DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0033
‘MODERN PAINTERS’—FIRST VOLUME. 21
devotion to one beautiful and hardly accessible thing,
like the luminosity of a cloud—puts the sun in one
part of the sky and draws the sunbeams from another,
and, again, casts shadows at right angles to the light ?
“ Bold and frank licences ” he names these—no worse;
albeit with this fine warning : “ The young artist must
keep in mind that the painter’s greatness consists not
in his taking, but in his atoning for, them.” It remains
for him who would enter into the matter to follow the
argument of Modern Painters as its author presents
it, and as no summary comment is able to represent
it. Let it only be added here that the reason Ruskin
gives for the abhorrence of “ falsehood ”—that nature
is immeasurably superior to all that the human mind
can conceive—seems to be precisely a reason why man
might be content with one or two truths at a time
and reverently glad of the means (fictitious shadow
amongst them) of securing the one or two; not in
disorganisation, but in the unity of, as it were, a
dazzled pictorial vision, confessing its limitations by
fewness, and its love of natural facts by closing with
the few. If Turner was so supreme an artist as to
have stolen that fire from heaven which is the light,
why still there are painters who have not it and yet
have not deserved to die. But to say so of Turner
would be a mere trick of speech. Not even he had
more than a paint-box; but doubtless he was the most
divine landscape painter that ever lived. And his
great panegyrist magnifies him for the sake of that
devotion to one beautiful and hardly accessible thing,
like the luminosity of a cloud—puts the sun in one
part of the sky and draws the sunbeams from another,
and, again, casts shadows at right angles to the light ?
“ Bold and frank licences ” he names these—no worse;
albeit with this fine warning : “ The young artist must
keep in mind that the painter’s greatness consists not
in his taking, but in his atoning for, them.” It remains
for him who would enter into the matter to follow the
argument of Modern Painters as its author presents
it, and as no summary comment is able to represent
it. Let it only be added here that the reason Ruskin
gives for the abhorrence of “ falsehood ”—that nature
is immeasurably superior to all that the human mind
can conceive—seems to be precisely a reason why man
might be content with one or two truths at a time
and reverently glad of the means (fictitious shadow
amongst them) of securing the one or two; not in
disorganisation, but in the unity of, as it were, a
dazzled pictorial vision, confessing its limitations by
fewness, and its love of natural facts by closing with
the few. If Turner was so supreme an artist as to
have stolen that fire from heaven which is the light,
why still there are painters who have not it and yet
have not deserved to die. But to say so of Turner
would be a mere trick of speech. Not even he had
more than a paint-box; but doubtless he was the most
divine landscape painter that ever lived. And his
great panegyrist magnifies him for the sake of that