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  As finely textured and interesting as Hilton’s biography is—as interesting in its plot and characters as a George Eliot novel—it is still, problematically, a life of a Victorian giant whose work is nowadays unread. Hilton himself admits that he has met practically no one who has read more than a few pages of Fors Clavigera. Who reads any of Ruskin? There are set pieces in anthologies (“The Nature of Gothic,” for instance). Yet all of Ruskin was one big rambling work, and a real familiarity with him is practically equivalent to a university education. Hilton’s most tempting offer for readers is to follow the fated derivation of each of Ruskin’s books from Modern Painters, written in five volumes from 1843 to 1860. This first and seminal work, with its emphasis on landscape painting, leads to studies of actual landscape, and from there to cities and cathedrals. Already in The Stones of Venice, completed in 1850, Ruskin’s attention was turning to the interplay of art and economics, and to the sociology and politics of the Middle Ages as medieval people experimented with small republics.

  When Victorian readers opened The Stones of Venice in 1851 they learned on its first page that three great island cities—“three thrones, of mark beyond all others”—had ruled vast empires. They were Bible readers all, and if they could not readily remember just where Tyre, the first of these cities, had been located, Ruskin’s allusion to Ezekiel’s description of it (the most glorious description of a city in all of literature) reminded them. The desolation of the second city, Venice, had been mourned in a sonnet everyone knew, “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic,” by Wordsworth (whose death the year before, in 1850, was fresh in English minds). We do not think of Venice as a “ruin,” but Ruskin and the Victorians did. That God would eventually smite the third island city, London, was a romantic idea that nobody believed—the British Empire fall!—but readers were thrilled to hear the pious warning that it assuredly would “if it forget” the fate of Tyre and Venice. Later in the century an ardent reader of Ruskin and nephew of Ruskin’s friend Sir Edward Burne-Jones would repeat this warning in a knell to Ruskin’s England, Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional.”

  Venice is not really sinking: the sea is rising up over it. It is a city built on wooden piles driven into sand. Its origins bespeak the fact that the barbarians who poured into Italy in the early years of the first millennium came on horses. If you built a city offshore, you had foiled these fur-clad, long-bearded Huns and Goths. The city’s name may echo the people mentioned in the seventh century B.C. by the Greek poet Alcman: the Wenetioi, who bred longmaned horses as beautiful as girls. Their knack for wandering became a Venetian talent: a Venetian merchant named for the evangelist who lies entombed in the chapel of the Ducal Palace, Mark, and for the wandering missionary, Paul—Marco Polo in the local dialect—is the first European to visit China. For trade was the source of Venice’s wealth. Its navy denuded the Dalmatian coast for masts. Its people became rich, as Shakespeare knew, beyond all imagining. They ate not with their fingers, like Queen Elizabeth, but with forks. Their warehouses were laden with silk, spices, weapons, Egyptian cotton, Sicilian wheat, silver, and gold. After 1450 they printed the world’s most beautiful books, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. It was this perfection of civilization that Ruskin studied in fine detail. Its energy had lasted for well over a thousand years, always perilously and always brilliantly, holding off Turks, mainland Italians, enemies from over the Alps. When Ruskin first saw Venice, an enormous painting by Tiepolo hung in shreds inside the Ducal Palace (which had been hit by Austrian artillery) and the roof was open to rain.

  Ruskin’s Newdigate Prize poem at Oxford had been about Romantic ruins (those at Salsette and Elephanta in India). John William Burgon’s “Petra”—with its one memorable line: “A rose-red city half as old as time”—is the best known of the Newdigates. For many years their subjects, set by the chancellor, were meditations on Volney’s prose work Les Ruines (1791), which had inspired Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Even Macaulay imagined a future New Zealand poet gazing on the ruins of London Bridge. Archaeology in Ruskin’s lifetime gave the history of civilizations a deeper past. Geologists were tracing strata of rock with coherent fossils of flora and fauna from Siberia to Michigan: orders of nature that, like civilizations, had flourished and disappeared millions of years ago. The past seemed to be not one creation, as in Genesis, but many, each canceled by awesome catastrophes followed by a new beginning.

  What Ruskin saw in all this was that civilizations that took thousands of years to mature could be destroyed in a second. One Austrian shell through the roof of San Marco could make ashes of a Veronese. Time itself is enemy enough of the arts: watercolors and photographs are irrevocably fading. Automobile exhaust in our time is eating the Parthenon. Turner’s paintings, as Ruskin observed, kept their brilliant colors for a few hours only, losing their intensity as they dried. The skies of Europe were darkening. Venice was disappearing into the Adriatic.

  Ruskin had traced European painting from Turner back to its medieval beginnings, architecture back to the Romanesque. He had consistently laid down an ethics and a morality for individual works and styles. Egyptian art was executed by slaves; how could it be good? Greek art was sensual and therefore morally suspect. Ruskin burned Turner’s pornographic drawings (and Charles Eliot Norton, after Ruskin’s death, burned Ruskin’s correspondence with Rose La Touche). Victorians thought in categories of foul and fair. The aristocracy knew “what’s done, and what isn’t done”—a taboo system much stronger than law.

  Ruskin’s mind evolved, book by book. He thought and felt his way out of Victorian constraints, or tried to, and went mad in the process. Hilton charts this dramatic change, an awakening that was as tragic as Lear and as triumphant as Spinoza’s escape from dogma and superstition into crystalline reason. Ruskin did not abandon his evangelical fundamentalism; he transformed it. He evolved a philosophy of religion in which morality and art were complementary and mutually vital.

  His sense of the foul and fair became a new energy. England’s economic system was foul. It created more illth (a word he coined) than wealth. Its proponents, moreover, didn’t know what real wealth was. They had lost their sense of moral decency (Ruskin resigned his professorship at Oxford rather than countenance vivisection in the medical school). Ruskin decided that Turner’s glorious paganism had been fair, that the soul does not survive the death of the body, that the grace of God was as evident in Aristotle as in St. Paul. The England he began to imagine in Fors Clavigera was to be organized in accordance with this new value system: a socialist society devoted to justice, significant work (handicraft rather than manufacture), administered by benevolent “captains” of guilds, with happy clean children and noble stonemasons like the ones who had raised Chartres in French fields.

  Hilton promises us a study of Fors as a sort of third volume of his biography. The book still belongs to the distinguished list of worthy and influential works that are almost never read even by those interested in literature and ideas: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, Horace Traubel’s Conversations with Walt Whitman in Camden, Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the Bible. The one book of Ruskin’s that people seem to read, Praeterita, began as a part of Fors.

  A more eccentric work than Fors Clavigera had never been written (unless it is Tristram Shandy). The book’s original purpose, to found the Guild of St. George, becomes incidental. Its hero is Theseus; its Ariadne, Rose La Touche; and its Minotaur is the economics of capitalism, laissez-faire business, banks, usury, and the kind of advertising that makes the inferior product seem to be the best. In short, our own world of engineered obsolescence, scoundrels in high places, and eleven different taxes and surcharges on one telephone bill.

  One of the oldest images in world art and literature is that of a hero—Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Samson, Beowulf, St. George, and perhaps the one hunter on the cave walls at Lascaux—facing a monster, a dragon, a demon. On the night of February 22, 1878, at Brantwood, the fif
ty-nine-year-old Ruskin fought with the Devil. He took off all his clothes, to be armorless like David before Goliath. Being Ruskin, he wrote it all down in his diary, before and after. Hilton analyzes these cryptic, terrifying, and pitiful pages with subtlety and insight. It was a battle of symbol against symbol—a St. Anthony contending with hallucinations. Faith fought with doubt, fair fought with foul, sanity with insanity. Ruskin’s servant found him at dawn, naked and freezing, out of his mind.

  These paranoid seizures would return with increasing ferocity. Ruskin, the most decent of men, would curse Joan Severn (whom he normally wrote to in baby talk), accusing her and her husband of being freeloaders and layabouts. He thought the cook was Queen Victoria. He gathered the household on their knees at the front door to confess to Cardinal Manning. He became so impossible that Joan agreed to his leaving Brantwood for a boarding house in Folkestone, where he was lonely, disoriented, and a stranger among strangers.

  The great mind that had been so skilled in perception in Ruskin’s youth and so omnidirectional in his maturity flared into an incandescent irrationality, and went out. For his last ten years he sat in his room at Brantwood, shielded by the Severns. Turner, too, had gone batty, Swift and Nietzsche, Emerson and John Clare. Ruskin’s madness had a kind of logic to it: his frustrated loves, his failure to make people understand his vision of a just society, and his religious doubts compounded his despair. Add old age, a cruelly trussed hernia (from dancing a jig), loneliness, and disembodied voices.

  Biographies grasp the exteriors of lives and give what account they can of their interiors. These can be wholly different realities. The existence in space and time of the art historians Max Raphael and Erwin Panofsky, two great inheritors of what Ruskin began, will be dramatic and interesting when we have biographies of them as complete as Hilton’s of Ruskin, but until we read their books our knowledge of them is little better than ignorance. Curiously, we don’t believe this. I know several intelligent people who have read biographies of Joyce and Wittgenstein but not Joyce and Wittgenstein. Hilton’s immensely readable and meticulously researched life of Ruskin will be read by hundreds of people who have never read a word of Ruskin and probably won’t.

  What they will miss is Ruskin’s voice. It is, even at its most querulous and preacherly, not writing but speaking. It is, in a beautiful sense, thinking aloud, at its most congenial, conversational, richly anecdotal, and always observant. He is the world’s best companion for looking at a Venetian building or Gothic carving. He can tell you that the stone flowers that seem to be mere decoration at the top of a cathedral column grow wild in the fields round about. He takes nothing for granted; his readers are children to be taught, to be beguiled into learning. For one of his Oxford lectures he brought a plow, to make certain that his students knew what one looked like. (The lecture was on sculpture.) He could make passages from the Bible sound like words you had never heard before. A lecture that began with Michelangelo ended with the proper shoes for little girls; one on landscape painting ended with the industrial pollution of rivers and what to do about it.

  Most of the problems Ruskin addressed are ours as well. The century that began in the year of his death saw the most terrible wars in all of recorded time; and cruelty, without shame or pity, has gone on disgracing humanity. For fifty years Ruskin tried to show us how to live and how to praise.

  THE CONCORD SONATA

  AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON

  At his small sanded white pine table in his cabin at Walden Pond on which he kept an arrowhead, an oak leaf, and an Iliad in Greek, Henry David Thoreau worked on two books at once. In one, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, he wrote: Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. In the other, Walden, or Life in the Woods, he wrote three such sentences, a paragraph which no intelligence can understand: I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers whom I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

  JOHN BURROUGHS

  Thoreau did not love Nature for her own sake, or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, or with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert White did, for instance, but for what he could make out of them. He says: The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenuous worshiper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. This fine effluence he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling. This is the mythical hound and horse and turtledove which he says in Walden he long ago lost, and has been on their trail ever since. He never abandons the search, and in every woodchuck hole or muskrat den, in retreat of bird, or squirrel, or mouse, or fox that he pries into, in every walk and expedition to the fields or swamps or to distant woods, in every spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, to the effluence that so provokingly eludes him.

  This search of his for the transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will not be caught, he has set forth in this beautiful parable in Walden.

  GEESE

  Well now, that Henry. Thursday one of the Hosmer boys told him he’d heard geese. He wants to know everything anybody can tell him in the way of a bird or skunk or weed or a new turn to the wind. Well, Henry knew damned good and well that it’s no time to be hearing geese. So, always assuming his leg wasn’t being pulled, he sat down and thought about it. And after awhile, didn’t take him long, he got up and walked to the station. He didn’t ask. He told Ned that at half past one on Thursday a train had passed through with a crate of geese in the baggage car. That’s a fact, Ned said, but I don’t recollect anybody being around here at the time.

  STANLEY CAVELL

  I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical source of these symbols in perhaps his most famously cryptic passage. But the very fact that they are symbols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell us what we need to know. The writer comes to us from a sense of loss; the myth does not contain more than symbols because it is no set of desired things he has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself.

  THE JOURNAL: 1 APRIL 1860

  The fruit of a thinker is sentences: statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, not fore-thought, so that I occasionally wake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I never consciously considered before, and as surprisingly novel and agreeable to me as anything can be.

  6

  And yet we did unbend so far as to let our guns speak for us, when at length we had swept out of sight, and thus left the woods to ring, again with their echoes; and it may be many russet-clad children, lurking in those broad meadows with the bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though wholly concealed by brakes and hardhack and meadowsweet, heard our salute that afternoon.

  7

  Solitude, reform, and silence.

  8

  In A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers Thoreau wrote: Mencius says: If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of the heart, he does not know how to seek them again. The duties of all practical philosophy consist only in seeking after the sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.

  9

  Duke Hsuan of Qi arranged his skirts and assumed a serene face to receive the philosopher Meng Tze, and who knows how many devils had come with him? The magicians had drilled the air around the gates with incessant drumming, and the butlers were burning incense.

  The duke could see wagons of millet on the yellow road. The philosopher had apparently travelled in some humble manner. From the terrace he could see no caravan. There was no commotion among the palace guard.

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sp; Sparrows picked among the rocks below the bamboo grove.

  A merchant was handing in a skip of persimmons and a string of carp at the porter’s lodge. The weather was dry.

  The philosopher when he was ushered in was indeed humble. His clothes were coarse but neat, and his sleeves were modest. He wore a scholar’s cap with ear flaps.

  They met as gentlemen skilled in deference and courtly manners, bow for bow. The duke soon turned their talk to this feudal baron or that, angling for news. There had for years been one war after another.

  —And yet, Meng Tze said, the benevolent have no enemies.

  Duke Hsuan smiled. Philosophers were always saying idiotic things like this.

  —The grass, Meng Tze continued, stands dry and ungrowing in the seventh month and the eighth. Then clouds darken the sky. Rain falls in torrents. The grass, the millet, the buckwheat, the barley turns green again, and grows anew. Nothing we are capable of can control this process of nature. And yet men who ought to be the caretakers of other men kill them instead. They are pleased to kill. If there were a ruler who did not love war, his people would look at him with longing, loving eyes. It is in nature to love the benevolent.