旅行的艺术:Ⅷ 对美的拥有-4

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在1856年到1860年之间，当旅游代理商托马斯·库克第一次开始带领英国旅行团前往瑞士的阿尔卑斯山时，罗斯金最希望教大家做的事就是绘画：“绘画的艺术，对于人类而言，要比写作的艺术更加重要，每个孩子不仅要学写字，更要学画画。无奈，绘画艺术常被忽视和滥用，以至于懂得绘画基本原则的人少而又少，即使是博学的教师也未必知道。”

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.'

为了矫正时弊，罗斯金出版了两本书，一本是1857年的《绘画的元素》，另一本是1859年的《透视画法的元素》，同时他还在伦敦的工人学院里作了一系列的演讲。在那里，他教授学生——大多是伦敦的手工艺者——有关明暗法、色彩、尺寸、角度和构图等方面的技巧。他的演讲大受欢迎，他写的书更是获得了巨大的商业上的成功，因此，他更深信绘画不该只是属于小众的艺术：“如果想学绘画的话，每个人身上都有不错的能力，就像学习法语，拉丁语或数学一样，可以达到某种程度并且学以致用。”

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.'

什么是绘画的要点？罗斯金强调为了追求美而画与一心画出好的作品或成为艺术家并没有冲突：“人生来就是艺术家，就像河马生来是河马一样；你不能把你自己变成别人，就像你不能把你自己变成长颈鹿。”如果他伦敦东区的学生们在完成所有课程后，无法画出任何可以挂在画廊里展出的作品，他也并不介意。“我的目标并不是把一名工匠调教为一名艺术家，而是使他成为一名更加快乐的工匠，”他在1857年对皇家委员会作了此种表述。他诉苦说，他自己远非一个有天赋的艺术家。对于他孩童时代的绘画，他嘲讽说：“在我一生中，我从未看到任何男孩的作品显得如此没有原创力，或是如此缺乏通过记忆来描绘的能力。我无法照原样画出任何东西，我画不出一只猫、一只老鼠、一艘船或是一把刷子。”

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.'

如果没有天赋的人都在绘画的话，那么，绘画的价值何在呢？罗斯金认为，绘画可以教我们去观察：不是走马观花地看，而是关注。在用我们的手再创造眼前的景物的过程中，我们似乎自然而然地从一个以松散的方式观察美的位置转向了另一个位置，在这个位置上，我们可以获得对美的组成部分的深刻理解，继而获得关于美的更深刻的记忆。一个曾经在工人学院学习过的小商人转述了罗斯金在课程结束时对他和他的同学们所说的话：“现在，请记住，绅士们，我并没有试图教你们画，只是教你们去观察。两个男人正在穿越克拉尔市场，他们中的一个从市场的另一端走出去，出去时跟进来时并没什么差别；另一个注意到了卖黄油的妇女篮子旁边垂下的一些皱叶欧芹，并且带着美的影像离开。这种美的影像在他的日常生活中留存多日，不断重现。我希望你们这样去观察事物。”

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.'

罗斯金因为人们如此少地注意到细节而感到痛苦。他为现代旅游者的盲目和匆忙感到痛惜，尤其是那些得意于自己在一周时间内乘火车游遍欧洲（由托马斯·库克第一个在1862年开办的旅游行程）的人：“我们在旅行时，如果我们放弃每小时走100英里，从从容容地行进，我们或许会变得健康些、快乐些或明智些。世界之大，远超过我们的眼界可以容纳的范围，不管人们走得多慢；走得快，他们也不会看到更多。真正珍贵的东西是所思和所见，不是速度。子弹飞得太快并不是好事；一个人，如果他的确是个人，走慢点也并无害处；因为他的辉煌根本不在于行走，而在于亲身体验。”

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.'

有一种标准可以衡量我们是多么习惯于对细节的疏忽：如果我们停下来注视一地的风景，停留时间约为完成一幅素描的时间，那我们将被认为是反常，甚至是危险的。10分钟敏锐的专注是描画一棵树所必需的；然而最好看的树也很少能让过路人驻足1分钟。

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.

罗斯金认为，假若我们只想旋风式地造访一个遥远的地方，就难以从这个旅途得到快乐，正如如果我们行色匆匆，就无法注意到垂在篮边的欧芹这样的细节。有一段时间他对旅游业感到非常沮丧，1864年，罗斯金在曼彻斯特向一批富有的工厂老板大声疾呼：“你们认为火车旅行其乐无穷。你们已经在沙夫豪森瀑布上架了一座铁路桥；你们在卢塞恩的泰尔教堂旁的高崖开挖隧道；你们已经破坏了日内瓦湖克拉朗堤岸，你们在英国乡间山谷升起大火，使得那里的宁静不复存在，你们在足迹所至的每个地方造起一堆让人生厌的白色旅馆。你们眼中的阿尔卑斯山不过是在有熊出没的花园里，一根擦过肥皂的柱子，你们爬上去，然后一边溜下来，一边快乐地尖叫。”

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”.'

罗斯金：《一根孔雀胸部羽毛的研究》，1873年

罗斯金的言辞有些过激，但两难处境却是真实的。技术也许让人们更加容易接触到美，但是它并没有使拥有或欣赏美的过程变得简单。

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.

那么，照相机有什么错呢？没有，罗斯金最初这样想。“在这恐怖的19世纪，机械给人们带来了各种害处，但照相机提供了一种解毒剂。”他在评论1839年路易·雅克·芒代·达盖尔 [2] 的发明时这样写道。1845年，他在威尼斯拼命拍照，结果非常满意。他在写给父亲的信中说：“利用银版摄影在阳光下拍摄到的东西非常棒，它使整个皇宫跃然纸上，每一块碎片和上面的斑点都在，当然，也不会有比例上的差错。”

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.'

然而，罗斯金逐渐察觉到摄影给它的大多数使用者带来了严峻的问题，他的热情慢慢消失。使用者们不是把摄影作为积极而有意识的观察的一种补充，相反，他们将它作为一种替代物，以为只要有一张照片，自己就把握了世界的一部分。

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.

罗斯金每次旅行总会画些素描。在解释他对绘画的热爱时，罗斯金曾经提及说这种爱源于一种渴望。“不为名声，不为服务于别人，也不为自己，而是来自一种像吃或喝一样的本能。”而绘画、吃饭、喝水这三件事之所以可以相提并论，是因为它们全部涉及自己从这个世界吸收好的元素，把好的东西输进来。据罗斯金说，在孩童时代，他就非常喜欢草的样子，甚至常常想去吃它，但是他渐渐发觉尝试把草画下来会更好：“我过去经常躺在草地上，并通过绘画来捕捉它们的成长过程——直到草地的每一平方英尺的原野或碧绿的河畔成为我的一笔财产。”

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.'

照相本身并不能保证这样的收获。对于一片景色真正的拥有，实质是通过有意识的努力注意到各种元素并且了解它们的结构。只要将眼睛睁开，我们就能见到许多美景，但是这份美在记忆中存留多久却要依赖于我们领悟它的用心的程度。照相机模糊了观看和注视之间、观看与拥有之间的区别；它或许可以让我们择取真正的美，但是它却可能不经意地使意欲获得美的努力显得多余。照相机暗示我们，只需拍摄一张照片，我们就做完了所有的功课，然而就清晰地了解一个地方（如一片树林）而言，就必然包含询问我们自己一系列的问题，比如，“树干是如何与树根相连的？”“雾是从哪里来的？”“为什么一棵树的色泽似乎比另一棵更深？”——在素描的过程之中，类似的问题不断出现并得到回答。

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.