believe the man who designed and delighted in that archivolt to have been wise, happy, and holy.’

11. This unusual use of the pronoun occurs often in Ruskin’s work, e.g. The Bible of Amiens IV.23: ‘These are the only two Bronze tombs of her Men of the great ages left in France.’ Similarly in the subtitle of The Bible of Amiens: ‘Sketches of the History of Christendom for Boys and Girls Who Have Been Held at Its Fonts.’ Etc.
12. It was in obedience to an idea like this one that John Stuart Mill’s father had him start learning Greek at the age of 3, and had him read, by age 8, all of Herodotus, Xenophon’s Cypropaedia and Memorabilia, the Lives of Diogenes Laertius, part of Lucian, Isocrates, and six of Plato’s dialogues, including the Theatetus. ‘Through the early training bestowed on me by my father,’ Mill says, ‘I started with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.’ We might oppose to this way of understanding our lives the beautiful Essay by Taine, where he shows that the hours of flânerie are the richest and most fruitful for the mind and spirit. And to go to the opposite extreme, we might find the way of life described so well by George Eliot in Adam Bede to be charming, even poetic, if not exactly profitable for the spirit (and besides, who knows, it might well be that too): ‘Even idleness is eager now – eager for art museums, periodical literature, and even scientific theorising and peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage; he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders… He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots or sheltering himself under the orchard boughs. He knew nothing of week-day services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing… He had an easy conscience… able to carry a great deal of beer or port wine – not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations… Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him’, etc. (Adam Bede, vol. 2, ch. 52.)
13. See note ii above on Ruskin’s use of this pronoun.
14. Actually the place we wish to occupy in the society of the dead in no way gives us the right to desire to occupy such a place in the society of the living. The virtue of the first ought to detach us from the second, and if reading and appreciation do not free us from ambition (I am speaking only of vulgar ambition, of course, what Ruskin calls ‘the desire to have a good position in the world and in life’), it is a sophistry to say that we have gained through the former the right to succumb to the latter. A man is no more entitled to be ‘received in good society’, or to wish to be so received, just because he is more intelligent and cultured. This is one of those sophistries that the vanity of intelligent people seeks out in the arsenal of their intelligence in order to justify their basest inclinations.
15. Cf. Emerson: ‘It is with a good book as it is with good company. Introduce a base person among gentlemen; it is all to no purpose; he is not their fellow. Every society protects itself. The company is perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, though his body is in the room.’
16. This idea offends a very widely held preconception in us, one which may, in addition, be just as true as Ruskin’s paradox. However, let us let Ruskin enjoy his theory and let us not be surprised that this man ‘wiser than us’ thinks ‘differently from us.’
17. Yet this type of fog that envelops the splendour of beautiful books, like the mist of a beautiful morning, is a natural fog, the breath so to speak of the genius who exhales it unconsciously, not an artificial veil that he voluntarily surrounds his writing with in order to hide it from the masses. When Ruskin says he ‘wants to make sure that you are worthy of it’, it is simply a figure of speech. For to give one’s thought a brilliant form, more accessible and more seductive to the public, would diminish it – that is what an easy writer does, a writer of the second rank.

But to envelop one’s thought so that only those who take the trouble to lift the veil may understand it, that is what a difficult writer does, who is no less a writer of the second rank. The writer of the first rank is the one who uses whatever words are dictated to him by an interior necessity, by the vision of his thought which he cannot alter in the least -and uses those words without asking himself whether they please the masses or repel them. Sometimes the great writer feels that, instead of his sentences at the bottom of which flickers a faint uncertain light that not every gaze will perceive, he would like to be recognised as a great man (he need only array and display the delightful metals that he pitilessly melts down and makes disappear in the process of constructing his somber alloys), recognised by the crowd and, an even more diabolical temptation, by those of his friends who deny his genius, and most of all by his mistress.

That is when he will write a second-rate book, with everything that is kept unrevealed in a beautiful book, which makes up the noble atmosphere of silence, the wondrous veneer that sparkles with the sacrifice of everything left unsaid. Instead of writing Flaubert’s Sentimental Education he will write Maupassant’s Strong as Death. And it is not the desire to write Sentimental Education rather than the other kind of book which makes him renounce all these vain beauties, it is no consideration foreign to his work, no reasoning in which he says ‘I’. He is only the site where the thoughts are formed which select themselves at every moment, which build and perfect the necessary and unique form in which they will be made incarnate.

18. It would be wrong to see in this the thinker’s whim; on the contrary, that would detract from the depth of his thought. But the fact that to understand something is in a way, as we have said, to be equal to it, means that to understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment when we understand it, a profound thought of our own, and this demands some effort, a genuine descent into our own heart, passing through and leaving far behind us those clouds of ephemeral thought through which we are ordinarily content to view things. Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort; the only books we incorporate into ourselves are those we read with a genuine appetite, after having struggled to procure them for ourselves, so great was our need for them.
19. Sometimes Ruskin gives profound advice without revealing his reason for giving it, the way a doctor cannot give a full physiological explanation to a patient in order to justify his prescription; it may seem arbitrary to the patient but another doctor, if you told him about it, would judge it to be quite correct.
20. Just as in The Bible of Amiens (II. 1), we here see Ruskin asking us to connect certain important ideas to a ‘purely formal and arithmetical’ division (he says, it is true, ‘formal and arithmetical at first sight’ but it is not so only at first sight, it stays so throughout). In the same chapter (II. 30 and 31) he connects all of his ideas about the Salian Franks to etymologies that are necessarily fanciful because of their sheer number: if any one of them were accurate (which is, in any case, highly unlikely), it would necessarily exclude the others. Finally, still in the same chapter II, he says: ‘Fere-Encos passing swiftly on the tongue into Francos – a derivation surely not to be adopted, but the idea it gives of a weapon is worth considering most carefully.’
21. Here the metaphor elevates the idea precisely with the aid of things whose stature Ruskin certainly would not recognise. The armorial probably meant nothing to him, and the type of people who know exactly whether a certain kind of person is received or not received (Balzac, Gobseck: ‘Madame de Beauséant received her, it seems to me…’ ‘Yes, but only at her routs!’ replied the vicountess.’) – those who know the illustriousness of everyone’s ancestry and intermarriages – must not have possessed in Ruskin’s eyes a very enviable knowledge. Whether someone is of good blood or of obscure blood has little importance in a thinker’s eyes. But Ruskin’s image appeals to the idea that it has, on the contrary, great value: ‘he knows the words of true descent and ancient blood…’ So the pleasure that such images give the reader, and first of all gave the author, is in truth based on intellectual insincerity.
22. Someone I know sometimes tells her son: ‘It would not matter to me in the least if you married a woman who had never heard of Ruskin, but I could not bear to see you marry a woman who said ‘tramvay’’ (instead of pronouncing it ‘trarmway’).
23. An allusion to the etymology of ‘chameleon’:
24. 2 Peter 3:5-7: ‘Reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.’
25. Cf. The Bible of Amiens: ‘aimless — shall we say also, readers,