Rackstraw Downes is lost.
He turns the pages of a portable Ruskin, a paperback in a state of pleasing
decay, bewildered that his chosen passage from The White Thorn Blossom,
as the Fifth Letter of Fors Clarigera is titled, is eluding him. This
is the Ruskiniad at New York's National Arts Club, convened a hundred
years to the day after the Sage of Brantwood died. I am moderating proceedings,
and partly to help, but mostly because I know how he will respond, I
cheekily ask if I might search the reference on the CD-ROM Cambridge
University Press has lent us, all thirty nine volumes of Cook and Wedderburn's
Library Edition compressed onto a single disk, every word indexed. Downes
explodes with Ruskinian condemnation of confounded new technology, and
miraculously, just then, his portion pops into sight:
All true science is "savoir
vivre." But all your modern science is the contrary of that.
It is "savoir mourir."
And of its very discoveries, such as they are, it cannot make use.
That telegraphic signalling was a discovery; and conceivably, some
day, may be a useful one. And there was some excuse for your being
a little proud when, about last sixth of April (Cœur-de-Lion's
death-day, and Albert Dürer's), you knotted a copper wire all
the way to Bombay, and flashed a message along it, and back. But what
was the message, and what the answer? Is India the better for what
you said to her? Are you the better for what she replied?
Rackstraw is no doubt right:
the older Ruskin, with his prophet's beard and haughty castigations
of capitalist decadence issued in missals to the workmen and labourers
of England, would have taken a dim view of digital technology (he banned
steam engines, after all, from the enterprises of his utopian Guild
of St.George). But the younger Ruskin often contradicts his elder self:
where the latter bemoans the railway which drowns out the nightingales
in Denmark Hill ("every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour,
and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton"), the former traversed Europe
by train, devouring timetables with uncontained excitement. There was
a similar change of heart with photography. "Among all the mechanical
poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it
has given us at any rate one antidote, the Daguerreotype. It's a most
blessed invention", he wrote to his father in 1845 as he scrammbled
to document crumbling Venetian palazzi before decay - or, worse, restoration
- finished them off (leaving the camerawork to his servant). But later
in life, when Lewis Carroll asked permission to print an edition of
his photo-portrait of Ruskin, he got the reply to look up the next issue
of Fors (Number Five again, as it happens), where he could read of photographers:
"You have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing
more, except brown blots through a hole in the box." Carroll replied,
"Can't afford tenpence".
How is one to go in search
of Ruskin in 2000? The backlash his reputation suffered in the early
decades of the last century still lingers: he is better known in some
quarters for what he didn't do on his wedding night than what he did
write in the 39 volumes; for losing to Whistler in the courts than for
any of his educational or anti-restoration triumphs, at Oxford or Venice.
Is he best consigned to the pantheon of angry old men, the "elegant
Jeremiahs" in George Landow's phrase, to be wheeled out when gloriously
rounded condemnations of alienated labour and ecological spoilation
are required? Should we just marvel at the purple prose, the "word
pictures", for its literary style? Or is he principally a fossil
(he would have found the metaphor no insult as geology was his first
love) to be examined for what he reveals of eminently Victorian taste,
to be celebrated, perhaps, as "the man who probably first awakened
the English people to what art really meant" as a contemporary
eulogist wrote a century ago? Is the best we can do with him to slot
him into a history of taste, contextualising Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites,
who he championed, or Whistler, who he panned? The exhibition curated
at the Tate Gallery by Robert Hewison, from what I can tell from the
catalogue proofs, is sharply selected, with many treats in store, though
the collision promised, in the first section of the show, of Turner
and Holman Hunt, the extremes of his taste in living art, is to be awaited
with trepidation (unless the RA's Crossroads exhibition has effectively
immunised London gallery goers from daring synchronic juxtapositions).
In the New York Ruskiniad,
I wanted to conduct a different kind of experiment with scatter, to
take the temperature of Ruskin fever by finding out what is actually
being read these days. Professor Hewison (as this year's Slade Professor
at Oxford he is successor to a chair first occupied by Ruskin) led a
party of very lucky journalists to Venice last Autumn, to see the Serene
Republic through Ruskin's manic gaze - or one might say through Rose
La Touche-tinted spectacles. On a launch speeding through a Whisterlean
(excuse me) fog one morning, Hewison outlined the order of worship at
the Remembrance Service at Coniston, where Ruskin is buried, for January
20, when he died, and I rued not-too-whistfully that I'd be in New York
then. As San Giorgio Maggiore emerged from the mists, a thought took
seed of a parallel ceremony in the New World- which Ruskin never visited.
He should have done, judging by the receptions afforded Dickens and
Wilde. Ruskin could hold audiences of 2000 in thrall, and would have
been welcomed with open arms; but despite "kind invitations enough
to visit America", he explained to readers of Fors Clavigera, "I
could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable
as to possess no castles".
Likely Ruskinians or acknowledged
Ruskinists (devotees and scholars, in other words) were invited to read
a passage of their choice that they felt spoke to the moment, justifying
their selection in personal terms if they fancied. His Immortal Memory
would be toasted with Domecq sherry, donated by Allied Domecq, the successor
company of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq which made Ruskin's career as
a preaching aesthete, patron and philathropist financially possible.
(Adele Domecq was the first Lolita to break his heart.) Ruskin himself,
meanwhile, kept a sober eye over proceedings, the eye in question lodged
in a plaster bust made for the occasion by sculptor John Dann from self-portraits,
photographs, and the Millais portrait at Glenfinlas waterfall. The whole
event set out to be a bit of fun, and the running joke was that no one
would need to read any Ruskin for a quite a while afterwards. What resulted,
on the contrary, was an extraordinary testimony to the living force
of a truly great writer. I haven't been able to put away the CD since,
(and hungrily devoured Tim Hilton's masterful and long awaited biography,
"The Later Years").
But the enigma only intensifies
with more reading. How did he get away with such nuttiness, such exalted
leaps of logic, such vituperative dismissals of people or things or
forms one is convinced he should have loved? (The work of Constable
and David Cox, an artist collected by Ruskin and his father, offered
"the mere blundering of clever peasants".) Of course, it could
simply be argued that he was the first great art pundit of modern times,
doing-down the opposition, levelling Turner's rival much as Clement
Greenberg would denigrate Calder to vaunt Smith a century later (although
I guess Vasari did the same with Michelangelo's peers). But actually,
Ruskin was fanatically loyal to his critical sensibility. Truth in taste
was as sacrosanct to him as moral truth. Notoriously he lashed out,
in print, at his friend, David Roberts, while praising to the hilt Millais
after his one-time protégé had made off with the virginal
Mrs. Ruskin.
Ruskin's prose bristles with
contradiction as much as it shimmers with beauty. By contradiction I
don't mean changes of stance from one career point to the next. Indeed,
Ruskin's accommodation of, say, Michelangelo, or the art of Greece,
hitherto written off in one of his great theoretical schemes, accents
his writing with excitement and integrity. Rather, it is the coexistence
of incompatibles - enquiry and dogma, sensing and preaching - that underscores
his intellectual personality with ambivalence. What makes his writing
so exhilerating at its best is what also makes it so bewildering: a
mind wandering in the hills. It is not a question of split personality,
as Roger Quennell implied in a 1949 biography which cast Ruskin as "an
artist weighed down by a prophet's robes", neat a formulation as
this is. Rather it has to do with a man of deeply religious temperament
weathering a storm of conflicting paradigms in all of which he is invested.
Victorian readers possessed a formidable tolerance, a need one could
say, for a reconcilliation of opposites in their transitional culture.
Ruskin's feat was to engage simultaneously the two highest opposing
creative forces: truth and imagination. It is, surely, the argument
for the truth-value in Turner's fantastic and idiosyncratic impressions
of nature which strikes us, now, as more odd than anything else in Ruskin.
It is because his argument is in equal measure incongruous and compelling
that it is sublime.
Luckily (as choice was entirely
down to readers) the Ruskiniad was a lasagne of Ruskin: social criticism
and the environment, Canaletto and Turner, the Crystal Palace and the
Venetian Gothic, metaphysics and his inner fantasy world. Often, the
personality of the Ruskinian was as well represented as Ruskin himself:
as with Donald Kuspit's selection from the concluding section of Volume
V of Modern Painters: "Now this form of unbelief in God is connected
with, and necessarily productive of, a precisely equal unbelief in man".
Or with Leonard McComb, whose show of drawings had just opened at the
New York Studio School, who selected a disarmingly straightforward-seeming
passage from Elements of Drawing. And as also with the enigmatic "bleeding
chunk" chosen by Harold Bloom from Sesame and Lilies to be read
in his absence, a creative misreading of a piece of Ruskinian irony.
Hilton Kramer, who also had a stand-in, accompanied his selection with
a reminiscence from the 1950s when he applied for a grant to study Turner
and Ruskin as was told by the authorities that his tastes were hopelessly
passé. "I had the good luck to acquire a set of the great
Cook and Wedderburn edition of his Works - thirty-nine stout volumes
- which had been deaccessioned by the Yale Library as a 'duplicate'.
The price was $40." The set now fetches thousands, and Ruskin's
stock at Yale has increased accordingly. Besides the "sage of Linden
Street" as Harold Bloom is known, and his stand-in, Christopher
Wood, Yale was represented by Timothy Barringer, who spoke on industrial
gothic, and Gillian Forrester, a curator at the Yale Center for British
Art, where she selected a tight display of Ruskin drawings in their
collection and from elsewhere. As an extension of their Ruskin commemorations,
incidentally, the Yale Center fixed special labels with choice quotes
from Ruskin to many pieces in their permanent collection. Note should
also be taken of the richly informative and exquisitely catalogued exhibition
curated by Dyke Benjamin, another reader at the Ruskiniad, drawn largely
from his own extraordinary collection of Ruskin first editions, manuscripts,
and memorabilia, as well holdings of the Houghton Library at Harvard,
at New York's bibliophile Grolier Club.
The true value of the Ruskiniad
really came across in certain moments when insight into participant
and Ruskin was symbiotic. One such highlight for me personally was Deborah
Rosenthal's contribution. Rosenthal is a religious Jew who has written
with fervour about Medieval Christian art. Her paintings reflect both
interests. She read from the chapter in The Stones of Venice which dealt
with the "Material of Ornament", where Ruskin argues that
"all ornament is base which takes for its subject human work",
whereas "all noble ornament … is the expression of man's delight
in God's work":
For observe, the function
of ornament is to make you happy. Now in what are you rightly happy?
Not in thinking of what you have done yourself; not in your own pride;
not your own birth; not in your own being, or your own will, but in
looking at God; watching what He does; what He is; and obeying His
law, and yielding yourself to His will.
You are to be made happy by ornaments; therefore they must be the
expression of all this. Not copies of your own handiwork; not boastings
of your own grandeur; not heraldries; not king's arms, nor any creature's
arms, but God's arm, seen in His work. Not manifestation of your delight
in your own laws, or your own liberties, or your own inventions; but
in divine laws, constant, daily, common laws;-not Composite laws,
nor Doric laws, nor laws of the five orders, but of the Ten Commandments.
Then the proper material of ornament will be whatever God has created;
and its proper treatment, that which seems in accordance with or symbolical
of His laws.
Now, there is a danger of
presumption on my part; Rosenthal may have chosen the passage as much
from curiosity or disagreement or respectful difference as from any
other motive, but it seemed to me that energies of meaning and interpretation
were accruing in a unique way: a modern orthodox Jew, evidently comfortable
with a cosmopolitan appreciation of religious art from whatever faith,
reading an Evangelical Protestant on the brink of losing his faith,
who is in turn "reading" the carvings of Catholic artisans
from centuries prior: each party evolving her, his, or their own matrix
of meaning from the lifeflow of forms.
Again, there is the danger
of over-interpretation, but what resonated in my imagination as I heard
Deborah recite the lists of appropriate and inappropriate ornament is
a kind of Deuteronimic separation of clean from unclean. I am not implying
that bigger issues of iconoclasm, of what can or cannot be depicted
in art, should be mapped onto Ruskin's argument or Rosenthal's reading
of it; rather it is just a sense of moral-cum-aesthetic energy arising
from this meditation on order and division, celebration and restraint.
Modern Painters and Stones
of Venice abound with what their author would later regret as "Protestant
egotism and insolence". Ruskin experienced an "unconversion"
at Turin in his fortieth year, and it is significant that his epiphany
should pit the sensual over the puritanical. One Sunday morning, after
admiring Veronese's Queen of Sheba (painter and subject epitomizing,
respectively, colour and luxury), and feeling overwhelmed by its God-given
power, he attended a particularly dire service at the Waldensian chapel,
with its sermon denouncing the world. But the peculiar tension in his
critical discourse between the sensual stuff out of which aesthetic
experience emerges, and the full spiritual significance of that experience,
did not disolve that July day with his "Mother-Law of Protestantism".
In his autobiography he boasted of "a sensual faculty of pleasure
in sight, as far as I know unparalleled", noting that it even exceeded
Turner's. And yet, throughout his writing, there is a suspicion bordering
on disdain for the sensual, while "sensuality" - a word which
yields 88 citations when I search my CD-ROM - is a term of severe opprobrium.
In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, for instance, he berates the "enervated
sensuality" of the Renaissance. Elsewhere he contrasts the "savageness
and seclusion" of mountain life with the "indolence and sensuality
of the most debased cities of Europe", with echoes of the Waldensian
chapel. But the distinction that is so important for Ruskin between
the sensual base and the higher faculty of aesthetic discernment, is
not just a Low Church hang-up about pleasure. Philosophically, it seeks
to distance an ideal, transcendent, metaphysical view of art and nature
form a view that is mechanical, as one would expect from the matarialist
("Progressive", "Utlitarian") outlook he so abhorred.
"Now the mere animal consciousness of the pleasantness I call Aesthesis
but the exulting, reverent and grateful perception of it I call Theoria",
as he wrote in Modern Painters II. His position on the physicality of
aesthetic experience is thus ambiguous: he was not a slave to a mind-body
opposition, as Theoria incorporated Aesthesis rather than shunning it,
but he was irked by the limitations of the purely physical. A psychobiographer
would have fun reconciling this with his abhorence of fully developed
female sexuality and his infatuations with prepubescent girls. That
Balzac could be "a philosopher even in his sensuality" is
tellingly self-reflective of the philosophic-critic "unparalleled"
in his sensual faculty of sight.
Ruskin made a special allowance
for the reprinting of Modern Painters II after he had announced that
regret at its Theology would prevent him from doing so, breaking his
resolve for the very reasonn that he felt the rise of Aestheticism -
Art for Art's sake, Whistler etc. - required a restatement of this distinction
between Theoria and "mere aesthesis". It was a philosophical
distinction for which modernism would have little use: Whistler may
have won a mere farthing, but "mere aesthesis" won the Twentieth
Century. At least, that is, in its formalist telling. Half a century
later the debate was still rolling. To Clement Greenberg, another critic
who felt himself unrivaled in retinal power - and insight into its significance
- "the modern painter derives his inspiration from the very physical
materials he works with". Now, as it happens, this assertion touches
on a whole modernist doctrine of truth to materials prefigured in Ruskin;
but as a statement against any kind of external truth-value in representation
this is fundamentally anti-Ruskinian. To this very statement Ananda
K. Coomaraswamy (like Ghandhi, who translated Unto This Last into Gujarati,
seemingly oblivious to Ruskin's fulmination against the "barbarous
grotesque of mere savageness" of Indian art) countered that what
Greenberg "actually means [is] that the modern artist may be excited,
but is not inspired."
But for another reader at
the Arts Club last January, the painter Robert Berlind, a vague memory
of some sentences of Ruskin's that stuck in his mind from student days,
he thought from Mornings in Florence (and here the CD-ROM proved its
weight in silicon!) linked the Victorian sage with formalism rather
than pitting him against it. This reading epitomises Ruskin's distinctness
from the modern sensibility, and his overlap with it; his openness to
subtle sensuality and his transcendence of it. Berlind recalled that
Ruskin was describing a faded old tomb in Santa Croce:
It is the crowning virtue
of all great art that, however little is left of it by the injuries
of time, that little will be lovely. As long as you can see anything,
you can see-almost all;-so much the hand of the master will suggest
of his soul…And, if you look long, you will find it is not so
little. That worn face is still a perfect portrait of the old man,
though like one struck out at a venture, with a few rough touches
of a master's chisel. And that falling drapery of his cap is, in its
few lines, faultless, and subtle beyond description. And now, here
is a simple but most useful test of your capacity for understanding
Florentine sculpture or painting. If you can see that the lines of
that cap are both right, and lovely; that the choice of the folds
is exquisite in its ornamental relations of line; and that the softness
and ease of them is complete,-though only sketched with a few dark
touches,-then you can understand Giotto's drawing, and Botticelli's;-Donatello's
carving, and Luca's. But if you see nothing in this sculpture, you
will see nothing in theirs, of theirs. Where they choose to imitate
flesh, or silk, or to play any vulgar modern trick with marble-(and
they often do)-whatever, in a word, is French, or American, or Cockney,
in their work, you can see; but what is Florentine, and for ever great-unless
you can see also the beauty of this old man in his citizen's cap,-you
will see never.
Program of the Ruskiniad
held at the National Arts Club, New York, January 20, 2000
Welcome, by O. Aldon James, President of the National Arts Club
Dyke Benjamin, a Ruskin pot-pourri of quotations; Donald Kuspit,
from "Peace", Modern Painters V; Laurie Schneider Adams,
"John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River: Prefiguations of his
later madness"; Leonard McComb, from Elements of Drawing,
First Practice, Exercise VIII; Gillian Forrester, on Turner,
from Harbours of England; James Gardner, on Canaletto, from Modern
Painters I; Robert Berlind, "It is the crowning virtue of
all great art", from Mornings in Florence; Peter Smith,
from "Traffic", in Ethics of the Dust; Deborah Rosenthal,
The Material of Ornament, from Chapter XX, The Stones of Venice; Rackstraw
Downes, extracts from The White Thorn Blossom, from Fors Clavigera,
Letter Five; Timothy Barringer, Ruskin's comments on Industrial
Gothic; Jason Rosenfeld, Ruskin's comments on the Crystal Palace;
Jed Perl, Marcel Proust on Ruskin, from George Painter's biography
of Proust; Alexi Worth, Henry James on Ruskin, from the correspondence
of Henry James; David Cohen,
Peter Fuller on Ruskin, from Theoria; Hilton Kramer, (in absentia)
read by Samuel Menashe, "It is a misfortune for all honest
critics…" from Modern Painters I; Harold Bloom, (in
absentia) read by Christopher Wood, "The message to us of
our poet", from Sesame and Lilies, Lecture 3;
Toast: "There is no wealth but life"
Cohen on the critics:
Roger Fry: Fry, Freud and Formalism
Herbert Read and Peter Fuller: Seeing Moore,
the Case of Two Critics
Clement Greenberg: Ornithology for Birds, Greenberg's
"Homemade Esthetics"
David Sylvester: The
Golden Lion of English Artwriting exclusive to Artcritical