DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0048
3$
JOHN RUSKIN.
waters, which painters of moderate powers are able to
do artistically, giving keen pleasure thereby, but giving
it easily, and urges him to study rather the painting
of the broken sea, the shifting surface, and the
cataract. The question arises in the reader’s mind
yet again whether this noble teaching, which would,
if it were possible, make another Turner, has not in
fact made, in the lower places, many bad painters.
And yet his refutation of the bad painters of a quite
different kind—those whom his teaching did not make
and could not make—and his immediate appeal to
the nature they disintegrated by the shattering effect
of their negligence and the insolence of their recon-
struction, are true master’s work in this section on
the sea, and in that which follows, on vegetation.
Such is the lesson on the passage of the cataract
from the spring to the fall, when the parabolic curve
ceases, whereas the false painters carry that curve to
the end, and make their water look active where it
should be wildly subject to gravitation. Such is the
study of the waves seen, from the sea shoreward, not
as successive breakers, but as the self - same water
repeating its crash with the perturbed spirit of the
sea. Such also is the study of the top of the nodding
wave when “ the water swings and jumps along the
ridge like a shaken chain.” Such is the history of the
growth of a tree, and the statement of the laws of its
delimitation of outline, and of its angles, which the
wildest wind that ever blew on earth cannot take out,
JOHN RUSKIN.
waters, which painters of moderate powers are able to
do artistically, giving keen pleasure thereby, but giving
it easily, and urges him to study rather the painting
of the broken sea, the shifting surface, and the
cataract. The question arises in the reader’s mind
yet again whether this noble teaching, which would,
if it were possible, make another Turner, has not in
fact made, in the lower places, many bad painters.
And yet his refutation of the bad painters of a quite
different kind—those whom his teaching did not make
and could not make—and his immediate appeal to
the nature they disintegrated by the shattering effect
of their negligence and the insolence of their recon-
struction, are true master’s work in this section on
the sea, and in that which follows, on vegetation.
Such is the lesson on the passage of the cataract
from the spring to the fall, when the parabolic curve
ceases, whereas the false painters carry that curve to
the end, and make their water look active where it
should be wildly subject to gravitation. Such is the
study of the waves seen, from the sea shoreward, not
as successive breakers, but as the self - same water
repeating its crash with the perturbed spirit of the
sea. Such also is the study of the top of the nodding
wave when “ the water swings and jumps along the
ridge like a shaken chain.” Such is the history of the
growth of a tree, and the statement of the laws of its
delimitation of outline, and of its angles, which the
wildest wind that ever blew on earth cannot take out,