Much of what is said by our contemporaries in their intellectual exchanges bears his imprint, just as on coins one sees the effigy of the reigning sovereign. In death he continues to enlighten us, like those extinguished stars whose light still reaches us, and it can be said of him what he said when Turner died: ‘It is through those eyes, closed for ever in the depths of the grave, that generations yet unborn will see nature.’
‘In what tempting and magnificent forms falsehood may have insinuated itself into the very heart of his intellectual sincerity …’ This is what I meant to say: there is a sort of idolatry which no one has defined better than Ruskin himself, in a passage from the Lectures on Art: ‘Such I conceive generally, though indeed with good arising out of it, for every great evil brings some good in its backward eddies – such I conceive to have been the deadly function of art in its ministry to what, whether in heathen or Christian lands, and whether in the pageantry of words, or colours, or fair forms, is truly, and in the deep sense, to be called idolatry – the serving with the best of our hearts and minds, some dear or sad fantasy which we have made for ourselves, while we disobey the present call of the Master, who is not dead, and who is not now fainting under His cross, but requiring us to take up ours.’
Now it certainly seems that at the basis of Ruskin’s work, at the root of his talent, one finds this very idolatry. No doubt he never allowed it completely to overlay – even as an embellishment, – to immobilize, paralyse and finally to kill his intellectual and moral sincerity. In every line he wrote, as at each moment of his life, one senses this need for sincerity struggling against idolatry, proclaiming its vanity and humbling beauty before duty, be it an unaesthetic duty.
I shall not take examples of this from his life (which was not like the lives of Racine, or Tolstoy, or Maeterlinck, aesthetic at first and later moral, but one in which morality established its rights from the outset and in the very heart of his aesthetic – without perhaps ever liberating itself as completely as in the lives of the other Masters I have just named). I have no need to recall its stages, for they are quite well known, from the early scruples which he felt at drinking tea while looking at Titians, up until the time when, having swallowed up the five millions left him by his father on his social and philanthropic work, he decided to sell his Turners.
But there is a more inward form of dilettantism than the active form (which he had overcome) and the real duel between his idolatry and his sincerity was fought out not at certain moments of his life, or in certain passages in his books, but the whole time, in those deep and secret places, unknown almost to ourselves, where our personality receives images from the imagination, ideas from the intellect and words from the memory, and affirms itself in the ceaseless choices it makes from them and ceaselessly wagers in a sense the destiny of our moral and spiritual lives. I have the impression that in those places the sin of idolatry never ceased to be committed by Ruskin. And at the very moment when he was preaching sincerity he lacked it himself, not in what he said but in the manner in which he said it.
The doctrines he was professing were moral and not aesthetic doctrines, yet he chose them for their beauty. And as he did not want to present them as beautiful but as true, he was obliged to lie to himself concerning the nature of the reasons which had led him to adopt them. Hence a compromising with his conscience so unceasing that immoral doctrines sincerely professed might have been less dangerous for the integrity of his mind than these moral doctrines whose affirmation is not wholly sincere, having been dictated by an unacknowledged aesthetic preference.
This sin was being committed constantly, in the actual choice of each explanation he gave of a fact, of each judgement he passed on a work, in his actual choice of the words he used – and it finally lent a mendacious attitude to the mind that was constantly giving way to it. So that the reader may be better able to judge the sort of trompe l’oeil which a passage from Ruskin is for anyone, including for Ruskin himself, I shall quote one of those which I find most beautiful yet where this defect is at its most flagrant.
You will see that if in theory (in appearance, that is, the content of a writer’s ideas being always the appearance, and their form the reality) beauty has been subordinated to the moral sense and to truth, in actual fact truth and the moral sense have been subordinated to the aesthetic sense, and to an aesthetic sense somewhat distorted by these perpetual compromises. The subject is ‘The Causes of Venice’s Decline’.
‘Not in the wantonness of wealth, not in vain ministry to the desire of the eye or the pride of life, were those marbles hewn into transparent strength, and those arches arrayed in the colours of the iris. There is a message written in the dyes of them, that once was written in blood; and a sound in the echoes of their vaults, that one day shall fill the vault of heaven, – “He shall return to do judgement and justice.”
The strength of Venice was given her, so long as she remembered this: her destruction found her when she had forgotten this; and it found her irrevocably, because she forgot it without excuse. Never had a city a more glorious Bible. Among the nations of the North, a rude and shadowy sculpture filled their temples with confused and hardly legible imagery; but, for her, the skill and the treasures of the East had gilded every letter, and illumined every page, till the Book-Temple shone from afar off like the star of the Magi.
In other cities, the meetings of the people were often in places withdrawn from religious association, subject to violence and to change; and on the grass of the dangerous rampart, and in the dust of the troubled street, there were deeds done and counsels taken, which, if we cannot justify, we may sometimes forgive. But the sins of Venice, whether in her palace or in her piazza, were done with the Bible at her right hand.
The walls on which its testimony was written were separated but by a few inches of marble from those which guarded the secrets of her councils, or confined the victims of her policy. And when in her last hours she threw off all shame and all restraint, and the great square of the city became filled with the madness of the whole earth, be it remembered how much her sin was greater, because it was done in the face of the House of God, burning with the letters of His Law.
Mountebank and masquer laughed their laugh and went their way; and a silence has followed them, not unforetold; for amidst them all, through century after century of gathering vanity and festering guilt, that white dome of St Mark’s had uttered in the dead ear of Venice: “Know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement.”
Now if Ruskin had been entirely sincere with himself he would not have thought that the crimes of the Venetians had been more inexcusable and more severely punished than those of other men because they possessed a church of multicoloured marble instead of a limestone cathedral, because the Doge’s palace was next to St Mark’s instead of at the other end of the town, and because in Byzantine churches, instead of being simply represented as in the sculpture of northern churches, the biblical texts of the mosaics are accompanied by lettering forming a quotation from the Gospel or the prophecies. It is none the less true that this passage from The Stones of Venice is of great beauty, even though it is quite difficult to account for the reasons for that beauty. It seems to me to rest on something false and I feel some scruples about yielding to it.
Yet there must be some truth in it. There is no altogether false beauty properly speaking, for aesthetic pleasure is that very pleasure which goes with the discovery of a truth. What is quite hard to say is to what order of truth the very keen aesthetic pleasure one gets from reading such a passage can correspond.
It is itself mysterious, full at once of images of beauty and of religion like that same church of St Mark’s, where all the figures from the Old and New Testaments appear against a background of a sort of splendid darkness and fitful brilliancy.
I remember having read it for the first time in St Mark’s itself, during an hour of storm and darkness when the mosaics shone with their own material light alone, with an inner, earthly and ancient gold, to which the Venetian sun, which sets even the angels of the campaniles on fire, no longer added anything of itself; the emotion which I
