Death and Champagnole: A Contribution to the Reading of The Seven Lamps of Architecture

DEATH AND CHAMPAGNOLE: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE READING OF THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE PIERRE FONTANEY Pergue domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna ( Aeneid VI 269) Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun; But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. (Ecclesiastes II: 7-8) The Lamp of Memory, the sixth of the Seven Lamps of Architecture, opens with one of Ruskin's celebrated purple passages - the description of the Jura at Champagnole:' Among the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude , as having been marked by more than ordinary fulness of joy and clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura... The passage, it will be remembered, falls into two parts: first, the evocation of the actual landscape, endowed with 'all the solemnity' although with 'none of the savageness' of the Alps further away, itself fair and tender with flowers and birds; then, as an anticlimax, Ruskin briefly imagines the same scene translated to North America, where there is no sense of the presence and of the history of man, and at once his joy turns into gloom: The Bowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music; the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs... I propose to raise the following questions: Are these lines functional? If so, what is their function? These questions seem to me to need raising, as commentators have expressed a degree of puzzlement or dissatisfaction with them. UTQ. Volume XLm, Number 2, Winter 1974 DEATH AND CHAMPAGNQLE 133 There is, for instance, the dissatisfaction of Mrs Meynell! who, incidentally , attests their popularity with nineteenth-<:entury readers: 'Perhaps nothing in The Seven Lamps: she writes, 'has been found so memorable by the greater number of readers.' She declares her appreciation of the 'finished' and 'exquiSite' 'mastery' of the 'word-painting: yet her response is half-hearted: she detects about it something overdone Cit is too much, too charged, too anxious'), an element of gratuity, in sum, as a consequence of which her imagination fails to be moved deeply. A recent commentator, George P. Landow, is apparently puzzled.' Responding, not to the literary quality of the passage, but to the argument which it seems to him to convey, he construes it as expounding a theory of beauty that embarrassingly contradicts the one offered in the fourth lamp, the Lamp of Beauty, and, three years earlier, in the second volume of Modern Painters. The beauty of architectural ornament is defined in the fourth lamp as consisting in the imitation of natural forms, not all natural forms being equally beautiful, or even beautiful at all, but nO beautiful form being conceivable that is not derivable from nature. Nature is beautiful because it is God-created and bears upon itself the signature of God. Beauty is, therefore, objective. This definition of beauty is conformable to the mOre general and more sophisticated one given in Modern Painters 2, in which beauty is also seen as objective, or, to use Ruskin's own language, as 'inherent': it inheres in the natural object, that is, ultimately, in God, resolving itself into a relationship with the divine, either because the object is symbolical of some divine quality Or because it involves the fulfilment of some divinely-appointed function. Ruskin posits a faculty, the theoretic faculty, that enables man to perceive beauty in its relation with the divine. In Modern Painters 2 Ruskin dismisses such theories of beauty as would ground it in the subject instead of the object. There are two theories of this kind : that beauty is a matter of custom, and that it is a matter of the association of ideas. His refutation is the traditional one: custom, and the association of ideas, do have an influence on the experience of beauty, but they do not create beauty itself, which stands prior to them.' In practice Ruskin allows the association of ideas some importance when it is historical (or 'rational: as he calls it) and great importance when it is personal (or 'accidental: as he calls it), going so far as to suggest that there may be a constant 'unconscious underworking' of 'indefinite' 'accidental' association that renders it impossible ever to experience beauty in its objective integrity. Indeed, next to the 'theoretic' faculty, he refers 134 l?IERRE FONTANEy' to an 'associative' faculty. Yet, for him, the association of ideas cannot create beauty; and about 'rational' associations he has this to say:' By Rational Association I understand the interest which any object may bear historically, as having been in some way connected with the affairs or affections of men; an interest shared in the minds of all who are aware of such connection; which to call beauty is mere and gross confusion of terms; it is no theory to be confuted, but a misuse of language to be set aside, a misuse involving the positions that in uninhabited countries the vegetation has no grace, the rock no dignity, the cloud no colour... George Landow brings together these lines and those from The Seven Lamps quoted above ('The flowers in an instant lost their light, etc.') and comments: 'The position which Ruskin here [i.e., in Modern Painters 2] dismisses so contemptuously is approximately that which he chose a few years after.' To him the anticlimax in the Lamp of Memory means, over and against the evidence of the Lamp of Beauty, that Ruskin by 1849 somehow also held that 'historical associations can create beauty: was in fact in the process of shifting his emphasis from 'principles above man' to 'man himself: from the objective to the subjective. He regards it as a signincant landmark in Ruskin's evolution, which he sees generally as one from the objective, through the deadening and loss of religiOUS conndence, to the subjective; from an emphasis on the natural and there· fore the supernatural, that is, on art, to one on the purely human, that is, On the economic and the social. In other words, for Mrs Meynell, the Champagnole description stands in comparative isolation, brilliant, but feebly related to its context, whereas for George Landow it relates with Ruskin's general doctrine, but does so awkwardly, at the cost of contradiction and confusion. My contention will be that it relates strictly with the context (pace Mrs Meynell) and smoothly with the doctrine (pace Professor Landow). The Champagnole landscape is both real and emblematic, its emblematic import being seen more clearly when it is compared with the diary entry for 19 April 1846,' written on the spot and at the time, which provides the raw material for it. All the factual elements are in the 1846 document, and in much the same order; the luxuriant flowers, which are listed in both texts with only minor variations (out of the ten flowers of 1846, eight appear in 1849 in the same order, the 'Alpine blue flower' being identified as polygala alpina; one - the wild strawberry - appears further down the list; one the lilac-like flower - is omitted), the ivy and the moss, the vertical clefts DEATH AND CHAMPAGNOLE 135 filled with oxalis, the dark pine forest, the steep valley of the Ain, over which a hawk sails slowly, the noise of the river below, the thrushes singing among the pine branches. Strikingly, there is at the end of the entry a remark that leads directly to the anticlimax in the Lamp of Memory: It struck me suddenly how utterly different the impression of such a scene would be, if it were in a strange land and in one without history. How dear to the feeling is the pine of Switzerland compared to that of Canada! I have allowed too little weight to these deep sympathies, for I think, if that pine forest had been among the Alleghanys, or if the stream had been Niagara, I should only have looked at them with intense melancholy and desire for home. Quite explicitly the imagined feeling of gloom is caused not simply by homesickness, but by the lack of historical associations, by the default of 'rational' as well as of 'accidentar associations. The J849 text is clearly based on the 1846 one, yet with differences. Not all of these are equally helpful. For instance, the predictable substitution for the soberly factual and enumerative style of J846 of one that is mOre elaborate, animated, and intense all round (thus, 'and the ground all blue with violets' becomes 'and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets') hardly is. What is illuminating is the long addition at the beginning: Ruskin first compares the Jura with the Alps and, from the feature they have in common, solemnity (the word 'solemn' being used twice in the diary), he builds up a dramatic sense of the kinship, and yet contrast, between them: of their kinship in point of 'strength' and 'might,' only the strength of the Jura is 'as yet restrained'; and of the contrast between the 'savageness' of the Alps, their loudness, wildness, sternness, fury, rudeness , destructiveness (there is here a plentiful admixture of pathetic fallacy, which is nearly absent from the diary), and the tenderness, softness , and quietness of the Champagnole landscape: for consistency's sake, the 'solemn roar of the water' of 1846 is subdued, further down, into 'the solemn murmur of its waters.' The clue to the comparison is, as I read the passage, the word 'power' immediately at the outset: It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, of the Alps; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth... The word does not occur in the diary, but doesoccur in The Seven Lamps: the third lamp is that of 'power', or sublimity, a concept which Ruskin 136 PIERRE FONTANEY repeatedly links with, and illustrates by, mountain imagery. Here are a few samples of sublime mountain imagery in the third lamp: 'the grey cliff,' 'the awful cone of the far-off mountain,' 'the dateless hills, which it needed earthquakes to lift, and deluges to mould," the 'majestic heave of the mountain side, all tom and traversed by depth of defile and ridge of rock.'" The last, climactic, image in the lamp, which is meant to gather into itself the whole spirit of sublimity, is that of the lifting of 'grey cliffs of lonely stone, into the midst of sailing birds and silent air.'9 The architect is urged, in order to develop his capacity for sublimity, to foster in himself a 'sympathy' with the mountains: 'Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome"· is Ruskin's parting advice. The nascent mountain landscape of Champagnole, then, in so far as it has kinship with the high mountains, is emblematic of nascent sublimity, of sublimity 'beginning to be manifested' and 'as yet restrained,' while the distant Alps stand for full sublimity, for the full sense of melancholy, threatening, infinity and mystery with which Ruskin (in Burke's tradition ) associates it in the third lamp. In the same way, the Bowery spring landscape, in SO far as it contrasts with the high mountains, is emblematic of beauty, which is explicitly referred to (again, like the word 'power,' the word 'beauty' is not used in the diary): at the end of the description, as he is starting his transition to the anticlimax, Ruskin speaks of the 'secluded and serious beauty' of the scene, and this exactly balances his mention of the word 'power': the description opens with one and closes with the other. The two leaves of the Champagnole diptych stand in much the same relation one to the other as do, according to the third and fourth lamps, 'power' and 'beauty' in architecture, that is, as man's Adam-like rugged command over the world, lofty originality, creative energy do to his Eve-like (note the girlish connotations of the oxalis trooping 'like virginal processions of the Mois de Marie' : the Bowers are graceful, loving, faintly shy, which is what women ought to be) loving humility and warm imitative subservience to the world; as his approach to the awful mystery of the supernatural and natura naturans does to his familiar intercourse with natura naturata, as his gloom and terrOr do to his joy. Only, the sublimity of Champagnole is so toned down as to be compatible with its beauty. But, at the end, when Ruskin comes to the edge of the ravine, they are set sharply side by side. Here sublimity is represented by the dizzy depth of the valley ('the fall of a hundred fathoms') over which the hawk sails DEATH AND CHAMPAGNOLE 137 slowly. In the diary this was reported straightforwardly: There was a hawk sailing slowly along the opposite cliff.' In The Seven Lamps the valley is dramatized thus, 'On the opposite side of the valley, walled along as it was by grey cliffs of limestone: which looks back to the 'grey cliff' series of images in the Lamp of Power, whereas the hawk image at the climax of the description recaptures the final climactic bird image of that lamp. The windhovering hawk of sublimity lIies in superbly easy mastery of the dangerous, so near to, and yet so far from, the singing thrushes of beauty cosily sheltered 'among the pine-boughs.' Structurally, then, the Champagnole landscape relates backward with the Lamps of Power and Beauty, the two aesthetic lamps, which it binds together tightly. It fulfills a function parallel to that of the proleptic vision, at the beginning of the Lamp of Power, of the two orders of architecture: one the marble chapel, and the other 'the vast weariness of some shadowy wall:" between which the difference also is, as Ruskin puts it himself, 'that which there is in nature between things beautiful and sublime.' Like the Champagnole landscape, the chapel is 'secluded: being associated with forest and river, and, like it, it is above all characterized by the mass of its lIowers, here the carved lIowers Cthe fretted Hower-work shrinking under its arches') lying as thick as snow Cas if under vaults of late-fallen snow': at Champagnole 'the dark vertical clefts in the limestone [are] choked up with them [i.e., the lIowers] as with heavy snow'). Conversely, the vast shadowy wall is akin to the 'grey cliff' of the Champagnole ravine, being vast, dark, and strong like it, and its stones 'like mountain foundations.' There remains to interpret the anticlimax. Its dark, silent, chilly, heavy landscape I also take to be emblematic and, through its emblematic significance, to be structurally related to the book as a whole. As the two words 'power' and 'beauty' were an indication of the function of the Champagnole landscape, so two more words act as pointers: they are 'life' (in 'how much of the former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs': 'power: being applied to the whole of the landscape, Howers, forest, and hills, is not to be taken here in the sense of sublimity, but simply of the capacity to move and to fill with joy) and 'memory' (in 'how much of the glory of the ... creation is reHected from things mare precious in their memories than it, in its renewing'). They suggest that the passage also relates backward with the Lamp of Life, and forward with the Lamp of Memory - the order of the lamps being, be it remembered: (3) Power (4) Beauty ( 5) Life (6) Memory. 138 :PIERRE FONTANEY The motif of life, in connection with the counter motif of death, runs through the whole book. It appears in the first lamp, that of Sacrifice, in the guise of the sense of the worth of man's labour, which is so valuable that man must devote it to God and, at the same time, be careful not to waste it in the slightest degree. This sense of the worth of man's handwork is built up in the second lamp, that of Truth, in which Ruskin opposes the machine-made, which he equates with the false and the dead, to the man-made, which he equates with the true and the living, his dislike for the machine-made merging, as the book proceeds, into his general (puritanical, and Victorian middle"class) dislike of all that is clever, elegant, finicky, Himsy, of all 'tricks' and 'vanities' - which caused the downfall of Gothic - and his taste for the hand·made into his general taste for the simple, the homely, the massive, the clumsy but solid and honestly meant. The motif is also present in both the lamps of Power and Beauty, with the feeling, in the Lamp of Power, that the creating of sublimity draws (in due Longinian tradition) on the greatest emotions and strongest living energy of man, and, in the Lamp of Beauty, that the creating of beauty is a matter, not of the passively receptive imitation of natural forms, but of the active recapturing of their living, organic beauty. These two themes, of the wonder of man's creative energy and of the overriding worth of his labour, are brought into focus in the Lamp of Life. This lamp rests on the basic opposition between the dead or death-like and the living. Again the dead is equated with the mechanical, which is to be understood literally and metaphorically: the mechanical is all living by rote, of which one manifestation is the using of machines. Against this Ruskin sets the true Life, using as he goes metaphors of warmth ('the How of a lava stream, first bright and fierce,' 'the warmth of the true life.'l2 'the mass of its homogeneous fire''') versus metaphors of cold ('the tumbling over and over of its frozen blocks,' 'the hemlock cold of the false,''' or the 'cold cutting' and 'chill' of wrong finish") and metaphors of the fading of colours (,to see the shell of the living creature in its adult form, when its colours are faded, and its inhabitants perished'lO). True Life is the total involvement of man's sensibility and energy, capacity to feel and to act, without any holding back: unselfconsciousness, frankness, boldness , even impudence, are in this context the virtues which Ruskin chooses to praise. When at his most impudently creative, man, fulfilling himself through his labour, will also be at his happiest (this looks forward, of course, to The Nature of Gothic). Thus vitally engaged, he will create, through some sympathy with the natural organic processes, that which DEATH AND CHAMPAGNOLE 139 has in it the seeds of life, the organic.l7 This argument is brought to bear upon the specific problem of the Gothic Revival, which is central to the Lamp of Life: Ruskin is at great pains to show that some process of creative imitation of mediaeval Gothic must be initiated, of which he can see little evidence, and failing which the Revival is doomed: hence his scepticism at its chances of success.IS The Lamp ends on a brief climax: 1. Since our life must at the best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace and rolling of the Wheel. Death is here again connected with machines, in this case the steamengine ('the Furnace'), its smoke ('the thick darkness') and motion ('rolling of the wheel': Ruskin is probably thinking of railways), but it also appears literally, as the ultimate unavoidable destruction of man, and the need to make the fullest use of life is felt all the more poignantly as life is shorter and more fragile. The Champagnole deSCription follows upon this. I wish to suggest that the anticlimactic part of it is emblematic of death, which, at this stage of The Seven Lamps, is beginning to overflow from the metaphOrical into the literal. So far in the book, death has been present, as I have shown, as the metaphor of the type of individual and collective human conduct which Ruskin condemns: broadly, that is, as the spirit of the Industrial Revolution . Clearly, this metaphorical usage involves Ruskin's sensibility deeply. He draws repeatedly on the starkest imagery of sickness and dissolution to express his anguish and disgust at the passing away of his Gothic Eden: for instance, in the Lamp of Truth, late Gothic is seen as early Gothic 'thinned and pared away into ", skeletons,' hideously 'distorted' and 'emaciated,' the 'ghost' Of 'spectre' of itself;20 Of, in the last, climactic, paragraph , the fall of Gothic is fantastically described in terms of 'disease,' 'decrepitude' and 'rotting away,' and inediaeval ruins as 'rent skeletons' torn 'joint by joint, and bone by bone.21 In this way a perceptible intimation of the horror of death broods over the first lamps. With the Lamp of Memory, however, the ominously metaphOrical turns into the literal. The Lamp of Memory deals with these platitudes: that dead men and past communities are remembered through their architecture and that architecture is one of man's most lasting defences against oblivion. Therefore , Ruskin urges, men must build strong architecture, public and domestic, so as to achieve a sense of permanence and peace in their Iife- 140 PIERRE FONTANEY time and, after their death, to rise 'out of the shadows' to speak to the living. As an illustration he gives a cottage at Grindelwald, which bears On its front a dedication to God that tells of its present owners' piety and faith: after their death, the dedication will go on speaking of them to their descendants. It is an interesting example, in that it formulates directly what Ruskin is engaged in seeking. The dedication tells of the hope of the married pair to travel through trials to the Heavenly Paradise (,Auf der Reise durch diese Jammerzeit/Nach dem himmlischen Paradiese') in order there to gain the crown of peace to all eternity (,Mit der Friedenskrone / Zu aile EWigkeit'),22 which is as clear a statement as can be of that which Ruskin is looking for: absolute ataraxy within absolute permanence , of which the pastoral cottage is a dim adumbration. As the lamp draws to its close, however, a keen feeling develops that the whole attempt is foredoomed, that ultimately all buildings will fall into ruin, men be forgotten, and death prevail. Hence the anguished way in which Ruskin speaks of restoration: 'Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter: it is impossible [Ruskin's italics], as impossible as it is to raise the dead';2' and he responds to it in terms of 'skeletons' and 'corpses' which it is sacrilegious to try and fake into a semblance of life, and in all respects better to let lapse back into the primeval matter, 'melt' into 'clay' and 'dust.' More is here involved than the surface controversy with the rabid restorers of the Cambridge Camden or Viollet-Ie-Duc school: Ruskin is moved by his depth panic at death and corruption. The Lamp of Memory ends with death triumphant. The seventh lamp, that of Obedience, is Ruskin's last defence. Let us, his argument runs, decide on one style ( for instance, geometrical Early Decorated) and enforce it upon all. A unity and concentration of energy will be gained whereby all restlessness and disorder will be driven back and the social body itself (the Lamps were written in the throes of 1848) cured of its fever. As he advocates the need of a unified style, Ruskin uses a revealing comparison, that of a child 'who would sit down and shudder if he were left free in a fenceless plain,' whereas he would be happy and active if he were 'within a walled garden,'2' a comparison of which it is arguable that it has its roots in Ruskin's own hortus conclusus childhood at Heme Hill, where 'the little domain answered every purpose of Paradise.''' A unified style of architecture and, indeed, unity itself, are seen metaphorically as some sheltered locus amoenus, that is, again, as a place where peace and permanence are reached, whereas the little-boy-Iost image is charged with all the pathos of anguish and death. The enclosed garden of Obedience, the figure of Ruskin's desire and aim of the quest of which The Seven DEATH AND CHAMPAGNOLE 141 Lamps tells, is the victory (how short-lived!) of the imagination over Death. The Champagnole landscape occurs at the turning-point in the book at which death begins to break through. It gathers into itself the spirit of both the sublime and the beautiful, of which Ruskin deliberately makes it emblematic: his use of the words 'power' and 'beauty' indicates his intention . It is also deliberately made emblematic of both life and, proleptically, death: again, the use of the two words 'life' and 'memories' is a manifest indication. Its sublimity and beauty are caught in their mysterious sympathetic connection with Life, the category that for Ruskin overrides and pertneates all others. If this connection is broken, death deletes the landscape and they vanish. Specifically, the imagery of the anticlimax the cold, the lack of colours, the darkness - relates backward with the death imagery of the Lamp of Life. It is hardly necessary to say that it is also archetypal: death, the unimaginable, tends to be imagined negatively , as the lack of light, sound, and motion, which is what characterizes the North American landscape. The Champagnole passage, then, as I respond to it, is beyond doubt purple, but also (pace Mrs Meynell) functional. Its function, however, does not consist (pace Professor Landow) in working out the preliminaries of some new (let alone incompatible) theory of beauty - indeed, it is about sublimity, life, and memory as much as about beauty. Ruskin is here engaged in something other than theoriZing: the passage has for its function to create a direct and vivid sense of the whole complex pattern of interrelationships that moves him so deeply. It is the keystone of the book. What is one to make of the remark in the diary entry: 'I have allowed too little weight to these deep sympathies,' which George Landow also construes as evidence for Ruskin's 'apparent acceptance of Associationism'? Assuming that in the diary Ruskin thought of the Champagnole landscape as beautiful, which he does not say, but is a fair assumption, and referring his remark back to Modern Painters 2, it means what it says: it occurred to Ruskin that in his theory of beauty he had 'allowed' some 'weight,' that is, some de facto importance, to the association of ideas (which he demonstrably had), only more to 'accidental' than to 'rational' association, and that 'rational' association should be 'allowed' henceforward more 'weight.' This qualification of his thought does not amount to offering new de jure grounds for beauty. Ruskin's conception of beauty remains as objective throughout The Seven Lamps as in Modern Painters 2 and as firtnly grounded in the 142 PIERRE FONTANBl' divine. Nor is there in The Seven Lamps any perceptible shift away from the 'principles above man.' What is pre-eminently perceptible, though, is the massive new emphasis on life and on the human. This is how Ruskin felt about it himself. Commenting much later in life, in 1883, on precisely the two passages under discussion, the one on 'rational' association in Modem Painters 2 and the Champagnole landscape in The Seven Lamps, he wrote: 2