Ruskin’s life is well known, and there is no need for me to recall its stages, from the first scruples he felt about drinking tea while looking at Titians to the moment when, having squandered on social and philanthropic works the fortune of five million his father had left him, he decided to sell his Turners.
But there is a dilettantism more inward than the dilettantism of action which Ruskin overcame, and the true battle between his idolatry and his sincerity was played out not at certain hours of his life, not on certain pages of his books, but at every moment, in those deep, secret realms, almost unknown to ourselves, where our personality receives the images from our imagination, the ideas from our intelligence, and the words from our memory, and where it asserts itself in the continual choices it has to make among those images, ideas, words – where it incessantly rolls the dice so to speak of our moral and spiritual life.
It seems to me that in those realms Ruskin never ceases to commit the sin of idolatry, and at the very moment when he preaches sincerity he lacks it himself, not in what he says but in how he says it. The doctrines he professed were moral doctrines, not aesthetic doctrines, but he chose them for their beauty, and since he did not want to present them as beautiful, rather as true, he was obliged to deceive himself about the nature of the reasons that had led him to adopt them.
From this obligation arose a compromise of the conscience so incessant that immoral doctrines, sincerely professed, may well have been less dangerous to the integrity of his spirit than these moral doctrines affirmed in a less than absolutely sincere way, dictated as they were by an unacknowledged aesthetic preference. Such a sin was committed constantly, in every choice he made – every explication of a fact, every appreciation of a work of art, down to every word he used – and it ended up giving a deceitful slant to the spirit that succumbed so ceaselessly to this sin.
So that the reader might better judge the kind of optical illusion that a page of Ruskin is for us all, and evidently was for Ruskin himself as well, I would like to quote here one of the passages of his that I find most beautiful, where nevertheless this weakness is most glaring.
We will see that if the beauty of the page is theoretically subordinated to moral feeling and to truth (that is, on the surface – since the content of a writer’s ideas is always superficial, and the form of his ideas is their true reality), in reality the truth and the moral feeling of the passage are subordinated to the aesthetic sentiment, and moreover to an aesthetic sentiment somewhat falsified by these perpetual compromises. The passage concerns the causes for the decline of Venice:
Not in the wantonness of wealth, not in vain ministry to the desire of the eyes or pride of life, were those marbles hewn into transparent strength, and those arches arrayed in the colours of the iris. There is a message written in the dyes of them, that once was written in blood; and a sound in the echoes of their vaults, that one day shall fill the vault of heaven-’ He shall return to do judgment and justice.’ [Gen. 18:19 – M.P.] The strength of Venice was given her, so long as she remembered this; her destruction found her when she had forgotten this; and it found her irrevocably, because she forgot it without excuse.
Never had city a more glorious Bible. Among the nations of the North, a rude and shadowy sculpture filled their temples with confused and hardly legible imagery; but, for her, the skill and treasures of the East had gilded every letter, and illuminated every page, till the Book-Temple shone from afar off like the star of the Magi. In other cities, the meetings of the people were often in places withdrawn from religious association, subject to violence and to change; and on the grass of the dangerous rampart, and in the dust of the troubled street, there were deeds done and counsels taken, which, if we cannot justify, we may sometimes forgive.
But the sins of Venice, whether in her palace or in her piazza, were done with the Bible at her right hand. The walls on which its testimony was written were separated but by a few inches of marble from those which guarded the secrets of her councils, or confined the victims of her policy. And when in her last hours she threw off all shame and restraint, and the great square of the city became filled with the madness of the whole earth, be it remembered how much her sin was greater, because it was done in the face of the House of God, burning with the letters of His Law.
Mountebank and masquer laughed their laugh, and went their way; and a silence has followed them, not unforetold; for amidst them all, through century after century of gathering vanity and fostering guilt, that white dome of St Mark’s had uttered in the dead ear of Venice, ‘Know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.’2
Now if Ruskin had been entirely sincere with himself, he would not have thought that the crimes of the Venetians were harder to excuse than those of other men, and more severely punished, simply because the Venetians possessed a church of many-coloured marble instead of a limestone cathedral, because the Doge’s Palace was next to St Mark’s instead of at the other end of the city, and because the Biblical passages in Byzantine churches were not only illustrated as they are in the sculpture of Northern churches, but also accompanied on the mosaics by letters forming a quotation from the Gospel or the prophecies. It is nonetheless true, however, that this passage from The Stones of Venice is one of great beauty, even though it may be difficult to analyse the reasons for this beauty.
The beauty seems to rest on something false, and we hesitate to give into it. Yet at the same time we must grant it a certain truth. There is, properly speaking, no beauty that is altogether false, because aesthetic pleasure is precisely that which accompanies the discovery of a truth. Just what order of truth the keen, quick aesthetic pleasure one takes in reading a passage like this may correspond to – that is what it is hard to say. The passage is mysterious, full of images at once beautiful and religious, like that same St Mark’s Church, where all the characters of the Old and New Testaments appear against the background of a kind of splendid darkness and scintillating brilliance.
I remember reading this page for the first time in St Mark’s itself, during an hour of rain and darkness when the mosaics shone solely with their own material light, an inward, terrestrial, ancient gold into which the Venetian sun that sets even the angels atop the campaniles on fire mingled nothing of itself; the emotion I felt reading it there, among all these angels shining in their dark surroundings, was very great and yet not, perhaps, very pure.
Just as the joy of seeing the beautiful, mysterious figures was heightened, but also tainted, by the somewhat academic pleasure I felt when I understood the texts in Byzantine letters visible alongside their haloed brows, so likewise the beauty of Ruskin’s images was deepened but also corrupted by the pride of referring to the sacred text. A kind of egotistical return to oneself is inevitable in these joys, where art and erudition mingle and aesthetic pleasure may become more acute but cannot also remain as pure.
Perhaps this page of The Stones of Venice – which, like St Mark’s, had biblical quotations inscribed right next to its images in the mosaic of its dazzling, penumbral style – perhaps it was beautiful above all because it gave me the exact same adulterated pleasures I had felt in the Byzantine church. And was the page not also like the mosaics of St Mark’s in another way too? Both intended to instruct, and set little store by their artistic beauty.
Yet today they give us nothing but pleasure. The pleasure their didacticism gives the scholar is a selfish one, whereas the pleasure their beauty gives the artist is the most disinterested – a beauty disdained, even unknown, by those whose only goal was to teach the people, who merely gave them a little beauty in addition.
On the last page, truly sublime, of The Bible of Amiens, the phrase ‘if you would care for the promise to you’ is an example of the same kind. Or when Ruskin, again in The Bible of Amiens (III.27), ends the section on Egypt by saying that ‘She was the Tutress of Moses; and the Hostess of Christ’, we may allow him the Tutress of Moses, for to educate requires certain virtues. But having been the Hostess of Christ – even if it adds to the beauty of the sentence, is it truly reasonable to include this claim in a judgment motivated solely by the virtues of Egypt?
It is with my most cherished aesthetic impressions that I have tried to wrestle here, pushing intellectual sincerity to its cruelest outermost limits. Need I add that, despite expressing this general reservation, in a universal sense and less about Ruskin’s works than about the
