Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

Permit me to say, with reference to the proposed restoration of the church, that no modern architect, no mason either, can, or would if they could, “copy” those traceries. They will assuredly put up with geometrical models in their place, which will be no more like the old traceries than a Kensington paper pattern is like a living flower. Whatever else is added or removed, those traceries should be replaced as they are, and left in reverence until they moulder away. If they are already too much decayed to hold the glass safely (which I do not believe), any framework which may be necessary can be arranged to hold the casements within them, leaving their bars entirely disengaged, and merely kept from falling by iron supports. But if these are to be “copied,” why in the world cannot the congregation pay for a new and original church, to display the genius and wealth of the nineteenth century somewhere else, and leave the dear old ruin to grow gray by Severn side in peace?

I am, Sir, your faithful servant, J. RUSKIN.

HANG _CIRCULAR[147] RESPECTING MEMORIAL STUDIES OF ST. MARK’S, VENICE, NOW IN PROGRESS UNDER MR. RUSKIN’S DIRECTION._

_This circular will be given to visitors to the Old Water-color Society’s Exhibition, Pall Mall East, or on application to the Fine Art Society,_ 148 _New Bond Street._

My friends have expressed much surprise at my absence from the public meetings called in defence of St. Mark’s. They cannot, however, be too clearly certified that I am now entirely unable to take part in exciting business, or even, without grave danger, to allow my mind to dwell on the subjects which, having once been dearest to it, are now the sources of acutest pain. The illness which all but killed me two years ago[148] was not brought on by overwork, but by grief at the course of public affairs in England, and of affairs, public and private alike, in Venice; the distress of many an old and deeply regarded friend there among the humbler classes of the city being as necessary a consequence of the modern system of centralization, as the destruction of her ancient civil and religious buildings.

How far forces of this national momentum may be arrested by protest, or mollified by petition, I know not; what in either kind I have felt myself able to do has been done two years since, in conjunction with one of the few remaining representatives of the old Venetian noblesse.[149] All that now remains for me is to use what time may be yet granted for such record as hand and heart can make of the most precious building in Europe, standing yet in the eyes of men and the sunshine of heaven.

The drawing of the first two arches of the west front, now under threat of restoration, which, as an honorary member of the Old Water-color Society, I have the privilege of exhibiting in its rooms this year, shows with sufficient accuracy the actual state of the building, and the peculiar qualities of its architecture.[150] The principles of that architecture are analyzed at length in the second volume of the “Stones of Venice,” and the whole façade described there with the best care I could, in hope of directing the attention of English architects to the forms of Greek sculpture which enrich it.[151] The words have been occasionally read for the sound of them; and perhaps, when the building is destroyed, may be some day, with amazement, perceived to have been true.

In the mean time, the drawing just referred to, every touch of it made from the building, and left as the color dried in the spring mornings of 1877, will make clear some of the points chiefly insisted on in the “Stones of Venice,” and which are of yet more importance now.[152] Of these, the first and main ones are the exquisite delicacy of the work and perfection of its preservation to this time. It seems to me that the English visitor never realizes thoroughly what it is that he looks at in the St. Mark’s porches: its glittering confusion in a style unexampled, its bright colors, its mingled marbles, produce on him no real impression of age, and its diminutive size scarcely any of grandeur. It looks to him almost like a stage scene, got up solidly for some sudden festa. No mere guide-book’s passing assertion of date--this century or the other--can in the least make him even conceive, and far less feel, that he is actually standing before the very shafts and stones that were set on their foundations here while Harold the Saxon stood by the grave of the Confessor under the fresh-raised vaults of the first Norman Westminster Abbey, of which now a single arch only remains standing. He cannot, by any effort, imagine that those exquisite and lace-like sculptures of twined acanthus--every leaf-edge as sharp and fine as if they were green weeds fresh springing in the dew, by the Pan-droseion[153]--were, indeed, cut and finished to their perfect grace while the Norman axes were hewing out rough zigzags and dentils round the aisles of Durham and Lindisfarne. Or nearer, in what is left of our own Canterbury--it is but an hour’s journey in pleasant Kent--you may compare, almost as if you looked from one to the other, the grim grotesque of the block capitals in the crypt with the foliage of these flexile ones, and with their marble doves--scarcely distinguishable from the living birds that nestle between them. Or, going down two centuries (for the fillings of the portico arches were not completed till after 1204), what thirteenth-century work among our gray limestone walls can be thought of as wrought in the same hour with that wreath of intertwined white marble, relieved by gold, of which the tenderest and sharpest lines of the pencil cannot finely enough express the surfaces and undulations? For indeed, without and within, St. Mark’s is not, in the real nature of it, a piece of architecture, but a jewelled casket and painted reliquary, chief of the treasures in what were once the world’s treasuries of sacred things, the kingdoms of Christendom.

A jewelled casket, every jewel of which was itself sacred. Not a slab of it, nor a shaft, but has been brought from the churches descendants of the great Seven of Asia, or from the Christian-Greek of Corinth, Crete, and Thrace, or the Christian-Israelite in Palestine--the central archivolt copied from that of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the opposing lions or phœnixes of its sculptures from the treasury of Atreus and the citadel of Tyre.

Thus, beyond all measure of value as a treasury of art, it is also, beyond all other volumes, venerable as a codex of religion. Just as the white foliage and birds on their golden ground are descendants, in direct line, from the ivory and gold of Phidias, so the Greek pictures and inscriptions, whether in mosaic or sculpture, throughout the building, record the unbroken unity of spiritual influence from the Father of light--or the races whose own poets had said “We also are his offspring”--down to the day when all their gods, not slain, but changed into new creatures, became the types to them of the mightier Christian spirits; and Perseus became St. George, and Mars St. Michael, and Athena the Madonna, and Zeus their revealed Father in Heaven.

In all the history of human mind, there is nothing so wonderful, nothing so eventful, as this spiritual change. So inextricably is it interwoven with the most divine, the most distant threads of human thought and effort, that while none of the thoughts of St. Paul or the visions of St. John, can be understood without our understanding first the imagery familiar to the Pagan worship of the Greeks; on the other hand, no understanding of the real purport of Greek religion can be securely reached without watching the translation of its myths into the message of Christianity.

Both by the natural temper of my mind, and by the labor of forty years given to this subject in its practical issues on the present state[154] of Christendom, I have become, in some measure, able both to show and to interpret these most precious sculptures; and my health has been so far given back to me that if I am at this moment aided, it will, so far as I can judge, be easily possible for me to complete the work so long in preparation. There will yet, I doubt not, be time to obtain perfect record of all that is to be destroyed. I have entirely honest and able draughtsmen at my command; my own resignation[155] of my Oxford Professorship has given me leisure; and all that I want from the antiquarian sympathy of England is so much instant help as may permit me, while yet in available vigor of body and mind, to get the records made under my own overseership, and registered for sufficient and true. The casts and drawings which I mean to have made will be preserved in a consistent series in my Museum at Sheffield, where I have freehold ground enough to build a perfectly lighted gallery for their reception. I have used the words “I want,” as if praying this thing for myself. It is not so. If only some other person could and would undertake all this, Heaven knows how gladly I would leave the task to him. But there is no one else at present able to do it: if not now by me, it can never be done more.--And so I leave it to the reader’s grace.

J. RUSKIN.

All subscriptions to be sent to Mr. G. Allen, Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent.

POSTSCRIPT.[156]

By the kindness of the Society of Painters in Water-colors I am permitted this year, in view of the crisis of the fate of the façade of St. Mark’s, to place in the exhibition-room of the Society ten photographs, illustrative of its past and present state. I have already made use of them, both in my lectures at Oxford and in the parts of _Fors Clavigera_ intended for Art-teaching at my Sheffield Museum; and all but the eighth are obtainable from my assistant, Mr. Ward (2 Church Terrace, Richmond), who is my general agent for photographs, either taken under my direction (as here, Nos. 4, 9, and 10), or specially chosen by me for purposes of Art Education. The series of views here shown are all perfectly taken, with great clearness, from the most important points, and give, consecutively, complete evidence respecting the façade.

They are arranged in the following order:

1. THE CENTRAL PORCH. }
2. THE TWO NORTHERN PORCHES. } _Arranged in one_
3. THE TWO SOUTHERN PORCHES. } _frame._
4. THE NORTHERN PORTICO.
5. THE SOUTHERN PORTICO. _Before restoration._
6. THE WEST FRONT, IN PERSPECTIVE. _Seen from the North._
7. THE WEST FRONT, IN PERSPECTIVE. _Seen from the South._
8. THE SOUTH SIDE. _Before restoration._
9. DETAIL OF CENTRAL ARCHIVOLT.
10. THE CROSS OF THE MERCHANTS OF VENICE.

This last photograph is not of St. Mark’s but is of the inscription which I discovered, in 1877, on the Church of St. James of the Rialto. It is of the 9th or 10th century (according to the best antiquarians of Venice), and is given in this series, first, to confirm the closing paragraph in my notes on the Prout drawings in Bond Street;[157] and secondly to show the perfect preservation even of the hair-strokes in letters carved in the Istrian marble used at Venice a thousand years ago. The inscription on the cross is--

“Sit crux vera salus huic tua Christe loco.”
(Be Thy Cross, O Christ, the true safety of this place.)

And on the band beneath--

“Hoc circa templum sit jus mercantibus æquum,
Pondera nec vergant nec sit conventio prava.”
(Around this temple let the merchants’ law be just,
Their weights true, and their contracts fair.)

The bearing of this inscription on the relations of Antonio to Shylock may perhaps not be perceived by a public which now--consistently and naturally enough, but ominously--considers Shylock a victim to the support of the principles of legitimate trade, and Antonio a “speculator and sentimentalist.” From the series of photographs of St. Mark’s itself, I cannot but think even the least attentive observer must receive one strong impression--that of the singular preservation of the minutest details in its sculpture. Observe, this is a quite separate question from the _stability_ of the fabric. In our northern cathedrals the stone, for the most part, moulders away; and the restorer usually replaces it by fresh sculpture, on the faces of walls of which the mass is perfectly secure. Here, at St. Mark’s, on the contrary, the only possible pretence for restoration has been, and is, the alleged insecurity of the masses of inner wall--the external sculptures remaining in faultless perfection, so far as unaffected by direct human violence. Both the Greek and Istrian marbles used at Venice are absolutely defiant of hypæthral influences, and the edges of their delicatest sculpture remain to this day more sharp than if they had been cut in steel--for then they would have rusted away. It is especially, for example, of this quality that I have painted the ornament of the St. Jean d’Acre pillars, No. 107, which the reader may at once compare with the daguerreotype (No. 108) beside it, which are exhibited, with the Prout and Hunt drawings, at the Fine Art Society’s rooms.[158] These pillars are known to be not later than the sixth century, yet wherever external violence has spared their decoration it is sharp as a fresh-growing thistle. Throughout the whole façade of St. Mark’s, the capitals have only here and there by casualty lost so much as a volute or an acanthus leaf, and whatever remains is perfect as on the day it was set in its place, mellowed and subdued only in color by time, but white still, clearly white; and gray, still softly gray; its porphyry purple as an Orleans plum, and the serpentine as green as a greengage. Note also, that in this throughout perfect decorated surface there is not a loose joint. The appearances of dislocation, which here and there look like yielding of masonry, are merely carelessness in the replacing or resetting of the marble armor at the different times when the front has been retouched--in several cases quite wilful freaks of arrangement. The slope of the porphyry shaft, for instance, on the angle at the left of my drawing, looks like dilapidation. Were it really so, the building would be a heap of ruins in twenty-four hours. These porches sustain no weight above--their pillars carry merely an open gallery; and the inclination of the red marble pilasters at the angle is not yielding at all, but an originally capricious adjustment of the marble armor. It will be seen that the investing marbles between the arch and pilaster are cut to the intended inclination, which brings the latter nearly into contact with the upper archivolt; the appearance of actual contact being caused by the projection of the dripstone. There are, indeed, one or two leaning towers in Venice whose foundations have partly yielded; but if _anything_ were in danger on St. Mark’s Place, it would be the campanile--three hundred feet high--and not the little shafts and galleries within reach--too easy reach--of the gaslighter’s ladder. And the only dilapidations I have myself seen on this porch, since I first drew it forty-six years ago, have been, first, those caused by the insertion of the lamps themselves, and then the breaking away of the marble net work of the main capital by the habitual clattering of the said gaslighter’s ladder against it. A piece of it which I saw so broken off, and made an oration over to the passers-by in no less broken Italian, is in my mineral cabinet at Brantwood.

Before leaving this subject of the inclined angle, let me note--usefully, though not to my present purpose--that the entire beauty of St. Mark’s campanile depends on this structure, there definitely seen to be one of real safety. This grace and apparent strength of the whole mass would be destroyed if the sides of it were made vertical. In Gothic towers, the same effect is obtained by the retiring of the angle buttresses, without actual inclination of any but the coping lines.

In the Photograph No. 5 the slope of the angles in the correspondent portico, as it stood before restoration, is easily visible and measurable, the difference being, even on so small a scale, full the twentieth of an inch between the breadth at base and top, at the angles, while the lines bearing the inner arch are perfectly vertical.

There was, indeed, as will be seen at a glance, some displacement of the pillars dividing the great window above, immediately to the right of the portico. But these pillars were exactly the part of the south front which carried no weight. The arch above them is burdened only by its own fringes of sculpture; and the pillars carried only the bit of decorated panelling, which is now bent--not outwards, as it would have been by pressure, but inwards. The arch has not subsided; it was always of the same height as the one to the right of it (the Byzantine builders throwing their arches always in whatever lines they chose); nor is there a single crack or displacement in the sculpture of the investing fringe.

In No. 3 (to the right hand in the frame) there is dilapidation and danger enough certainly; but that is wholly caused by the savage and brutal carelessness with which the restored parts are joined to the old. The photograph bears deadly and perpetual witness against the system of “making work,” too well known now among English as well as Italian operatives; but it bears witness, as deadly, against the alleged accuracy of the restoration itself. The ancient dentils are bold, broad, and cut with the free hand, as all good Greek work is; the new ones, little more than half their size, are cut with the servile and horrible rigidity of the modern mechanic.

This quality is what M. Meduna, in the passage quoted from his defence of himself[159] in the _Standard_, has at once the dulness and the audacity actually to boast of as “_plus exacte_”!

Imagine a Kensington student set to copy a picture by Velasquez, and substituting a Nottingham lace pattern, traced with absolute exactness, for the painter’s sparkle and flow and flame, and boasting of his improvements as “_plus exacte_”! That is precisely what the Italian restorer does for _his_ original; but, alas! he has the inestimable privilege also of destroying the original as he works, and putting his student’s caricature in its place! Nor are any words bitter or contemptuous enough to describe the bestial stupidities which have thus already replaced the floor of the church, in my early days the loveliest in Italy, and the most sacred.

In the Photograph No. 7 there is, and there only, _one_ piece of real dilapidation--the nodding pinnacle propped on the right. Those pinnacles stand over the roof gutters, and their bracket supports are, of course, liable to displacement, if the gutters get choked by frost or otherwise neglected. The pinnacle is not ten feet high, and can be replaced and secured as easily as the cowl on a chimney-pot. The timbers underneath were left there merely to give the wished-for appearance of repairs going on. They defaced the church front through the whole winter of 1876. I copied the bills stuck on them one Sunday, and they are printed in the 78th number of _Fors Clavigera_, the first being the announcement of the Reunited agencies for information on all matters of commercial enterprise and speculation, and the last the announcement of the loss of a cinnamon-colored little bitch, with rather long ears (_coll’ orecchie piùtosto lunghe_). I waited through the winter to see how much the Venetians really cared for the look of their church; but lodged a formal remonstrance in March with one of the more reasonable civic authorities, who presently had them removed. The remonstrance ought, of course, to have come from the clergy; but they contented themselves with cutting flower-wreaths on paper to hang over the central door at Christmas-time. For the rest, the pretence of rottenness in the walls is really too gross to be answered. There are brick buildings in Italy by tens of thousands, Roman, Lombardic, Gothic, on all scales and in all exposures. Which of them has rotted or fallen, but by violence? Shall the tower of Garisenda stand, and the Campanile of Verona, and the tower of St. Mark’s, and, forsooth, this little fifty feet of unweighted wall be rotten and dangerous?

Much more I could say, and show; but the certainty of the ruin of poor Bedlamite Venice is in her own evil will, and not to be averted by any human help or pleading. Her _Sabba delle streghe_ has truly come; and in her own words (see _Fors_, letter 77th): “Finalmente la Piazza di S. Marco sarà invasa e completamente illuminata dalle Fiamme di Belzebù. Perchè il _Sabba_ possa riuscire più completo, si raccomanda a tutti gli spettatori di fischiare durante le fiamme come anime dannate.”

Meantime, in what Saturday pause may be before this Witches’ Sabbath, if I have, indeed, any English friends, let them now help me, and my fellow-workers, to get such casts, and colorings, and measurings, as may be of use in time to come. I am not used to the begging tone, and will not say more than that what is given me will go in mere daily bread to the workers, and that next year, if I live, there shall be some exposition of what we have got done, with the best account I can render of its parts and pieces. Fragmentary enough they must be,--poor fallen plumes of the winged lion’s wings,--yet I think I can plume a true shaft or two with them yet.

Some copies of the second edition of this circular had printed at
the top of its last and otherwise blank page the words, “_Present
State of Subscription Lists:--_,” a printer’s error, mistaken by
some readers for a piece of dry humor.

Subscriptions were collected by Mr. G. Allen, as above intimated,
and also by Mr. F. W. Pullen, secretary to the Ruskin Society of
Manchester, under the authority of the following letter, which was
printed and distributed by him: “_November_ 29, 1879.--DEAR MR.
PULLEN: I am very glad to have your most satisfactory letter, and
as gladly give you authority to receive subscriptions for drawings
and sculptures of St. Mark’s. Mr. Bunney’s large painting of the
whole west façade, ordered by me a year and a half ago, and in
steady progress ever since, is to be completed this spring. It was
a £500 commission for the Guild, but I don’t want to have to pay it
with Guild capital. I have the power of getting casts, also, in
places where nobody else can, and have now energy enough to give
directions, but can no more pay for them out of my own pocket. Ever
gratefully yours, J. R. As a formal authority, this had better have
my full signature--JOHN RUSKIN.” In a further letter to Manchester
on the subject, Mr. Ruskin wrote as follows: “It is wholly
impossible for me at present to take any part in the defence--at
last, though far too late--undertaken by the true artists and
scholars of England--of the most precious Christian building in
Europe; ... nor is there any occasion that I should, if only those
who care for me will refer to what I have already written, and will
accept from me the full ratification of all that was said by the
various speakers, all without exception men of the most accurate
judgment and true feeling, at the meeting held in Oxford. All that
I think it necessary for you to lay, directly from myself, before
the meeting you are about to hold, is the explicit statement of two
facts of which I am more distinctly cognizant from my long
residences in Italy at different periods, and in Venice during
these last years, than any other person can be--namely, the
Infidel--(malignantly and scornfully Infidel and anti-religionist)
aim of Italian ‘restoration’--and the totality of the destruction
it involves, of whatever it touches.” So again, in a second and
despairing letter, he wrote: “You cannot be too strongly assured of
the total destruction involved, in the restoration of St.
Mark’s.... Then the plague of it all is, What can you do? Nothing
would be effectual, but the appointment of a Procurator of St.
Mark’s, with an enormous salary, dependent on the Church’s being
let alone. What you can do by a meeting at Manchester, I have no
notion. The only really practical thing that I can think of would
be sending me lots of money to spend in getting all the drawings I
can of the old thing before it goes. I don’t believe we can save it
by any protests.” See the _Birmingham Daily Mail_, Nov. 27, 1879.
The reader is also referred to “Fors Clavigera,” New Series, Letter
the Fourth, pp. 125-6.

The meeting in Oxford alluded to above was held in the Sheldonian
Theatre on November 15, 1879. Amongst the principal speakers were
the Dean of Christ Church (in the chair), Dr. Acland, the Professor
of Fine Art (Mr. W. B. Richmond), Mr. Street, Mr. William Morris,
and Mr. Burne Jones.

LETTERS ON SCIENCE.

I.

GEOLOGICAL.

THE CONFORMATION OF THE ALPS. 1864
CONCERNING GLACIERS. 1864.
ENGLISH _versus_ ALPINE GEOLOGY. 1864.
CONCERNING HYDROSTATICS. 1864.
JAMES DAVID FORBES: HIS REAL GREATNESS. 1874.

II.

MISCELLANEOUS.

ON REFLECTIONS IN WATER. 1844.
ON THE REFLECTION OF RAINBOWS. 1861.
A LANDSLIP NEAR GIAGNANO. 1841.
ON THE GENTIAN. 1857.
ON THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. (Undated.)

I.

GEOLOGICAL.

[From “The Reader,” November 12, 1864.]

_THE CONFORMATION OF THE ALPS._

DENMARK HILL, 10_th November_, 1864.

My attention has but now been directed to the letters in your October numbers on the subject of the forms of the Alps.[160] I have, perhaps, some claim to be heard on this question, having spent, out of a somewhat busy life, eleven summers and two winters (the winter work being especially useful, owing to the definition of inaccessible ledges of strata by new-fallen snow) in researches among the Alps, directed solely to the questions of their external form and its mechanical causes; while I left to other geologists the more disputable and difficult problems of relative ages of beds.

I say “more disputable” because, however complex the phases of mechanical action, its general nature admits, among the Alps, of no question. The forms of the Alps are quite _visibly_ owing to the action (how gradual or prolonged cannot yet be determined) of elevatory, contractile, and expansive forces, followed by that of currents of water at various temperatures, and of prolonged disintegration--ice having had small share in modifying even the higher ridges, and none in causing or forming the valleys.

The reason of the extreme difficulty in tracing the combination of these several operative causes in any given instance, is that the effective and destructive drainage by no means follows the leading fissures, but tells fearfully on the softer rocks, sweeping away inconceivable volumes of these, while fissures or faults in the harder rocks of quite primal structural importance may be little deepened or widened, often even unindicated, by subsequent aqueous action. I have, however, described at some length the commonest structural and sculptural phenomena in the fourth volume of “Modern Painters,” and I gave a general sketch of the subject last year in my lecture[161] at the Royal Institution (fully reported in the _Journal de Genève_ of 2d September, 1863), but I have not yet thrown together the mass of material in my possession, because our leading chemists are only now on the point of obtaining some data for the analysis of the most important of all forces--that of the consolidation and crystallization of the metamorphic rocks, causing them to alter their bulk and exercise irresistible and irregular pressures on neighboring or incumbent beds.

But, even on existing data, the idea of the excavation of valleys by ice has become one of quite ludicrous untenableness. At this moment, the principal glacier in Chamouni pours itself down a slope of twenty degrees or more over a rock two thousand feet in vertical height; and just at the bottom of this ice-cataract, where a water-cataract of equal power would have excavated an almost fathomless pool, the ice simply accumulates a heap of stones, on the top of which it rests.

The lakes of any hill country lie in what are the isolated lowest (as its summits are the isolated highest) portions of its broken surface, and ice no more engraves the one than it builds the other. But how these hollows were indeed first dug, we know as yet no more than how the Atlantic was dug; and the hasty expression by geologists of their fancies in such matters cannot be too much deprecated, because it deprives their science of the respect really due to it in the minds of a large portion of the public, who know, and _can_ know, nothing of its established principles, while they can easily detect its speculative vanity. There is plenty of work for us all to do, without losing time in speculation; and when we have got good sections across the entire chain of the Alps, at intervals of twenty miles apart, from Nice to Innspruch, and exhaustive maps and sections of the lake-basins of Lucerne, Annecy, Como, and Garda, we shall have won the leisure, and may assume the right, to try our wits on the formative question.

J. RUSKIN.[162]

[From “The Reader,” November 26, 1864.]

_CONCERNING GLACIERS._

DENMARK HILL, _November_ 21.

I am obliged to your Scottish correspondent for the courtesy with which he expresses himself towards me; and, as his letter refers to several points still (to my no little surprise) in dispute among geologists, you will perhaps allow me to occupy, in reply, somewhat more of your valuable space than I had intended to ask for.

I say “to my no little surprise,” because the great principles of glacial action have been so clearly stated by their discoverer, Forbes, and its minor phenomena (though in an envious temper, which, by its bitterness, as a pillar of salt, has become the sorrowful monument of the discovery it denies)[163] so carefully described by Agassiz, that I never thought there would be occasion for much talk on the subject henceforward. As much as seems now necessary to be said I will say as briefly as I can.

What a river carries fast at the bottom of it, a glacier carries slowly at the top of it. This is the main distinction between their agencies. A piece of rock which, falling into a strong torrent, would be perhaps swept down half a mile in twenty minutes, delivering blows on the rocks at the bottom audible like distant heavy cannon,[164] and at last dashed into fragments, which in a little while will be rounded pebbles (having done enough damage to everything it has touched in its course)--this same rock, I say, falling on a glacier, lies on the top of it, and is thereon carried down, if at fullest speed, at the rate of three yards in a week, doing usually damage to nothing at all. That is the primal difference between the work of water and ice; these further differences, however, follow from this first one.

Though a glacier never rolls its moraine into pebbles, as a torrent does its shingle, it torments and teases the said morain very sufficiently, and without intermission. It is always moving it on, and melting from under it, and one stone is always toppling, or tilting, or sliding over another, and one company of stones crashing over another, with staggering shift of heap behind. Now, leaving out of all account the pulverulent effect of original precipitation to glacier level from two or three thousand feet above, let the reader imagine a mass of sharp granite road-metal and paving-stones, mixed up with boulders of any size he can think of, and with wreck of softer rocks (micaceous schists in quantities, usually), the whole, say, half a quarter of a mile wide, and of variable thickness, from mere skin-deep mock-moraine on mounds of unsuspected ice--treacherous, shadow-begotten--to a railroad embankment, _passenger_-embankment, one eternal collapse of unconditional ruin, rotten to its heart with frost and thaw (in regions on the edge of each), and withering sun and waste of oozing ice; fancy all this heaved and shovelled, slowly, by a gang of a thousand Irish laborers, twenty miles downhill. You will conjecture there may be some dust developed on the way?--some at the hill bottom? Yet thus you will have but a dim idea of the daily and final results of the movements of glacier moraines--beautiful result in granite and slate dust, delivered by the torrent at last in banks of black and white slime, recovering itself, far away, into fruitful fields, and level floor for human life.

Now all this is utterly independent of any action whatsoever by the ice on its sustaining rocks. It _has_ an action on these indeed; but of this limited nature as compared with that of water. A stone at the bottom of a stream, or deep-sea current, necessarily and always presses on the bottom with the weight of the column of water above it--plus the excess of its own weight above that of a bulk of water equal to its own; but a stone under a glacier may be hitched or suspended in the ice itself for long spaces, not touching bottom at all. When dropped at last, the weight of ice may not come upon it for years, for that weight is only carried on certain spaces of the rock bed; and in those very spaces the utmost a stone can do is to press on the bottom with the force necessary to drive the given stone into ice of a given density (usually porous); and, with this maximum pressure, to move at the maximum rate of about a third of an inch in a quarter of an hour! Try to saw a piece of marble through (with edge of iron, not of soppy ice, for saw, and with sharp flint sand for felspar slime), and move your saw at the rate of an inch in three-quarters of an hour, and see what lively and progressive work you will make of it!

I say “a piece of marble;” but your permanent glacier-bottom is rarely so soft--for a glacier, though it acts slowly by friction, can act vigorously by dead-weight on a soft rock, and (with fall previously provided for it) can clear masses of that out of the way, to some purpose. There is a notable instance of this in the rock of which your correspondent speaks, under the Glacier des Bois. His idea, that the glacier is deep above and thins out below, is a curious instance of the misconception of glacier nature, from which all that Forbes has done cannot yet quite clear the public mind, nor even the geological mind. A glacier never, in a large sense, thins out at all as it expires. It flows level everywhere for its own part, and never slopes but down a slope, as a rapid in water. Pour out a pot of the thickest old white candied, but still fluent, honey you can buy, over a heap of stones, arranged as you like, to imitate rocks.[165] Whatever the honey does on a small scale, the glacier does on a large; and you may thus steady the glacier phenomena of current--though, of course, not those of structure or fissure--at your ease. But note this specially: When the honey is at last at rest, in whatever form it has taken, you will see it terminates in tongues with low rounded edges. The possible height of these edges, in any fluid, varies as its viscosity; it is some quarter of an inch or so in water on dry ground; the most fluent ice wall stand at about a hundred feet. Next, from this outer edge of the stagnant honey, delicately skim or thin off a little at the top, and see what it will do. It will not stand in an inclined plane, but fill itself up again to a level from behind. Glacier ice does exactly the same thing; and this filling in from behind is done so subtly and delicately, that, every winter, the whole glacier surface rises to replace the summer’s waste, not with progressive wave, as “twice a day the Severn fills;” but with silent, level insurrection, as of ocean-tide, the gray sea-crystal passes by. And all the structural phenomena of the ice are modified by this mysterious action.

Your correspondent is also not aware that the Glacier des Bois gives a very practical and outspoken proof of its shallowness opposite the Montanvert. Very often its torrent, under wilful touch of Lucina-sceptre, leaps to the light at the top of the rocks instead of their base.[166] That fiery Arveron, sometimes, hearing from reconnoitring streamlets of a nearer way down to the valley than the rounded ice-curve under the Chapeau, fairly takes bit in teeth, and flings itself out over the brow of the rocks, and down a ravine in them, in the wildest cataract of white thunder-clouds (endless in thunder, and with quiet fragments of rainbow for lightning), that I have ever blinded myself in the skirts of.

These bare rocks, over which the main river sometimes falls (and outlying streamlets always) are of firm-grained, massively rounded gneiss. Above them, I have no doubt, once extended the upper covering of fibrous and amianthoidal schist, which forms the greater part of the south-eastern flank of the valley of Chamouni. The schistose gneiss is continuous in direction of bed, with the harder gneiss below. But the outer portion is soft, the inner hard, and more granitic. This outer portion the descending glaciers have always stripped right off down to the hard gneiss below, and in places, as immediately above the Montanvert (and elsewhere at the brows of the valley), the beds of schistose gneiss are crushed and bent outwards in a mass (I believe) by the weight of the old glacier, for some fifty feet within their surface. This looks like work; and work of this sort, when it had to be done, the glaciers were well up to, bearing down such soft masses as a strong man bends a poplar sapling; but by steady push far more than by friction. You may bend or break your sapling with bare hands, but try to rub its bark off with your bare hands!

When once the ice, _with strength always dependent on pre-existent precipice_, has cleared such obstacles out of its way, and made its bed to its liking, there is an end to its manifest and effectively sculptural power. I do not believe the Glacier des Bois has done more against some of the granite surfaces beneath it, for these four thousand years, than the drifts of desert sand have done on Sinai. Be that as it may, its power of excavation on a level is proved, as I showed in my last letter, to be zero. Your correspondent thinks the glacier power vanishes towards the extremity; but as long as the ice exists, it has the same progressive energy, and, indeed, sometimes, with the quite terminal nose of it, will plough a piece of ground scientifically enough; but it never digs a hole: the stream always comes from under it full speed downhill. Now, whatever the dimensions of a glacier, if it dug a big hole, like the Lake of Geneva, when it was big, it would dig a little hole when it was little--(not that this is _always_ safe logic, for a little stone will dig in a glacier, and a large one build; but it is safe within general limits)--which it never does, nor can, but subsides gladly into any hole prepared for it in a quite placid manner, for all its fierce looks.

I find it difficult to stop, for your correspondent, little as he thinks it, has put me on my own ground. I was _forced_ to write upon Art by an accident (the public abuse of Turner) when I was two-and-twenty; but I had written a “Mineralogical Dictionary” as far as C, and invented a shorthand symbolism for crystalline forms, before I was fourteen: and have been at stony work ever since, as I could find time, silently, not caring to speak much till the chemists had given me more help.[167] For, indeed, I strive, as far as may be, not to speak of anything till I know it; and in that matter of Political Economy also (though forced in like manner to write of that by unendurable circumfluent fallacy), I know my ground; and if your present correspondent, or any other, will meet me fairly, I will give them uttermost satisfaction upon any point they doubt. There is free challenge: and in the knight of Snowdoun’s vows (looking first carefully to see that the rock be not a glacier boulder),

“This rock shall fly
From its firm base, as soon as I.”

J. RUSKIN.[168]

[From “The Reader,” December 3, 1864.]

_ENGLISH_ VERSUS _ALPINE GEOLOGY._

DENMARK HILL, 29_th Nov._

I scarcely know what reply to make, or whether it is necessary to reply at all, to the letter of Mr. Jukes in your last number. There is no antagonism between his views and mine, though he seems heartily to desire that there should be, and with no conceivable motive but to obtain some appearance of it suppresses the latter half of the sentence he quotes from my letter.[169] It is true that he writes in willing ignorance of the Alps, and I in unwilling ignorance of the Wicklow hills; but the only consequent discrepancy of thought or of impression between us is, that Mr. Jukes, examining (by his own account) very old hills, which have been all but washed away to nothing, naturally, and rightly, attributes their present form, or want of form, to their prolonged ablutions, while I, examining new and lofty hills, of which, though much has been carried away, much is still left, as naturally and rightly ascribe a great part of their aspect to the modes of their elevation. The Alp-bred geologist has, however, this advantage, that (especially if he happen at spare times to have been interested in manual arts) he can hardly overlook the effects of denudation on a mountain-chain which sustains Venice on the delta of one of its torrents, and Antwerp on that of another; but the English geologist, however practised in the detection and measurement of faults filled in by cubes of fluor, may be pardoned for dimly appreciating the structure of a district in which a people strong enough to lay the foundation of the liberties of Europe in a single battle,[170] was educated in a fissure of the Lower Chalk.

I think, however, that, if Mr. Jukes can succeed in allaying his feverish thirst for battle, he will wish to withdraw the fourth paragraph of his letter,[171] and, as a general formula, even the scheme which it introduces. That scheme, sufficiently accurate as an expression of one cycle of geological action, contains little more than was known to all leading geologists five-and-twenty years ago, when I was working hard under Dr. Buckland at Oxford;[172] and it is so curiously unworthy of the present state of geological science, that I believe its author, in his calmer moments, will not wish to attach his name to an attempt at generalization at once so narrow, and so audacious. My experience of mountain-form is probably as much more extended than his, as my disposition to generalize respecting; it is less;[173] and, although indeed the apparent limitation of the statement which he half quotes (probably owing to his general love of denudation) from my last letter, to the chain of the Alps, was intended only to attach to the words “quite visibly,” yet, had I myself expanded that statement, I should not have assumed the existence of a sea, to relieve me from the difficulty of accounting for the existence of a lake; I should not have assumed that all mountain-formations of investiture were marine; nor claimed the possession of a great series of stratified rocks without inquiring where they were to come from. I should not have thought “even more than one” an adequate expression for the possible number of elevations and depressions which may have taken place since the beginning of time on the mountain-chains of the world; nor thought myself capable of compressing into Ten Articles, or even into Thirty-nine, my conceptions of the working of the Power which led forth the little hills like lambs, while it rent or established the foundations of the earth; and set their birth-seal on the forehead of each in the infinitudes of aspect and of function which range between the violet-dyed banks of Thames and Seine, and the vexed Fury-Tower of Cotopaxi.

Not but that large generalizations are, indeed, possible with respect to the diluvial phenomena, among which my antagonist has pursued his--(scarcely amphibious?)--investigations. The effects of denudation and deposition are unvarying everywhere, and have been watched with terror and gratitude in all ages. In physical mythology they gave tusk to the Grææ, claw to the Gorgons, bull’s frontlet to the floods of Aufidus and Po. They gave weapons to the wars of Titans against Gods, and lifeless seed of life into the hand of Deucalion. Herodotus “rightly spelled” of them, where the lotus rose from the dust of Nile and leaned upon its dew; Plato rightly dreamed of them in his great vision of the disrobing of the Acropolis to its naked marble; the keen eye of Horace, half poet’s, half farmer’s (albeit unaided by theodolite), recognized them alike where the risen brooks of Vallombrosa, amidst the mountain-clamors, tossed their champed shingle to the Etrurian sea, and in the uncoveted wealth of the pastures,

“Quæ Liris quietâ;
_Mordet_ aquâ, taciturnus amnis.”[174]

But the inner structure of the mountain-chains is as varied as their substance; and to this day, in some of its mightier developments, so little understood, that my Neptunian opponent himself, in his address delivered at Cambridge in 1862, speaks of an arrangement of strata which it is difficult to traverse ten miles of Alpine limestone without finding an example of, as beyond the limits of theoretical imagination.[175]

I feel tempted to say more; but I have at present little time even for useful, and none for wanton, controversy. Whatever information Mr. Jukes can afford me on these subjects (and I do not doubt he can afford me much), I am ready to receive, not only without need of his entreaty, but with sincere thanks. If he likes to try his powers of sight, “as corrected by the laborious use of the protractor,” against mine, I will in humility abide the issue. But at present the question before the house is, as I understand it, simply whether glaciers excavate lake-basins or not. That, in spite of measurement and survey, here or elsewhere, seems to remain a question. May we answer the first, if answerable? That determined, I think I might furnish some other grounds of debate in this notable cause of Peebles against Plainstanes, provided that Mr. Jukes will not in future think his seniority gives him the right to answer me with disparagement instead of instruction, and will bear with the English “student’s” weakness, which induces me, usually, to wish rather to begin by shooting my elephant than end by describing it out of my moral consciousness.[176]

J. RUSKIN.

[From “The Reader,” December 10, 1864.]

_CONCERNING HYDROSTATICS._

NORWICH, 5_th December._

Your pages are not, I presume, intended for the dissemination of the elements of physical science. Your correspondent “M. A. C.” has a good wit, and, by purchasing any common treatise on the barometer, may discover the propriety of exercising it on subjects with which he is acquainted. “G. M.” deserves more attention, the confusion in his mind between increase of pressure and increase of density being a very common one.[177] It may be enough to note for him, and for those of your readers whom his letter may have embarrassed, that in any incompressible liquid a body of greater specific gravity than the liquid will sink to any depth, because the column which it forms, together with the vertical column of the liquid above it, always exceeds in total weight the column formed by the equal bulk of the liquid at its side, and the vertical column of liquid above that. Deep-sea soundings would be otherwise impossible. “G. M.” may find the explanation of the other phenomena to which he alludes in any elementary work on hydrostatics, and will discover on a little reflection that the statement in my last letter[178] is simply true. Expanded, it is merely that, when we throw a stone into water, we substitute pressure of stone-surface for pressure of water-surface throughout the area of horizontal contact of the stone with the ground, and add the excess of the stone’s weight over that of an equal bulk of water.

It is, however, very difficult for me to understand how any person so totally ignorant of every circumstance of glacial locality and action, as “G. M.” shows himself to be in the paragraph beginning “It is very evident,” could have had the courage to write a syllable on the subject. I will waste no time in reply, but will only assure him (with reference to his assertion that I “get rid of the rocks,” etc.), that I never desire to get rid of anything but error, and that I should be the last person to desire to get rid of the glacial agency by friction, as I was, I believe, the first to reduce to a diagram the probable stages of its operation on the bases of the higher Alpine aiguilles.[179]

Permit me to add, in conclusion, that in future I can take no notice of any letters to which the writers do not think fit to attach their names. There can be no need of initials in scientific discussion, except to shield incompetence or license discourtesy.

J. RUSKIN.

[From “Rendu’s Theory of the Glaciers of Savoy,” Macmillan, 1874.]

_JAMES DAVID FORBES: HIS REAL GREATNESS.[180]_

The incidental passage in “Fors,” hastily written, on a contemptible issue, does not in the least indicate my sense of the real position of James Forbes among the men of his day. I have asked his son’s[181] permission to add a few words expressive of my deeper feelings.

For indeed it seems to me that all these questions as to priority of ideas or observations are beneath debate among noble persons. What a man like Forbes first noticed, or demonstrated, is of no real moment to his memory. What he was, and how he taught, is of consummate moment. The actuality of his personal power, the sincerity and wisdom of his constant teaching, need no applause from the love they justly gained, and can sustain no diminution from hostility; for their proper honor is in their usefulness. To a man of no essential power, the accident of a discovery is apotheosis; to _him_, the former knowledge of all the sages of earth is as though it were not; he calls the ants of his own generation round him, to observe how he flourishes in his tiny forceps the grain of sand he has imposed upon Pelion. But from all such vindication of the claims of Forbes to mere discovery, I, his friend, would, for my own part, proudly abstain. I do not in the slightest degree care whether he was the first to see this, or the first to say that, or how many common persons had seen or said as much before. What I rejoice in knowing of him is that he had clear eyes and open heart for all things and deeds appertaining to his life; that whatever he discerned, was discerned impartially; what he said, was said securely; and that in all functions of thought, experiment, or communication, he was sure to be eventually right, and serviceable to mankind, whether out of the treasury of eternal knowledge he brought forth things new or old.