It is when Ruskin is far away from us that we translate his books and try to capture the characteristics of his thought in a close likeness. And so it is not the accents of our faith or of our love that you will come to know, but our piety alone that you will perceive here and there, stealthy and impassive, busied, like the Theban virgin, on the restoration of a tomb.
Notes
- Similarly in Val d’Arno, the lion of St Mark is the direct descendant of the lion of Nemea, and its plumed crest is the one to be seen on the head of the Hercules of Camarina, with the difference pointed out elsewhere in the same book ‘that Herakles kills the beast and makes a helmet and cloak of its skin; the Greek St Mark converts the beast and makes an evangelist of him.’ [Val d’Arno, 8, cciii.]
It is not in order to find another sacred lineage for the lion of Nemea that I have quoted this passage, but to emphasize the whole idea of the end of this chapter in The Bible of Amiens, ‘that there is a Sacred classical art’. Ruskin did not want (Val d’Arno) Greek to be contrasted with Christian but with the Gothic, ‘because St Mark is Greek like Herakles’. We touch here on one of Ruskin’s most important ideas, or more accurately on one of the most original sentiments he brought to the contemplation and study of Greek and Christian works of art, to convey which fully it is necessary to quote a passage from St Mark’s Rest which is, in my opinion, one of those where there emerges the most clearly anywhere in Ruskin, where that particular attitude of mind can most easily beseen at work which led him to pay no heed to the advent of Christianity, to recognize a Christian beauty already in the works of paganism and to trace the persistence of a Hellenic ideal into the works of the Middle Ages.
It is quite certain that this attitude of mind, wholly aesthetic in my view, at least logically in its essence if not chronologically in its origins, became systematized in Ruskin’s mind and that he extended it into his historical and religious criticism. But even when Ruskin is comparing Greek royalty with Frankish (Val d’Arno, chapter on ‘Franchise’), or when he is declaring in The Bible of Amiens that ‘Christianity brought no great alteration to the ideal of virtue and of human happiness,’ or when he speaks as we have seen on the preceding page of the religion of Horace, all he is doing is to draw theoretical conclusions from the aesthetic pleasures he had felt on rediscovering a canephoros in a Herodias, a Harpy in a cherub, a Greek vase in a Byzantine dome. Here is the passage in St Mark’s Rest: ‘And this is true, not of Byzantine art only, but of all Greek art … Let us leave, today … the word “Byzantine”. There is but one Greek school, from Homer’s day down to the Doge Selvo’s; and these St Mark’s mosaics are as truly wrought in the power of Daedalus, with the Greek constructive instinct … as ever chest of Cypselus or shaft of Erectheum.’
Then Ruskin enters the baptistery of St Mark’s and says: ‘Over the door is Herod’s feast. Herodias’s daughter dances with John the Baptist’s head in the charger, on her head, – simply the translation of any Greek maid on a Greek vase, bearing a pitcher of water on her head … Pass on now into the further chapel under the darker dome. Darker, and very dark; – to my old eyes scarcely decipherable, to yours, if young and bright, it should bebeautiful, for it is indeed the origin of all those golden-domed backgrounds of Bellini, and Cima, and Carpaccio; itself a Greek vase, but with new Gods. That ten-winged cherub in the recess of it, behind the altar, has written on the circle on its breast, “Fulness of Wisdom”.
It is the type of the Breath of the Spirit. But it was once a Greek Harpy, and its wasted limbs remain scarcely yet clothed with flesh from the claws of birds that they were … Above, Christ himself ascends, borne in a whirlwind of angels; and, as the vaults of Bellini and Carpaccio are only the amplification of the Harpy vault, so the Paradise of Tintoret is only the final fulfilment of the thought in this narrow cupola … there is no question but that these mosaics are not earlier than the thirteenth century. And yet they are still absolutely Greek in all modes of thought and forms of tradition. The Fountains of fire and water are merely forms of the Chimera and the Peirene; and the maid dancing, though a princess of the thirteenth century in sleeves of ermine, is yet the phantom of some sweet water-carrier from an Arcadian spring.’ [St Mark’s Rest, 92, et seq. The quotations are not continuous.] Cf., when Ruskin says: ‘I am alone, as I believe, in thinking still with Herodotus.’
Anyone of a mind sufficiently discerning to be struck by the features characteristic of a writer’s physiognomy, and who does not hold where Ruskin is concerned to everything he may have been told, that he was a prophet, a seer, a Protestant and other things which mean very little, will feel that such features, though certainly secondary, are yet very ‘Ruskinian’. Ruskin lives in a sort of brotherhood with all the great minds of every age, and since he is interested in them only to the extent that they are able to answer the eternal questions, for him there are no ancients or moderns and hecan talk of Herodotus as he would of a contemporary. As the ancients have no value for him except in so far as they are ‘of the present day’, and can serve as illustrations for our daily meditations, he does not treat them at all as ancients.
And so all those of their words which have not been rejected as obsolete and are no longer seen as relating to a given epoch, have a greater importance for him, and preserve in some sense the scientific value they may once have had but of which time had deprived them. From the manner in which Horace speaks of the spring of Bandusia, Ruskin deduces that he was pious, ‘in Milton’s fashion’. And even at the age of eleven, learning the odes of Anacreon for pleasure, he learnt from them ‘with certainty, what in later study of Greek art it proved extremely advantageous to me to know, that the Greeks liked doves, swallows, and roses just as well as I did.’ [Praeterita, lxxxi.] Obviously for an Emerson ‘culture’ has the same value.
But without even pausing over the differences, which are profound, let us note first of all, to stress those features peculiar to the physiognomy of Ruskin, that because he saw no distinction between science and art he speaks of the ancients as scientists with the same reverence as of the ancients as artists. When it comes to discoveries in natural history he invokes the 104th psalm, falls in with the view of Herodotus (readily opposing it to the opinion of a contemporary scientist) on a question of religious history, and admires one of Carpaccio’s paintings as an important contribution to the descriptive history of parrots (St Mark’s Rest: ‘The Shrine of the Slaves’).
Obviously we should soon join up again here with the idea of a classical sacred art, ‘there is only one Greek art, St Jerome and Herakles, etc.’, each one of these ideas leading to the rest. But for the time being we still onlyhave a Ruskin deeply attached to his library, making no distinction between science and art, believing in consequence that a scientific theory may remain true just as a work of art may remain beautiful (this idea he never expresses explicitly, but secretly it governs all the others and alone can have made them possible), and going to an ode from antiquity or a medieval bas-relief for facts of natural history or of critical philosophy, convinced that all the sages from every age and every country are better worth consulting than the fools, be they contemporary. This inclination is of course held in check by a critical sense so right that we can have full confidence in him, and he exaggerates it only for the pleasure of making little jokes about ‘thirteenth-century entomology’ etc., etc.
- What an interesting collection might be made of French landscapes as seen through English eyes: the rivers of France by Turner; Bonington’s ‘Versailles’; Walter Pater’s ‘Auxerre’ or ‘Valenciennes’, ‘Vézélay’ or ‘Amiens’; Stevenson’s ‘Fontainebleau’; and how many more!
- I do not have the time today to make myself clear concerning this failing, but I fancy that through my translation, however flat it may be, the reader may be able to see, as through the thick but abruptly illuminated glass of a fish-tank, the rapid but perceptible snatching away of the thought by the phrase, and the instant wasting which the thought suffers.
Days of Reading (I)
There are no days of my childhood which I lived so fully perhaps as those I thought I had left behind without living them, those I
