Days of Reading, Proust, Marcel
Days of Reading
Contents
John Ruskin
Days of Reading (I)
Days of Reading (II)
From The Method of Sainte-Beuve (extracts)
Swann Explained by Proust
John Ruskin
One by one, like the ‘muses leaving their father Apollo to go and bring light to the world’, Ruskin’s ideas left the godlike head which had borne them and, embodied in living books, went to bring instruction to the nations.
Ruskin had withdrawn into the solitude in which prophetic existences often end until it pleases God to call back the cenobite or ascetic whose superhuman task is done. And the mystery which was being fulfilled, the slow destruction of a perishable brain which had harboured an immortal posterity, could only be guessed at, through the veil stretched over it by pious hands.
Today death has put mankind in possession of the immense inheritance that Ruskin bequeathed to it. For the man of genius can only give birth to works which will not die by creating them in the image not of the mortal being that he is, but of the exemplum of mankind he bears within him. His thoughts are in some sense lent to him for his lifetime, of which they are the companions.
On his death they return to mankind and instruct it. Such as that august family dwelling in the rue de la Rochefoucauld known as the home of Gustave Moreau while he yet lived and since his death as the Musée Gustave Moreau.
There has long been a John Ruskin Museum (in Sheffield). Its catalogue is like an epitome of all the arts and all the sciences. Photographs of paintings by the masters are found next to collections of minerals, as in Goethe’s house.
Like the Ruskin Museum, Ruskin’s oeuvre is universal. He sought the truth, he found beauty even in chronological charts and the laws of society. But the logicians having so defined the ‘Fine Arts’ as to exclude mineralogy as well as political economy, it is only of that part of Ruskin’s oeuvre which concerns the ‘Fine Arts’ as they are generally understood, of Ruskin as aesthetician and art critic, that I shall have to speak here.
It was said first of all that he was a realist. And indeed he often reiterated that the artist should apply himself to the pure imitation of nature, ‘without rejecting, despising, choosing anything’.
But it has been said also that he was an intellectualist for he wrote that the best picture was the one which contained the loftiest ideas.
Speaking of the group of children who are amusing themselves sailing toy boats in the foreground of Turner’s ‘Building of Carthage’, he concludes: ‘The exquisite choice of this incident, as expression of the ruling passion which was to be the source of the future greatness of the new city … is quite as appreciable when it is told as when it is seen, it has nothing to do with the technicalities of painting; a scratch of the pen would have conveyed the idea and spoken to the intellect as much as the elaborate realizations of colour. Such a thought as this is something far above all art; it is epic poetry of the highest order.’
‘In the same way,’ adds Milsand, who quotes this passage, ‘when he analyses a “Holy Family” by Tintoretto, the feature by which Ruskin recognizes a great master is a ruined wall and the beginnings of some masonry, by means of which the artist gives us symbolically to understand that the birth of Christ was the end of the Jewish economy and the advent of the new alliance.
A composition by the same Venetian painter, a “Crucifixion”, Ruskin finds to be a masterpiece of painting because the artist has been able, by a seemingly insignificant incident, by introducing a donkey grazing off some palm leaves in the background to Calvary, to state the profound idea that it was Jewish materialism, with its expectation of a purely temporal Messiah and with the disappointment of its hopes at the entry into Jerusalem, that was the source of the hatred unleashed against the Saviour and hence of his death.’
It has been said that he did away with the role of imagination in art by giving too large a role to science. Did he not say that: ‘… every class of rock, earth and cloud, must be known by the painter, with geologic and meteorologic accuracy … Every geological formation has features peculiar to itself; definite lines of fracture, giving rise to fixed resultant forms of rock and earth; peculiar vegetable products, among which still further distinctions are wrought out by variations of climate and elevation … [The painter] observes every character of the plant’s colour and form … he seizes on its lines of … rigidity or repose … observes its local habits, its love or fear of peculiar places, its nourishment or destruction by particular influences; he associates it in his mind with all the features of the situation it inhabits … He must render the delicate fissure, and descending curve, and undulating shadow of the mouldering soil with gentle and fine finger like the touch of the rain itself … The greatest picture is that which conveys to the mind of the spectator the greatest number of the greatest ideas.’
But it has been said in return that he ruined science by giving too large a place in it to the imagination. And indeed, one can but think of the simple-minded finalism of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre saying that God has divided melons into slices so as to make them easier for men to eat, when one reads passages such as this: ‘… God has employed colour in His creation as the unvarying accompaniment of all that is purest, most innocent, and most precious; while for things precious only in material uses, or dangerous, common colours are used … look at a dove’s neck, and compare it with the grey back of a viper … So again, the crocodile and alligator are grey, but the innocent lizard green and beautiful.’
Although it has been said that he reduced art to being merely the vassal of science, since he carried his theory of the work of art seen as giving us facts about the nature of things to the point of declaring that ‘a Turner discloses more about the nature of rocks than any academy will ever know,’ and that ‘a Tintoretto need only let his hand go to reveal a multitude of truths about the play of the muscles which will confound all of the world’s anatomists,’ it has been said also that he humbled science before art.
It has been said lastly that he was a pure aesthetician and that his one religion was that of Beauty, because he in fact loved it throughout his life.
But it has been said on the other hand that he was not even an artist, because into his appreciation of beauty he intruded considerations that were perhaps higher but were certainly alien to aesthetics. The first chapter of The Seven Lamps of Architecture lays down that the architect should use the most precious and durable materials, an obligation made to derive from the sacrifice of Jesus and the permanent conditions of that sacrifice agreeable to God, conditions we have no call to think have been modified, God not having let us know explicitly that they have been. And here is one of his arguments in Modern Painters, in order to settle the question of knowing who is right between the supporters of colour and the adepts of chiaroscuro: ‘… but take a wider view of nature, and compare generally rainbows, sunrises, roses, violets, butterflies, birds, gold-fish, rubies, opals, and corals, with alligators, hippopotami, … sharks, slugs, bones, fungi, fogs, and corrupting, stinging, destroying things in general, and you will feel then how the question stands between the colourists and the chiaroscurists, – which of them have nature and life on their side, and which have sin and death.’
And because so many contrary things have been said about Ruskin, the conclusion is that he was contradictory.
Of all these aspects of Ruskin’s physiognomy, the one we are most familiar with, because it is the one of which we possess, if I may so put it, the most painstaking and successful, the most striking and widely known portrait, is the Ruskin who throughout his life knew of only one religion: that of Beauty.
It may be the literal truth that the worship of Beauty was the perpetual activity of Ruskin’s life; but I adjudge that the object of that life, its deep, secret and constant intention, was other, and if I say so it is not in order to go against the system of M. de la Sizeranne, but to prevent his being depreciated in readers’ minds by an interpretation which is false but natural and as if inevitable.
Not only was Ruskin’s principal religion religion as such (I shall return to this point in a moment, because it dominates and characterizes his aesthetic), but to remain for the present with his ‘Religion of Beauty’, our own age must be warned that, if it wishes to refer truthfully to Ruskin, it cannot utter these words without emending the sense which its aesthetic dilettantism is too inclined to lend to them. In fact, for an age of dilettantes and aesthetes, a worshipper of Beauty is a man who, practising no other form of worship but his own, and acknowledging no other god but it, must spend his life in the enjoyment afforded by the voluptuous contemplation of works of art.
But, for reasons the wholly metaphysical search for which
