up his sketches in tight bundles
that would go deep into his pockets.
[237] I insist upon this unalterability of colour the more because I
address you as a beginner, or an amateur; a great artist can sometimes
get out of a difficulty with credit, or repent without confession. Yet
even Titian's alterations usually show as stains on his work.
[238] It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few
colours; it saves time to have enough tints prepared without mixing, and
you may at once allow yourself these twenty-four. If you arrange them in
your colour-box in the order I have set them down, you will always
easily put your finger on the one you want.
Cobalt. Smalt. Antwerp blue. Prussian blue.
Black. Gamboge. Emerald green. Hooker's green.
Lemon yellow. Cadmium yellow. Yellow ochre. Roman ochre.
Raw sienna. Burnt sienna. Light red. Indian red.
Mars orange. Ext't of vermilion. Carmine. Violet carmine.
Brown madder. Burnt umber. Vandyke brown. Sepia.
Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colours, but you
need not care much about permanence in your own work as yet, and they
are both beautiful; while Indigo is marked by Field as more fugitive
still, and is very ugly. Hooker's green is a mixed colour, put in the
box merely to save you loss of time in mixing gamboge and Prussian blue.
No. 1. is the best tint of it. Violet carmine is a noble colour for
laying broken shadows with, to be worked into afterwards with other
colours.
If you wish to take up colouring seriously, you had better get Field's
"Chromatography" at once; only do not attend to anything it says about
principles or harmonies of colour; but only to its statements of
practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on each
other when mixed, &c.
[239] A more methodical, though, under general circumstances, uselessly