The Nautilus
/Ruskin on Venice
Robert Hewison,Yale University Press, 2009
Five changes of government, four military campaigns, a wrecked economy, the withdrawal of Venice’s patrician leaders from public life, and seven years of poor weather and bad harvests between 1796 and 1814 meant that the city was shabby and decayed when Byron arrived in 1816.
In 1797 Napoleon had famously extinguished the thousand-year-old Venetian Republic, and in 1815 the Austrians took the city, trying in their ham-handed way to make everything more efficient – and failing miserably, since Venice resists all non-Venetian ideas of efficiency as complacently as housecats resist the call to exercise. But the one thing the Austrians could at least begin was the slow and ungainly movement of Venice into the modern era, thus opening up the two-century struggle that still defines the city – and that certainly defined Ruskin’s love-hate relationship with her overseers. Primed by the Romantics and the lachrymose sentimental streak that ran through the Victorian era, Ruskin opened that relationship in breathless love, as he relates in one volume of his Praeterita:
that the fairy tale should come true now seemed wholly incredible, and the start from the gate of Padua in the morning, - Venice, asserted by people whom we could not but believe, to be really over there, on the horizon, in the sea! How to tell the feeling of it!
But as another famous lover of Venice once put it, “After paradise – that’s when love stories get interesting.”It was in the full swoon of that first love that Ruskin wrote the first volume of the book that would change his life – and Venice’s life – forever: in 1853 he published The Stones of Venice, in which he venerated the Gothic architectural marvels of that city over all other styles and proclaimed the Doge’s Palace the wonder and marvel of the world. The book was draped in the most arresting prose Ruskin knew how to write, and it gradually ascends throughout its length from investigation to outright love poem, culminating in the famous final paragraph:
A city of marble, did I say? Nay, rather a golden city, paved with emerald. For truly, every pinnacle and turret glanced or glowed, overlaid with gold, or bossed with jasper. Beneath, the unsullied sea drew in deep breathing to and fro, its eddies of green wave. Deep-hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea, - the men of Venice moved in sway of power and war; pure as her pillars of alabaster, stood her mothers and maidens; from foot to brow, all noble, walked her knights; the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armour shot angrily under their blood-red mantle-folds. Fearless, faithful, patient, impenetrable, implacable, - every word a fate – sat her senate. In hope and honour, lulled by flowing of wave around their isles of sacred sand, each with his name written and the cross graved at his side, lay her dead. A wonderful piece of the world. Rather, itself a world.
The effect was more powerful and wide-reaching than Ruskin could possibly have dreamt. By maintaining that Venice’s internal corruption (social, commercial, the mean ol’ Catholic Church, etc) had caused her to lapse into the state of semi-ruin in which she now stood, Ruskin was looking longingly at the past – but most of his readers saw it as a summons to the future. A wave of neo-Gothic building (which Ruskin promptly despised) swept the West, and restoration committees sprang up on every street corner in Venice, intent on saving the city’s crumbling architectural wonders.
Do not let us talk of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and the model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care: but the building is destroyed, and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of Hewison’s book is that he’s seldom content to let Ruskin have the last word, especially when Ruskin is mostly in the wrong. Here he rejoins:
Yet as modern Venetian urban historian Giandomenico Romanelli has pointed out, in the 1860s and 1870s for the Venetians ‘restoration’ was precisely that, a recovery of the city’s architectural glories, as opposed to the retention of reminders of her melancholy and defeated past. It was bringing a corpse back to life.
About Ruskin’s more florid sentiments, Hewison wryly comments, “This is not the sort of commentary one might expect to find in a history of architecture.” No indeed, and you’ll find no trace of it in, for instance, William Dean Howells’ chatty and jaunty 1866 account of his own life in Venice. Part of this was the Howells knew that jaunty usually sells better than jaundiced, but part of it was also that by midcentury, Ruskin was an unbalanced lunatic – and it was love that was to blame.As close to love as Ruskin could come, that is. He first met Rose LeTouche when he was 38 and she was 10, and he fell in love with her “purity” and immediately began thinking of marriage. His busy schedule and her worried parents conspired to keep them mostly apart for the next few years, but she turned 18 at the beginning of 1866, and he proposed. She told him to wait three years for an answer, but they didn’t even see each other again for four years, during which time Ruskin’s obsession only grew stronger (perhaps not coincidentally, he also began experiencing mental breakdowns that would grow worse with time). The analogy with Dante and the child Beatrice was no doubt irresistible to Ruskin, and like Dante, there may have been some unconscious calculation involved, as Hewison shrewdly points out:
[Rose was] the worst possible choice of someone to fall in love with, but it may be that that was the point. She was a fantasy, and though his feelings for her after her eighteenth birthday became increasingly sexual, to obtain her would have spoiled the dream.
The potential marriage was forestalled in part because Ruskin’s actual marriage, to Effie Millais, had ended badly – and famously. After she accused him of impotence and “sexual abnormality,” he responded that although he found her attractive, something about her was grotesque (the decorum of the time relieved him of needing to get specific, and Ruskin scholars have debated what the offending detail could have been. Body odor? Pubic hair? An actual vagina? The evenings get long, for Ruskin scholars). They were granted an annulment, but the conditions were such that if Ruskin were to marry again and father children, the annulment would be invalid and the second marriage would be bigamous.In the meantime, the strain on all those around him – especially his family friends the Severns and the Hillards – was considerable, as he pressed for more contact with Rose and she (under strain of her own from worsening tuberculosis) contrived to both encourage and dissuade him. Tensions could often be acute, and in one remarkable instance – when the whole group was visiting Ruskin in Venice in 1872 - those tensions are actually photographed. Hewison has his sly brand of fun analyzing:
This situation accounts for the drama beneath the surface of one of the most unusual souvenir photographs ever taken. … superficially this group portrait … records the Ruskin party on holiday in Venice. But a boiling row is taking place. On the right sits and embarrassed Albert Goodwin, who also happens to be unwell. At his feet sits an equally embarrassed Constance Hilliard, while above her stands a furious Arthur Severin, his right arm on the chair of a tight-lipped Joan. Mrs. Hilliard stands, keeping her distance, while on the left Ruskin sadly sits, his eyes on the middle distance and his mouth set.
Ruskin’s last decade was spent almost entirely in the silence of near-total dementia, but in the letters and journal entries of earlier decades, we find him again and again returning not only to The Stones of Venice (although he wrote many other books, the conclusion is inescapable that he knew he’d written only one truly great one) but to Venice itself, the city that so many readers of his age had come to associate with him. He felt the association himself, the sense that he could write about this place as he could about no other, in prose such as she had never received before. He himself usually expressed a polite estimation of that prose, at one point writing, “I know exactly what I had got to say, put the words firmly in their places like so many stitches, hemmed the edges of chapters round with what seemed to me graceful flourishes, touched them finally with my cunningest points of colour, and read the work to papa and mamma at breakfast next morning, as a girl shows her sampler.”But even his offhand references to Venice are filled with light, as in a 1869 letter (ironically, to his mother):
Here in one city maybe seen the effects of extreme aristocracy and extreme democracy – of the highest virtues and the worst sins – of the greatest arts and the most rude simplicities of humanity. It is the history of all men, not ‘in a nutshell’, but in a nautilus shell – my white nautilus that I painted so carefully is a lovely type of Venice.
Robert Hewison writes that through Ruskin’s works, Venice is “constantly resurrected,” but he’s leaving out his own substantial contribution. As inconceivable as the thought would have been to the Victorians, nobody today reads Ruskin – he’s preserved, in books like this one, very much as he sought to preserve Venice: expertly, in large fragments, and with infectious enthusiasm.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Columbia Journal of American Studies, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.