- Ruskin alludes here to the passage in Matthew (21:33 ff.; or the same passage in Isaiah 5:2): ‘There was a certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower’ (to be able to survey the vineyard). He had already alluded to these verses in Lectures of Architecture and Painting, §19, when, listing all the passages in the Bible that mention towers, he says: ‘you recollect the husbandman building a tower in his vineyard.’ Ruskin means to demonstrate (with respect to the religious value of Gothic architecture) that towers are never religious in nature in the Bible; they are built only out of pride, for pleasure, or for defense.
- Cf. Time and Tide, §46.
- The entire paragraph is in fact printed in red in the English text. We had wanted to do the same in the French, to preserve the strange effect of these pages in the original, but practical difficulties prevented it.
- Cf. Stones of Venice: ‘a message that once was written in blood and a sound that one day shall fill the vault of heaven’ (I.IV.71); and Crown of Wild Olive, II.59: ‘when the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart’s blood instead of vermilion’.
- An allusion to this strange passage in Ezekiel: ‘Then said he unto me: Son of man, dig now in the wall; and when I had digged in the wall, behold a door… So I went in and saw; and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about. And there stood before them seventy men… with every man his censer in his hand; and a thick cloud of incense went up. Then said he unto me: Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery?’ (Ezek. 8:6-18).
- Turner. On this drawing, its pathos, and its meaning, see Modern Painters, V.I.17 and V.XVIII.2.
- The physical analogy is the offer of arteriosclerosis which the demon of good living makes every day to arthritics. But here too, with health as with genius, temperament is stronger than the doctor’s orders.
- The circle of Hell in Dante which bears the name of Cain. See Inferno, cantos V and XXXII.
- [Ruskin’s note] (Romans 8:6: ‘To be spiritually minded is life and peace’.)
- An allusion to Dante, Inferno III, 60.
- An allusion to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, Act 3, Scene 1.
- It is the centurion of Capernaum who says to Jesus: ‘I have soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it’ (Matt. 8:9).
- Cf.: ‘Man is the sun of the world; more than the real sun. The fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or measure. Where he is, are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world’ (Modern Painters V, p. 225, quoted by Bardoux in his book on Ruskin).
- If there were only this phrase ‘do and teach’, the most direct reference would seem to be to Acts 1:1 (‘all that Jesus began both to do and teach’), but the context suggests that the reference is rather to Matthew 5:19: ‘Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven’ – and, Ruskin adds, in the kingdoms of earth.
- The Library Edition informs us that this is the term used in alchemy for gold dissolved in nitro-hydrochloric acid, supposed to contain the elixir of life.
- Minerva, Vulcan, Apollo (see On the Old Road, II. 36).
- Job 28:7.
- See footnote 1 above on this final sentence for an analysis of the five ‘themes’ it blends together (and, without descending into excessive subtlety, it is easy to arrive at seven themes, if we include the ‘corn laws’ and the ‘better bread’).
Makeshift Memory
I have here translated The Bible of Amiens, by John Ruskin, but this does not seem to be enough for the reader, in my view. To read only one book by an author is to see him only once. You can distinguish someone’s individual traits in a single conversation, but it is only through repeated encounters in different circumstances that you can recognise these traits as characteristic and essential, and for a writer, for a musician or a painter, the varying circumstances that allow you, by a sort of controlled experiment, to discern the permanent aspects of his character are his various works.
We find again, in a second book, in another painting, the particularities which, the first time, we might have believed depended on the subject matter. Putting the different works side by side brings out the common elements whose interrelation constitutes the moral physiognomy of the artist. When multiple Rembrandt portraits painted from different models are reunited in a gallery, we are struck at once by what is common to them all, the very features of the Rembrandt face.
So, by adding a footnote every time a passage of The Bible of Amiens awakened in me, by analogies and correspondences however remote, the memory of other works of Ruskin’s, and by translating in the footnote whatever text came, or returned, to mind, I have tried to enable the reader to put himself in the position of someone who has been in Ruskin’s presence before, someone who, having conversed with him already, can recognise in his words that which is permanent and fundamental to Ruskin himself.
I have tried in this way to provide for the reader a kind of makeshift memory, in which I have stored away recollections of Ruskin’s other books – a sort of echo chamber where the words of The Bible of Amiens can resonate more deeply by awakening the echoes of their brothers.
But doubtless these echoes will not, as they would in a memory which had formed on its own, answer the words of The Bible of Amiens from the horizons that are generally hidden from our sight, horizons at various distances which our life itself, day by day, measures out. The echoes will not rejoin this word, whose similarity has drawn them to it, by crossing the gentle resistance of that intervening atmosphere which has the dimensions of our life itself and which is the entire poetry of memory.
The fact is, the primary task of every critic should be to help the reader to notice these particular traits and to draw his attention to the similar traits which will enable him to see them as the essential characteristics of the writer’s genius.
If the critic has felt this, and has helped others to feel it, his duties are more or less fulfilled. If he has not felt it, he can write all the books in the world about Ruskin – Ruskin the Man, the Writer, the Prophet, the Artist; The Range of His Activities, The Errors of His Doctrine; every edifice reaching the highest heights of excellence, perhaps – but he will have missed the point.
Ruskin in Venice
This man who has bathed the old cathedrals in more love and more joy than even the sun bestows when it adds its fleeting smile to their centuries-old beauty cannot, if we truly understand him, have been mistaken. But to what extent Ruskin’s marvelous soul has faithfully reflected the world, and the touching and tempting forms in which deception and untruth have been able to slip, despite everything, into the heart of his intellectual sincerity, are matters we will never, perhaps, be given to know.
What I mean by these ‘magnificent and tempting forms of deception and untruth’ is that there is a kind of idolatry which no one has defined better than Ruskin himself, in the following passage from Lectures on Art:
Such I conceive generally, though indeed with good arising out of it, for very 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 and 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 fainting under His cross, but requiring us to take up ours.1
Now this very idolatry can, I think, be found at the deepest level of Ruskin’s work, at the roots of his talent. Of course he never lets it completely overlay (even as an embellishment), immobilise, paralyse, and finally kill his intellectual and moral sincerity. In every line of his work, just as at every moment of his life, we can sense the need for sincerity fighting against idolatry, proclaiming its vanity, and humbling beauty before duty, even unaesthetic duty.
I will not here draw examples from his life (a life which was not aesthetic first and moral afterwards, like that of a Racine, a Tolstoy, a Maeterlinck, but one in which morality asserted its rights from the beginning, even at the heart of the aesthetic – if perhaps without ever freeing itself
