After another visit to Chamouni, he crossed France to Paris, where something awaited him that upset all his plans, and turned his energies into an unexpected channel.

CHAPTER II

CHRISTIAN ART (1845-1847)

At Paris, on the way heme in 1844, he had spent some days in studying Titian and Bellini and Perugino.  They were not new to him; but now that he was an art-critic, it behoved him to improve his acquaintance with the old masters.  “To admire the works of Pietro Perugino” was one thing; but to understand them was another, a thing which was hardly attempted by “the Landscape Artists of England” to whom the author of “Modern Painters” had so far dedicated his services.  He had been extolling modernism, and depreciating “the Ancients” because they could not draw rocks and clouds and trees; and he was fresh from his scientific sketching in the happy hunting-ground of the modern world.  A few days in the Louvre made him the devotee of ancient art, and taught him to lay aside his geology for history.

In one way the development was easy.  The patient attempt to copy mountain-form had made him sensitive to harmony of line; and in the great composers of Florence and Venice he found a quality of abstract design which tallied with his experience of what was beautiful in Nature.  Aiguilles and glaciers, drawn as he drew them, and the figure-subjects of severe Italian draughtsmen, are beautiful by the same laws of composition, however different the associations they suggest.

But he had been learning these laws of beauty from Turner and from the Alps; how did the ancients come by them?  This could be found only in a thorough study of their lives and times, to begin with, to which he devoted his winter, with Rio and Lord Lindsay and Mrs. Jameson for his authorities.  He found that his foes, Caspar Poussin and Canaletto, and the Dutch landscapists, were not the real old masters; that there had been a great age of art before the era of Vandyck and Rubens—­even before Michelangelo and Raphael; and that, towards setting up as a critic of the present, he must understand the past out of which it had grown.  So he determined to go to Florence and Venice, and to study the religious painters at first hand.

Mountain-study and Turner were not to be dropped.  For example, to explain the obvious and notorious licences which Turner took with topography, it was necessary to see in what these licences consisted.  Of the later Swiss drawings, one of the wildest and most impressive was the “St. Gothard”; Ruskin wanted to find Turner’s point of view, and to see what alterations he had made.  He told Turner so, and the artist, who knew that his picture had been realized from a very slight sketch, was naturally rather opposed to this test, as being, from his point of view, merely a waste of time and trouble.  He tried to persuade the Ruskins that the Swiss Sonderbund war, then going on, made travelling unsafe, and so forth.  But in vain.  Mr. John was allowed to go, for the first time alone, without his parents, taking only a servant, and meeting the trustworthy Coutet at Geneva.