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The Two Paths

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THE TWO PATHS

By John Ruskin, M.A.




CONTENTS.


THE TWO PATHS.


LECTURE I.
THE DETERIORATIVE POWER OF CONVENTIONAL ART OVER NATIONS

LECTURE II.
THE UNITY OF ART

LECTURE III.
MODERN MANUFACTURE AND DESIGN

LECTURE IV.
THE INFLUENCE OF IMAGINATION IN ARCHITECTURE

LECTURE V.
THE WORK OF IRON, IN NATURE, ART, AND POLICY

APPENDICES





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.


THE TWO PATHS.

THE IDEAL OF AN ANGEL
THE SERPENT BEGUILING EVE
CONTRAST
SYMMETRY
ORNAMENT
CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE
CENTREPIECE OF BALCONY
GENERAL EFFECT OF MASSES
PROFILE
TEETH OF THE BORDER
BORDER AT THE SIDE OF BALCONY
OUTLINE OF RETRACTED LEAVES




PREFACE.


The following addresses, though spoken at different times, are
intentionally connected in subject; their aim being to set one or two
main principles of art in simple light before the general student, and
to indicate their practical bearing on modern design. The law which it
has been my effort chiefly to illustrate is the dependence of all noble
design, in any kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form.

This is the vital law; lying at the root of all that I have ever tried
to teach respecting architecture or any other art. It is also the law
most generally disallowed.

I believe this must be so in every subject. We are all of us willing
enough to accept dead truths or blunt ones; which can be fitted
harmlessly into spare niches, or shrouded and coffined at once out of
the way, we holding complacently the cemetery keys, and supposing we
have learned something. But a sapling truth, with earth at its root and
blossom on its branches; or a trenchant truth, that can cut its way
through bars and sods; most men, it seems to me, dislike the sight or
entertainment of, if by any means such guest or vision may be avoided.
And, indeed, this is no wonder; for one such truth, thoroughly
accepted, connects itself strangely with others, and there is no saying
what it may lead us to.

And thus the gist of what I have tried to teach about architecture has
been throughout denied by my architect readers, even when they thought
what I said suggestive in other particulars. "Anything but that. Study
Italian Gothic?--perhaps it would be as well: build with pointed
arches?--there is no objection: use solid stone and well-burnt brick?--
by all means: but--learn to carve or paint organic form ourselves! How
can such a thing be asked? We are above all that. The carvers and painters
are our servants--quite subordinate people. They ought to be glad if we
leave room for them."

Well: on that it all turns. For those who will not learn to carve or
paint, and think themselves greater men because they cannot, it is
wholly wasted time to read any words of mine; in the truest and
sternest sense they can read no words of mine; for the most familiar I
can use--"form," "proportion," "beauty," "curvature," "colour"--are
used in a sense which by no effort I can communicate to such readers;
and in no building that I praise, is the thing that I praise it for,
visible to them.

And it is the more necessary for me to state this fully; because so-
called Gothic or Romanesque buildings are now rising every day around
us, which might be supposed by the public more or less to embody the
principles of those styles, but which embody not one of them, nor any
shadow or fragment of them; but merely serve to caricature the noble
buildings of past ages, and to bring their form into dishonour by
leaving out their soul.

The following addresses are therefore arranged, as I have just stated,
to put this great law, and one or two collateral ones, in less
mistakeable light, securing even in this irregular form at least
clearness of assertion. For the rest, the question at issue is not one
to be decided by argument, but by experiment, which if the reader is
disinclined to make, all demonstration must be useless to him.

The lectures are for the most part printed as they were read, mending
only obscure sentences here and there. The parts which were trusted to
extempore speaking are supplied, as well as I can remember (only with
an addition here and there of things I forgot to say), in the words, or
at least the kind of words, used at the time; and they contain, at all
events, the substance of what I said more accurately than hurried
journal reports. I must beg my readers not in general to trust to such,
for even in fast speaking I try to use words carefully; and any
alteration of expression will sometimes involve a great alteration in
meaning. A little while ago I had to speak of an architectural design,
and called it "elegant," meaning, founded on good and well "elected"
models; the printed report gave "excellent" design (that is to say,
design _excellingly_ good), which I did not mean, and should, even
in the most hurried speaking, never have said.

The illustrations of the lecture on iron were sketches made too roughly
to be engraved, and yet of too elaborate subjects to allow of my
drawing them completely. Those now substituted will, however, answer
the purpose nearly as well, and are more directly connected with the
subjects of the preceding lectures; so that I hope throughout the
volume the student will perceive an insistance upon one main truth, nor
lose in any minor direction of inquiry the sense of the responsibility
which the acceptance of that truth fastens upon him; responsibility for
choice, decisive and conclusive, between two modes of study, which
involve ultimately the development, or deadening, of every power he
possesses. I have tried to hold that choice clearly out to him, and to
unveil for him to its farthest the issue of his turning to the right
hand or the left. Guides he may find many, and aids many; but all these
will be in vain unless he has first recognised the hour and the point
of life when the way divides itself, one way leading to the Olive
mountains--one to the vale of the Salt Sea. There are few cross roads,
that I know of, from one to the other. Let him pause at the parting of
THE TWO PATHS.




THE TWO PATHS


_BEING_

LECTURES ON ART, AND ITS APPLICATION TO DECORATION AND
MANUFACTURE DELIVERED IN 1858-9.




LECTURE I.

THE DETERIORATIVE POWER OF CONVENTIONAL ART OVER
NATIONS.


_An Inaugural Lecture, Delivered at the Kensington Museum,
January, 1858._

[Footnote: A few introductory words, in which, at the opening of this
lecture, I thanked the Chairman (Mr. Cockerell), for his support on the
occasion, and asked his pardon for any hasty expressions in my
writings, which might have seemed discourteous towards him, or other
architects whose general opinions were opposed to mine, may be found by
those who care for preambles, not much misreported, in the _Building
Chronicle;_ with such comments as the genius of that journal was
likely to suggest to it.]


As I passed, last summer, for the first time, through the north of
Scotland, it seemed to me that there was a peculiar painfulness in its
scenery, caused by the non-manifestation of the powers of human art. I
had never travelled in, nor even heard or conceived of such a country
before; nor, though I had passed much of my life amidst mountain
scenery in the south, was I before aware how much of its charm depended
on the little gracefulnesses and tendernesses of human work, which are
mingled with the beauty of the Alps, or spared by their desolation. It
is true that the art which carves and colours the front of a Swiss
cottage is not of any very exalted kind; yet it testifies to the
completeness and the delicacy of the faculties of the mountaineer; it
is true that the remnants of tower and battlement, which afford footing
to the wild vine on the Alpine promontory, form but a small part of the
great serration of its rocks; and yet it is just that fragment of their
broken outline which gives them their pathetic power, and historical
majesty. And this element among the wilds of our own country I found
wholly wanting. The Highland cottage is literally a heap of gray
stones, choked up, rather than roofed over, with black peat and
withered heather; the only approach to an effort at decoration consists
in the placing of the clods of protective peat obliquely on its roof,
so as to give a diagonal arrangement of lines, looking somewhat as if
the surface had been scored over by a gigantic claymore.

And, at least among the northern hills of Scotland, elements of more
ancient architectural interest are equally absent. The solitary peel-
house is hardly discernible by the windings of the stream; the roofless
aisle of the priory is lost among the enclosures of the village; and
the capital city of the Highlands, Inverness, placed where it might
ennoble one of the sweetest landscapes, and by the shore of one of the
loveliest estuaries in the world;--placed between the crests of the
Grampians and the flowing of the Moray Firth, as if it were a jewel
clasping the folds of the mountains to the blue zone of the sea,--is
only distinguishable from a distance by one architectural feature, and
exalts all the surrounding landscape by no other associations than
those which can be connected with its modern castellated gaol.

While these conditions of Scottish scenery affected me very painfully,
it being the first time in my life that I had been in any country
possessing no valuable monuments or examples of art, they also forced
me into the consideration of one or two difficult questions respecting
the effect of art on the human mind; and they forced these questions
upon me eminently for this reason, that while I was wandering
disconsolately among the moors of the Grampians, where there was no art
to be found, news of peculiar interest was every day arriving from a
country where there was a great deal of art, and art of a delicate
kind, to be found. Among the models set before you in this institution,
and in the others established throughout the kingdom for the teaching
of design, there are, I suppose, none in their kind more admirable than
the decorated works of India. They are, indeed, in all materials
capable of colour, wool, marble, or metal, almost inimitable in their
delicate application of divided hue, and fine arrangement of fantastic
line. Nor is this power of theirs exerted by the people rarely, or
without enjoyment; the love of subtle design seems universal in the
race, and is developed in every implement that they shape, and every
building that they raise; it attaches itself with the same intensity,
and with the same success, to the service of superstition, of pleasure
or of cruelty; and enriches alike, with one profusion on enchanted
iridescence, the dome of the pagoda, the fringe of the girdle and the
edge of the sword.

So then you have, in these two great populations, Indian and Highland--
in the races of the jungle and of the moor--two national capacities
distinctly and accurately opposed. On the one side you have a race
rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift
of it; on the other you have a people careless of art, and apparently
incapable of it, their utmost effort hitherto reaching no farther than
to the variation of the positions of the bars of colour in square
chequers. And we are thus urged naturally to enquire what is the effect
on the moral character, in each nation, of this vast difference in
their pursuits and apparent capacities? and whether those rude chequers
of the tartan, or the exquisitely fancied involutions of the Cashmere,
fold habitually over the noblest hearts? We have had our answer. Since
the race of man began its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever
been done by it so significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial
degradation, as the acts the Indian race in the year that has just
passed by. Cruelty as fierce may indeed have been wreaked, and
brutality as abominable been practised before, but never under like
circumstances; rage of prolonged war, and resentment of prolonged
oppression, have made men as cruel before now; and gradual decline into
barbarism, where no examples of decency or civilization existed around
them, has sunk, before now, isolated populations to the lowest level of
possible humanity. But cruelty stretched to its fiercest against the
gentle and unoffending, and corruption festered to its loathsomest in
the midst of the witnessing presence of a disciplined civilization,--
these we could not have known to be within the practicable compass of
human guilt, but for the acts of the Indian mutineer. And, as thus, on
the one hand, you have an extreme energy of baseness displayed by these
lovers of art; on the other,--as if to put the question into the
narrowest compass--you have had an extreme energy of virtue displayed
by the despisers of art. Among all the soldiers to whom you owe your
victories in the Crimea, and your avenging in the Indies, to none are
you bound by closer bonds of gratitude than to the men who have been
born and bred among those desolate Highland moors. And thus you have
the differences in capacity and circumstance between the two nations,
and the differences in result on the moral habits of two nations, put
into the most significant--the most palpable--the most brief
opposition. Out of the peat cottage come faith, courage, self-
sacrifice, purity, and piety, and whatever else is fruitful in the work
of Heaven; out of the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice,
idolatry, bestiality,--whatever else is fruitful in the work of Hell.

But the difficulty does not close here. From one instance, of however
great apparent force, it would be wholly unfair to gather any general
conclusion--wholly illogical to assert that because we had once found
love of art connected with moral baseness, the love of art must be the
general root of moral baseness; and equally unfair to assert that,
because we had once found neglect of art coincident with nobleness of
disposition, neglect of art must be always the source or sign of that
nobleness. But if we pass from the Indian peninsula into other
countries of the globe; and from our own recent experience, to the
records of history, we shall still find one great fact fronting us, in
stern universality--namely, the apparent connection of great success in
art with subsequent national degradation. You find, in the first place,
that the nations which possessed a refined art were always subdued by
those who possessed none: you find the Lydian subdued by the Mede; the
Athenian by the Spartan; the Greek by the Roman; the Roman by the Goth;
the Burgundian by the Switzer: but you find, beyond this--that even
where no attack by any external power has accelerated the catastrophe
of the state, the period in which any given people reach their highest
power in art is precisely that in which they appear to sign the warrant
of their own ruin; and that, from the moment in which a perfect statue
appears in Florence, a perfect picture in Venice, or a perfect fresco
in Rome, from that hour forward, probity, industry, and courage seem to
be exiled from their walls, and they perish in a sculpturesque
paralysis, or a many-coloured corruption.

But even this is not all. As art seems thus, in its delicate form, to
be one of the chief promoters of indolence and sensuality,--so, I need
hardly remind you, it hitherto has appeared only in energetic
manifestation when it was in the service of superstition. The four
greatest manifestations of human intellect which founded the four
principal kingdoms of art, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Italian,
were developed by the strong excitement of active superstition in the
worship of Osiris, Belus, Minerva, and the Queen of Heaven. Therefore,
to speak briefly, it may appear very difficult to show that art has
ever yet existed in a consistent and thoroughly energetic school,
unless it was engaged in the propagation of falsehood, or the
encouragement of vice.

And finally, while art has thus shown itself always active in the
service of luxury and idolatry, it has also been strongly directed to
the exaltation of cruelty. A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent
life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle, but
races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow
exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.

Does it not seem to you, then, on all these three counts, more than
questionable whether we are assembled here in Kensington Museum to any
good purpose? Might we not justly be looked upon with suspicion and
fear, rather than with sympathy, by the innocent and unartistical
public? Are we even sure of ourselves? Do we know what we are about?
Are we met here as honest people? or are we not rather so many
Catilines assembled to devise the hasty degradation of our country, or,
like a conclave of midnight witches, to summon and send forth, on new
and unexpected missions, the demons of luxury, cruelty, and
superstition?

I trust, upon the whole, that it is not so: I am sure that Mr. Redgrave
and Mr. Cole do not at all include results of this kind in their
conception of the ultimate objects of the institution which owes so
much to their strenuous and well-directed exertions. And I have put
this painful question before you, only that we may face it thoroughly,
and, as I hope, out-face it. If you will give it a little sincere
attention this evening, I trust we may find sufficiently good reasons
for our work, and proceed to it hereafter, as all good workmen should
do, with clear heads, and calm consciences.

To return, then, to the first point of difficulty, the relations
between art and mental disposition in India and Scotland. It is quite
true that the art of India is delicate and refined. But it has one
curious character distinguishing it from all other art of equal merit
in design--_it never represents a natural fact_. It either forms
its compositions out of meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of
line; or if it represents any living creature, it represents that
creature under some distorted and monstrous form. To all the facts and
forms of nature it wilfully and resolutely opposes itself; it will not
draw a man, but an eight-armed monster; it will not draw a flower, but
only a spiral or a zigzag.

It thus indicates that the people who practise it are cut off from all
possible sources of healthy knowledge or natural delight; that they
have wilfully sealed up and put aside the entire volume of the world,
and have got nothing to read, nothing to dwell upon, but that
imagination of the thoughts of their hearts, of which we are told that
"it is only evil continually." Over the whole spectacle of creation
they have thrown a veil in which there is no rent. For them no star
peeps through the blanket of the dark--for them neither their heaven
shines nor their mountains rise--for them the flowers do not blossom--
for them the creatures of field and forest do not live. They lie bound
in the dungeon of their own corruption, encompassed only by doleful
phantoms, or by spectral vacancy.

Need I remind you what an exact reverse of this condition of mind, as
respects the observance of nature, is presented by the people whom we
have just been led to contemplate in contrast with the Indian race? You
will find upon reflection, that all the highest points of the Scottish
character are connected with impressions derived straight from the
natural scenery of their country. No nation has ever before shown, in
the general tone of its language--in the general current of its
literature--so constant a habit of hallowing its passions and
confirming its principles by direct association with the charm, or
power, of nature. The writings of Scott and Burns--and yet more, of the
far greater poets than Burns who gave Scotland her traditional
ballads,--furnish you in every stanza--almost in every line--with
examples of this association of natural scenery with the passions;
[Footnote: The great poets of Scotland, like the great poets of all
other countries, never write dissolutely, either in matter or method;
but with stern and measured meaning in every syllable. Here's a bit of
first-rate work for example:

"Tweed said to Till,
'What gars ye rin sae still?'
Till said to Tweed,
'Though ye rin wi' speed,
And I rin slaw,
Whar ye droon ae man,
I droon twa.'"]

but an instance of its farther connection with moral principle struck
me forcibly just at the time when I was most lamenting the absence of
art among the people. In one of the loneliest districts of Scotland,
where the peat cottages are darkest, just at the western foot of that
great mass of the Grampians which encircles the sources of the Spey and
the Dee, the main road which traverses the chain winds round the foot
of a broken rock called Crag, or Craig Ellachie. There is nothing
remarkable in either its height or form; it is darkened with a few
scattered pines, and touched along its summit with a flush of heather;
but it constitutes a kind of headland, or leading promontory, in the
group of hills to which it belongs--a sort of initial letter of the
mountains; and thus stands in the mind of the inhabitants of the
district, the Clan Grant, for a type of their country, and of the
influence of that country upon themselves. Their sense of this is
beautifully indicated in the war-cry of the clan, "Stand fast, Craig
Ellachie." You may think long over those few words without exhausting
the deep wells of feeling and thought contained in them--the love of
the native land, the assurance of their faithfulness to it; the subdued
and gentle assertion of indomitable courage--I _may_ need to be
told to stand, but, if I do, Craig Ellachie does. You could not but
have felt, had you passed beneath it at the time when so many of
England's dearest children were being defended by the strength of heart
of men born at its foot, how often among the delicate Indian palaces,
whose marble was pallid with horror, and whose vermilion was darkened
with blood, the remembrance of its rough grey rocks and purple heaths
must have risen before the sight of the Highland soldier; how often the
hailing of the shot and the shriek of battle would pass away from his
hearing, and leave only the whisper of the old pine branches--"Stand
fast, Craig Ellachie!"

You have, in these two nations, seen in direct opposition the effects
on moral sentiment of art without nature, and of nature without art.
And you see enough to justify you in suspecting--while, if you choose
to investigate the subject more deeply and with other examples, you
will find enough to justify you in _concluding_--that art,
followed as such, and for its own sake, irrespective of the
interpretation of nature by it, is destructive of whatever is best and
noblest in humanity; but that nature, however simply observed, or
imperfectly known, is, in the degree of the affection felt for it,
protective and helpful to all that is noblest in humanity.

You might then conclude farther, that art, so far as it was devoted to
the record or the interpretation of nature, would be helpful and
ennobling also.

And you would conclude this with perfect truth. Let me repeat the
assertion distinctly and solemnly, as the first that I am permitted to
make in this building, devoted in a way so new and so admirable to the
service of the art-students of England--Wherever art is practised for
its own sake, and the delight of the workman is in what he _does_
and _produces_, instead of what he _interprets_ or _exhibits_,
--there art has an influence of the most fatal kind on brain and heart,
and it issues, if long so pursued, in the _destruction both of intellectual
power_ and _moral principal_; whereas art, devoted humbly and self-
forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe,
is always helpful and beneficent to mankind, full of comfort, strength,
and salvation.

Now, when you were once well assured of this, you might logically infer
another thing, namely, that when Art was occupied in the function in
which she was serviceable, she would herself be strengthened by the
service, and when she was doing what Providence without doubt intended
her to do, she would gain in vitality and dignity just as she advanced
in usefulness. On the other hand, you might gather, that when her
agency was distorted to the deception or degradation of mankind, she
would herself be equally misled and degraded--that she would be checked
in advance, or precipitated in decline.

And this is the truth also; and holding this clue you will easily and
justly interpret the phenomena of history. So long as Art is steady in
the contemplation and exhibition of natural facts, so long she herself
lives and grows; and in her own life and growth partly implies, partly
secures, that of the nation in the midst of which she is practised. But
a time has always hitherto come, in which, having thus reached a
singular perfection, she begins to contemplate that perfection, and to
imitate it, and deduce rules and forms from it; and thus to forget her
duty and ministry as the interpreter and discoverer of Truth. And in
the very instant when this diversion of her purpose and forgetfulness
of her function take place--forgetfulness generally coincident with her
apparent perfection--in that instant, I say, begins her actual
catastrophe; and by her own fall--so far as she has influence--she
accelerates the ruin of the nation by which she is practised.

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