I went to the portal of the Booksellers none the less. But how to recognize the little figure among the hundreds of others? Suddenly a young sculptress of talent and of promise, Mme L. Yeatman, said to me: ‘Here’s one that looks like it.’ We looked a little lower down, and … there it was. It wasn’t ten centimetres high.
It has been worn away yet its gaze is there still, the stone still has the hole picking out the pupil and lending it the expression by which I recognized it. There, amidst thousands of others, an artist dead centuries before has left this little person who dies a little each day, and who had been dead for a very long time, lost in the midst of that host of others, for ever.
But he had set it there. And one day a man for whom there is no death, no infinity of matter, no oblivion, a man who, casting far away from him that annihilation which weighs us down, to pursue ends that dominated his life, so many that he was unable to achieve them all whereas we seem to lack them, this man came, and seeing, in those waves of stone where one jagged crest seemed just like another, all the laws of life, all the soul’s thoughts, named them by their names, and said: ‘Look, it is this, it is that.’
As at the Day of Judgement, which is represented not far away, the trumpet of the archangel is to be heard in his words as he says: ‘Those who have lived shall live, matter is nothing.’ And indeed, like the dead represented not far away in the tympanum, who have been awoken by the archangel’s trumpet and have arisen, have resumed their form, are recognizable and alive, so the little figure has come alive again and has recovered its gaze, and the Judge has said: ‘Thou hast lived, thou shalt live.’
He himself is not an immortal judge and his body will die; but what matter! He carries out his immortal task as if he were not going to die, unconcerned by the size of the object that occupies his time and, though having but one human life to live, he spends several days in front of one of the ten thousand figures on a church. He drew it. For him it corresponded to the ideas stirring in his brain, heedless of approaching old age. He drew it, he spoke of it.
And the monstrous, inoffensive little figure was to be resurrected, against all hope, from that death which seems more absolute than others, that disappearance into the midst of an infinite number made anonymous by their resemblance, but out of which genius can quickly draw us also.
Rediscovering it there, one could not but be moved. It seems to live and to be gazing, or rather to have been taken by death in the very act of gazing, like those Pompeians whose movements remain suspended. In fact it is the sculptor’s idea that has been seized here in its movement by the immobility of the stone. I was touched to rediscover it there; nothing then dies of what has once lived, the sculptor’s thought any more than that of Ruskin.
Coming upon it there, necessary to Ruskin, who devoted one of the very few engravings illustrating his book to it (The Seven Lamps of Architecture) because for him it was an actual and enduring part of his thought, and pleasing to me because his thought is necessary to me, a guide to my own which met with his along the way, I felt myself to be in a state of mind closer to that of the artists who carved the Last Judgement in the tympanum and who believed that the individual, that which is most particular in a person, in an intention, does not die but remains in the memory of God and will be resurrected. Who is right out of Hamlet and the gravedigger, when the one sees only a skull and the other recalls a fancy? Science may say: the gravedigger; but it reckons without Shakespeare, who will cause the memory of that fancy to endure beyond the dust of the skull.
At the angel’s summons, each one of the dead is found to be still there, in his place, when we had thought him long since turned to dust. At Ruskin’s summons, we find the smallest figure, framing a tiny quatrefoil, resurrected in its form, gazing at us with the same gaze which seems to fit inside no more than a millimetre of stone.
No doubt, poor little monster, I would not have been clever enough to find you, amongst the thousands of stones in our towns, to pick out your figure, to rediscover your personality, to summon you, to make you live again. Infinity, numbers, annihilation weigh us down, but it is not that they are so strong; it is that my mind is not very strong.
True, there was nothing really beautiful about you. Your poor face, that I would never have noticed, does not have a very interesting expression, although obviously it has, as everyone does, an expression that no one else has ever had. But since you were sufficiently alive to continue to gaze with that same sideways gaze, for Ruskin to notice you and, after he had spoken your name, for his reader to be able to recognize you, are you sufficiently alive now, are you sufficiently loved? One can but think on you with tenderness, unkind though your look be, because you are a living creature, because, through long centuries, you were dead without hope of resurrection and because you have been resurrected.
And one of these days perhaps some other person will go to seek you out in your portal, looking fondly on your oblique and spiteful face, now resurrected, because what has come from a human mind can alone one day arrest another mind which, in its turn, has fascinated our own. You were right to remain there, unregarded, crumbling away. You could hope for nothing from matter, in which you were mere nothingness.
But the little ones have nothing to fear, nor do the dead. For sometimes the Spirit visits the earth; and as it passes the dead arise, and little forgotten faces recover their gaze to engage that of the living who, for their sake, abandon the living who are not alive and go to seek for life only where the Spirit has shown it to them, in stones which are already dust yet still contain human thought.
The man who enveloped the old cathedrals in more love and more joy than is bestowed on them by the sun when it adds its fugitive smile to their centuries-old beauty, cannot, if we understand him aright, have been mistaken. In the world of the spirit it is as in the universe of physics, where the height of a fountain can not exceed the height of the place from which the water has originally descended.
The great beauties of literature correspond to something, and in art it is enthusiasm perhaps which is the criterion of truth. If we suppose Ruskin to have sometimes been mistaken, as a critic, in the exact assessment of a work’s value, the beauty of his wrong judgement is often of greater interest than that of the work being judged and corresponds to something which may be other than it but no less precious.
I do not believe that Ruskin was wrong to say of the ‘Beau Dieu of Amiens’ that ‘no sculpture would satisfy, or ought to satisfy, the hope of any loving soul that has learned to trust in Him; but at the time, it was beyond what till then had been reached in sculptured tenderness,’ and M. Huysmans right to call this same Amiens God ‘a fop with a sheep’s face’, but it hardly matters that we should know. Whether or not the ‘Beau Dieu of Amiens’ is what Ruskin thought it was is of no importance for us.
Just as Buffon said that ‘all the intellectual beauties to be found (in a beautiful style), all the relations of which it is made up, are so many truths as useful and perhaps more precious for the public mind than those which may constitute the subject-matter,’ so the truths making up the beauty of the passages in the Bible about the Beau Dieu of Amiens have value independently of the beauty of the statue, but Ruskin would not have found them had he spoken of it disdainfully, for enthusiasm alone could give him the power to discover them.
What it will never be given to us to know perhaps, and what in any case we cannot search for here, is just how faithfully that marvellous soul reflected the universe, and in what tempting and pathetic forms falsehood may, for all that, have insinuated itself into the very heart of his intellectual sincerity. Whatever the answer,
