f
an aspen-tree, idly begun, but carried out with interest and patience,
confirmed the principle. At Geneva, once more in the church where he had
formed such resolutions the year before, the desire came over him with
renewed force; now not only to be definitely employed, but to be
employed in the service of a definite mission, which was, in art,
exactly what Carlyle had preached in every other sphere of life in that
book of "Heroes": the gospel of sincerity.
The design took shape. At Chamouni he studied plants and rocks and
clouds, not as an artist to make pictures out of them, nor as a
scientist to class them and analyze them; but to learn their aspects and
enter into the spirit of their growth and structure. And though on his
way home through Switzerland and down the Rhine he made a few drawings
in his old style for admiring friends, they were the last of the kind
that he attempted. Thenceforward his path was marked out; he had found a
new vocation. He was not to be a poet--that was too definitely bound up
with the past which he wanted to forget, and with conventionalities
which he wished to shake off; not to be an artist, strugging with the
rest to please a public which he felt himself called upon to teach; not
a man of science, for his botany and geology were to be the means, and
not the ends, of his teaching; but the mission was laid upon him to tell
the world that Art, no less than other spheres of life, had its Heroes;
that the mainspring of their energy was Sincerity, and the burden of
their utterance, Truth.
BOOK II
THE ART CRITIC
(1842-1860)
CHAPTER I
"TURNER AND THE ANCIENTS" (1842-1844)
The neighbour, or the Oxonian friend, who climbed the steps of the Herne
Hill house and called upon Mrs. Ruskin, in the autumn and winter of
1842, would learn that Mr. John was hard at work in his own study
overhead. Those were its windows, on the second-floor, looking out upon
the front-garden; the big dormer-window above was his bedroom, from
which he had his grand view of lowland, and far horizon, and unconfined
sky, comparatively clear of London smoke. In the study itself, screened
from the road by russet foliage and thick evergreens, great things were
going on. But Mr. John could be interrupted, would come running lightly
downstairs, with both hands out to greet the visitor; would show the
pictures, eagerly demonstrating the beauties of the last new Turners,
"Ehrenbreitstein" and "Lucerne,"
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