I have had to descend to the depths of myself to grasp even the trace of this idolatry, and to study its nature and the somewhat artificial element it mixes into the most vibrant literary pleasures which Ruskin gives us, since I am now ‘used to’ Ruskin. But the idolatry must have shocked me quite often when I was starting to love his books, before I closed my eyes little by little to their flaws, as one does whenever one falls in love.
Love for another living creature often has a sordid origin which is later purified. A man makes the acquaintance of a woman because she can help him attain a goal that has nothing to do with her; then, after he has gotten to know her, he loves her for her own sake and does not hesitate for a moment to sacrifice to her the goal she was only there in the first place to help him reach.
In the same way, my love for Ruskin’s books was blended at first with something of selfish interest: the pleasure of the intellectual profit I intended to draw from them. Certainly, while I read the first few pages and felt their power and charm, I forced myself not to resist them, not to argue too much within myself, because I sensed that if the charm of Ruskin’s thought could one day extend for me over everything it touched – if, in a word, I would one day be completely taken with it – then the world would be enriched with everything I had not known before: the Gothic cathedrals, the countless English and Italian paintings which had not yet awakened in me the desire without which there is never true knowledge.
For Ruskin’s ideas are not like Emerson’s, for example, which can be entirely contained in a book, that is, in an abstract thing, a pure sign of themselves. The object to which an idea like Ruskin’s refers, from which it cannot be separated, is not immaterial: it is scattered here and there across the surface of the earth. You have to go in search of it where it can be found – in Pisa, in Florence, in Venice, at the National Gallery, in Rouen, in Amiens, in the mountains of Switzerland.
An idea like that, which has as its object something other than itself, which has realised itself in space, is no longer free and infinite thought, but limited, subjected, incarnate in bodies sculpted of marble, in cloud-covered mountains, in painted countenances, and it may well be less godlike than pure thought but it makes the world more beautiful to us, or at least makes certain parts of the world, certain named individual parts, more beautiful to us, because it has touched them and because it has initiated us into them by making us, if we want to understand it, love them.
That is in fact what happened: all at once the world regained infinite value in my eyes. And my admiration for Ruskin gave such importance to the things he had made me love that they seemed charged with a value literally greater than that of life itself. At a time when I thought that my days were nearing their end, I set out for Venice so that I could, before I died, approach and touch and see incarnated in the rosy palaces, crumbling but nevertheless still standing, Ruskin’s ideas about the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages.
What importance, what reality, could a city like Venice have – unique, fixed in time and localised in space – in the eyes of someone so soon to depart from this earth? How could the theories of domestic architecture that I could study and verify there in these living examples be among those ‘truths which are more powerful than death, which keep us from fearing death and almost make us love it’?3 It is the power of genius to make us love a beauty we feel to be more real than we are, in things which are in others’ eyes as particular and as perishable as ourselves.
- This sentence of Ruskin, I would add, applies better to idolatry as I understand it, taken out of context in this way, than to what it originally refers to in Lectures on Art.
- The Stones of Venice I.IV.71. — The final verse is taken from Ecclesiastes (12:9).
- Renan.
Servitude and Freedom
Second-rate minds generally think that to let yourself be guided by the books you admire detracts from the independence of your faculty of judgment. ‘What should it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself!’ Such opinions rest on a psychological mistake which can be disposed of properly by anyone who has accepted this type of spiritual discipline and felt their powers of comprehension and feeling immeasurably increased thereby, and their critical faculties not paralysed in the slightest. In such circumstances we are, quite simply, in a state of grace, when all of our faculties are invigorated, our critical sense as much as the rest.
So too, this voluntary servitude is the beginning of freedom. There is no better way to discover what you feel than to try to re-create in yourself what a master has felt. In this profound effort, it is our own thoughts that we bring to light by means of his. Our life is free but only because it has a purpose – it has been a long time since anyone believed in the sophistry of freedom through indifference, and it is an equally naive sophistry that writers succumb to unawares when they try to empty their minds at every moment, unburden themselves of every external influence, to ensure that they remain their own unique selves.
In reality, the only times when we truly have all our intellectual and spiritual powers at our disposal are the times when we do not think we are acting independently, when we do not arbitrarily choose the goal toward which we direct our efforts. The novelist’s theme, the poet’s vision, the philosopher’s truth forces itself upon him in an almost necessary way, external to his own mind as it were. And it is precisely by subordinating his spirit to the task of expressing this vision, of approaching this truth, that the artist becomes truly himself.
Resurrection
Ruskin’s medieval studies, together with his belief in the goodness of faith, confirmed his belief in the necessity of free, joyful, and personal labour without mechanical intervention. You will perceive this best if I transcribe here a passage very characteristic of Ruskin. He is talking about a little figure a few inches high, lost in a crowd of hundreds of tiny figures at the Portal of the Booksellers of the Rouen cathedral:
The fellow is vexed and puzzled in his malice; and his hand is pressed hard on his cheek bone, and the flesh of the cheek is wrinkled under the eye by the pressure. The whole, indeed, looks wretchedly coarse, when it is seen on a scale in which it is naturally compared with delicate figure etchings; but considering it as a mere filling of an interstice on the outside of a cathedral gate, and as one of more than three hundred (for in my estimate I did not include the outer pedestals), it proves very noble vitality in the art of the time.
We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done by halves and shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all.
Perhaps all that we have to do is meant for nothing more than an exercise of the heart and of the will, and is useless in itself; but, at all events, the little use it has may well be spared if it is not worth putting our hands and our strength to.
It does not become our immortality to take an ease inconsistent with its authority, nor to suffer any instruments with which it can dispense, to come between it and the things it rules: and he who would form the creations of his own mind by any other instrument than his own hand, would also, if he might, give grinding organs to Heaven’s angels, to make their music easier.
There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sensuality enough in human existence, without our turning the few glowing moments of it into mechanism; and since our life must at the best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and rolling of the Wheel.
I confess that when I reread this page, upon Ruskin’s death, I was seized by the desire to see the little fellow he describes. And so I went to Rouen, as if obeying a last wish, as if Ruskin, dying, had in a sense bequeathed this poor creature to his readers. Ruskin had given him life by speaking of him, and the creature had just lost forever, without knowing it, someone who had done as much for him as his original sculptor.
But when I
