On May Day each year I open a small book,
bound in red calf and with the signature ‘John Ruskin’ embossed in gold on its
cover. It belonged to my grandmother and was given to her on May 1st,
1912, while she was studying at Whitelands
College in south London. The date is important. In 1912, my grandmother,
about to leave Whitelands to start her career, had been one of the attendants
at the College’s annual ‘Crowning
of the Queen of the May’ ceremony: my book carries the inscription “This
book is given to Vera Dove. Signed Alice, Queen of the May, 1912” A book plate
on the inside cover explains that this ‘quaint old ceremony’ had been revived
at the College in 1881 ‘at the request of John Ruskin “to give real and elevating
pleasure to the young”.’ Ruskin himself, during his lifetime, had presented a
cross each year to the Queen of the May, together with ‘many purple calf-bound
copies of his books, to be distributed to her subjects’. Both ceremony and book
giving continued after Ruskin’s death.
The book is Ruskin’s A Joy Forever. When I inherited it, a red silk bookmark led me a
page where I read this striking declaration:
It seems to me
that one of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its
disease of thinking. If it would only just look at a thing instead of thinking
what it must be like, or do a thing instead of thinking it cannot be done, we
should all get on far better.
The disease of thinking - this seems at
first an odd complaint from one of the great thinkers of the Victorian age,
‘the sage of Brantwood’. But Ruskin was a man who hated muddle, and muddled
thinking aroused his wrath. When I recall Matthew Arnold’s definition of the
aim of criticism – ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ – I think of
Ruskin. In his own paintings and drawings, whether of mountains, rocks or
architecture, Ruskin was always concerned to see and record as accurately as
possible: he was, after all, both scientist and artist: the principles of
observation by which he classified geological specimens were no different from
the way he classified the different types of arches in Venice. Painstakingly,
first by clambering up ladders to inspect, record and draw arches at eye level,
then by identifying their particular similarities and differences, strengths
and weaknesses, Ruskin was able to establish what no one had attempted before:
the evolution and characteristics of six distinctive orders (types) of the Venetian
arch, which unlocked the sequence of Venetian architectural development.
It was hard work, and Ruskin was scathing
about the ‘mischievous tendency of the hurry of the present day’. He had spent,
he complained, ‘two long winters’ in the drawing of details on the spot, and
yet
I see constantly
that architects who pass three or four days in a gondola going up and down the
Grand Canal, think that their first impressions are just as likely to be true
as my patiently wrought conclusions.
The particular object of his contempt here
is George
Edmund Street. Street, architect of
the Law Courts in the Strand, and one of the most prominent architects of the
mid-nineteenth century, strikes me as an unlikely enemy: he would become an
early and vocal member of William Morris’s Society
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) of which Ruskin was the presiding
spirit; he would also proclaim himself a committed opponent of ‘those
destructive works of church restoration which I suspect I deplore more than my
critics, and of which an instance carried out under my direction will be looked
for in vain’.
Neither Street nor Ruskin suffered from
self-doubt. Though there was something of a rapprochement
later on, (both men meeting in Venice in 1878, lamenting together the damaging
effects of growing prosperity on La
Serenissima), twenty years earlier Ruskin had been unsparing:
Mr Street
glances hastily at the façade of the Ducal Palace – so hastily in fact that he
does not even see what the pattern is, and misses the alternation of red and
black in the centre of its squares – and yet he instantly ventures on an
opinion on the chronology of its capitals, which is one of the most complicated
and difficult subjects in the whole range of Gothic archaeology. It may,
nevertheless, be ascertained with very fair probability of correctness by any
person who will give a month’s hard work to it, but it can be ascertained no
otherwise.
I can’t help thinking Ruskin was less than
fair to Street here, and to those other architects going up and down the Grand Canal in
their gondolas. He himself advocated using a gondola to get close to the architectural
details on the façades of the waterfront palaces.
Here he is, in The Stones of Venice,
praising ‘the precision of chiselling and delicacy of proportion in the ornament
and general lines’ of the palaces between Casa Foscari and the Rialto. He urges
the traveller ‘to stay his gondola beside each of them long enough to examine
their every line’; but Ruskin immediately continues with this warning :
… observe most
carefully the peculiar feebleness and want of soul in the conception of their
ornament, which mark them as belonging to a period of decline, as well as the
absurd mode of introduction of their pieces of coloured marble.
I admire Ruskin greatly, but there are
times – this is one – when he surely protests too much. I wish he’d get back in his gondola and think more carefully about what he is seeing.
He occasionally admitted he was prone to contradict himself, as I think he
does here. Is it really possible simultaneously to admire ‘the precision of
chiselling and delicacy of proportion in the ornament ‘ of Venetian Renaissance
palaces yet to condemn ‘the peculiar feebleness and want of soul in the
conception of their ornament’? I doubt
it.
Adrian Barlow
[References: the Ruskin quotations from
my grandmother’s book are in A Joy for
Ever, 1880 edn., London: Geo. Allen and Unwin, p.188. Ruskin’s outburst
about the ‘peculiar feebleness’ of the decoration (on the Palazzo Contarini
delle Figuri) comes from The Stones
of Venice, vol. III, §1. Quotations from, and references to, G.E. Street in
Venice are taken from George Edmund
Street, a Memoir, by Arthur Edmund Street (1886).
[Illustrations:
(i) Palazzo Ducale – the courtyard, with the domes of San Marco behind; (ii)
the decorative pattern on the façade of the Palazzo Ducale, which Ruskin
claimed George Edmund Street had not studied with sufficient care.
Text and photographs © the author.
You can access my previous posts about
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