I nevertheless went up to the Portal of the Booksellers. But how could I recognise the one little fellow among the hundreds of others? Suddenly the talented and promising young sculptor I was with, Louise Yeatman, said: ‘Here’s one that looks like it.’ We look a little lower and – there he is. He is less than four inches tall, a little crumbled, but the gaze is still the same: the stone has preserved the indentation which put the pupil in relief and gave him the expression by which I recognise him.
There, among thousands of other figures, an artist dead for centuries has left this little fellow who dies a little each day, and who for a very long time has been altogether dead, lost in the crowd of others, forever.
But this artist set him there in his place and one day a man for whom there is no death, for whom there is no materialist infinity, no forgetting, a man who casts off the nothingness that oppresses us in order to pursue the goals which rule his life, goals so numerous that he cannot attain them all while we ourselves seem not to have even one – this man arrives and among these waves of stone whose every eroded, foamy crest seems to resemble every other, he sees all of the laws of life, all the thoughts of the soul, and he calls them by their true name and he says: ‘Look. It is this, it is that.’
As though on the Day of Judgment, depicted in stone not far away, he lets his words be heard like the trumpet of the archangel and he says: ‘Those who have lived shall live, matter is nothing.’ And in fact, like the dead – whom the nearby tympanum shows reawakened at the blast of the archangel’s trumpet, arisen, having taken on their bodies again, recognisable, alive – the little fellow here has been brought back to life, has found his gaze once more, and the Judge has said: ‘You have lived, you shall live again.’ As for him, he is not an immortal judge, his body will die, but what does it matter!
As though dying were not in fact his destiny, he accomplishes his immortal task, caring nothing about the size of the thing that occupies his time; with only one human life to live, he spends several of its days in front of one among ten thousand figures on a single church. He drew it. For him it corresponded to the ideas which stirred in his brain, irrespective of the approach of old age. He drew it, he spoke of it.
And the innocuous, even monstrous little figure would be brought back to life, against all hope, from a death which seems even more final than other deaths – disappearance into numerical infinity under the leveling of likeness – but from which genius means to save us too. We cannot help but be moved by finding the little fellow there.
He seems to live and see us, or rather he seems to have been taken by death in the very moment of this gaze, like the Pompeiians interrupted forever in mid-gesture. It is, in fact, the thought of the sculptor, seized here mid-gesture by the immobility of stone. I was touched to recapture it here; it means that nothing dies which has ever lived, neither the thought of the sculptor nor the thought of John Ruskin.
Encountering the little figure here – so necessary to Ruskin that he devoted one of the very few illustrations in his book to it, for it was a living and lasting part of his thought; and pleasing to us, because his thought is necessary to us, a guide to our own now that we, on our own path, have encountered it – we feel ourselves to be in a state of mind closer to that of the artists who made the sculptures of the Last Judgment on the tympanum and who thought that the individual, that which is most particular to a person or an intention, does not die but remains in the memory of God and will be resurrected. Who is right, the gravedigger or Hamlet, when one sees only a skull before him while the other calls up a fancy of his imagination? Science may say the gravedigger, but science has failed to take account of Shakespeare, who will make the memory of this fancy outlast even the dust of the skull.
At the summons of the angel, all of the dead still find themselves there in their place, where we thought them long ago turned to dust. At the summons of Ruskin, we see the smallest figure, framing a miniscule quatre-foil, resurrected in its body, looking at us with the same gaze that seems to be held in no more than a millimetre of stone.
It is true, poor little monster, that I would not have been able to find you among the millions of stones in all the cities, to pick out your shape, to recapture your personality, to speak your name, to bring you back to life.
But that is not because infinity, number, nothingness, the things that oppress us, are too strong; it is because my own mind is too weak. Granted, there is nothing truly beautiful about you. Your poor little face, which I would never have noticed, does not have a particularly interesting expression, although it does have, of course, like everyone’s, an expression that no one else has ever had. But since you were alive enough to keep looking with that same sidelong gaze, so that Ruskin noticed you and, having spoken your name, made it possible for his reader to recognise you, are you still alive enough?
Are you loved enough? One cannot help but think of you with affection, however ugly you may seem, because you are a living creature, because, down through the long centuries, you were dead without hope of resurrection and because you have been resurrected. And one of these days maybe someone else will go to find you at your portal, will look with affection upon your wretched sloping resurrected face, because only what has gone forth from one mind can one day captivate another mind which has in turn enchanted our own.
You were right to remain there, unnoticed, crumbling. You could expect nothing from matter, in which you were merely nothingness, but the little ones have nothing to fear, nor do the dead. For sometimes the Spirit visits the earth; in its wake the dead arise, the little forgotten figures regain their gaze and capture the regard of the living who, for them, abandon the living who do not live and go in search of life only where the Spirit has revealed it to them, in the stones which are already dust and yet still of the mind.
The end
