Very far from being a dilettante or an aesthete, Ruskin was the precise opposite, one of those Carlyle-like men warned by their genius of the vanity of all pleasure and at the same time of the presence close beside them of a timeless reality, intuitively perceived by their inspiration.
Their talent is given to them as an ability to capture this omnipotent and timeless reality, to which they dedicate, enthusiastically and as if in obedience to a command from their conscience, their fleeting lifetimes, in order to endow them with value.
Such men, attentive and anxious, faced by a universe needing to be deciphered, are warned as to those elements of reality on which their special gifts will shed a peculiar light for them, by a sort of demon who guides them, of a voice that they can hear, the timeless inspiration of beings of genius. Ruskin’s special gift was the sense of Beauty, in nature as in art.
It was in Beauty that his temperament led him to seek for reality, and hence his wholly religious life was spent wholly aesthetically. But he did not conceive of the Beauty to which he thus found himself devoting his life as an object of enjoyment designed to attract him, but as a reality infinitely more important than life itself, for which he would have given his own life.
You will see Ruskin’s aesthetic follow from this. You must understand first of all that the years in which he came to know a new school of architecture or of painting may have been the principal landmarks of his moral life. He can speak of the years when the Gothic made its appearance for him with the same gravity, the same recurrence of emotion, the same serenity as a Christian speaks of the day when the truth was revealed to him.
The events of his life were intellectual ones and its important landmarks those when he penetrated into a new form of art, the year when he understood Abbeville, the year when he understood Rouen, the day when the painting of Titian and the shadows in Titian’s painting seemed nobler to him than the painting of Rubens and the shadows in Rubens’s painting.
You must understand next that the poet being for Ruskin, as for Carlyle, a sort of scribe writing down at nature’s dictation a more or less important part of her secret, the artist’s first duty is to add nothing of his own pressing to this message from God. From which height the complaints of realism as well as of intellectualism directed at Ruskin can be seen to evaporate, like clouds that hug the ground.
If such objections are wide of the mark, it is because they do not aim high enough. Such criticisms mistake the right altitude. The reality which the artist must record is at once material and intellectual. Matter is real because it is an expression of the mind.
As for mere appearances, no one was more sardonic than Ruskin about those who see the object of art as being their imitation. ‘The simple pleasure in the imitation,’ he says, ‘would be precisely of the same degree (if the accuracy could be equal), whether the subject of it were the hero or his horse … we may consider tears as a result of agony or of art, whichever we please, but not of both at the same moment.
If we are surprised by them as an attainment of the one, it is impossible we can be moved by them as a sign of the other.’ If he attaches such importance to the way things look, this is because it alone reveals their underlying nature. M. de la Sizeranne has given us an admirable translation of a passage where Ruskin shows that the ‘leading’ lines of a tree can reveal to us which troublesome trees have pushed it to one side, which winds have tormented it, etc. The configuration of something is not simply the image of its nature, it is the clue to its destiny and the transcript of its history.
Another consequence of which conception of art is this: if reality is one and the man of genius he who sees it, what importance does the substance in which he represents it have, be it pictures, statues, symphonies, laws, actions? In his Heroes and Hero-Worship Carlyle makes no distinction between Shakespeare and Cromwell, Mohammed and Burns.
Emerson numbers Swedenborg as well as Montaigne among his Representative Men. Where the system goes too far is, because the reality being translated is one, in not distinguishing profoundly enough between the different modes of translation.
Carlyle says that it was inevitable that Boccaccio and Petrarch should have been good diplomats because they were good poets. Ruskin commits the same error when he says that ‘a painting is beautiful to the extent that the ideas it translates into images are independent of the language of images.’ If Ruskin’s system errs in any direction, it is in this one, it seems to me. Because painting cannot attain to the unitary reality of things and hence compete with literature, except on condition that it not be literary.
If Ruskin promulgated the artist’s duty as being scrupulously to obey these ‘voices’ of his genius which tell him what is real and to be transcribed, it was because he himself had had experience of what was genuine in inspiration, infallible in enthusiasm and fruitful in reverence.
Only, although what excites enthusiasm, commands reverence and prompts inspiration be different for each one of us, we each end by attributing to it a more particularly sacred character. It can be said that for Ruskin this revelation, this guide was the Bible.
Here let us pause as at a fixed point, at the centre of gravity of Ruskin’s aesthetic. Thus it was that his religious sense directed his aesthetic sense.
And first, to those who may think that it adulterated it, that into the artistic appreciation of monuments, statues and pictures it introduced religious considerations which had no place there, I shall answer that it was quite the reverse. That something divine which Ruskin sensed deep inside the feeling inspired in him by works of art was precisely what was profound and original about that feeling, which imposed itself on his taste without being susceptible to modification. And the religious reverence that he brought to the expression of this feeling, his fear of subjecting it to the least distortion in translating it, prevented him, contrary to what has often been supposed, from ever introducing into his impressions of works of art any artifice of reasoning that was foreign to them.
So that those who see in him a moralist or an apostle loving in art what is not art, are equally as mistaken as those who, ignoring the profound essence of his aesthetic feeling, confuse it with a sensual dilettantism. So that, finally, his religious fervour, which had been the token of his aesthetic sincerity, further reinforced it and shielded it against all interference from without.
It is as I see it of no importance that this or that notion of his supernatural aesthetic should be false. All those who have some idea of the laws by which genius develops know that its strength is measured more by the strength of its beliefs than by whatever satisfaction the object of those beliefs may offer to common sense. But since Ruskin’s Christianity was of the very essence of his intellectual nature, his artistic preferences, equally profound, had to have some kinship with it.
And so, just as his love of Turner’s landscapes corresponded in Ruskin to that love of nature which afforded him his greatest joys, so to the fundamentally Christian nature of his thought there corresponded his permanent predilection, which dominated the whole of his life, the whole of his work, for what may be called Christian art: the architecture and sculpture of the French Middle Ages, the architecture, sculpture and painting of the Italian Middle Ages.
There is no need to search in his life for evidence of the disinterested passion with which he loved their works, you will find the proof of it in his books. So vast was his experience that very often the most thorough knowledge displayed in one work is neither used nor mentioned, even by way of allusion, in those other of his books where it would be appropriate.
Such are his resources that he does not lend us his words; he gives them to us and does not take them back. You know, for example, that he wrote a book on Amiens cathedral. From which you might conclude that that was the cathedral he loved the most and knew the best. Yet in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, where Rouen cathedral is named forty times as an example, and that of Bayeux nine times, Amiens is not named once.
In Val d’Arno, he confesses that the church that made him the most profoundly drunk on Gothic was Saint-Urbain in Troyes. Yet, not once in The Seven Lamps nor in The Bible of Amiens is mention made of Saint-Urbain. So far as the lack of references to Amiens
