In Twilight in Italy Lawrence uses the kind of word-painting that produces the effect of moving elements within a scene to describe his experience upon leaving the darkened, sensual interior of San Tommaso and coming out suddenly into bright day:

Across, the heavy mountain crouched, along the side of the lake, the upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great, pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky.

As this passage demonstrates, Lawrence, like Ruskin, creates his powerful descriptions by transforming description into narrative. In this instance he first implicitly places himself as viewer with the word Across, which informs the reader where the scene takes place in relation to the perceiving eye. Then Lawrence presents the outlines of mountain form, not as static boundaries between material masses but rather as paths of movement. Thus, the mountain "crouched" before him alongside the lake, while on his left hand the headland "swept down" from the arid heights. Since Lessing it has been a critical commonplace that the verbal arts are essentially temporal and the visual ones static. Ruskinian -- and Laurentian -- word-painting uses this inevitable sequentiality of verbal art both to order and to energize its attempts to create a visualizable pictorial image

Another way that Lawrence metamorphoses description into narrative appears in the magnificent opening pages of "San Gaudenzio" in Twilight in Italy:

The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines. It is so still and transcendent, the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should have been blown out at the end of summer. For as we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in the full sunshine.

Meanwhile, the Christmas roses become many. They rise from their budded, intact humbleness near the ground, they rise up, they throw up their crystal, they become handsome, they are heaps of confident, mysterious whiteness in the shadow of a rocky stream. It is almost uncanny to see them. They are the flowers of darkness, white and wonderful beyond belief.

Then their radiance becomes soiled and brown, they thaw, break, and scatter and vanish away. Already the primroses are coming out, and the almond is in bud. The winter is passing away. On the mountains the fierce snow gleams apricot gold as evening approaches, golden, apricot, but so bright that it is almost frightening. What can be so fiercely gleaming when all is shadowy? It is something inhuman and unmitigated between heaven and earth. (81-82)

In this passage Lawrence neither includes a natural element, such as a stream, which moves through the scene to create movement, nor does he, as in the San Tommaso prospect vision, transform static visual elements into kinetic ones to produce the same effect. Rather he presents the transformation of scene in the course of the seasons almost purely in terms of a narrative of change.

Compare his description of Cagliari in the closing pages of the section entitled "The Sea" in Sea and Sardinia. Like Ruskin's many descriptions of mountain scenery both in his autobiographical and in his art critical writings, this passage takes the form of a sudden sight, a moment of visual perception felt as a moment of spiritual or imaginative vision as well.

And suddenly there is Cagliari: a naked town rising steep, steep, golden-looking, piled naked to the sky from the plain at the head of the formless hollow bay. It is strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy. The city piles up lofty and almost miniature, and makes me think of Jerusalem: without trees, without cover, rising rather bare and proud, remote as if back in history, like a town in a monkish, illuminated missal ... rather jewel-like: like a sudden rose-cut amber jewel naked at the depth of the vast indenture. The air is cold, blowing bleak and bitter, the sky is all curd. And that is Cagliari. It has that curious look, as if it could be seen, but not entered. It is like some vision, some memory, something that has passed away. (52; emphasis added)

In one sense, Lawrence relates the experience of first seeing Cagliari much in the manner of a nineteenth-century traveler in search of the picturesque, for he proceeds by interspersing facts encountered with thoughts prompted by them. This passage's presentation of a prospect vision and its comparison of that view to both a medieval missal and the New Jerusalem also resemble many parts of Modern Painters and Praeterita. This Ruskinian prospect vision, one immediately recognizes, derives its energy from its active verbs, but it is not composed in visual terms as is the description of the mountain view from San Tommaso, for Lawrence presents the viewer looking at a scene rather than place him within it.

Lawrence's natural development of Ruskinian word-painting takes the form of using such techniques learned from his Victorian master to convey precisely those experiential and imaginative truths that most concerned him -- and in so doing he advanced both nonfiction and the novel into new areas. Lawrence's own brilliant additions to the tradition of Ruskinian word-painting -- the sensuous and semi-conscious feelings one experiences within a scene appear with particular clarity in Twilight in Italy when he relates his experience of San Tommaso. This passage, which appears in "The Spinner and the Monks," owes a great deal to Ruskin's many presentations of prospect visions, Pisgah Sights, and distant views of mountains throughout his works (but particularly in Modern Painters and Praeterita), and that section which tells of Lawrence's entrance into the church itself seems based upon Ruskin's elaborate narrative presentation of St. Mark's in The Stones of Venice. After explaining that the "tiny chaotic back-ways" and "tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the village" (Twilight in Italy, 20) obamed him, Lawrence relates how, one day, he at last manages to ascend to the church that surmounts the village. Finding a broken stairway, he runs up it, "and came out suddenly, as by a miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the tremendous sunshine," and he discovers himself in "another world, the world of the eagle, the world of fierce abstraction.... I was in the skies now" (21). After describing his setting, first in terms of the details surrounding him and then by filling in the distant sights far below on the lake, Lawrence next ruminates upon the church he has come to investigate, after which he enters its sheltering darkness.

It always remains to me that San Tommaso and its terrace hang suspended above the village, like the lowest step of heaven, of Jacob's ladder. Behind, the land rises in a high sweep. But the terrace of San Tommaso is let down from heaven, and does not touch the earth.

I went into the Church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my soul shrank.

I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to distill me into it. (21-22)

This passage well exemplifies Lawrence's version of what Richard L. Stein has taught us to recognize as a Ruskinian "fable of perception." Brilliantly as this scene departs from Ruskin's own methods by emphasizing the physical and subconscious reactions of the viewer, it nonetheless represents Lawrence adding to instead of denying his Ruskinian heritage.

In fact, Lawrence here stands in relation to Ruskin as Ruskin himself stands in relation to Sir Joshua Reynolds; each incorporates and builds upon the ideas of his predecessor. When Reynolds attempted to win prestige for the art of painting, he found himself forced to use the only available terminology, and he therefore employed the traditional opposition between mechanical (or physical) and intellectual arts. Thus he claimed that painting, like literature, was an intellectual art. In contrast, Ruskin inherited the resources of the romantic tradition, and when he came to formulate his romantic theory of the sister arts -- he takes literature and painting as equivalent forms of the poetic and urges us to receive his remarks on one subject as applying to the other -- he added a third term, the imaginative, to the two that Reynolds had used. Therefore, he can urge that in contrast to works produced by physical and intellectual means, poetry is produced by the higher faculty of imagination. Lawrence, who comfortably takes his place in this progression, demonstrates by his descriptive passages and narrative that he adds the unconscious and sexual drives to those faculties Ruskin had described. For Lawrence, therefore, imaginative description had to include those sensations that hover around and beneath consciousness. By including and even emphasizing elements that Ruskin had himself not included, Lawrence extends this kind of imaginative description in his own way. Such a history of the evolution of word-painting and its theoretical roots sounds suspiciously like one of those purely progressive histories of style or other phenomena that always present what comes later as superior to what preceded it. Of course, from the point of view of one who considers Lawrence's kinds of additions to descriptive prose to be the finest things such prose can produce, this conclusion would be valid. Others have to point out, however, that Laurentian description sacrifices one kind of strength for another. Therefore, the only kind of progressive history his contributions to word-painting support is one that holds that styles or modes must continually develop different capacities.