The differences between the original “Rime” and STC’s later
versions are minor but crucial, most notable among them probably the addition
of marginal glosses (in the style of the Geneva Bible) explaining and
commenting upon the more arcane events of the poem, and sometimes veering off
into strange and lovely digressions. I think of them as his version of Eliot’s
Notes to The Waste Land.
Coincidentally, the seminar will be reading (and Rebecca
will be presenting on) Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture, a book first
published in May 1849. The edition we’ll be working from, however, is a handy
Dover reprint (1989) of the 1880 reprint of the book. There are not a lot of
textual changes from the first edition to this reprint, in contrast to the new
editions of the early volumes of Modern Painters, where JR went to considerable
pains to tinker with the text, removing offensive bits, softening the rhetoric,
etc. With Seven Lamps, he’s left the text pretty much unchanged save for the
excision of some “pieces of rabid and utterly false Protestantism” – part and
parcel of his rejection of his early Evangelical rhetoric and its concomitant
fierce anti-Catholic stance. (How much of which was assumed, one wonders, to
placate his parents, worried that their pious son’s poking about the glorious
monuments of medieval Papism?)
He has added a number of notes at the foot of the page (in of course a smaller typeface), which constitute a kind of running 30-years-later commentary on the work. Many of them congratulate his younger self on getting things right; some of them, amusingly, note precisely how bloody wrong he was in 1849. All in all, the footnotes give one the sense of reading an author's own annotated copy of his earlier work.
He has added a number of notes at the foot of the page (in of course a smaller typeface), which constitute a kind of running 30-years-later commentary on the work. Many of them congratulate his younger self on getting things right; some of them, amusingly, note precisely how bloody wrong he was in 1849. All in all, the footnotes give one the sense of reading an author's own annotated copy of his earlier work.
The only significant change to the actual text of the 1880 Seven Lamps, that
most programmatic of Ruskin’s volumes, is the addition of marginal tags noting
the heads of his arguments, and the setting apart of important points in an
absurdly magnified and bolded typeface. Alas, these changes have nothing of the
effect of Coleridge’s glosses in “Rime,” which serve to deepen the mystery of
the poem & its air of antiquity. Ruskin’s typographical additions, to my
eye, have the effect of adding a series of managerial bullet points, of turning
a long and eloquent peroration in the direction of a memo.
***
Yes, I finished reading Ruskin’s Works proper in the Library
Edition the other day, knocking off Praeterita and Dilecta (volume 35); now I’m
midway thru the first big volume of letters. Thanks to Lancaster’s RuskinCentre, I’ve downloaded glorious PDFs of 30 volumes of the Library Edition onto
my iPad, and have instant access not merely to almost all of JR’s major works,
but to the edition’s comprehensive bibliography and (full-volume) index as
well. One learns something new every day – I discovered, as part of the Index
(volume 39)’s entry on “Ruskin, John,” a year-by-year biographical record,
which includes everything he was writing on any given year, every place he
visited, etc. Magnificent. But being never quite satisfied, I lament that the
index isn’t hyperlinked to the various volumes – now that would make things interesting!
I continue trundling thru Ruskin criticism, in recent weeks
PD Anthony’s John Ruskin’s Labour: A Study of Ruskin’s Social Theory (a rather useful study by a chap who is I gather a
management theorist, and who’s written a book on the ideology of work that I’ve
got to get to) and Michael Wheeler’s Ruskin’s God, a scrupulous study marred only by Wheeler’s
all-too-evident need to prove that Ruskin never really fell into agnosticism –
honest, he didn’t!
But even more recent is Kristine Ottesen Garrigan’s Ruskin
on Architecture: His Thought and Influence
(Wisconsin, 1973), a book which has made me think about the whole enterprise of
“taking an author whole” – in particular, of trying to get a global view of a
writer whose works span some X-million words. Bob Archambeau groused somewhere
lately (probably on Facebook, where all the poets have gone now blogging's declassé) about Fredric Jameson’s sloppy misreading of Yeats; and while I’m the
first to admit and admire Jameson’s genius, he’s the sort of critic who’s happy
to write profoundly on an author on the basis of having read one or two books
by him, to make a sweeping statement about a poet after reading the anthology
texts.
Garrigan, on the other hand, has achieved over who knows how
many years of labor (labor, mind you, not facilitated by having an
electronically searchable version of the LE) a comprehensive view of Ruskin’s
entire enterprise, and she’s able to tie her remarkably even-handed assessment
of his architectural criticism (two chapter titles: “What Ruskin Emphasized in
Architecture”; “What Ruskin Ignored in Architecture” – hint: the latter chapter
is rather longer than the former, & includes most of what most architects
and scholars of architecture consider significant about the art) into, by the
end of the book, a global interpretation of Ruskin’s whole imaginative and
cultural enterprise. Of course, it’s an interpretation modeled on what she
reads as Ruskin’s own basic drive to make cultural wholes out of fragments –
and, it strikes me, that’s a familiar drive on the part of the high modernists,
as well. I begin to suspect there’s something to be said for Guy Davenport’s
derivation of so much of twentieth-century writing from the “meditation on the
ruins” genre. Gotta dig out that copy of Volney.
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