No, I shall not find a picture more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, although I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, because I want to remain sincere and I know that a picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it. I shall not collect images of the hawthorn. I do not venerate the hawthorn, I go to see it and to breathe it in. I have allowed myself this brief incursion – which is not in any way an offensive – on to the ground of contemporary literature because it seemed to me that the features of idolatry there in germ in Ruskin would stand out clearly to the reader when thus magnified, all the more for being so strongly differentiated.
I beg our contemporary in any case, should he have recognized himself in this very clumsy pencil sketch, to believe that it was done without malice and that, as I have said, I needed to go to the furthermost limits of sincerity with myself to make this complaint against Ruskin and discover this fragile element in my absolute admiration for him.
Now not only is there ‘nothing at all dishonourable in sharing with Ruskin’, but also I could never find any greater compliment to pay this contemporary than to have addressed the same criticism to his as to Ruskin. I can almost regret having been so discreet as not to name him. For when one is admitted into the presence of Ruskin, be it in the attitude of a donor, solely in order to hold up his book and to help it to be read more attentively, that is not a punishment but an honour.
I come back to Ruskin. So ‘used’ am I to him today that to grasp the evidences, and study the nature of this idolatry, and the slight factitiousness it sometimes adds to the keenest literary pleasures that he affords us, I need to descend deep into my own self. But it must often have shocked me when I was starting to love his books, before gradually closing my eyes to their defects, as happens in any love-affair. Love-affairs with living people may sometimes have a sordid origin which is later purified.
A man makes the acquaintance of a woman because she can help him to achieve an end unconnected with herself. Then, once he knows her, he loves her for herself, and unhesitatingly sacrifices to her that end she was merely to have helped him to attain.
Thus originally there was something self-interested mixed in with my love for Ruskin’s books, a delight in the intellectual profit I was to derive from them. The fact is that, sensing the power and attraction of the very first pages I read, I made an effort not to resist them, not to argue too much with myself, because I felt that if one day the attraction of Ruskin’s thought should extend for me over everything he had touched, in short if I became completely enamoured of his thought, the world would be enriched by everything of which I had hitherto been ignorant, by Gothic cathedrals and by any number of pictures in England and in Italy which had not yet awoken in me that desire without which there is never true knowledge.
For Ruskin’s thought is not like the thought of an Emerson, for example, which is contained in its entirety in a book, something abstract that is, a pure sign of itself. The object to which a thought like Ruskin’s is applied and from which it is inseparable, is not immaterial, it is scattered across the surface of the earth. One must go to seek it wherever it is to be found, to Pisa, to Florence, to Venice, to the National Gallery, to Rouen, to Amiens, into the mountains of Switzerland. Such a thought, which has an object other than itself, which has realized itself in space, which is thought no longer infinite and free but limited and subjugated, which is incarnate in bodies of sculpted marble, in snow-covered mountains, in painted faces, is perhaps less godlike than pure thought.
But it makes the universe more beautiful for us, or at least certain parts of it, certain named parts, because it has touched them and initiated us into them many profound psychological truths for us, excludes us on the other hand from the poetic feeling for nature, because it puts us into selfish frames of mind (love is at the highest point along the scale of selfishness, but it is still selfish) in which the poetic feeling occurs only with difficulty.
Admiration for someone’s thought, on the contrary, causes beauty to arise at every step because it is constantly awakening the desire for it. The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgement of part of its independence.
‘What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.’ Such a view rests on a psychological error which will be discounted by all those who have thus accepted a spiritual discipline and feel thereby that their power of understanding and of feeling is infinitely enhanced, and their critical sense never paralysed. Then we are simply in a state of grace in which all our faculties, our critical sense as much as the others, are enhanced.
And so this voluntary servitude is the beginning of freedom. There is no better way of coming to be aware of what feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his. We are free in life but only if we have an aim: the sophism of an indifferent freedom was exposed long ago.
Those writers who are forever emptying their minds, thinking to rid them of all outside influence so as to be quite sure of remaining personal, are obeying, unknowingly, a sophism equally as naïve. In point of fact, the only occasions when we can truly call on the full power of our minds are those when we by forcing us, if we would understand them, to love them.
And so indeed it was; the universe suddenly took on for me again an infinite value. And my admiration for Ruskin lent to the things which he had brought me to love so great an importance that they seemed to me charged with a value higher than that of life itself.
This was literally so on an occasion when I believed that my days were numbered; I set off for Venice in order, before I died, to approach, to touch, to see embodied, in palaces that were decaying yet still upright, still pink, Ruskin’s ideas on the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages.
What importance, what reality can a town so special, so localized in time and so particularized in space as Venice have in the eyes of someone about to take leave of the earth, and how could the theories of domestic architecture that I might study there and verify from living examples, be amongst those ‘truths which dominate death, which keep us from fearing it and cause us almost to love it’ (Renan)? The power of genius is to make us love a beauty we feel to be more real than ourselves, in those things which in the eyes of others are as particular and as perishable as ourselves.
The poet’s ‘I shall say they are beautiful once your eyes have said so’ is not very true, if the eyes in question are those of the beloved. In a certain sense and whatever splendid compensations, on this same ground of poetry, it may be preparing for us, love depoeticizes nature.
To the man in love the earth is nothing more than ‘the carpet for the lovely child’s feet’ of his mistress, nature nothing more than ‘her temple’. That love which uncovers so do not believe we are acting independently, when we do not choose an arbitrary objective for our endeavours.
The theme of the novelist, the vision of the poet, the truth of the philosopher, impose themselves on them in an almost necessary way, externally to their minds so to speak. And it is by submitting his mind to the conveying of that vision, to the approximation to that truth, that the artist becomes truly himself.
But in speaking of the passion, somewhat artificial to start with but later so very profound, which I had for Ruskin’s thought, I speak by the light of memory and of a memory which recalls only the facts ‘but can repossess nothing of the deep past’.
It is only when certain periods of our lives are forever closed, when, even at those times when we seem to have been granted the power and the freedom, we are forbidden to reopen the doors to them by stealth, when we are incapable of reverting even for an instant to the state in which we were for so long, only then do we refuse to accept that such things should have been entirely abolished. We can no longer sing of them, having failed to heed Goethe’s wise admonition, that there is no poetry but in the things one can still feel. But if we are unable to relight the fires of the past, we would like at least to gather up their ashes.
For want of a resurrection of which we are no longer capable, we would like at least, with the
