If two thousand years ago we could have seen the "slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea" and the resulting formation of a "lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain," how little we would have understood

the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hands are all the comers of the earth! how little imagined that ... there was indeed a preparation, and the only preparation possible, for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendour! (10.145).

Thus playing the sage, Ruskin interprets the significance of an apparently unimportant set of islands in the Venetian lagoon. Any historian, or even anyone with antiquarian interests, could thus have pointed to those islands that provided the first seeds of Venice and its empire. What distinguishes this passage from such straightforward historical discussions, of course, is both that Ruskin finds in these historical facts a divine plan and that he presents his interpretation of it with a dramatic rhetorical flourish alluding to the Bible. As Cook and Wedderbum, Ruskin's editors, point out, the phrase "in whose hands are all the comers of the earth" alludes to Revelation 7:1, and Ruskin uses this allusion as a means of indicating to many of his Victorian readers that they have encountered matters of divine law and inspired prophecy. In fact, the crescendo of lush writing to which the sentence builds finds its justification in the supposed fact that it moves from mere earthly historical matters t o the divine laws that, Ruskin claims, they embody.

Ruskin, who is never shy about claiming that he can read divine intention, frequently ends his chapters with such biblical allusion or by pointing to the presence of God. The second volume of The Stones of Venice characteristically closes upon such a note. Briefly turning away from his main subject, Ruskin pleads for the preservation of Venice and its works of art, which are threatened by man and time and the elements, and as he so frequently does, he cites his own experience to indicate the value of what his contemporaries allow to be destroyed. He mentions several state rooms in the Ducal Palace

that were full of pictures by Veronese and Tintoret, that made their walls as precious as so many kingdoms; so precious, indeed, and so full of majesty, that sometimes when walking at evening on the Lido, whence the great chain of the Alps, crested with silver clouds, might be seen rising above the front of the Ducal Palace, I used to feel as much awe in gazing on the building as on the hills, and could believe that God had done a greater work in breathing into the narrowness of dust the mighty spirits by whom its haughty walls had been raised, and its burning legends written, than in lifting the rocks of granite higher than the clouds of heaven, and veiling them with their various mantle of purple flower and shadowy pine. (10.43-39)

Once again, by indicating the presence of God in unexpected places and things, Ruskin produces a positive note on which to close his discussion, for by insisting upon God's role in creating both Venetian art and the origins of the city, he manages to demonstrate what inspiring, what wonderful, things happen when man does not fall away from God but follows the divine within him -- as Ruskin claims to do when writing The Stones of Venice.

Last modified 2000