VII
RUSKIN'S MAPS

Reading the map is as great a pleasure to some people as reading a story-book. You will see them pore over the atlas for an hour together, going on dream-journeys. It is a cheap way of globe-trotting, and gets rid of the discomforts; only one must have imagination to turn the wriggling hair-lines into vistas of river scenery, and the woolly-bear shading into forested crests and peaks against the sunset. It needs a good deal of imagination to get over the ugliness of most modern maps; but why should maps be ugly?

That is a question which Ruskin often asked, and he gave a great deal of trouble and time to the subject: not enough to carry out such a reformation as his energetic preaching and teaching did effect in some other things, but perhaps we have not quite come to the end of the story yet.

Anyway, the map-readers, and all who have known the bliss of owning a Bible with a "Palestine" for solace during sermon-time in childhood, or have realised the privileges of even Bradshaw's ugly chart on a long journey—all these will not think it strange to be told that Ruskin was a map-lover too, and that he was nearly as fond of plans as of pictures. Indeed, the old complaint against his art criticism was that he wanted pictures to be maps, decoratively coloured diagrams of nature, in which you could find your way about, know the points of the compass, latitude, altitude, geology, botany, fauna, flora, and the universal gazetteer.

He says in the Notes on his Turner Exhibition that he began to learn drawing by copying maps, and only came to pictures later. It is a biographical fact that his first use of a paint-box was to tint seas blue—not skies; and to ornament his outline with a good full red and green and yellow. Here is his first map of Italy, facsimiled from the coloured original. You see how he tried to be neat, and how he knew, without having to amend his lettering, to put one D and two R's in "MEDITERRANEAN." About Germany he was always antagonistic or inattentive; here, you see, he thinks it is in Austria! It is hardly possible that he was really copying when he made that characteristic blunder.

Why do we refer to these childishnesses? Because he—the art critic and art teacher—began his art career not by sketching people or cottages or flowers, but by copying maps; and because he ended his career in bidding his hearers do likewise. Of course the value of advice entirely depends upon what you mean to do with it. If you want to make colourable imitations of fashionable pictures, don't take Ruskin's word for anything. If you want to be a scholar in the school of the Old Masters, then you might do worse than listen to him. They "leant on a firm and determined outline"—that is Sir Joshua Reynolds; they started with painstaking draughtmanship, and added colour tint by tint; and so he says, "I place map-making first among the elementary exercises," and so forth, and made his young pupils begin with simple facsimile—"If you can draw Italy you know something about form"—and then paint the globe with its conflicting shade and local colour. Afterwards, in setting one at Turner, he would say, "I want you to make a map of the subject. Get the masses outlined, and fill in the spaces with the main colours; and that will do."

The next photograph is from a coloured drawing of the same size; the pale spaces are pink and yellow and green, and the Lake of Geneva, which looks rather blotchy in the print, is more pleasant in ultramarine. This is one of a set of geological maps made to illustrate the course of the usual tour through France and the Alps, perhaps, to judge by the handwriting, for the journey of 1835, when he made special preparations to study geology. He could hardly carry a bulky sheet or atlas, and so extracted just what he required, in a series of neat little pages, put together into a home-made case, ready for use at any moment. Youngsters who take this kind of trouble are likely to become men of weight; at least, they get to know how interesting the world is. Ruskin on a journey was never bored, unless he was ill; he looked out of window and poked you up: "Now, put away that book; we are just coming to the chalk"; or, "Are you looking out for the great twist in the limestone?" And the changes in the face of the country, with new flowers and varying crops, were a continual entertainment.

Another use of maps to Ruskin was in writing the descriptive eloquence for which most readers chiefly admire him. I remember a very good judge of pictures and books once choosing the best passage of Ruskin—not that such "bests" come to much—and fixing on the bird's-eye-view passage in which he takes you with the stork and the swallow on their northward flight over the varying scenery of Europe ("Stones of Venice," II., vi., § 8; "Selections," I., § 20). Now this has all the imaginative charm of Hans Christian Andersen's "Snow Queen," or George Macdonald's "At the Back of the North Wind"; but it is nothing more nor less than notes on the map of Europe—of course, by a map-lover.

To help in such work he collected maps wherever he went. He kept them in a special set of drawers in his study, some mounted on spent diagram-cards from his lectures, and some dropping to pieces with wear and tear. Among these are still his first map of the Lakes, from Jonathan Otley's or Wordsworth's Guide, and his old Keller's "Switzerland" of 1844, which he used forty years later, saying that he did not want the railways, and no new map showed the roads better. Of favourite towns, such as Venice and Amiens, there are large scale plans, the best that could be bought; and of some Swiss districts, like NeuchÂtel, there is quite a library of cartology. A highly detailed map of MÉdoc, from a wine advertisement, was found useful; likewise Britain with the centres of Trinity College, London, which he kept for its clearness. Philip's "Authentic Map of England" is endorsed "good common use," and he even kept close at hand a set of children's dissecting maps. The Ordnance Survey is fully represented, but because too much was put into these beautiful six-inch sheets, he has coloured them fancifully and vigorously, to get clear divisions of important parts. Clearness and distinctness, every one must feel, are not the strong points of modern cartography, hence the use of sketch-maps: such as this of Spain, scribbled on a sheet of foolscap to keep him in mind of the graceful, swinging coastline and the proportions of the provinces.

The overloaded modern map is a work of reference—it is a dictionary, not a book. Ruskin felt that it was useless for educational or literary purposes, and he was continually trying to improve away the detail and to substitute graphic statistics. One line of this attempt was in the direction of models. Beck's raised map of Switzerland (1853) was often in use, but it was spoilt for him by the shining surface, which catches high lights and distracts the eye: all models ought to be painted in dead colours, except the water, which needs the shine for the sake of transparency.

So, in 1881, when he was working at the physical geology of the Coniston neighbourhood, he tried to make a model of the hills and dales, to see how the strike and dip of strata and the faults and dykes in the rock came out in relation to ups and downs, lake-basins and crags, and so forth. He found modelling too tedious to carry out himself, and, with characteristic oddness in his employment of means to ends, he set his gardener, the late Dawson Herdson, on the job. Herdson made a very fair general sketch in clay of the Old Man, and the main features as seen from the Coniston side; but he had not pegged out his distances, and when Dow Crag was built up into emphatic gloom, and Leverswater hollowed into depth, the smaller heights had no space left for them, and the effect was altogether too willow-patterned. Then Ruskin put another of his employÉs to work, and after much labour the model now in the Coniston Museum was evolved.

This was intended to be photographed or engraved in a side-light, as one of a series of physical maps. Another was to have been Savoy, for which Ruskin made the sketch here shown. The black Lake of Geneva is dark blue in his drawing; the valleys are green, and the mountains roughly knocked in with lamp-black and Chinese white, tinted over with yellow for limestone, pink for Mont Blanc protogine, and red for gneiss. Rough as the sketch is, you see the structure of the Alps, the lie of the land, at a glance. Towns, roads, and all the rest should be shown, he said, on separate plans.

Towards this purpose he collected bird's-eye views in great variety, from Maclure and Macdonald's lithograph of the Soudan, to quaint old panoramas, of which one—the mountains seen from the Buet—is quite like a William Blake design of Heaven and Hell, and fit to serve as a background to all the mythologies. Also, for their pleasant picturesqueness, he liked the queer productions of ancient cartographers, such as Edmund Squib's funny map of China (1655), and a seventeenth-century production called "The New Map of Muscovy," and "The Course of the Great River Wolga," by A. Olearius; with pictures of Russian peasants along the banks, and the camels of "the Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet." Such maps have the charm of graphic expression; they don't pretend to be gazetteers, but they take you about the country with the entertainment of a traveller's tale.

They are decorative also; that was another appeal to Ruskin. William Morris has shown in the illustrations to the Saga Library how maps can become picturesque designs, and this was much on the lines that Ruskin would have followed. He might not have inserted dragons of the deep, nor, as in Drayton's "Polyolbion," nymphs and shepherds on the hills and lakes, out of all proportion and possibility; but he thought a map could be far more explanatory and ornamental than the usual school atlas.

His attempt at a diagrammatic history of France, sketched on a page of note-paper, was engraved for "Our Fathers have Told Us"—his projected school history of the "Nice Things that have Happened." You see—and for lack of space I must leave it for your further insight—how he designed to show the roses of Provence and the lilies of France in this garden of Gaul, at one time feebly struggling, then blowing fully and freely spreading, then broken in upon by the wild beast of war; the lily bed trampled and ruined; Aquitaine wasted to blankness, and so forth. Worked out completely, an atlas of history on this plan might be as pretty as any picture-book. A child accustomed to such maps would have little trouble in remembering the outlines of national growth, and the whole tedious business of dates and uncouth names would be infinitely lightened. Perhaps, some day, Ruskin's hint will be taken, and his suggestions will bear fruit.

He never cared for worship and admiration, when they did not mean the understanding of his aims, and the carrying out of his work. He knew his gift was to irrigate, as he said—to suggest and stimulate. People called him an egoist; but how wise in its humility was the close of his preface to "Loves Meinie!"—"It has been throughout my trust, that if Death should write on these, 'What this man began to build, he was not able to finish,' God may also write on them, not in anger but in aid, 'A stronger than he cometh.'" And for much that he has left to do, no greater strength is needed, but only the glory of going on.