am I afraid of trusting your kindness with the confession, that it is placed there more in memory of my old master, than in the hope of its proving of any lively interest or use to you. But it is now some fifty years since it was brought in triumph to Herne Hill, being the first picture my father ever bought, and in so far the foundation of the subsequent collection, some part of which has been permitted to become permanently national at Cambridge and Oxford. The pleasure which that single drawing gave on the morning of its installation in our home was greater than to the purchaser accustomed to these times of limit less demand and supply would be credible, or even conceivable;—and our back parlour for that day was as full of surprise and gratulation as ever Cimabue's joyful Borgo.1

The drawing represents, as you will probably-notremember, only a gleam of sunshine on a peaty moor, bringing out the tartan plaids of two Highland drovers, and relieved against the dark grey of a range of quite featureless and nameless distant mountains, seen through a soft curtain of rapidly drifting rain.

169. Some little time after we had acquired this unob trusive treasure, one of my fellow students,-it was in my undergraduate days at Christ Church-came to Herne Hill to see what the picture might be which had afforded me so great ravishment. He had himself, as afterwards Kinglake and Curzon,' been urged far by the thirst of oriental travel; the chequer of plaid and bonnet had for him but feeble interest after having worn turban and capote; and the grey of Scottish hill-side still less, to one who had climbed Olympus and Abarim. After gazing blankly for a minute or two at the cheerless district through which lay the drovers' journey, he turned to me and said, "But, Ruskin, what is the use of painting such very bad weather?" And

1 [See Vol. III. p. 644 n.]

442, p.

2 [For references to Kinglake's Eothen, see Vol. VI. p. 269, Vol. XV. and Vol. XIX. p. 108; for Curzon's Monasteries of the Levant, Vol. IX. p. 35.] 3 [Compare Modern Painters, vol. iv. (Vol. VI. p. 88), where Ruskin had already given this remark.]

I had no answer, except that, for Copley Fielding and for me, there was no such thing as bad weather, but only different kinds of pleasant weather-some indeed inferring the exercise of a little courage and patience; but all, in every hour of it, exactly what was fittest and best, whether for the hills, the cattle, the drovers-or my master and me.

170. Be the case as it might,—and admitting that in a certain sense the weather might be bad in the eyes of a Greek or a Saracen,-there was no question that to us it was not only pleasant, but picturesque; and that we set ourselves to the painting of it, with as sincere desire to represent the to our minds-beautiful aspect of a mountain shower, as ever Titian a blue sky, or Angelico a golden sphere of Paradise. Nay, in some sort, with a more perfect delight in the thing itself, and less colouring of it by our own thoughts or inventions. For that matter, neither Fielding, nor Robson, nor David Cox, nor Peter de Wint, nor any of this school, ever had much thought or invention to disturb them. They were, themselves, a kind of contemplative cattle, and flock of the field, who merely liked being out of doors, and brought as much painted fresh air as they could, back into the house with them.

171. Neither must you think that this painting of fresh air is an entirely easy or soon managed business. business. You may paint a modern French emotional landscape with a pail of whitewash and a pot of gas-tar in ten minutes, at the outside. I don't know how long the operator himself takes to it-of course some little more time must be occupied in plastering on the oil-paint so that it will stick, and not run; but the skill of a good plasterer is really all that is required, the rather that in the modern idea of solemn symmetry you always make the bottom of your picture, as much as you can, like the top. You put seven or eight streaks of the plaster for your sky, to begin with; then you put in a row of bushes with the gas-tar, then you rub the ends of them into the same shapes upside down-you put three or four more streaks of white, to intimate the

presence of a pool of water-and if you finish off with a log that looks something like a dead body, your picture will have the credit of being a digest of a whole novel of Gaboriau,1 and lead the talk of the season.

172. Far other was the kind of labour required of even the least disciple of the old English water-colour school. In the first place, the skill of laying a perfectly even and smooth tint with absolute precision of complex outline was attained to a degree which no amateur draughtsman can have the least conception of. Water-colour, under the ordinary sketcher's mismanagement, drops and dries pretty nearly to its own fancy,-slops over every outline, clots in every shade, seams itself with undesirable edges, speckles itself with inexplicable grit, and is never supposed capable of representing anything it is meant for, till most of it has been washed out. But the great primary masters of the trade could lay, with unerring precision of tone and equality of depth, the absolute tint they wanted without a flaw or a retouch; and there is perhaps no greater marvel of artistic practice and finely accurate intention existing, in a simple kind, greater than the study of a Yorkshire waterfall, by Girtin, now in the British Museum, in which every sparkle, ripple, and current is left in frank light by the steady pencil which is at the same instant, and with the same touch, drawing the forms of the dark congeries of channelled rocks, while around them it disperses the glitter of their spray.

173. Then further, on such basis of well-laid primary tint, the old water-colour men were wont to obtain their effects of atmosphere by the most delicate washes of transparent colour, reaching subtleties of gradation in misty light, which were wholly unthought of before their time. In this kind the depth of far-distant brightness, freshness, and mystery of morning air with which Copley Fielding used to invest the ridges of the South Downs, as they rose

1 [For other references to Gaboriau, see Vol. XXVIII. p. 118.] [Not of a Yorkshire, but of a Welsh, waterfall; if, as seems to be the case, Ruskin refers to the large drawing ("Cayne Waterfall") which is No. 55 in the Catalogue of Drawings, vol. ii.]

out of the blue Sussex champaign, remains, and I believe must remain, insuperable, while his sense of beauty in the cloud-forms associated with higher mountains, enabled him to invest the comparatively modest scenery of our own island,-out of which he never travelled,-with a charm seldom attained by the most ambitious painters of Alp or Apennine.

1

174. I vainly tried in writing the last volume of Modern Painters to explain, even to myself, the cause or nature of the pure love of mountains which in boyhood was the ruling passion of my life, and which is demonstrably the first motive of inspiration with Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron. The more I analyzed, the less I could either understand, or justify, the mysterious pleasure we all of us, great or small, had in the land's being up and down instead of level; and the less I felt able to deny the claim of prosaic and ignobly-minded persons to be allowed to like it level, instead of up and down. In the end I found there was nothing for it but simply to assure those recusant and grovelling persons that they were perfectly wrong, and that nothing could be expected, either in art or literature, from people who liked to live among snipes and widgeons.

175. Assuming it, therefore, for a moral axiom that the love of mountains was a heavenly gift, and the beginning of wisdom, it may be imagined, if we endured for their sakes any number of rainy days with philosophy, with what rapture the old painters were wont to hail the reappearance of their idols, with all their cataracts refreshed, and all their copse and crags respangled, flaming in the forehead of the morning sky. Very certainly and seriously there are no such emotions to be had out of the hedged field or ditched fen; and I have often charitably paused in my insistences in Fors Clavigera that our squires should live from year's end to year's end on their own estates, when I reflected how many of their acres lay in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire

2

[Really the last chapter of the fourth volume: see Vol. VI. pp. 418 seq.] [See, for instance, Letters 9 and 10 (Vol. XXVII. pp. 161, 176).]

or even on duller levels, where there was neither good hunting nor duck-shooting.

2

176. I am only able to show you two drawings in illustration of these sentiments of the mountain school, and one of those is only a copy of a Robson,' but one quite good enough to represent his manner of work and tone of feeling. He died young, and there may perhaps be some likeness to the gentle depth of sadness in Keats, traceable in his refusal to paint any of the leaping streams or bright kindling heaths of Scotland, while he dwells with a monotony of affection on the clear repose of the northern twilight, and on the gathering of the shadow in the mountain gorges, till all their forms were folded in one kingly shroud of purple death. But over these hours and colours of the scene his governance was all but complete; and even in this unimportant and imperfectly rendered example, the warmth of the departing sunlight, and the depth of soft air in the recesses of the glen, are given with harmony more true and more pathetic than you will find in any recent work of even the most accomplished masters.

177. But of the loving labour, and severely disciplined observation, which prepared him for the expression of this feeling for chiaroscuro, you can only judge by examining at leisure his outlines of Scottish scenery, a work of whose existence I had no knowledge, until the kindness of Mrs. Inge advised me of it, and further, procured for me the loan of the copy of it laid on the table; which you will find has marks placed in it at the views of Byron's Lachiny-Gair, of Scott's Ben Venue, and of all Scotsmen's Ben Lomond,-plates which you may take for leading types of the most careful delineation ever given to mountain scenery, for the love of it, pure and simple.*

4

[The copy was not left at Oxford.]

2 [At the age of forty-five (1788–1833).]

Wife of the then Provost of Worcester College.]

[Scenery of the Grampian Mountains; illustrated by Forty Etchings in the Soft Ground. by George Fennell Robson, 1814. Ben Lomond is Nos. 2-4; Ben Venue, Nos. 8-10; and Lachin-y-gair, Nos. 31, 32. For "Byron's Lachin-y-Gair," pare Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 61 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 331).]

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