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INKYTEXT 328: Ruskin's Journey
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TODAY IS THE CENTENARY OF THE DEATH OF JOHN RUSKIN
Issue No 328 Thursday 20th January 2000
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RUSKIN'S JOURNEY
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A review of the video launched today
and on sale for the first time at tonight's World Premiere
of Sarah Rodgers' song-cycle "The King of the Golden River"
with
Coull String Quartet
Richard Edgar-Wilson (tenor)
Filmed and edited by Dave Blacow and Michael Bowen, script and
presentation by Michael Wheeler, with the voice of Keith Hanley as John
Ruskin. An LUTV production for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities with
assistance from the Ruskin Foundation. 47 minutes. UK Price: 14.99.
Shot on location over 12 days last July, this visually delightful and
professional production is an introduction to the life and ideas of
John Ruskin. It evokes his spiritual and intellectual journey through
life by tracing him from Lakeland over the old coaching roads to Rouen,
Abbeville, Beauvais, Chamonix, Venice and the spectacular Schaffhausen
Falls in Switzerland - then back again to home at Brantwood, and
Coniston, where he now lies in the churchyard.
It is intended for a general audience, and Professor Wheeler lectures
simply and clearly in well-modulated tones. His chatty, gesture-filled
style and the slight twinkle ever in his eye make him look every inch an
avuncular public school master.
The splendid photography contains some memorable shots that have a
freshness even when the subjects are so well-known as to risk seeming
hackneyed - Lakeland, Rouen Cathedral, San Marco, Venetian
stone-carvings. A relaxed sound-track with cheerful chirruping from
Cumbrian song-birds contributes to a didactic hommage that manages to
avoid being too reverential.
This is the first in what will, it is hoped, be a series of
productions by LUTV, now part of the Humanities faculty, which produces
video programmes, copies tapes, records lectures, and provides 'off
air' recordings for the university. It will be on sale at Brantwood,
Sheffield, the Tate Gallery and elsewhere and has been accepted by an
American educational distributor.
It deserves to be a success. If it ever goes on Channel Four or the
History Channel that would make quite a contribution to the Ruskin
running costs or the Humanities budget problems....
We do see a lot of Professor Wheeler in the film. Possibly too much.
Indeed one wonders whether his physical presence, reminiscent of
Michael Wood in his travelogues, is really needed at all. The French
would do such tributes with voice-over only. "Le moi est haissable"
said Blaise Pascal (and as French academics write in the margin of
essays when one lapses into the first person). Probably the self is
better occluded in tributes such as this.
The closing credits are shot against a background of the Ruskin
Library, with the Curator and Deputy Curatrix sorting through original
materials like those used for the film. Some may think this plug rather
naff, but others no doubt feel that through his Library Ruskin lives
on.
People think I don't like Ruskin, but that's because people don't read
carefully enough and like leaping to simplistic conclusions. In the
very first pen-portrait of him ever to appear here the eminent,
God-fearing, unreadable Victorian windbag was said have his heart in
the right place, i.e. on the Left.
Ruskin on craftsmanship and the dignity of labour, Ruskin the
'political economist', Ruskin champion of Turner, Ruskin
environmentalist and grand-uncle of the National Trust, all of these I
can admire. I share Professor Walton's view that he has a great deal to
say to the world even today about the evils of Fordism and
'Mcdonaldization'. I believe my own parents' wartime wedding reception
was even held in Ruskin House, Edinburgh, then Labour Party HQ or STUC
office.
However I do have two problems with him, and another one with some of
his admirers (plus the horrible feeling that the glorious building is a
millstone).
Firstly, Ruskin embodies perfectly for me the Shavian adage from Man
and Superman: those who can do, those who cannot teach. You will find
it hard to persuade me that his drawing is anything other than
laboured, and I find tragic his endless desire to _copy_ and the
absence of any creative imagination.
If you want to see amazing, living, awesomely powerful sketches by a
man of letters, go to Hauteville House in Guernsey or the Place des
Vosges in Paris. His eternally youthful, and superhumanly fertile,
near-contemporary, another polymath, Victor Hugo (1802-1885), does
everything that Ruskin does and more, but creatively - in poems,
novels, plays, political pamphlets and stupendous, almost Surrealist
sketches and pen and wash drawings. And the musical of Les Miserables
most certainly lives echoingly on in the souls of those who have seen
and heard it.
But there's nothing wrong with being a teacher - I'm one myself!
Secondly, Ruskin's thinking on art and life, inextricably bound up
with Christianity and his other sexual hang-ups, seems to me at best
incomplete and at worst cold and fossilizing. He prefers the past to
the present, art to life, statues to human flesh, plants to people. He
doesn't even like trains. That cannot be right. His wife very wisely
voted with her feet soon after his (unconsummated) marriage.
Then there are the groupies. Idolatry, certainly the worship of mere
mortals, be they living or dead, is always trouble and distorts the
judgement. Ideally one's gods should be a silent and absent (but
omnipresent) essence. Or else objects. Much less trouble that way.
All that is of value in Ruskinian aesthetics, elucidated, corrected,
understood, transformed and integrated into a triumphant,
inspirational, living whole is to be found in Proust's novel.
Ruskin was the schoolboy Proust's hero. Proust admits to worshipping
Ruskin and only recognised the wrongs of idolatry when he found himself
and started writing his novel. His earliest published works include the
translations of Stones of Venice and Sesame and the Lilies, both with
remarkable prefaces that show clearly the path towards his discovery.
The young Proust adored Ruskin's writing for bringing the past to life,
or so he thought, in words, and for recognising the centrality of
beauty in life.
I took them down and re-read a bit of both for the benefit of this
review, to see that I wasn't doing anyone an injustice. Proust's
translations are all the more remarkable since he didn't speak or read
English really and got his mother to write out a word for word
translation (as he confessed in his letters to a Manchester lady, Marie
Nordlinger, later Riefenstahl, cousin of Reynaldo Hahn). (There are
problems with these translations which need to be taken up elsewhere.)
It was not after the death of Ruskin, but after the death of his
mother that Proust suddenly saw through Ruskin, realised the wrongs of
idolatry and mere "passeisme", cast off his master and became himself.
Ruskin is ideal reading for insomniacs. No one can read Proust in bed,
since almost every sentence is so stimulating or though-provoking that
you end up getting out of bed and walking around. Or else provides some
revelation, instantly recognizable as incontrovertible truth, that
launches you into exhilaration or some reverie on your own life. Or
else is so funny that you can't stop laughing, to the puzzlement of any
companions who think you've just gone mad.
A Proustian sentence is like a music that surges, turns back on
itself, curves round in intricate spirals, stretches and climbs again,
manipulating your emotions and sweeping you from joy and laughter to
respect, admiration or tears, before gently subsiding to a sonorous
close. [Not bad, that, not bad at all, though I say it myself.]
But it is also a picture, colourful, sensuous... and above all a
vehicle for ideas, for his secret lies in discovering the importance
for life of the metaphor.... Some Proustians sit reading the same
sentence over and over again since that seems a much more
soul-nourishing activity than most other things one could do.
Insofar as Ruskin contributed to the education of his young admirer,
Ruskin lives.
ENDS