History as Nostalgia
Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University
Chapter 5 of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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indicates a link to material not in the original print version.- This web version of of Ruskin's Poetic Argument is a project supported by the University Scholars Programme of the National University of Singapore. It was carried out by the following Student Research Assistants under the direction of George P. Landow: Tiaw Kay Siang of the Faculty of Engineering created the electronic text using OmniPage Pro OCR software; Eugene Lee, Gerald Ajam and Chew Yong Jack of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Adrian Kang of School of Computing and Derrick Wong of School of Design and Environment created the HTML version, including converting footnotes to in-text citations; all links to materials in VW were added by Landow.
rom the start of his book, Ruskin strikes a melodramatic tone, converting even biblical allusion into the matter of romance. The prophet's execration against Tyre, Ruskin writes, is to us "as a lovely song," so that we forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and the sea, that they were once "as in Eden, the garden of God," "Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak — so quiet, — so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow" (IX, 17). The song and the warning, the sermon and the romance, alternate formally throughout the book, reflecting not only the intercutting from present to past but also profound psychic divisions within Ruskin himself. Many of the book's bestknown passages are tirades on the depravity and folly of all the actual, living figures that populate Ruskin's landscape of monuments. These gestures of alienation from the human race seem part of the impulse that led him in 1835 to sketch the city empty of people and the gondolas moving without guides, as though they would disrupt his communion with that sublimated humanity embodied in marble (in fact, his wife, Effie, once wrote that he dreaded going to church for fear of the filth of the crowds). The book is morbidly addicted to romance-to the dream of a time perfect because remote. Yet at the same time his aim (as we saw with Modern Painters II) is to escape aesthetic detachment from the human through a communion with aesthetic symbols viewed as real forms of love. In his longest and most famous chapter, Ruskin introduces the idea of an art Shakespearean in its acceptance, unbounded in its capacity to sympathize with human beings triumphing and suffering. [ For another approach to the genres of The Stones of Venice]
Theologically, the impulses to affirm and to condemn center on the paradox of the Fall; emotionally, they center on the paradoxical nature of ruins. Picturesque nostalgia celebrates the shadow of the absent on the present, preserving the lost object by simultaneously possessing and not possessing it. Similarly, Ruskin insists that Venice is a ruin in order to preserve her as the "richer inheritance" of memory. But this paradox is complicated by the more active energy of condemnation, which insists that Venice is a ruin in order to insist on her guilt. In this feminization of time, so to speak, the lost object of desire-in effect, the past itself-persists simultaneously as a goddess and a harlot, but the splitting of the female, in addition to releasing a powerful emotional ambivalence, releases a metaphysical ambiguity as well. If Venice sinned, then her fall can be rationalized as deserved punishment, yet [98/99] she survives in the book as Ruskin's capital of the imagination, charged with the fate of all things rare. The mystery of her fall challenges the intelligibility of Providence.
Ruskin's meditation on time, then, is both sentimental and metaphysical. The Venetian legend justifies the ways of God by means of a dialectic that illuminates the spiritual origins and possibilities of nineteenth-century culture, yet it also explores the obscure painfulness of all temporal existence, the mystery of the Lord's giving and the Lord's taking away. The questions it engages are the questions of Job, and they trouble the surface of Ruskin's piety, compelling his argument to deeper resolutions.
Ruskin expressed the anxieties underlying his metaphysical concerns in letters written during the two winters in Venice. These show a new anguish in his obsession with the loss of artistic treasures, since he now regarded that loss in the light of the religious doubts that had begun to assail him. One of these, the letter to Henry Acland of May 1851, contains the phrase that has since become a commonplace in Victorian studies: "[My faith], which was never strong, is being beaten into mere gold leaf, and flutters in weak rags from the letter of its old forms.... If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses." Our first object, he continues, must be "to find out what we are to believe, and what is to be the future root of our life.... [or] we shall only, I think, find out what roots we have got, by the edge of the axe laid to them" (XXXVI, 115). In January 1852, he wrote his father that he had no intellectual difficulties with the matter of religious belief but very many with the "manner of revealing it. The doctrine is God's affair. But the revelation is mine, and it seems to me that from a God of Light and Truth, His creatures have a right to expect plain and clear revelation touching all that concerns their immortal interests. And this is the great question with me-whether the Revelation be clear, and Men are blind ... or whether there be not also some strange darkness in the manner of Revelation itself." He continues, "I would give all the poetry in Isaiah and Ezekiel willingly, for one or two clearer dates" (XXXVI, 127). On Good Friday of 1852 he wrote describing an anxiety attack that he resolved by acting as though the Bible were true, and this gave him peace for a time.
On Easter he wrote again, concerning his need to believe in the afterlife: "It makes all the difference whether one regards a vexation as a temporary thing out of which good is to come in future, or a dead loss out of a short life." Even art can be denied an afterlife: "But the Venetian Academy repaints a Paul Veronese, and it is as if the painter had not been born" (XXXVI, 138-139). And three days later: "One's days must be either a laying up of treasure or a loss of it; life is either an [99/100] ebbing or a flowing tide; and every night one must say, Here is so much of my fortune gone — with nothing to restore it or to be given in exchange for it; or, Here is another day of good service done and interest got, good vineyard digging" (X, xxxix). The antidote to religious doubt is justified work, which will similarly defeat time by converting it into treasure to be saved rather than spent. The loss of human works is the loss of life; analogously, the modern Venetians are time's scythesmen who by "restoring" buildings are destroying the works of the past and are therefore destroying life.
Ruskin most powerfully expresses the idea of paintings as embodied life in two letters of early 1852. Turner had died the year before, and his executors discovered in his garret scores of canvases in bad condition, some of them so deteriorated that the canvas had shrunk from the frame. Ruskin wrote his father:
You say Turner kept his treasures to rot, not knowing or understanding the good it would be to give me some. Yes, but in the same way, I myself, through sheer ignorance of the mighty power of those Swiss drawings, suffered the opportunity of his chief energy to pass by, and only got the two — St. Gothard and Goldau.... But I knew it not.... This was not my fault .... yet it had this irrevocably fatal effect — leaving in my heart through my whole life the feeling of irremediable loss, such as would, if I were not to turn my thoughts away from it, become in my "memory a rooted sorrow.... Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them, and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things. [XXXVI, 125-126; X,436n]
In the second letter Ruskin begs his father to take every chance to buy Turners at auctions, even to the amount of £10,000 — because of what they would mean to him: "But do you count for nothing the times out of time you see me looking at them morning and evening, and when I take them up to sleep with? I have fifty pounds' worth of pleasure out of every picture in my possession every week that I have it... if I should outlive you, the pictures will be with me wherever I am" (XXXVI, 134).
Underlying Ruskin's catalog of losses — the continuing destruction of Italian art, the death of Turner and the missed purchases, his own wasted time and misguided efforts, the threat, above all, of lost faith — stands the irredeemable solitude of a man who has transferred his affections to art. The letters imply moreover that the purchase of paintings had come to symbolize a paternal love purer than what his own father could give him; and as for his marriage, no comment could be more poignant than the claim that pictures were his only friends. In effect he took Venice as his bride, the city once sacred to his early and [100/101] forfeited love. The book he devoted to her voices the needs expressed in his letters by means of two intertwined purposes, the reaffirmation of faith and the preservation of life. He sets himself, in the first place, against the three hammers of the geologist, the restorer, and the Renaissance builder. By comparing his own work to geology, he makes clear early on that he sees himself as an archaeologist of the Word, providing clearer dates and harder evidence than Ezekiel and so healing the breach between science and religion opened up by the Renaissance. He sets himself, second, against the false restorers (or whom the Renaissance builders were the first) by restoring the dead stones to life-by his drawings, his careful teaching, and his imaginative resuscitation of the ancient monuments to the condition of their first "good vineyard digging." The Bible of the earth showed the geologists no traces of the Deluge, but if anything, a tale told by an idiot, spanning eons of dead tomorrows. Ruskin, reading the "language of Types" and the articulate stones of the Venetians, gave England a massive commentary on this Bible in marble, recording not the purposeless motions of wind and wave but a sea voyage and a Covenant and the workings of Providence through time.
The passage that expresses most openly the anguish and desire at the heart of The Stones of Venice immediately follows a discussion of the Byzantine style. Suddenly Ruskin breaks out in a voice like Job's:
I do not wonder at what men Suffer, but I wonder often at what they Lose. We may see how good rises out of pain and evil; but the dead, naked, eyeless loss, what good comes of that?... the whole majesty of humanity raised to its fulness, and every gift and power necessary for a given purpose, at a given moment, centred in one man, and all this perfected blessing permitted to be refused, perverted, crushed, cast aside by those who need it most,... these are the heaviest mysteries in this strange world, and, it seems to me, those which mark its curse the most. And it is true that the power with which this Venice had been entrusted was perverted, when at its highest, in a thousand miserable ways: still, it was possessed by her alone.... That mighty Landscape, of dark mountains that guard her horizon with their purple towers... that mighty Humanity.... the majesty of thoughtful form, on which the dust of gold and flame of jewels are dashed as the sea-spray upon the rock, and still the great Manhood seems to stand bare against the blue sky ... then judge if so vast, so beneficent a power could indeed have been rooted in dissipation or decay. It was when she wore the ephod of the priest, not the motley of the masquer, that the fire fell upon her from heaven. [X, 178-179]
Tintoretto, The Annunciation, Scuola di San Rocco, Venice. Click on image to open larger picture, which will appear in a new window. [Not in print version.]
Ruskin has been concerned to connect the Byzantine love of color with the late school of painters, including Titian, Tintoretto, Bellini, Giorgione, and Veronese, who for him stand at the apex of the Venetian [101/102] achievement. A single massive sentence enumerates that achievement in parallel clauses (beginning with "that mighty landscape," "that mighty Humanity," "the majesty of thoughtful form," "that mighty Mythology," and summed up by "the compass of that field of creation"), which are then followed by an affirmation. The complete paragraph, beginning with the colorists and ending with the religious origins of the city, establishes an unbroken genealogy, symbolized by the body of perfected Manhood, which is the shape of the city. Two other images of the city follow: the priest's garment set with stones, which symbolizes the discovery of color and is therefore the type of sanctified beauty, and the masker's garment, which is the type of unsanctified sensuousness. The imagery of the passage associates Venice with both genders yet also links the city to its cultural achievements as a pure mother to her sons, in which case the image and its suggestion — the continuity of generations amid apparent ruin — repeat the design of Tintoretto's Annunciation. Against this image Ruskin pits his anguished questions, which correspond to various statements in his letters, particularly those that express his mourning for the lost Turner drawings and those that assert the uniqueness of his need and his mission. The passage therefore counteracts fears of loss and separation with a fantasy of nurturing, but it cannot rationally resolve the contradictions Ruskin has raised: he does not know why loss is permitted or why the city turned harlot, nor can be answer them with a simple biblical faith. The Fall myth, however, suggests a symbolic resolution.
In The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur describes myth as a means of achieving through narrative what cannot be expressed logically. In the case of the Fall story, what cannot be expressed logically is a contradiction: humans are sinful and sin is within us, yet at the same time sin is not our natural and complete condition. The Fall story, then, asserts the externality of sin and the "priority" of innocence to sin (Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil). Ruskin's working out of moral dilemmas in his book is precisely of this sort: by means of a central paradox — that Venice is fallen and yet unfallen — he denies the priority of Original Sin. The unconscious wish concealed in the present passage is the fantasy of continued union with the undefiled mother, but by transferring the wish onto cultural history, [102/103] Ruskin achieves a genuinely creative myth, with the force to revolutionize nineteenth-century society. For the myth of the pure birth, contained in the imagery of the maiden and the vine (the type, as Ruskin observed, "either of Christ Himself, or of those who were in a state of visible or professed union with Him" [X, 171]), provides symbolic hope: for the individual ego, hope for the survival of the original, pure energy of childhood through accidents and losses; for the historical ego, the survival of great art as a propulsive force for collective renewal, "making the whole infinite future, and imperishable past, a richer inheritance."
References
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Works, Ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Frye, Northrop. A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House, 1968.
Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
Rosenberg, John. The Darkening Glass. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
Ruskin, John. Works ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Young, G.M. Victorian England, Portrait of an Age, (London: Oxford University Press. 1936; reprint, 1960.)
Last modified December 2000