From the opening trio of excerpts from Modern Painters I - Of Truth of Space, Of Truth of Water and Of Truth of Skies (of which the titles alone suggest a triptych of poems?)
"And hence in art, every space or touch in which we can see everything, or in which we can see nothing, is false. Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing..." (Of Truth of Space)
"It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky ...
... Hence the sky is to be considered as a transparent blue liquid, in which, at various elevations, clouds are suspended, those clouds being themselves only particular visible spaces of a substance with which the whole mass of this liquid is more or less impregnated ..."
Ruskin is good on clouds - no, correction, he is extraordinarily good on clouds. There's a later lecture in the volume entitled The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), part apocalyptic warning, part poignant memoir for a (now polluted) atmosphere. I love the excerpts from the diaries (published in their entirety somewhere?) in which Ruskin records the skies he observes, the times of day, the activities he was engaged upon. The type of observation, the particularity of detail and attention, the very fact of bothering speak of very different times:
"Yesterday, an entirely glorious sunset, unmatched in beauty since that at Abbeville, - deep scarlet, and purest rose, on purple grey, in bars; and stationary, plumy, sweeping filaments above in upper sky, like "using up the brush," said Joanie; remaining in glory, every moment best, changing from one good into another, (but only in colour or light - form steady,) for half an hour full, and the clouds afterwards fading into the grey against amber twilight, stationary in the same form for about two hours, at least. The darkening rose tint remained till half-past ten, the grand time being at nine. ..."
It's hard to read such passages without being profoundly moved. You sense the man looking - that moral imperative of Ruskin's to pay attention. That evident desperation at what is passing even at the very moment of being perceived (surely the very essence of clouds). There are similarities to Thoreau's Journals but also a Victorian English 'plush' quality the American lacks (not necessarily a bad thing).* That two page set piece from The Lamp of Memory in The Seven Lamps of Architecture where Ruskin paints - for that's really the word - the pine forest above the village of Champagnole in the Jura. Too long to type in here, it's on pages 16 & 17 in the Selected. Read it.
Then read on into his discussion of the importance of Architecture (capital 'A', for Ruskin, of course) and more baleful predictions - this time of national corruption due to the decay in its buildings (public and private):
" ... it is ominous, infectious, and fecund of other faults and misfortune. When men do not love their hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both ...".
Ruskin then, typically, Christianises his argument although you increasingly see his struggle to draw reassuring conclusions. Ruskin's intelligence and creative perception simply cannot be contained within religious orthodoxy. Pound has been mentioned in an earlier post as a Ruskinian inheritor. I'm also thinking now of Robert Duncan - that kind of mind sprawl, zipping across the tracks, and multiplicity of projects (the HD Book his Fors Clavigera? He'd agree with Ruskin about hearths, that's for sure).
Ruskin is good on clouds - no, correction, he is extraordinarily good on clouds. There's a later lecture in the volume entitled The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), part apocalyptic warning, part poignant memoir for a (now polluted) atmosphere. I love the excerpts from the diaries (published in their entirety somewhere?) in which Ruskin records the skies he observes, the times of day, the activities he was engaged upon. The type of observation, the particularity of detail and attention, the very fact of bothering speak of very different times:
"Yesterday, an entirely glorious sunset, unmatched in beauty since that at Abbeville, - deep scarlet, and purest rose, on purple grey, in bars; and stationary, plumy, sweeping filaments above in upper sky, like "using up the brush," said Joanie; remaining in glory, every moment best, changing from one good into another, (but only in colour or light - form steady,) for half an hour full, and the clouds afterwards fading into the grey against amber twilight, stationary in the same form for about two hours, at least. The darkening rose tint remained till half-past ten, the grand time being at nine. ..."
It's hard to read such passages without being profoundly moved. You sense the man looking - that moral imperative of Ruskin's to pay attention. That evident desperation at what is passing even at the very moment of being perceived (surely the very essence of clouds). There are similarities to Thoreau's Journals but also a Victorian English 'plush' quality the American lacks (not necessarily a bad thing).* That two page set piece from The Lamp of Memory in The Seven Lamps of Architecture where Ruskin paints - for that's really the word - the pine forest above the village of Champagnole in the Jura. Too long to type in here, it's on pages 16 & 17 in the Selected. Read it.
Then read on into his discussion of the importance of Architecture (capital 'A', for Ruskin, of course) and more baleful predictions - this time of national corruption due to the decay in its buildings (public and private):
" ... it is ominous, infectious, and fecund of other faults and misfortune. When men do not love their hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both ...".
Ruskin then, typically, Christianises his argument although you increasingly see his struggle to draw reassuring conclusions. Ruskin's intelligence and creative perception simply cannot be contained within religious orthodoxy. Pound has been mentioned in an earlier post as a Ruskinian inheritor. I'm also thinking now of Robert Duncan - that kind of mind sprawl, zipping across the tracks, and multiplicity of projects (the HD Book his Fors Clavigera? He'd agree with Ruskin about hearths, that's for sure).
Ruskin lecturing:
"Perhaps some of my hearers this evening may occasionally have heard it stated of me that I am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do so. I never met with a question yet, of any importance, which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times ... " (Cambridge School of Art: Inaugural Address 1858)
There's Whitman in there but also (sadly) Carroll's cast of Mad Hatters and crazy Queens. I like the idea that Ruskin's thinking is "at its most characteristic when it's oblique" (Birch, Introduction) but suspect it's also a delicate balancing act with madness. That Woolf-like susceptibility to drown in sensation straining against inherited right thinking and moral propriety. Something had to give. And did. (The photo I saw a few weeks ago in a little gallery on Guildford High Street, taken by Carroll/Dodgson, of a crippled-looking John Ruskin in a chair).
And you see it in the prose style, too. Soaring rhetoric giving way to abrupt sentences, sudden disclosures that ache on the page:
"... this diagram ... shows you an old-fashioned sunset - the sort of thing Turner and I used to have to look at, - (nobody else ever would) constantly. Every sunset and every dawn, in fine weather, had something of the sort to show us. This is one of the last pure sunsets I ever saw, about the year 1876 ..." (note the parenthetic nobody else ever would).
and this:
"Blanched Sun, - blighted grass, - blinded man."
"Perhaps some of my hearers this evening may occasionally have heard it stated of me that I am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do so. I never met with a question yet, of any importance, which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times ... " (Cambridge School of Art: Inaugural Address 1858)
There's Whitman in there but also (sadly) Carroll's cast of Mad Hatters and crazy Queens. I like the idea that Ruskin's thinking is "at its most characteristic when it's oblique" (Birch, Introduction) but suspect it's also a delicate balancing act with madness. That Woolf-like susceptibility to drown in sensation straining against inherited right thinking and moral propriety. Something had to give. And did. (The photo I saw a few weeks ago in a little gallery on Guildford High Street, taken by Carroll/Dodgson, of a crippled-looking John Ruskin in a chair).
And you see it in the prose style, too. Soaring rhetoric giving way to abrupt sentences, sudden disclosures that ache on the page:
"... this diagram ... shows you an old-fashioned sunset - the sort of thing Turner and I used to have to look at, - (nobody else ever would) constantly. Every sunset and every dawn, in fine weather, had something of the sort to show us. This is one of the last pure sunsets I ever saw, about the year 1876 ..." (note the parenthetic nobody else ever would).
and this:
"Blanched Sun, - blighted grass, - blinded man."
He's worth reading, that's for sure.
___
___
* I'm thinking, too, of Joseph Cornell's annotation compulsion: the shifting moods and tenses of a day, the glimpses, the findings, moments of quotidian transcendence.
No comments:
Post a Comment