IV. CONCLUSION 207

Hampstead Heath; our galleries also are full of sacred subjects, in which, if any background be introduced at all, the foliage of the olive ought to have been a prominent feature.

And here I challenge the untravelled English reader to tell me what an olive-tree is like.

§ 12. I know he cannot answer my challenge. He has no more idea of an olive-tree than if olives grew only in the fixed stars. Let him meditate a little on this one fact, and consider its strangeness, and what a wilful and constant closing of the eyes to the most important truths it indicates on the part of the modern artist. Observe, a want of perception, not of science. I do not want painters to tell me any scientific facts about olive-trees. But it had been well for them to have felt and seen the olive-tree; to have loved it for Christ’s sake, partly also for the helmed Wisdom’s sake which was to the heathen in some sort as that nobler Wisdom which stood at God’s right hand, when He founded the earth and established the heavens. To have loved it, even to the hoary dimness of its delicate foliage, subdued and faint of hue, as if the ashes of the Gethsemane agony had been cast upon it for ever;¹ and to have traced, line by line, the gnarled writhing of its intricate branches, and the pointed fretwork of its light and narrow leaves, inlaid on the blue field of the sky,² and the small rosy-white stars of its spring blossoming, and the beads of sable fruit scattered by autumn along its topmost boughs-the right, in Israel, of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow,³-and, more than all, the softness of the mantle,

¹ [Luke xxii. 39, 44; Matthew xxvi. 36.]

² [With this passage, “To have loved it ... blue field of the sky,” Ruskin took particular pains, correcting and correcting it again. First, he wrote “To have loved it and watched patiently the fretwork of its pointed grey leaves on the blue field of the quiet sky.” This was next corrected to “To have loved it, even to the utmost fretwork ... quiet sky;” and he then continued, “to have loved it, even to the gnarled and writhing trunk-even to the hoary dimness of its entangled (corrected to “delicate”) foliage, subdued even to the colour of the dust (corrected to “subdued and faint of hue”), as if the ashes of the Gethsemane agony had been cast upon it for ever; to have loved it and to have traced line by line ...” Then the previous portion was altered, and the final form in the text arrived at.]

³ [See Deuteronomy xxiv. 20].

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