A sort of egotistical return into the self is inevitable in these joys, in which erudition mixes with art and where the aesthetic pleasures may become keener but not remain so pure. So perhaps this passage from The Stones of Venice was beautiful above all for affording me precisely those mixed joys I had felt in St Mark’s, for it too, like the Byzantine church, had its biblical quotations inscribed beside the images in the mosaic of its style, dazzling amidst the shadows.
Did the same not hold for it, moreover, as for the mosaics in St Mark’s, whose purpose was to instruct and which laid no great store by their artistic beauty? Today they no longer give us anything except pleasure. Yet the pleasure their didacticism gives the scholar is a selfish one, and the most disinterested pleasure is still that given to the artist by a beauty despised by, or even unknown to those whose one purpose was to educate the people and who gave it to them as something extra.
On the last page of The Bible of Amiens, the ‘if … you would care for the promise to you’ is an example of the same kind. When, again in The Bible of Amiens, Ruskin ends the section on Egypt by saying: ‘She was the Tutress of Moses and the Hostess of Christ,’ we can allow the tutress of Moses: certain virtues are required in order to educate. But the fact of having been the ‘hostess’ of Christ may add beauty to the sentence but can it really come into the reckoning in a reasoned appreciation of the virtues of the Egyptian genius?
I have been trying to wrestle here with my most cherished aesthetic impressions, attempting to carry intellectual sincerity to its ultimate and cruellest limits. Do I need to add that if I enter this general caveat, in some sense in the absolute, less about Ruskin’s works than about their essential inspiration and the quality of their beauty, he nevertheless remains for me one of the greatest writers of all times and all countries.
Rather than seeking to decry a defect peculiar to Ruskin, I have been trying to lay hold in him, as in a ‘subject’ particularly favourable to such observation, of an infirmity essential to the human mind.
Once the reader has understood fully in what this ‘idolatry’ consists, he will be able to explain to himself the excessive importance that Ruskin attaches in his essays to lettering in works of art (an importance another reason for which I indicated, far too summarily, in my preface), as well as his misuse of the words ‘irreverent’ or ‘insolent’: ‘mystery which we are not required to unravel, or difficulties which we should be insolent in desiring to solve,’ ‘let the artist distrust the spirit of choice, it is an insolent spirit,’ ‘where it is just possible for an irreverent person rather to think the nave narrow than the apse high,’ etc., etc. – and the state of mind which they reveal.
I was thinking of this idolatry (I was thinking also of the pleasure Ruskin takes in balancing his phrases in an equilibrium which seems rather to impose a symmetrical arrangement on his thought than to receive one from it)3 when I said: ‘I do not have to look for the tempting and pathetic forms in which falsehood may have insinuated itself into the very heart of his intellectual sincerity.’ But I should, on the contrary, have looked for them and I should be committing that same sin of idolatry were I to continue to shelter behind this essentially Ruskinian formula of reverence. It is not that I fail to recognize the virtues of reverence, it is the very condition of love. But where love ceases, it must never be substituted for it, so enabling us to believe without examination and to admire on trust.
Ruskin moreover would have been the first to approve my not according to his writings an infallible authority, since he even refused it to the Holy Scriptures: ‘… and there is no possibility of attaching the idea of infallible truth to any form of human language …’ But he liked the attitude of ‘reverence’ which believes it ‘insolent to throw light on a mystery’. In order to have done with idolatry and to make yet more certain that no misunderstanding remains concerning it between myself and my reader, I would like to bring on here one of our most justly celebrated contemporaries (as unlike Ruskin in other ways as could be!) who allows this fault to show in his conversation, though not in his books, carried to such an excess that it is easier to recognize and to demonstrate it in his case, with no need any more to strive so hard to magnify it.
When he talks he is afflicted – delightfully – with idolatry. Those who have once heard him will find an ‘imitation’ very crude in which nothing survives of his attractions, but they will know however of whom I wish to speak, whom I am taking here as my example, when I tell them that in the material in which a tragic actress is draped he recognizes admiringly the same stuff as is worn by Death in Gustave Moreau’s ‘The Young Man and Death’, or in the costume of one of his lady friends: ‘the very dress and hairstyle worn by the Princesse de Cadignan the day she saw d’Arthez for the first time.’ And as he looks at the actress’s drapery or at the society woman’s dress he is moved by such noble associations and exclaims: ‘Quite lovely!’ not because the material is lovely, but because it is the material painted by Moreau or described by Balzac and hence forever sacred … to idolaters.
In his bedroom you will find dielytras, either real ones in a vase or painted ones in a mural done by artist friends, because this is the very flower one sees represented in the Madeleine at Vézélay. As for some object that has belonged to Baudelaire, or to Michelet, or to Hugo, that he hedges about with a religious reverence. I savour too profoundly, am even carried away by, the witty improvisations into which our idolater is led and inspired by the particular kind of pleasure he finds in such veneration to wish in the very least to wrangle with him over it.
But at the very height of my enjoyment I ask myself whether this incomparable talker – and the listener who lets him go on talking – are not equally guilty of insincerity; whether because a flower (the passion flower) bears on it the instruments of the passion, it is a sacrilege to offer it to someone of another religion, or whether the fact of a house’s having been lived in by Balzac (if nothing remains there anyway which might tell us something about him) makes it more beautiful. Ought we really, other than to pay her an aesthetic compliment, to prefer someone because her name is Bathilde, like the heroine of Lucien Leuwen?
Mme de Cadignan’s costume is a ravishing invention of Balzac’s because it gives us an idea of Mme de Cadignan’s artistry, and informs us of the impression she wishes to make on d’Arthez and of some of her ‘secrets’. But once deprived of the idea it contains, it is no more than a sign deprived of its meaning, that is to say, nothing; and to continue to worship it, to the point of going into ecstasies when one finds it again in real life on the body of a woman, that is true idolatry. This is the favourite intellectual sin of artists, to which very few of them have failed to succumb.
Felix culpa! one is tempted to say when one sees how fruitful it has been for them in terms of charming inventions. But they should at least not succumb without a struggle. There is in nature no particular form, however beautiful, which has value except for that portion of the infinite beauty that has been able to embody itself there: not even the apple blossom, not even the blossom of the pink hawthorn. My love for these is infinite and the affliction (hay fever) which proximity to them brings on enables me each spring to give them a proof of that love not within reach of everyone.
But even towards them, which are far from literary, far from being linked to any aesthetic tradition, which are not ‘the actual flower to be seen in such and such a picture by Tintoret’ as Ruskin would say, or such and such a drawing by Leonardo as our contemporary would say (who has revealed to us, among many other things, which everyone now speaks of yet to which no one had paid any regard before him – the drawings in the Accademia in Venice), I shall always beware of an exclusive cult that might attach itself to anything in them other than the delight they afford me, a cult in whose name, by an egotistical return into the self, I might make of them ‘my’ flowers and
