Ruskinian Understanding of Beauty
Excerpt from “The Art of Travel” by Alain De Botton
John Ruskin was born in London in February 1819. A central part of his work was to pivot around the question of how we can possess the beauty of places.
From an early age, he was unusually alive to the smallest features of the visual world. He recalled that at three or four:
“I could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colors of my carpet - examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses with rapturous intervals of excitement.”
From his interest in beauty and its possession, Ruskin arrived at five central conclusions.
Firstly, that beauty is the result of a complex number of factors that affect the mind psychologically and visually.
Secondly, that humans have an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it.
Thirdly, that there are many lower expressions of this desire for possession, including the desire to buy souvenirs, to carve one’s name in pillars and to take photographs.
Fourthly, that there is only one way to possess beauty properly and that is through understanding it, through making ourselves conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) that are responsible for it.
And lastly, that the most effective way of pursuing this conscious understanding is by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, through writing or drawing them, irrespective of whether we happen to have any talent for doing so.
Ruskin’s primary intellectual concern was to teach people how to draw.
What was the point to drawing? Ruskin saw no paradox in stressing that it had nothing to do with drawing well, or with becoming an artist:
“A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.”
He did not mind if his students left his classes unable to draw anything that could ever hang in a gallery.
“My efforts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter.”
He complained that he himself was a far from talented artist. Of his childhood drawings, he mocked:
“I never saw any boy’s work in my life showing so little original faculty, or grasp by memory. I could literally draw nothing, not a cat, not a mouse, not a boat, not a brush.”
If drawing had value even when it was practiced by people with no talent, it was for Ruskin because drawing could teach us to see: to notice rather than to look. In the process of re-creating with our own hand what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to move from a position of observing beauty in a loose way to one where we acquire a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it:
“Now, remember, gentlemen, that I have not been trying to teach you to draw, only to see. Two men are walking through Clare Market, one of them comes out at the other end not a bit wiser than when he went in; the other notices a bit of parsley hanging over the edge of a butter-women’s basket, and carries away with him images of beauty which in the course of his daily work he incorporates with it for many a day. I want you to see things like these.”
Another benefit that we may derive from drawing is a conscious understanding of the reasons behind our attraction to certain landscapes and buildings. We find explanations for our tastes, we develop an ‘aesthetic’, a capacity to assert judgements about beauty and ugliness. We determine with greater precision what is missing in a building that we don’t like and what contributes to the beauty of the one we do. We more quickly analyze a scene that impresses us and pin down whence its power arises. We move from a numb ‘I like this’ to ‘I like this because…’, and then in turn towards a generalization about the likeable.
And on the basis of this conscious awareness, more solid memories can be founded. Carving our names on Pompey’s Pillar begins to seem unnecessary. Drawing allows us, in Ruskin’s account,
“to stay the cloud in its fading, the leaf in its trembling, and the shadows in their changing.”
Summing up what he had attempted to do in four years of teaching and writing manuals on drawing, Ruskin explained that he had been motivated by a desire to
“direct people’s attention accurately to the beauty of God’s work in the material universe”
It may be worth quoting in full a passage in which Ruskin demonstrated what exactly, at a concrete level, this strange-sounding ambition might involve:
“Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and it has a cheerful effect; and that’s all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the cause of beauty, and penetrate the minutest parts of loveliness. He looks up, and observes how the showery and subdivided sunshine comes sprinkled down among the gleaming leaves overhead, till the air is filled with the emerald light. He will see here and there a bough emerging from the veil of leaves, he will see the jewel brightness of the emerald moss and the variegated and fantastic lichens, white and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a single garment of beauty. Then come the cavernous trunks and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the steep bank, whose turfy slope is inlaid with flowers of a thousand dyes. Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane.”
“I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than to teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw”
Ruskin did not only encourage us to draw on our travels, he also felt we should write, or as he called it ‘word paint’, so as to cement our impressions of beauty. However respected he was in his lifetime for his drawings, it was his word-painting that captured the public imagination and were responsible for his fame in the late Victorian period.
The effectiveness of Ruskin’s word-painting derived from his method of not only describing what places looked like (‘the grass was green, the earth grey-brown’), but also of analyzing their effect on us in psychological language (‘the grass seemed expansive, the earth timid’). He recognized that many places strike us as beautiful not on the basis of aesthetic criteria - because the colors match or there is symmetry and proportion - but on the basis of psychological criteria, because they embody a value or mood of importance to us.
In the Alps, he described pine trees and rocks in psychological terms:
“I can never stay long without awe under an Alpine cliff, looking up to its pines, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of an enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it - upright, fixed, not knowing each other. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them; - those trees never heard human voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. No foot every stirred fallen leaf of theirs. All comfortless they stand, yet with such iron will that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them - fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of delicate life and monotony of enchanted pride.”
Through such psychological descriptions, we seem to come closer to answering the question of why a place has stirred us. We come closer to the Ruskinian goal of consciously understanding what we have loved.
