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Overview
Originally published in 1981.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691642390 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #246 |
| Pages: | 322 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.50(w) x 11.20(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Ruskin's Maze
Mastery and Madness in His Art
By Jay Fellows
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1981 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06479-6
CHAPTER 1
Strange Chords of Incipient Orthodoxy: Centres and Epicycles
A. Cock-Robinson-Crusoe Conceit and Other Geometrically Central Issues
In the beginning, Ruskin is at the Centre, a Centre of implicit decomposition, which is nevertheless strong enough to be not only his point of origin but furthermore his point of inaugural departure as well. Later, after much travel, it will also be a point of return that itself embodies the oscillations of redeparture. The act will not be one of becoming reacquainted with the recognizable. But to begin with, he is at the Centre — an unfallen Centre of original innocence — and there he possesses virtually no density, no opacity. As if unbound by gravity, he is virtually incorporeal. At the most, preoccupied by sight, he is an eyeball, as later, approaching a kind of reflexive blindness that is also an awareness of the multiplicity of selves, he will be the eye of the cat observing the eye of a bull, as if in contrasting mirrors. But seeing, he is himself now invisible. Simply, it is as if he did not exist. Yet he is at the Centre, as though on a stage that is yet to be part of a Theatre of Blindness. With no sense of self, he is nevertheless self-centered: "and, having nobody else to be dependent upon, [I] began to lead a very small, perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life, in the central point which it appeared to me, (as it must naturally appear to geometrical animals,) that I occupied in the universe" (xxxv, 37). And he is happy with his Centre, his privileged space. Still, his universe — the walled garden at Heme Hill — is small, "seventy yards long by twenty wide" (xxxv, 35-36). His "central point" is the Centre of almost nothing. Shrewdly, he understands that he must make the most of what he has. Making his Centre important by an act of focus, he, like most children, will set
all the faculties of heart and imagination on little things, so as to be able to make anything out of them he chooses. Confined to a little garden, he does not imagine himself somewhere else, but makes a great garden out of that; possessed of an acorn-cup, he will not despise it and throw it away, and covet a golden one in its stead: it is the adult who does so. The child keeps his acorn-cup as a treasure, and makes a gold one out of it in his mind [xx, 249-50].
But Ruskin's original "central position" is different from those special, if not always happy, locations that follow as experience is translated into autobiographical history. In fact, the first Centre is entirely different from the second. Privileged by the virtue of its innocence, the original "central point" is not a Centre of inclusion and mastery. Like its young occupant, it is without density. It weighs nothing. Essentially, it is a Centre without information or responsibility; it is without plenitude of any kind. Instead, there is only the shaping conceit of an innocent eye. And just as he rules what amounts to a model landscape from a throne of naive centricity, expanding his domain by a willfully proximate focus, as if his eyes were magnifying lenses curiously unqualified for or disbarred from distant focus, so, without a past and no feeling for the future, the young Ruskin also inhabits a tense of immediacy — a tense that is, in fact, every bit as central, or perhaps "between," as his "Cock-Robinson-Crusoe" location: "I remain in a jog-trot, sufficient-for-the day style of occupation — lounging, planless. ... I am beginning to consider the present as the only available time. ... I spend my days in a search after present amusement of what I have not future strength to attain" (I, 435). Time, like his early Herne Hill space and the later glass that concludes his "naked contention," is a mirror. There is only a kind of narcissistic immediacy — what refers directly to the unrefracted self. Without history, his world is without serial consequence. Cause and effect are fictions for the convenience of others. A gesture is autonomous, self-referring, and without echoes. Even death's "long shadow," apparent soon enough, cannot at first penetrate a world framed by his partitioned present tense: "I was sorry that my aunt was dead, but, at that time ... I lived mostly in the present, like an animal, and my principal sensation was — what a pity it was to pass such an uncomfortable evening — and we at Plymouth" (xxxv, 71)!
Yet Centres, like an autonomous present tense that will become a tense of ambitiously digressive indulgence, a painfully intimate autobiography of consciousness, have the potential to be embarrassing in the same way that excessive time spent in front of the mirror can be heretical for a reluctant first person, whose vanity has, until then, been merely theoretical. The child's Centre of naiveté is the charming pastoral of egotism before reflection. But the Centre of a more tested self-love is a public location, where the exaltation of the first person, beyond charm, is close to madness:
The following letter is an interesting and somewhat pathetic example of religious madness. ... The writer has passed great part of his life in a conscientious endeavor ... but his intense egotism and absence of imaginative power hindered him from perceiving that many people were doing the same, and meeting with the same disappointments. Gradually, he himself occupied the entire centre of his horizon; and he appointed himself to "judge the United States in particular, and the world in general" [xxviii, 312].
Ruskin's movements back and forth between a "central position" (an original vantage point not long blessed by either a childish naiveté or optics that are innocent, but soon characterized instead by his own brand of idiosyncratically "intense egotism") and, after the farsighted penetration of space, the more selfless and less dense Circumference that is a version of the background (a background of dispersal where "suburban" real estate has yet to become the infernal space of the confirmed claustrophobic) are the essential movements of Ruskin's consciousness. Yet these reciprocal movements — traveling back and forth in three-dimensional space — are concerned more with panorama than a conventional depth that is straight ahead, or any rectilinear distance but that announced by the perception of the "long shadow." And the history of Ruskin's attitude toward Centres, starting "perky," undergoes transformations that reflect his responses to pressures and responsibilities that are, finally, no less "conscientious" than those of the Central Judge of the "world in general" who, in the middle of his own panorama, is not entirely sane.
The "central position" of the child, with his Cock-Robinson-Crusoe conceit, is more self-centered than masterful, more concerned with the examination of self than the extensive observation of either the recessional space of backgrounds or the panorama of an inclusive peripheral vision. But then, surrounded by the Edenic walls of his Herne Hill garden, he has neither background nor sufficient panorama to challenge his egocentricity with a notion of "otherness." Still, shortly after conceit, comes shame — a mild shame, to be sure, that arrives as a feeling that he may not be entirely worthy of his geometrically "central position." It is the shame of the youthful, anonymous author of Modern Painters I, who employs the first person in print, if at all, with grave reluctance. The child's position of naive egocentricity is discarded by the anonymous author who has come to understand that he must earn the right to both signature and use of the first person. But earned egocentric signature and pronoun — only possible when a sense of "otherness," located either in distance or panorama, has been experienced — are anticipated by respect for a different kind of centricity.
Observed Centres — rather than central vantage points of private conceit that, as examples of reflexive space, reinforce the sense of a self which exists merely as a prefigurative shadow of a first person to come — begin to flourish. With a newly acquired awareness of a past that may itself be new, history (both personal and public) is interpreted by crisis, privileged time — central moments that, like enclosing circles, are turning points:
The painter's vocation was fixed from that hour [xii, 311].
Or about the Pre-Raphaelites:
I believe that these young artists to be at a most critical period of their career — at a turning point from which they may either sink into nothingness or rise to very real greatness [xii, 319].
Still, if most histories can be interpreted by the perception of crisis —
One saw in a moment that the painter was both powerful and simple, after a sort. ... And one saw in a moment that he had chanced upon his subject [xxii, 309] —
Ruskin would always wish to be even-handed enough to point out those patterns that are not revealed in privileged time:
in the earlier scenes in the life of Moses, by Sandro Botticelli, you know — not "in a moment," for the knowledge cannot be so obtained [xxii, 398-99].
Uninvolved in either the self-conscious search for the abstracted and autonomous moments of the Aesthetic School — of, say, Gabriel Dante Rossetti's "Silent Noon" from "The House of Life," Pater's "Conclusion," or the "instant made Eternity" of Browning's "The Last Ride Together" — Ruskin nevertheless chooses to see an art whose essence is not so much aesthetic and momentary detachment as it is an essence with societal ramifications: Gothic art consolidated in a flashing instant that overcomes rude, "intermediate" spaces. There is, Ruskin insists, a privileged, almost epiphanic, pause in that public history:
And it is in this pause of the star, that we have the great, pure, and perfect form of French Gothic; it was at the instant when the rudeness of the intermediate space had been finally conquered. ... That tracery marks a pause between the laying aside of one great ruling principle, and the taking up of another. ... It was the watershed of Gothic Art. Before it, all had been ascent; after it, all was decline; both, indeed, by winding paths and varied slopes; both interrupted, like the gradual rise and fall of the passes of the Alps, by great mountain outliers, isolated or branching from the central chain, and by retrograde or parallel directions of the valley of access. But the track of the human mind is traceable up to that glorious ridge, in a continuous line, and thence downwards. Like a silver zone....
And at that point, and that instant, reaching the place that was nearest heaven, the builders looked back, for the last time, to the way by which they had come....
Up to that time, up to the very last instant in which the reduction and thinning of the intervening stone was consummated, his eye had been on the openings only, on the stars of light.... It flashed, out in an instant, as an independent form [viii, 89-91].
Unsurprisingly, it is not merely a decidedly unmomentarily Gothic Art that can be understood by a shrewd grasp of the pause of central time. Italian Art is also an art whose essence can be revealed by a keen comprehension of its historical Centre. The altitude of an adolescent "high ground" gives way to a "spot" — albeit a special, selected "spot" — and plural, swollen moments that collectively become a privileged "hour":
Now so justly have the Pre-Raphaelites chosen their time and name, that the great change which clouds the career of medieval art was affected, not only in Raphael's time, but by Raphael's own practice, and by his practice in the very centre of his available life.
You remember, doubtless, what high ground we have for placing the beginning of human intellectual strength at about the age of twelve years. Assume, therefore, this period for the beginning of Raphael's strength. He died at thirty-seven. And in his twenty-fifth year, one half-year only past the precise centre of his available life, he was sent for to Rome, to decorate the Vatican....
And he wrote it thus: On one wall of that chamber he placed a picture of the World or Kingdom of Theology presided over by Christ. And on the side wall of that same chamber he placed the World or Kingdom of Poetry, presided over by Apollo. And from that spot, and from that hour, the intellect and the art of Italy date their degradation [xii, 148].
As if with a centripetal motion whose gravity is given its coherence by a still "spot" of privilege, Centres, like Chinese boxes — or the Monte Rosa Society within St. George's Guild — further dissolve into Centres that are increasingly interior, as if imaginatively protected. History becomes a design of centripetal (logo)-concentric circles, with special significance attached to a diminishing diameter, as privilege aspires toward the spatial economy of a "spot" that is either the altitude of "high ground" or — at sea level — the Centre itself. But as accounts become increasingly ambitious, moving from biography to public history, private moments, taking on a communal aspect, become hours. And in the process, history submits to a form of temporal optics — a "kind of focus of time" — that defines the Centre of nothing less than the Middle Ages:
it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about which we may consider the energy of the Middle Ages to be gathered; a kind of focus of time, which, by what is to my mind a most touching and impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest writer of the Middle Ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year 1300, the 'mezzo del cammin' of the life of Dante. Now, therefore, to Giotto, the contemporary of Dante, and who drew Dante's still existing portrait in this very year, 1300, we may always look for the central medieval idea in any subject [x, 400].
As a location of special moments, of spots, pauses, instants, the Centre, translated from substance to the attributive, comes paired with adjectives that describe their descriptive partner as much as the noun toward which they are directed. The connection between a "high ground" that is the beginning of intellectual maturity and centricity — a "high ground" before it becomes "too" high, like the meta-presence that will lead to a vortical vision spiraling toward absence — is familiar:
We now enter on the consideration of that central and highest branch of ideal art [v, 111].
But not only is what is central "highest," it is also, at this point, good for you — "healthy":
none of the three are a healthy or central state of man [vii, 424].
Predictably, to be central is to be extraordinary:
he has expressed the power in what I believe to be for ever a central and unmatchable way [vi, 364].
And what is "unmatchable" is at least close to greatness:
And I claim the personal honour of presenting to the Museum the great central work of Turner's life [xxx, 37].
Further, central location demands that certain standards be met:
I am at a loss to know why this picture is in a central position; it possesses no special merit of any kind [xiv, 128].
Special, the Centre is curiously not always central. It is not limited to circumferential middles. Too important to be merely "central," the Centre is at times, as with Ruskin himself, at the etymological "beginning" — or at least at a beginning that is like a seed or root whose originally centred concentricity, having extensively branched as toward the limbs of labyrinthine meaning, will be discovered later, as if in a memory that would, in an act of nostalgic impossibility, attempt to recentre what has become, as the ecstatic best that a dissymetrically surviving pathos has to offer, epicyclical or circumferential. More to the immediate point, the beginning — the root of the matter — is as central as an original innocence that knows its appropriate "height" (if not depth):
we have thus got to the root of it, and have a great declaration of the central medieval purpose [v, 280].
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ruskin's Maze by Jay Fellows. Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Table Of Contents, pg. vii
- A Note on Sources. Permissions, pg. ix
- Acknowledgments, pg. xi
- Preface, pg. xiii
- Introduction. A Travel Diary Toward Nothing But a Dream: Shadowy Types for Concluding Images and 'The Excavations of Silence", pg. 3
- Chapter One. Strange Chords of Incipient Orthodoxy: Centres and Epicycles, pg. 29
- Chapter Two. Central Men and Awful Lines: Attempts and Failures in Mastery, pg. 60
- Chapter Three. The Frosts of Death, pg. 85
- Chapter Four. Vacancies, Kindly and Deadly: Sweet Transitions and Jarring Thoughts, pg. 105
- Chapter Five. Circumferential Considerations: Lines without Beginnings or Endings, pg. 127
- Chapter Six. Labyrinths of Presence, Labyrinths of Absence: Initial Experiences of the Superimposition of Contrasting Designs, pg. 159
- Chapter Seven. Capricious Sinuousities: Venice and the City as Mind, pg. 198
- Chapter Eight. The Excavations of Silence: Double Labyrinths and the Architecture of Reluctant Nihilism, pg. 222
- Appendices, pg. 275