John Ruskin: Les
Pierres de Venise.
Trans by
Mme Mathilde P. Crémieux.
Preface by M. Robert de la Sizeranne.
Paris, Laurens.
A translation of The Stones
of Venice that adds to the French intelligence a new and
notable part of the spirit of Ruskin and the spirit of Venice,
would have been an interesting event in our literary history in
any period, outside any contingence. But this one (the first in
the French language) that we owe to the admirable efforts of Mme
Crémieux, has also come, as they say, very much of its hour. The
hour of Venice perhaps, too, one might be led to think from
certain signs, the hour of Ruskin in France, the hour of Venice
in any case. Venice has never enjoyed, among the intellects of
the elite, a favour as special and as lofty as it does today. In
order to take back its position of eminence Venice has never,
unlike Versailles, had to climb back up such a steep slope of
disdain (Musset's "dull park of Versailles" became,
through Barrès, through Montesquiou, through Henri de Régnier,
Helleu, Nolhac, Lobre, Boldini1, the residence of choice for poets and sages); the
rather populist and muddled vogue which it held (and scarcely
distinguished it from Naples or Sorrento other than through its
tragic legends which created the romantic foundation in the
universal surroundings of love) has transformed itself into a
ceaseless refined and profound predilection of the rarest minds
of our times. The dying Venice of Barrès, the carnivalesque and
posthumous Venice of Régnier, the Venice insatiable in love of
Mme de Noailles, the Venice of Léon Daudet, of Jacques Vontade2 exercise a unique
fascination on all well bred imaginations. And now Ruskin is
going to lead us away from this rather passive contemplation of
Venice.
He allows us to glide along by gondola. He
himself, in Praeterita, confessed to the gentle
voluptuousness he had found there. But it will be necessary, The
Stones of Venice in our hand, to stop off at all the
churches and dwellings, half erected, delightful and pink, rising
from the waters in which they are plunged, to study each capital,
to ask for a ladder to make out a relief to whose importance
Ruskin has drawn our attention and which, were it not for him, we
would never have noticed; not contenting ourselves with viewing
Venice as the decoration that formerly inspired Daniel Halévy to
his exquisite and scornful pages, but as a city which is alive,
which is, among all living cities, noble and wise, and whose
nobility, wisdom and vitality are still visible and admirable in
those stones that they ordain according to their laws.3 A sort of museum,
intact and perfect, of the domestic architecture during the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance - the sublime Middle Ages and the
disastrous Renaissance - that the inexhaustible and marvellous
lessons Venice is going to teach us, now that Ruskin is to make
its stones speak to us, and, thanks to Mme Crémieux's superb
translation, is going to address us in our own language, like one
of those apostles gilded with glossolalia4 which are represented in the baptistery of St Mark's. So
it is with beauty as with good fortune (of which a certain poet,
moreover, said that it was the promise), and beauty fades away,
like good fortune, into dull weariness if we pursue it to the
exclusion of all else. We could have wearied ourselves with the
languor of Venice and coldly repeat, in its praise, litanies of
genius. And now, upon our return to our Ruskinian pilgrimages,
energetic and industrious as they are, in which we will search
for truth and not pleasure, our pleasure will become all the more
profound, and Venice will shed upon us even greater enchantment
for having been for us a place of study and given us
voluptuousness beyond measure. Passionate pilgrims to the stones
which were at first ideas and which they become once more for us,
what wonderful lessons we hear the master preach to us at the
water's edge! To the colours of the Venetian skies, to the
mosaics in St Mark's, are added new colours, more enchanting
still because they are the very hues of a marvellous imagination,
Ruskin's colours, that his prose, like an enchanted ship, carry
across the world!
M. Alinari's photographs, both lively and
artistic, console us a little for the publishers or Ruskin's
heirs not authorizing the reproduction of the Master's wonderful
engravings. One could, upon seeing M. Alinari's plates, reply to
the question posed recently by M. de la Sizeranne, that
photography is indeed an art form in its own right. The
marvellous lecture on Ruskin that the latter gave at the Doge's
Palace and which reverberated so deeply in France and in England,
forms the preface of this book. In these Stones of Venice,
necessarily abridged, but still brimming with beautiful things,
we find pages on arrival in Venice, on Torcello, on St Mark's,
which in the anthology of Venice can, without fear of argument,
take their place beside those most beautiful pages in Barrès'
book. For Venice Ruskin will achieve in France what has been
begun by Turner, Barrès, Mme de Noailles, Henri de Régnier and
Whistler. A second edition is already going to press as we write.
Mme Crémieux's translation, being conceived primarily as a guide
to Venice, is a sort of abridgement of the "Travellers'
Edition", and we entreat for the third edition an appendix
which contains, if possible, the extract about the works of
Vittore Carpaccio. (At the very least it should introduce in the
Venetian index the material Ruskin added in his 1877 revision.
Without that we simply have the note on San Giorgio dei Schiavoni
which features in Mme Crémieux's translation: "it is
considered to contain a beautiful series by Carpaccio",
which is far too stupefactive to anybody who is familiar with
Ruskin's claim that he discovered Carpaccio.) Other parts of the
book have some kinship with other books by Ruskin, certain works
of Venetian criticism played a significant role in the evolution
of Ruskin's taste, take up an important part in his work - the
place that they held in his life - and inspired him to the
wonderful development of his other books, that one regrets that
the necessary limitations did not allow Mme Crémieux a full
table of references. But she has condensed so much into one
volume that it is already a miracle that she has been able to
succeed so well. The dazzling success of her translation is, as
they say, an extremely favourable prognosis, from the point of
view of the influence of Great Britain's beauties, viewed from
here at a distance and as if through a mist by those who can only
but imperfectly read the original, but introduced to them through
this translation in pure and clear light, cannot fail to
exercise French sensibility.
Marcel Proust.
First published in La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 5 May 1906.
1. A prose writer, two poets, an engraver, a scholar, two painters. Montesquiou dedicated his collection of sonnets, Les Perles rouges (1899) to Maurice Lobre (1862 - 1951).
2. Pseudonym of Mme Bulteau, novelist.
3. Proust always spoke of his old friend with a mixture of affection and reserve. Here he is thinking of two articles that Daniel Halévy wrote for La Revue de Paris (1 Aug & 1 Sept 1898) under the title Vénétie et Tuscane.
4. The gift of language.