The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [58]
To begin rectifying the situation, Ruskin published two books, The Elements of Drawing (1857) and The Elements of Perspective (1859), and gave a series of lectures at the Working Men's College in London, where he instructed students—mostly Cockney craftsmen—in techniques of 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 would ever be hung 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 on drawing in 1857. He explained that he himself was far from being a talented artist. Of his own childhood drawings, he said mockingly, ‘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 practised by those with no talent, it was, Ruskin believed, because it could teach us to see—that is, to notice rather than merely look. In the process of re-creating with our own hands what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to evolve from observing beauty in a loose way to possessing 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 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, but even the prettiest tree rarely detains passersby for longer than a minute.
Ruskin connected the wish to travel fast and far with the inability to derive appropriate pleasure from any one place or, by extension, from details such as single sprigs 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,