Yet in The Bible of Amiens, where one might suppose that he had brought together all his thoughts about Amiens, not once, in the pages where he speaks of the Vierge Dorée, does he make reference to the statues of Chartres. Such is the infinite wealth of his love and of his knowledge.
Usually, with a writer, the harking back to certain favourite examples, or even the repetition of certain developments, reminds us that we have to deal with a man who had a certain life, particular knowledge which took the place of some other knowledge, and a limited experience from which he drew all the advantage he could.
Merely by consulting the index to Ruskin’s various books, the constant novelty of the works cited there, and even more the spurning or, very often, abandoning for good of an item of knowledge used only once, give one a sense of something more than human, or rather the impression that each book is by someone new, who has other knowledge, not the same experience, another life.
The delightful game he played with his inexhaustible riches was forever to be drawing new treasures out from the wonderful jewel-cases of his memory: one day the precious rose window of Amiens, another day the golden lacework of the porch at Abbeville, and to wed these to the dazzling gems of Italy.
He was able indeed to pass from one country to another in this way because the same soul that he had worshipped in the stones of Pisa was that which had also given their immortal form to the stones of Chartres. No one has had his sense of the oneness of the Christian art of the Middle Ages, from the banks of the Somme to the banks of the Arno, and he has realized in our hearts the dream of the great medieval popes for a ‘Christian Europe’. If, as has been said, his name has to remain tied to Pre-Raphaelitism, we should understand by that not the one following Turner but that from before Raphael. Today we can forget the services he rendered to Hunt, to Rossetti, to Millais; but we cannot forget what he did for Giotto, for Carpaccio, for Bellini. His godlike task was not to arouse the living but to resurrect the dead.
Is this oneness of the Christian art of the Middle Ages not everywhere to be seen in the perspective of those passages in which his imagination here and there illuminates the stones of France with a magical reflection from Italy?
A moment ago we saw him in Pleasures of England comparing the Amiens Charity with that of Giotto. In The Nature of Gothic see how he compares the way in which flames are treated in Italian Gothic and in French, where he takes the porch of Saint-Maclou in Rouen for his example. And in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in connection with this same porch, see how something of the colours of Italy plays over its grey stones.
‘The subject of the tympanum bas-relief is the Last Judgement, and the sculpture of the Inferno side is carried out with a degree of power whose fearful grotesqueness I can only describe as a mingling of the minds of Orcagna and Hogarth. The demons are perhaps even more awful than Orcagna’s; and, in some of the expressions of debased humanity in its utmost despair, the English painter is at least equalled.
Not less wild is the imagination which gives fury and fear even to the placing of the figures. An evil angel, poised on the wing, drives the condemned troops from before the Judgement seat … but they are urged by him so furiously, that they are driven not merely to the extreme limit of that scene, which the sculptor confined elsewhere within the tympanum, but out of the tympanum and into the niches of the arch; while the flames that follow them, bent by the blast, as it seems, of the angel’s wings, rush into the niches also, and burst up through their tracery, the three lowermost niches being represented as all on fire, while, instead of their usual vaulted and ribbed ceiling, there is a demon in the roof of each, with his wings folded over it, grinning down out of the black shadow.’
Nor was this parallelism between the different kinds of art and different countries the most profound one he was to insist on. He was to be struck by the identity of certain religious ideas in pagan and Christian symbols. M. Ary Renan has remarked, very profoundly, how much of Christ there is in Gustave Moreau’s Prometheus. Ruskin, whose devotion to Christian art never made him contemptuous of paganism, compared in an aesthetic and religious sense the lion of St Jerome with the Nemean lion, Virgil with Dante, Samson with Hercules, Theseus with the Black Prince, the prophecies of Isaiah with the prophecies of the Cumean sibyl.
There is no call, certainly, to liken Ruskin to Gustave Moreau, but it can be said that a natural tendency, fostered by their acquaintance with the Primitives, led both to proscribe in art the expression of violent feelings and, in so far as it was applied to the study of symbols, to a certain fetishism in the worship of the symbols themselves, a fetishism that carried few dangers however for minds so fundamentally attached to the feeling symbolized that they could pass from one symbol to another without being detained by mere differences of surface.
As for the systematic prohibition of the expression of violent emotion in art, the principle which M. Ary Renan has called the principle of Beautiful Inertia, where can we find it better defined than in the passages on ‘The relation of Michaelangelo to Tintoretto’?1 Was it not inevitable that his study of medieval French and Italian art should lead to his somewhat exclusive worship of symbols?
And because he was searching, beneath the work of art, for the soul of an age, the resemblance between the symbols of the portal at Chartres and the frescoes of Pisa was bound to affect him as a proof of the originality typical of the spirit by which artists were then inspired, and their differences as evidence of its variety. With anyone else the aesthetic response might have risked being chilled by reasoning.
But in him all was love, and iconography, as he understood it, might better have been called iconolatry. At this point, moreover, art criticism gives way to something greater perhaps; its procedures are those almost of science, it is a contribution to history.
The appearance in the porches of cathedrals of some new quality informs us of changes no less profound in the history, not only of art but of civilization, as those announced to geologists by the appearance on earth of a new species. The stone sculpted by nature is no more instructive than the stone sculpted by the artist, and we derive no greater profit from that which preserves for us some ancient monster than that which exhibits a new god to us.
From this point of view the drawings which accompany Ruskin’s writings are highly significant. In the one plate you may find a single architectural motif as treated at Lisieux, Bayeux, Verona and Padua, as if we had to do with the varieties of a single species of butterfly in different climes. But the stones which he so loved never become abstract examples for him.
On each stone you can see the nuance of the passing moment joined with the colour of the centuries. ‘… Rushing down the street to see St Wulfran again,’ he tells us, ‘before the sun was off the towers, are things to cherish the past for, – to the end.’ He went further even; he made no separation between the cathedrals and that background of rivers and valleys against which they appear to the traveller as he approaches, like in a primitive painting. One of his most instructive drawings in this respect is that reproduced in the second engraving of ‘Our Fathers have told us’ entitled ‘Amiens, Jour des Trépassés’.
In the towns of Amiens, Abbeville, Beauvais and Rouen, consecrated by Ruskin’s stay in them, he spent his time sketching, either in the churches (‘without being disturbed by the sacristan’) or else in the open air. And what delightful, transient colonies they must have formed in these towns, the troupe of sketchers and engravers whom he took with him, just as Plato shows us the Sophists following Protagoras from town to town, and similar also to the swallows, in imitation of which they would pause for choice on the old roofs and ancient towers of the cathedrals.
Perhaps some of these disciples of Ruskin’s are still to be met with who accompanied him to the banks of this re-evangelized Somme, as if the days of St Firmin and St Salve had returned, and who, while the new apostle was talking and explicating Amiens like a Bible, made instead of notes drawings, graceful notes the folder of which is doubtless to be found in some English museum room and in which I imagine reality will have been slightly rearranged, in the style of Viollet-le-Duc.
The engraving ‘Amiens, Jour des Trépassés’ seems a little too beautiful to be true. Is
