refined, so modestly and kindly virtuous, so innocently fantastic, and so daintily pure, as the present girl-beauty of our British Islands: and whatever, for men now entering on the main battle of life, may be the confused temptations or inevitable errors of a period of moral doubt and social change, my own experience of help already received from the younger members of this University, is enough to assure me that there has been no time, in all the pride of the past, when their country might more serenely trust in the glory of her youth;-when her prosperity was more secure in their genius, or her honour in their hearts.

[For a reference to one of the pupils referred to here, see Ruskin's Introduction to W. G. Collingwood's Limestone Alps of Savoy (Vol. XXVI. p. 568).]

LECTURE VI

THE HILL-SIDE

GEORGE ROBSON AND COPLEY FIELDING

(Delivered 17th and 21st November 1883)

155. IN the five preceding lectures given this year, I have endeavoured to generalize the most noteworthy facts respecting the religious, legendary, classic, and, in two kinds, domestic, art of England. There remains yet to be defined one, far-away, and, in a manner, outcast, school, which belongs as yet wholly to the present century; and which, if we were to trust to appearances, would exclusively and for ever belong to it, neither having been known before our time, nor surviving afterwards, the art of landscape.

Not known before,-except as a trick, or a pastime; not surviving afterwards, because we seem straight on the way to pass our lives in cities twenty miles wide, and to travel from each of them to the next, underground: outcast now, even while it retains some vague hold on oldfashioned people's minds, since the best existing examples of it are placed by the authorities of the National Gallery in a cellar1 lighted by only two windows, and those at the bottom of a well, blocked by four dead brick walls fifty feet high.

156. Notwithstanding these discouragements, I am still minded to carry out the design in which the so-called

"cellar"

1 [Ruskin's statement that the Turner water-colours are consigned to a at the National Gallery (compare above, p. 290) has often been challenged as inaccurate; the rooms in which drawings are exhibited to the public being on the ground floor and not ill-lighted. He refers, however, not to those rooms, but to an inner room at the back, where many other drawings by Turner are still (1907) stored. Of this room, Ruskin's description is precisely accurate.]

7

2

Ruskin Schools were founded, that of arranging in them a
code of elementary practice, which should secure the skill
of the student in the department of landscape before he
entered on the branches of art requiring higher genius.
Nay, I am more than ever minded to fulfil my former
purpose now, in the exact degree in which I see the
advantages of such a method denied or refused in other
academies; and the beauty of natural scenery increasingly
in danger of destruction by the gross interests and dis-
quieting pleasures of the citizen. For indeed, as I before
stated to you,' when first I undertook the duties of this i
professorship, my own personal liking for landscape made
me extremely guarded in recommending its study. I only
gave three lectures on landscape in six years, and I never
published them; my hope and endeavour was to connect
the study of Nature for you with that of History; to
make you interested in Greek legend as well as in Greek
lakes and limestone; to acquaint you with the relations of
northern hills and rivers to the schools of Christian The-
ology; and of Renaissance town-life to the rage of its in-
fidelity. But I have done enough, and more than enough
-according to my time of life, in these directions; and
now, justified, I trust, in your judgment, from the charge
of weak concession to my own predilections, I shall arrange
the exercises required consistently from my drawing-classes,
with quite primary reference to landscape art; and teach
the early philosophy of beauty, under laws liable to no dis-
pute by human passion, but secure in the grace of Earth,
and light of Heaven.

157. And I wish in the present lecture to define to you the nature and meaning of landscape art, as it arose in England eighty years ago, without reference to the great master whose works have been the principal subject of my own enthusiasm. I have always stated distinctly that the

1 [See above, § 2, p. 268.]

2 The Lectures on Landscape (delivered in 1871) were ultimately published for Ruskin in 1898: see now Vol. XXII. pp. 1 seq.]

genius of Turner was exceptional, both in its kind and in its height:1 and although his elementary modes of work are beyond dispute authoritative, and the best that can be given for example and exercise, the general tenor of his design is entirely beyond the acceptance of common knowledge, and even of safe sympathy. For in his extreme sadness, and in the morbid tones of mind out of which it arose, he is one with Byron and Goethe; and is no more to be held representative of general English landscape art than Childe Harold or Faust are exponents of the total love of Nature expressed in English or German literature. To take a single illustrative instance, there is no foreground of Turner's in which you can find a flower.3

2

158. In some respects, indeed, the vast strength of this unfollowable Eremite of a master was crushing, instead of edifying, to the English schools. All the true and strong men who were his contemporaries shrank from the slightest attempt at rivalry with him on his own lines; and his own lines were cast far. But for him, Stanfield might have sometimes painted an Alpine valley, or a Biscay storm; but the moment there was any question of rendering magnitude, or terror, every effort became puny beside Turner, and Stanfield meekly resigned himself to potter all his life round the Isle of Wight, and paint the Needles on one side, and squalls off Cowes on the other. In like manner, Copley Fielding in his young days painted vigorously in oil, and showed promise of attaining considerable dignity in classic composition; but the moment Turner's Garden of Hesperides and Building of Carthage appeared in the Academy, there was an end to ambition in that direction; and thenceforth Fielding settled down to his quiet presidency of the old Water-Colour Society, and

1 [See, for instance, Vol. V. p. 353, and Vol. XXVII. p. 150; and compare below, p. 532.]

2

[Compare Vol. XIII. p. 143; Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 73 (Vol. XXXIV.).] 3 [Compare below, § 196 (p. 396), and Vol. XIII. pp. 519, 520.] In 1806 (at the British Institution) and 1815 (R.A.) respectively.]

[From 1831 to 1855: compare Præterita, i. § 238.]

painted, in unassuming replicas, his passing showers in the Highlands, and sheep on the South Downs.

159. Which are, indeed, for most of us, much more appropriate objects of contemplation; and the old watercolour room at that time, adorned yearly with the complete year's labour of Fielding, Robson, De Wint, Barret, Prout, and William Hunt, presented an aggregate of unaffected pleasantness and truth, the like of which, if you could now see, after a morning spent among the enormities of luscious and exotic art which frown or glare along your miles of exhibition wall, would really be felt by you to possess the charm of a bouquet of bluebells and cowslips, amidst a prize show of cactus and orchid from the hothouses of Kew.1

The root of this delightfulness was an extremely rare sincerity in the personal pleasure which all these men took, not in their own pictures, but in the subjects of them-s form of enthusiasm which, while it was as simple, was also as romantic, in the best sense, as the sentiment of a young girl and whose nature I can the better both define and certify to you, because it was the impulse to which I owed the best force of my own life, and in sympathy with which I have done or said whatever of saying or doing in it has been useful to others.

160. When I spoke, in this year's first lecture, of Rossetti, as the chief intellectual force in the establishment of the modern Romantic School; and again in the second lecture promised," at the end of our course, the collection of the evidence of Romantic passion in all our good English art, you will find it explained at the same time that I do not use the word Romantic as opposed to Classic, but as opposed to the prosaic characters of selfishness and stupidity, in all times, and among all nations. I do not think of King Arthur as opposed to Theseus, or to Valerius, but to Alderman Sir Robert, and Mr. John Smith.3 And therefore I opposed the child-like love of beautiful things,

1 [Compare Ruskin's description of these exhibitions in Vol. XIV. pp. 389–391.] 2 [See above, pp. 269, 291.]

3 [See above, pp. 359, 365.]