DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0032
20
JOHN RUSKIN.
five chalk touches bring a head into existence out
of nothing. No five touches in the whole course of
the work will ever do so much as these.” Towards
completion the decrease of respective effect continues.
We ought not, Ruskin tells us, to prefer this sensation
of power to the intellectual estimate of power that
comes as the work is developed. Those who take,
without the necessary care for precise meanings, what
he has said elsewhere against Michelangiolo should
check their own exaggeration by the sentence in
which he judges that master to be the only father of
art from whose work we get both the sensation and
the intellectual estimate of power, and equally. The
chapter “ Of Ideas of Truth ” entangles us once again
in the intricacies of this argument. “ No falsehood,”
it assures us, was ever beautiful. But granting that
the beautiful centaur is not in this subtle sense a
falsehood, does the same dispensation hold good in
the case of a brown shadow — a fictitious brown
shadow, even—cast upon a twilight road in order that
a bright cloud may be seen to shine? The painter
has not nature’s materials wherewith to make his
picture match hers; and that her foreground is light
whilst yet her cloud shines does not make the same
relation possible to man, who does not hold the pencils
of light. Truth as it is in a paint-box can be but rela-
tive. This is the obvious protest of every reader. Nay,
does not Ruskin himself justify Rubens, who—out of
gaiety and vitality of heart and not because of awful
JOHN RUSKIN.
five chalk touches bring a head into existence out
of nothing. No five touches in the whole course of
the work will ever do so much as these.” Towards
completion the decrease of respective effect continues.
We ought not, Ruskin tells us, to prefer this sensation
of power to the intellectual estimate of power that
comes as the work is developed. Those who take,
without the necessary care for precise meanings, what
he has said elsewhere against Michelangiolo should
check their own exaggeration by the sentence in
which he judges that master to be the only father of
art from whose work we get both the sensation and
the intellectual estimate of power, and equally. The
chapter “ Of Ideas of Truth ” entangles us once again
in the intricacies of this argument. “ No falsehood,”
it assures us, was ever beautiful. But granting that
the beautiful centaur is not in this subtle sense a
falsehood, does the same dispensation hold good in
the case of a brown shadow — a fictitious brown
shadow, even—cast upon a twilight road in order that
a bright cloud may be seen to shine? The painter
has not nature’s materials wherewith to make his
picture match hers; and that her foreground is light
whilst yet her cloud shines does not make the same
relation possible to man, who does not hold the pencils
of light. Truth as it is in a paint-box can be but rela-
tive. This is the obvious protest of every reader. Nay,
does not Ruskin himself justify Rubens, who—out of
gaiety and vitality of heart and not because of awful