1.
Among all the places we go to but don't look at properly or which leave us indifferent, a few occasionally stand out with an impact that overwhelms us and forces us to take heed. They possess a quality that might clumsily be called beauty. This may not involve prettiness or any of the obvious features that guidebooks associate with beauty spots. Recourse to the word might just be another way of saying that we like a place.
There was much beauty on my travels. In Madrid, a few blocks from my hotel there lay a patch of waste ground bordered by apartment buildings and a large orange-coloured petrol station with a car wash. One evening, in the darkness, a long, sleek, almost empty train passed several metres above the roof of the station and wended its way between the middle floors of the apartment buildings. With its viaduct lost in the night, the train appeared to float above the earth, a technological feat that looked more plausible given the train's futuristic shape and the pale ghostly green light emanating from its windows. Inside their apartments, people were watching television or moving around the kitchen; meanwhile, dispersed through the carriages, the few passengers stared out at the city or read newspapers: the start of a journey to Seville or Cordoba that would end long after the dishwashers had reached the end of their cycles and the televisions fallen silent. The passengers and apartment dwellers paid little attention to one another, their lives ran along lines that would never meet, except for a brief moment in the retina of an observer who had taken a walk to escape a sad hotel room.
In Amsterdam, in a courtyard behind a wooden door, there was an old brick wall which, despite a tear-inducing wind blowing along the canals, had slowly heated itself up in a fragile early spring sun. I took my hands from my pockets and ran them along the bricks' gnarled and pitted surface. They seemed light and ready to crumble. I had an impulse to kiss them, to feel more closely a texture that reminded me of blocks of pumice or halva from a Lebanese delicatessen.
In Barbados, on the eastern shore, I had looked out across a dark-violet sea that continued unhindered to the coasts of Africa. The island had suddenly seemed small and vulnerable and its theatrical vegetation of wild pink flowers and shaggy trees a touching protest against the sober monotony of the sea. In the Lake District, I remembered the view at dawn from our window in the Mortal Man Inn: hills of soft Silurian rock covered in fine green grass above which a layer of mist was hovering. The hills undulated as though they formed part of the backbone of a giant beast that had lain down to sleep and might at any point awake and stand up several miles high, shaking off oak trees and hedgerows like pieces of fluff caught on its felt green jacket.
2.
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is the desire to hold on to it: to possess it and give it weight in our lives. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.'
But beauty is fugitive, it is frequently found in places to which we may never return or else it results from a rare conjunction of season, light and weather. How then to possess it, how to hold on to the floating train, the halva-like bricks or the English valley?
The camera provides one option. Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety about losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter. Or else we can try to imprint ourselves physically on a place of beauty, perhaps hoping to render it more present in us by making ourselves more present in it. In Alexandria, standing before Pompey's Pillar, we could try to carve our name in the granite, to follow the example of Flaubert's friend Thompson from Sunderland ('You can't see the Pillar without seeing the name of Thompson, and consequently, without thinking of Thompson. This cretin has become part of the monument and perpetuates himself along with it … All imbeciles are more or less Thompsons from Sunderland'). A more modest step might be to buy something-a bowl, a lacquered box or a pair of sandals (Flaubert acquired three carpets in Cairo)-to be reminded of what we have lost, like a lock of hair that we cut from a departing lover's mane.
3.
John Ruskin was born in London in February 1819. A central part of his work was to pivot around the question of how we can possess the beauty of places.
From an early age, he was unusually alive to the smallest features of the visual world. He recalled that at three or four: 'I could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet-examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses with rapturous intervals of excitement.' Ruskin's parents encouraged his sensitivity. His mother introduced him to nature, his father, a prosperous sherry importer, read the classics to him after tea and took him to a museum every Saturday. In the summer holidays, the family travelled around the British Isles and mainland Europe, not for entertainment or persion, but for beauty, by which they understood chiefly the beauty of the Alps and of the medieval cities of northern France and Italy, in particular Amiens and Venice. They journeyed slowly in a carriage, never more than fifty miles a day, and every few miles stopped to admire the scenery-a way of travelling that Ruskin was to practise throughout his life.
From his interest in beauty and in its possession, Ruskin arrived at five central conclusions. Firstly, that beauty is the result of a complex number of factors that affect the mind psychologically and visually. Secondly, that humans have an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Thirdly, that there are many lower expressions of this desire for possession, including the desire to buy souvenirs and carpets, to carve one's name in pillars and to take photographs. Fourthly, that there is only one way to possess beauty properly and that is through understanding it, through making ourselves conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) that are responsible for it. And lastly, that the most effective way of pursuing this conscious understanding is by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, through writing or drawing them, irrespective of whether we happen to have any talent for doing so.
4.
Between 1856 and 1860, Ruskin's primary intellectual concern was to teach people how to draw: 'The art of drawing, which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing and should be taught to every child just as writing is, has been so neglected and abused, that there is not one man in a thousand, even of its professed teachers, who knows its first principles.'
To begin rectifying the damage, Ruskin published two books, The Elements of Drawing in 1857 and The Elements of Perspective in 1859, and gave a series of lectures at the Working Men's College in London, where he instructed students-mostly Cockney craftsmen-in shading, colour, dimension, perspective and framing. The lectures were heavily subscribed and the books were critical and commercial successes, confirming Ruskin in his view that drawing should not be for the few: 'There is a satisfactory and available power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all persons have the power of learning French, Latin or arithmetic, in a decent and useful degree.'
What was the point of drawing? Ruskin saw no paradox in stressing that it had nothing to do with drawing well, or with becoming an artist: 'A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.' He did not mind if his East End students left his classes unable to draw anything that could ever hang in a gallery. 'My efforts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter,' he told a Royal Commission into drawing in 1857. He complained that he himself was a far from talented artist. Of his childhood drawings, he mocked: 'I never saw any boy's work in my life showing so little original faculty, or grasp by memory. I could literally draw nothing, not a cat, not a mouse, not a boat, not a brush.'
If drawing had value even when it was practised by people with no talent, it was for Ruskin because drawing could teach us to see: to notice rather than to look. In the process of re-creating with our own hand what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to move from a position of observing beauty in a loose way to one where we acquire a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it. A tradesman who had studied at the Working Men's College reported what Ruskin had told him and his fellow students at the end of their course: 'Now, remember, gentlemen, that I have not been trying to teach you to draw, only to see. Two men are walking through Clare Market, one of them comes out at the other end not a bit wiser than when he went in; the other notices a bit of parsley hanging over the edge of a butter-woman's basket, and carries away with him images of beauty which in the course of his daily work he incorporates with it for many a day. I want you to see things like these.'
Ruskin was distressed by how seldom people noticed details. He deplored the blindness and haste of modern tourists, especially those who prided themselves on covering Europe in a week by train (a service first offered by Thomas Cook in 1862): 'No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.'
It is a measure of how accustomed we are to inattention that we would be thought unusual and perhaps dangerous if we stopped and stared at a place for as long as a sketcher would require to draw it. Ten minutes of acute concentration at least are needed to draw a tree; the prettiest tree rarely stops passersby for longer than a minute.
Ruskin connected the wish to travel fast and far to an inability to derive appropriate pleasure from any one place and, by extension, from details like single pieces of parsley hanging over the edges of baskets. In a moment of particular frustration with the tourist industry, he harangued an audience of wealthy industrialists in Manchester in 1864: 'Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages. You have put a railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffenhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva; there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled with bellowing fire nor any foreign city in which the spread of your presence is not marked by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels. The Alps themselves you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb, and slide down again, with “shrieks of delight”.'
The tone was hysterical, but the dilemma was genuine. Technology may make it easier to reach beauty, but it has not simplified the process of possessing or appreciating it.
What, then, is so wrong with the camera? Nothing, thought Ruskin initially. 'Among all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote,' he wrote of Louis-Jacques-Mandé's invention of 1839. In Venice in 1845, he used a daguerreotype repeatedly and delighted in the results. To his father he wrote: 'Daguerreotypes taken by this vivid sunlight are glorious things. It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off a palace itself-every chip of stone and stain is there-and of course, there can be no mistakes about proportion.'
Yet Ruskin's enthusiasm diminished as he observed the devilish problem that photography created for the majority of its practitioners. Rather than using photography as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used it as an alternative, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously from a faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
In explaining his love of drawing (it was rare for him to travel anywhere without sketching something), Ruskin once remarked that it arose from a desire, 'not for reputation, nor for the good of others, nor for my own advantage, but from a sort of instinct like that of eating or drinking'. What unites the three activities is that they all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within. As a child, Ruskin had so loved the look of grass that he had frequently wanted to eat it, he said, but he had gradually discovered that it would be better to try to draw it: 'I used to lie down on it and draw the blades as they grew-until every square foot of meadow, or mossy bank, became a possession ［my italics］ to me.'
But photography alone cannot ensure such eating. True possession of a scene is a matter of making a conscious effort to notice elements and understand their construction. We can see beauty well enough just by opening our eyes, but how long this beauty survives in memory depends on how intentionally we have apprehended it. The camera blurs the distinction between looking and noticing, between seeing and possessing; it may give us the option of true knowledge but it may unwittingly make the effort of acquiring it seem superfluous. It suggests we have done all the work simply by taking a photograph, whereas properly to eat a place, a woodland for example, implies asking ourselves a series of questions like, How do the stems connect to the roots?','Where is the mist coming from?','Why does one tree seem darker than another?'-questions implicitly raised and answered in the process of sketching.
5.
Encouraged by Ruskin's democratic vision of drawing, I tried my hand during my travels. As for what to draw, it seemed sensible to be guided by the desire to possess beauty which had previously led me to take up my camera. In Ruskin's words, 'Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.'
I decided to draw the bedroom window at the Mortal Man Inn because it was to hand and seemed attractive on a bright autumn morning. The result was a predictable yet instructive disaster. Drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes us from a woolly sense of what it looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities. So 'a window' reveals itself to be made of a succession of ledges holding the glass in place, of a system of ridges and indentations (the hotel's was in the Georgian style), of twelve panes that might seem square but are in fact mildly but importantly rectangular, of white paint that doesn't really look white but ash-grey, brown-grey, yellow, pinky mauve and mild green depending on the light and on the relationship between this light and the condition of the wood (in the north-western edge of the window, a trace of damp gave the paint a pinky tint). Nor is glass wholly clear; it has within it minute imperfections, tiny bubbles of air like a frozen fizzy drink, and on its surface mine had been marked with the traces of dried raindrops and the impatient swipes of a window cleaner's cloth.
Drawing brutally shows up our previous blindness to the true appearance of things. Consider the case of trees. In a passage in The Elements of Drawing, Ruskin discussed, with reference to his own illustrations, the difference between the way we usually imagine the branches of trees before we draw them and the way they reveal themselves once we have looked more closely with the help of a pad and pencil:'The stem does not merely send off a wild branch here and there to take its own way, but all the branches share in one great fountain-like impulse. That is to say, the general type of a tree is not as 1a but as 1b, in which the boughs all carry their minor pisions right out to the bounding curve. And the type of each separate bough is not 2a but 2b; approximating, that is to say, to the structure of a plant of broccoli.'
I had seen many oak trees in my life, but only after an hour spent drawing one in the Langdale valley (the result would have shamed an infant) did I begin to appreciate, and remember, their identity.
6.
Another benefit we may derive from drawing is a conscious understanding of the reasons behind our attraction to certain landscapes and buildings. We find explanations for our tastes, we develop an 'aesthetic', a capacity to assert judgements about beauty and ugliness. We determine with greater precision what is missing in a building we don't like and what contributes to the beauty of the one we do. We more quickly analyse a scene that impresses us and pin down whence its power arises ('the combination of limestone and evening sun', 'the way the trees taper down to the river'). We move from a numb 'I like this' to 'I like this because … ', and then in turn towards a generalization about the likeable. Even if they are only held in exploratory, tentative ways, laws of beauty come to mind: it is better for light to strike objects from the side than from overhead; grey goes well with green; for a street to convey a sense of space, the buildings must only be as high as the street is wide.
And on the basis of this conscious awareness, more solid memories can be founded. Carving our name on Pompey's Pillar begins to seem unnecessary. Drawing allows us, in Ruskin's account, 'to stay the cloud in its fading, the leaf in its trembling, and the shadows in their changing'.
Summing up what he had attempted to do in four years of teaching and writing manuals on drawing, Ruskin explained that he had been motivated by a desire to 'direct people's attention accurately to the beauty of God's work in the material universe'. It may be worth quoting in full a passage in which Ruskin demonstrated what exactly, at a concrete level, this strange-sounding ambition might involve: 'Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two inpiduals. The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect; and that's all！ But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the cause of beauty, and penetrate the minutest parts of loveliness. He looks up, and observes how the showery and subpided sunshine comes sprinkled down among the gleaming leaves overhead, till the air is filled with the emerald light. He will see here and there a bough emerging from the veil of leaves, he will see the jewel brightness of the emerald moss and the variegated and fantastic lichens, white and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a single garment of beauty. Then come the cavernous trunks and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the steep bank, whose turfy slope is inlaid with flowers of a thousand dyes. Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane.'
7.
Ruskin did not only encourage us to draw on our travels, he also felt we should write, or as he called it 'word paint', so as to cement our impressions of beauty. However respected he was in his lifetime for his drawings, it was his word-paintings that captured the public imagination and were responsible for his fame in the late Victorian period.
Attractive places typically render us aware of our inadequacies with language. In the Lake District, while writing a postcard to a friend, I explained-in some despair and haste-that the scenery was pretty and the weather wet and windy. Ruskin would have ascribed such prose more to laziness than incapacity. We were all, he argued, able to turn out adequate word-paintings. A failure was only the result of not asking ourselves enough questions, of not being more precise in analysing what we had seen and felt. Rather than rest with the idea that a lake was pretty, we were to ask ourselves more vigorously, 'What in particular is attractive about this stretch of water? What are its associations? What is a better word for it than big?' The finished product might not then be marked by genius, but at least it would have been motivated by a search for an authentic representation of an experience.