The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin 1107054893, 9781107054899
John Ruskin (1819–1900), one of the leading literary, aesthetic and intellectual figures of the middle and late Victoria
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t h e ca m b r i d g e c o m p an i on t o j o h n ru s ki n John Ruskin (1819–1900), one of the leading literary, aesthetic, and intellectual figures of the middle and late Victorian period, and a significant influence on writers from Tolstoy to Proust, has established his claim as a major writer of English prose. This collection of essays brings together leading experts from a wide range of disciplines to analyse his ideas in the context of his life and work. Topics include Ruskin’s Europe, architecture, technology, autobiography, art, gender, and his rich influence even in the contemporary world. This is the first multi-authored expert collection to assess the totality of Ruskin’s achievement and to open up the deep coherence of a troubled but dazzling mind. A chronology and guide to further reading contribute to the usefulness of the volume for students and scholars. francis o ’gorman is a professor in the School of English at the University of Leeds and the author of Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History (2015). His other recent publications include editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (2014), Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (co-edited with Katherine Mullin, 2014), and Ruskin’s Praeterita (2012), as well as The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture (2010). A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book.
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THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
JOHN RUSKIN edited by
FRANCIS O’GORMAN
Published online by Cambridge University Press
University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107674240 © Cambridge University Press 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin / edited by Francis O’Gorman. pages cm. – (Cambridge Companions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-05489-9 (hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-67424-0 (paperback) 1. Ruskin, John, 1819–1900 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Ruskin, John, 1819–1900 – Appreciation. 3. Ruskin, John, 1819–1900 – Influence. 4. Ruskin, John, 1819–1900. 5. Authors, English – 19th century – Biography. I. O’Gorman, Francis, editor. II. Title: Companion to John Ruskin. pr5264.c36 2015 828’.809–dc23 2015021266 isbn 978-1-107-05489-9 Hardback isbn 978-1-107-67424-0 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
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For Stephen Wildman Director and Curator Ruskin Library and Research Centre University of Lancaster UK With gratitude
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CONTENTS
List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Note on the principal contents of the Library Edition Chronology List of abbreviations 1 Introduction francis o’gorman
ix xi xiv xv xvii xxiii 1
part i
places
2 Edinburgh–London–Oxford–Coniston keith hanley
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3 The Alps emma sdegno
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4 Italy nicholas shrimpton
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5 France and Belgium cynthia gamble
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part ii 6 Art lucy hartley 7 Architecture geoffrey tyack
topics 83
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contents 8 Politics and economics nicholas shrimpton
116
9 Nation and class judith stoddart
130
10 Religion francis o’gorman
144
11 Sexuality and gender sharon aronofsky weltman
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12 Technology alan davis
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part iii
authorship
13 Ruskin and Carlyle david r. sorensen
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14 Lecturing and public voice dinah birch
202
15 Diary journals, correspondence, autobiography, and private voice martin dubois
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16 Creativity clive wilmer
230
part iv
legacies
17 Political legacies stuart eagles
249
18 Cultural legacies marcus waithe
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Guide to further reading Index
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279 286
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. John Ruskin, Glacier des Bois, Chamonix, c.1856. RF, Ruskin Library, Lancaster University. Reproduced with permission.
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2. John Ruskin, The Gates of the Hills, detail from The Pass of St Gothard near Faido, Switzerland, after J. M. W. Turner, 1855. Watercolour on paper. CGSG00105: Collection of the Guild of St George, Museums Sheffield. Reproduced with permission.
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3. John Ruskin, Church at Dijon, 1833. Reproduced courtesy of Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Lakeland Arts Trust, Kendal, Cumbria.
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4. J. M. W. Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon coming on), 1840. Oil on canvas, 90.8 × 122.6cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 99.22. Reproduced with permission.
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5. Fra Angelico, Ancilla Domini. vii. Frontispiece. Engraving by W. Holl. Library Edition, vii. frontispiece. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
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6. John Ruskin after Tintoretto, Advanced Naturalism. Library Edition, v.398. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
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7. John Ruskin, Decoration by Disks, Palazzo dei Badoari Partecipazzi. Library Edition, ix.288. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
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8. Benjamin Woodward, The Oxford Museum, 1858. Library Edition, xvi.216. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
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9. Comparison of engravings of J. M. W. Turner’s By the Brook-side (Richmond from the Moors, made for Turner’s England and Wales series of engravings) by J. C. Armytage under Ruskin’s supervision (above), and by J. T. Willmore ix
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l i s t o f i l l u s tr a t i o n s
under Turner’s supervision (below). Library Edition, vii.128. (Image: Alan Davis.)
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10. Wood engraving after Frederick Sandys’s Until Her Death, Good Words, 1863 (above), with enlarged detail (below). (Image: Alan Davis.)
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11. The Last Furrow. Library Edition, xxii.352. (Image: Alan Davis.)
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12. John Ruskin, The Vine: Free, and in Service, 1853, from The Stones of Venice II. Plate VI, Library Edition x.115. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
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13. David and Lida Cardozo Kindersley, The Ruskin Gallery, green slate, painted and gilded. Collection of the Guild of St George, Museums Sheffield, 1985. Reproduced with permission.
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CONTRIBUTORS
d i n a h b i r c h is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. Her publications include Ruskin’s Myths (1988) and Ruskin on Turner (1990), together with a selected edition of Fors Clavigera (2000) and John Ruskin: Selected Writings (2004). Her study of nineteenth-century educational ideals, Our Victorian Education, appeared in 2008. She is General Editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (7th edn, 2009). a l a n d a v i s is editor of The Ruskin Review and Bulletin and Honorary Visiting Researcher at the Ruskin Library and Research Centre (Lancaster University), with a special interest in Ruskin, Turner, and printmaking. He has curated exhibitions at the Ruskin Library including ‘A Pen of Iron’: Ruskin and Printmaking (2003), Ruskin’s Organic Vision (2005), and Ruskin and the Persephone Myth (2007). m a r t i n d u b o i s is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Newcastle. He has published articles on a range of Victorian writers, including Hopkins and William Barnes, and is currently completing a monograph on Hopkins and the poetry of religious experience. s t u a r t e a g l e s is Secretary of the Guild of St George. His first book, After Ruskin (2011), explores Ruskin’s social and political legacies in Great Britain up to 1920. In 2010, he gave the Ruskin Lecture on the subject of ‘Ruskin and Tolstoy’ and he continues to work on Ruskin’s reception in Russia and elsewhere in Europe. c y n t h i a g a m b l e is Chairman of the Ruskin Society and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. She writes and lectures on Anglo-French crosscurrents with Ruskin and Proust as foundations of her interdisciplinary research. Her books include Proust as Interpreter of Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Architecture (2002), John Ruskin, Henry James and the Shropshire Lads (2008), L’oeil de Ruskin: l’exemple de la Bourgogne (2011), and Wenlock Abbey 1857–1919: A Shropshire Country House and the Milnes Gaskell Family (2015). xi
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notes on co ntributor s k e i t h h a n l e y is Professor of English literature at Lancaster University, where he directed the Ruskin Centre, 2000–8. His books include John Ruskin’s Romantic Tours 1837–1838: Travelling North (2007) and, with J. K. Walton, Constructing Cultural Tourism: John Ruskin and the Tourist Gaze (2010) as well as Ruskin’s Struggle for Coherence (co-ed with Rachel Dickinson 2008). An edition of John Ruskin’s Continental Tour, 1835: The Written Records and Drawings is forthcoming. l u c y h a r t l e y is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge, 2001), and has published essays on aesthetics and democracy as well as on a critical bibliography of John Stuart Mill. She is currently editing a collection of essays entitled The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880 and recently completed a new book, The Interest in Beauty: Art and Public Political Life in Nineteenth-Century Britain. f r a n c i s o ’ g o r m a n published Late Ruskin: New Contexts in 2001 and edited Ruskin and Gender (2002) with Dinah Birch. He is the author most recently of Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History (2015) and editor of Ruskin’s Praeterita (2012), the Oxford Twenty-First Century Authors Algernon Charles Swinburne (2016), and Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (2016). He edited The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture (2010) and is currently a Professor in the School of English at the University of Leeds. e m m a s d e g n o teaches Victorian literature at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. She has published several essays on Ruskin and British travel culture. Her books include Ruskin, Venice and 19th-Century Cultural Travel (2010, edited with Keith Hanley) and John Ruskin’s Écrits sur les Alpes (2013, edited with Claude Reichler). She translated into Italian Ruskin’s Guide to Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice 1877 (2014, edited by Paul Tucker). n i c h o l a s s h r i m p t o n is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. His most recent publications are Ruskin and ‘War’ (2014), and editions of Anthony Trollope’s An Autobiography (2014) and The Warden (2014). His other writing on Ruskin includes the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on his work (15th edn, 2002 printing, and EB On-Line) and ‘Ruskin and the Aesthetes’ in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (1999, edited by Dinah Birch). d a v i d r . s o r e n s e n is Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. He is Senior Editor of the Duke-Edinburgh Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Duke, 1970–ongoing) and has co-edited Carlyle’s French Revolution (1989), The Newly Selected Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle (2004), The Carlyles at Home and Abroad (2004), and Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship (2013). xii
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not e s on c ont r i b ut o r s j u d i t h s t o d d a r t is a faculty member in English and associate dean of the Graduate School at Michigan State University. Her work includes Ruskin’s Culture Wars: ‘Fors Clavigera’ and the Crisis of Liberalism (1998), essays on Victorian visuality, sentimentality, and theories of the public sphere, and a book project, Pleasures Incarnate: The Aesthetic Project of British Sentimentality, 1830s-1930s. Her current research is on late-Victorian and modernist theories of personality. g e o f f r e y t y a c k is a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, Director of the Stanford University Centre in Oxford, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. His books include Sir James Pennethorne and the Making of Victorian London (1992), Oxford: An Architectural Guide (1998), and John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque (2013). He contributed a chapter to Ruskin and Architecture (2003, edited by R. Daniels and G. Brandwood) and is co-editor of George Gilbert Scott: An Architect and His Influence (2014). m a r c u s w a i t h e is a Fellow in English and a University Senior Lecturer at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is the author of William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (2006). His recent work includes essays on Ruskin, Carlyle, Empson, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Geoffrey Hill. In 2011 he launched Ruskin at Walkley, a web-based reconstruction of St George’s Museum, available at www.ruskinatwalk ley.org. s h a r o n a r o n o f s k y w e l t m a n , Davis Alumni Professor of English at Louisiana State University, is the author of two books: Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education (2007) and Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture, named Outstanding Academic Book by Choice magazine in 1999. She also guest-edited a special issue on Ruskin for Nineteenth-Century Prose in 2008. c l i v e w i l m e r is an Emeritus Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and Master of the Guild of St George, the charity founded by Ruskin in 1871. He edited John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Other Writings (1985), and is the author of several books of poetry, including New and Collected Poems (2012) and Urban Pastorals (2014).
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editor is grateful to the following for their support for this volume, advice, and encouragement: Anna Bond, Linda Bree, Bernard Richards, Paul Tucker, and Stephen Wildman. I’m also grateful to all the contributors for the helpful discussions we had about the shape and scope of the volume. I want to add my thanks for the interest and intellectual stimulation, over many years, of Van Akin Burd, Jeanne Clegg, James S. Dearden, Robert Hewison, Graham Huggan, Jim Spates, Jane Wright, and members of the Ruskin Seminar at the University of Lancaster and my fellow Directors of the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium (http://tundra.csd.sc.edu/vllc). I’d like to thank my family, John and Joyce O’Gorman, and Chris and Michelle O’Gorman, for their hugely generous support. I’d also like to thank Kate Williams for making sure that this book happened after all and for much else besides. Ruskin’s writing exists in a variety of different forms: in print, in digital surrogates, and in a substantial body of important material that remains in MS form. Material cited by Cynthia Gamble from the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University (marked as RF for Ruskin Foundation), is quoted with permission. The Ruskin Foundation, which has care of these materials, has sought to establish the copyright for Ruskin’s unpublished literary manuscripts but has been unable to do so on the basis of all the information currently known to it. The Foundation, through the Library at Lancaster, would therefore welcome contact from any person or persons who can show they hold this copyright. Francis O’Gorman York
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NOTE ON THE PRINCIPAL CONTENTS OF THE LIBRARY EDITION
In order to avoid cluttering parenthetical references with additional text, references to the Library Edition are to volume and page number only. Below is an outline list of the main works in each volume for ease of reference. i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. ix. x. xi. xii. xiii. xiv. xv. xvi. xvii. xviii. xix. xx. xxi.
Early Prose Writings Poems Modern Painters I (1843) Modern Painters II (1846) Modern Painters III (1856) Modern Painters IV (1856) Modern Painters V (1860) The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) The Stones of Venice I (1851) The Stones of Venice II (1853) The Stones of Venice III (1853) Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh lectures) (1854) The Harbours of England (1856), Turner Catalogues and Notes Academy Notes (1855–9, 1875), Notes on Prout and Hunt (1879–80) The Elements of Drawing (1857), The Elements of Perspective (1859), The Laws of Fésole (1877–8) A Joy for Ever (1857), The Two Paths (1859), Unto This Last (1860), Munera Pulveris (1862–3), Time and Tide (1867) Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Ethics of the Dust (1866), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) The Cestus of Aglaia (1865–6), The Queen of the Air (1869) Lectures on Art (1870), Aratra Pentelici (1870) Material relating to the Ruskin Art Collection at Oxford xv
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note on th e p rinc ipal co ntents of th e l ibrar y e dition
xxii. Lectures on Landscape (1871), Michael Angelo and Tintoret (1871), The Eagle’s Nest (1872), Ariadne Florentina (1872) xxiii. Val d’Arno (1873), The Aesthetic and Mathematical Schools of Florence (1874), Mornings in Florence (1875–7), The Shepherd’s Tower (1881) xxiv. Giotto and his Works in Padua (1853–60), The Cavalli Monuments at Verona (1872), Guide to the Academy at Venice (1877), St Mark’s Rest (1877–84) xxv. Love’s Meinie (1873–81), Proserpina (1875–86) xxvi. Deucalion (1875–83) xxvii. Fors Clavigera (1871–3) xxviii. Fors Clavigera (1874–6) xxix. Fors Clavigera (1877–84) xxx. Material relating to the Guild and Museum of St George xxxi. Bibliotheca Pastorum: The Economist of Xenophon (1876), Rock Honeycomb (1877), The Elements of Prosody (1880), A Knight’s Faith (1885) xxxii. Studies in Peasant Life: The Story of Ida (1883), Roadside Songs of Tuscany (1885), Christ’s Folk in the Apennine (1887), Ulric the Farm Servant (1886–8) xxxiii. ‘Our Fathers Have Told Us’: The Bible of Amiens (1880–85), Valle Crucis, The Art of England (1883), The Pleasures of England (1884) xxxiv. The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884) xxxv. Praeterita (1885–9), Dilecta (1886–1900) xxxvi. Letters I xxxvii. Letters II xxxviii. Bibliography, Catalogue of Ruskin’s Drawings xxxix. Index
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CHRONOLOGY
8 February 1819
John Ruskin, an only child, born to John James and Margaret Ruskin in 54 Hunter Street, London (now demolished). Brought up an Evangelical Protestant; often visits Scotland to see relatives.
1823
Family move to Herne Hill, Camberwell: Ruskin always remembers the garden (house now demolished). Ruskin taught by his mother; at some point early in his childhood, he begins to read through the Bible from cover to cover with her; early signs of exceptional memory.
1824–6
Ruskin travels with his father around Great Britain collecting orders for sherry: he sees many historical monuments and buildings.
1830
First poem published (‘On Skiddaw and Derwent Water’). Tutored in Greek and mathematics but is otherwise educated by his parents.
1832
Presented as a birthday present with a copy of Samuel Rogers’ Italy with engravings after, among others, Turner.
1833
First long family tour of the continent. Ruskin sees the Alps. Meets Adèle Domecq, with whom he falls in love.
1834
Taught at the Evangelical Thomas Dale’s school. Publishes his first prose (‘Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine’).
1835
First sees Venice.
1836
Writes a defence of Turner, not printed till 1903.
1837
Enters Christ Church, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner. Publishes The Poetry of Architecture. xvii
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chro nology
1838
Tries unsuccessfully for the Newdigate Prize for Poetry at Oxford; visits Scotland and the Lake District.
1839
Wins the Newdigate for ‘Salsette and Elephanta’ and meets Wordsworth. Purchases Turner’s Richmond, Surrey, the first of what will become Ruskin’s significant Turner collection.
1840
Embarks on long continental tour that lays the ground for Modern Painters I.
1841
Treated for depression at Leamington Spa; writes The King of the Golden River for Effie Gray. Is taught painting by J. D. Harding.
1842
Graduates from Oxford with an honorary double fourth; father takes a lease on the grand 163 Denmark Hill (now demolished).
1843
Writes and publishes Modern Painters I. Writes more poetry. Parents continue to hope that he will take holy orders and succeed as a poet.
1844
Visits Switzerland and France, particularly the Alps.
1845
Undertakes crucial visit to France, Switzerland, and Italy, this time without his parents: extends knowledge of pre-Renaissance Italian art.
1846
Publishes Modern Painters II. Repeats much of 1845 tour with his parents.
1847
Receives more treatment in Leamington Relationship with Effie Gray becoming closer.
1848
Marries Effie on 10 April. The official story will later be that the marriage was not consummated because of impotence but the truth remains unclear (and the impotence story was almost certainly a convenience to permit an annulment). From August, the family visits Normandy.
1849
Publishes The Seven Lamps of Architecture, his first significant book on buildings. Stays the winter in Venice, working on what will become The Stones of Venice.
1850
Publishes his Poems.
1851
Issues the first volume of the firmly Protestant The Stones, together with the expensive Examples of the
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Spa.
chrono lo gy
Architecture of Venice and Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, a Protestant account of the duties of clergy. Turner dies: in Ruskin’s view, the greatest landscape painter of all time. 1852
Effie and Ruskin move to 30 Herne Hill; another long period of study in Venice.
1853
Publishes Stones of Venice II and III and takes a holiday in Glenfinlas with Millais. Ruskin gives a sequence of lectures in Edinburgh on art published the following year. Marriage falling apart.
1854
Marriage annulled; travels throughout France, Switzerland, and Italy; beings teaching drawing at the Working Men’s College.
1856
Publishes Modern Painters III and IV and begins activity in support of the new Oxford Museum. In November, he meets Charles Eliot Norton, who will become an important if obtuse friend.
1857
Begins the exhausting labour of arranging the Turner Bequest (‘upwards of nineteen thousand pieces of paper’). Delivers The Political Economy of Art (later called A Joy for Ever).
1858
Inaugural address at the Cambridge School of Art. Finally ‘unconverted’ from Evangelicalism and enters a long and difficult period of theological thinking. Meets Rose La Touche (1848–75), an Evangelical Christian with whom he eventually falls in love. She will never be reconciled to Ruskin’s religious unorthodoxy.
1859
Publishes The Two Paths. Visits Yorkshire, and later Germany and Switzerland. Visits Winnington School (Cheshire), whose liberal programme of education attracts the post-Evangelical Ruskin.
1860
Ruskin completes Modern Painters and publishes the four essays of Unto This Last, which he will later regard as his most important work.
1861
Year dominated by depression; love for Rose deepens.
1862
In April, Ruskin and Rose are forbidden contact and do not meet again till 1866. Ruskin’s father is gravely ill. Publishes Munera Pulveris. xix
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chro nology
1863
Buys land in Chamonix, planning to leave England. Spends time at Winnington, gaining ideas about education, physical exercise, and religion.
1864
Ruskin’s father dies, leaving his son a fortune. Gives the lectures that become Sesame and Lilies, with Rose on his mind in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’. Joan Severn (Joanie) comes to Denmark Hill to care for Ruskin’s mother and will subsequently care for Ruskin himself at Brantwood until his death.
1865
The Governor Eyre controversy. The Ethics of the Dust, arising from his teaching at Winnington, is published (with ‘1866’ on the title page).
1866
Publishes The Crown of Wild Olive; travels in France and Switzerland; proposes marriage to Rose in February. Periodic states of despair.
1867
Publishes Time and Tide; continuing state of emotional torment; deep uncertainties about Christianity continue.
1868
Mrs La Touche contacts Effie (now married to Millais) who denounces Ruskin. Lectures in Dublin. In France at the end of the year.
1869
Sustained interest in ancient Greek religion. Publishes The Queen of the Air. Ruskin elected first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, his first (and only) official position.
1870
Inaugural lectures; founds drawing school at Oxford (still there).
1871
Disillusionment with Oxford undergraduates; tries to reach a new audience with Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (till 1884). Death of his mother. Buys Brantwood on Coniston Water. Begins to organise what will become the Guild of St George. In October, paints (watercolour and bodycolour over graphite on wove paper) Kingfisher (cover image).
1872
Rose rejects another marriage proposal. Publishes The Eagle’s Nest. Lectures at Oxford.
1873
Begins a sequence of science books searching out the mythic meanings of birds, plants, and stones.
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chrono lo gy
1874
Publishes Val d’Arno. In Italy; important experiences of spiritual renewal in Assisi. Declines gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
1875
Death of Rose La Touche (possibly from a form of anorexia nervosa). Ruskin gives a substantial art collection to Oxford. Founds St George’s Museum at Walkley, Sheffield.
1876
Travels in Switzerland: crucial period of spiritual revival in Venice at Christmas. Continues investigation of spiritualism.
1877
Dark, characterful drawings of Venice; publishes Guide to the Academy at Venice; begins St Mark’s Rest.
1878
First serious mental breakdown; Whistler v. Ruskin libel trial; organises Turner exhibition. Resigns chair at Oxford.
1879
Reads Plato; suffers serious depression.
1880
Returns to writing, including his only literary criticism, Fiction, Fair and Foul (to 1881); publishes Arrows of the Chace; begins The Bible of Amiens; travels in France.
1881
Suffers second episode of grave madness. Disturbed by the death of Carlyle; undertakes some writing, including The Bible of Amiens.
1882
Suffers devastating attack of mental illness in the spring. Recovering in France at the end of the year.
1883
Resumes Slade Professorship but his lectures are eccentric and his frustration grows. Publishes The Art of England. Increasingly bothered by the associations between his state of mind and the weather.
1884
Publishes The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.
1885
Resigns the Professorship, appalled by vivisection in his own Oxford Museum. Begins Praeterita, issued, like many of his works, in parts. Publishes On the Old Road.
1886
Suffers from further spell of madness.
1887
Publishes Hortus Inclusus; banished to Folkestone and Sandgate and does not think he will see Brantwood again; meets Kathleen Olander in London. xxi
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chro nology
1888
Leaves Sandgate for France, Switzerland, and Italy. Proposes to Kathleen Olander. Breaks down in Venice.
1889
Writes last portions of Praeterita. Mental breakdown ends public career.
1900
Dies on 20 January. Buried in the graveyard of St Andrew’s Church Coniston below a cross designed by W. G. Collingwood and carved from green slate from the local Tilberthwaite quarry.
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ABBREVIATIONS
All references to Ruskin’s works, unless stated otherwise, are to The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: Allen, 1903–12) and are cited simply as volume and page number. Note that the Library Edition is available in complete paperback facsimile from Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge Library Collection and in open access pdf form from Lancaster University’s Ruskin Library and Research Centre (www.lancaster.ac.uk /users/ruskinlib/Pages/Works.html). In-text abbreviations Bradley Brantwood Diary
Cate
Diaries
Family Letters
Hayman
Letters from Venice, 1851–1852, ed. J. L. Bradley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955) The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin: Together with Selected Related Letters and Sketches of Persons Mentioned, ed. Helen Gill Viljoen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971) The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, ed. George Allan Cate (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982) The Diaries of John Ruskin, ed. Joan Evans and J. H. Whitehouse, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–9) [paginated continuously] The Ruskin Family Letters: The Correspondence of John James Ruskin, his Wife, and their Son, John, 1801–1843, ed. Van Akin Burd, 2 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973) John Ruskin: Letters from the Continent, 1858, ed. John Hayman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982) xxiii
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list of abb rev iations
Hilton 1 Hilton 2 Hilton 3
La Touche
Library Norton
Reflections
Shapiro Winnington
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Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early 1819–1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Later Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) Tim Hilton, John Ruskin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) (a single volume that comprises both Hilton 1 and Hilton 2) John Ruskin and Rose La Touche: Her Unpublished Diaries of 1861 and 1867, ed. Van Akin Burd (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) James S. Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2012) The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, ed. John Lewis Bradley and Ian Ousby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Reflections of a Friendship: John Ruskin’s Letters to Pauline Trevelyan 1848-1866, ed. Virginia Surtees (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979) Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his Parents 1845, ed. Harold I. Shapiro (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972) The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. Van Akin Burd (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969)
1 FRANCIS O’ GORMAN
Introduction
John Ruskin (1819–1900), critic of art and society, has a habit of exposing cultural assumptions. Certainly, he allows readers to see some of the commonest assumptions in our own culture – at a popular level – concerning how we view the past and about how to value the work of the mind. Few writers from the nineteenth century prompt contemporary readers to summon up the language of ‘relevance’ more than he. Ruskin trips the switch on a journalistic habit of requiring historical thinkers and authors to speak directly to the present in order to be worth reading. Ruskin, in these terms, is easy to describe as valuable in the twenty-first century because he is, to use that frustrating word that is seeping into education in the humanities, ‘relatable’. He attracts the nouns and adjectives of a man of ideas who was apparently on a higher plane – a ‘visionary’, a ‘prophet’, a ‘sage’ – who still has things to say despite having died more than a century ago. We can apparently value him for being a little like us. Ruskin is ‘relevant’ to us for real reasons, to be sure. He cared about the dehumanising effects of modern labour practices; about the damage to human relations that the single-minded pursuit of money can cause. He was bothered by a lack of concern for the aesthetic achievements of history, the natural world, the legacy of good ideas. He ‘prophesied’ climate change – the quotation marks are there because the category of ‘prophesy’, like the categories of ‘anticipation’ or ‘prefiguring’, needs some substantial conceptual underpinning – and he was pained by the degradation of the environment. Ruskin thought highly of things made by hand rather than by machines. In turn he reminds us to be in touch with the planet, with its materials, and to take responsibility for what is physically around us; to take responsibility for things we have made and others have made for us. Ruskin, in 1948, was the ‘prophet of the good life’.1 He told readers in his own day, as much as now, that there are matters more important – as Ruskin said in his lecture, ‘Traffic’, in Bradford on 21 April 1864 – than ‘getting on’.2 He informs us that we are too busy merely making money. And we do not 1
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know – to borrow mischievously the title of the United Kingdom’s Financial Times weekend supplement – how to spend it. Ruskin remains, in these terms, a man with his finger on our feverish pulse, knowing what we have done to ourselves and the world. Do we need ‘authorities’, though, to reassure us that it is acceptable to have doubts about The Way We Live Now? Ruskin’s work – for those readers who care about him – can seem a little like sacred scripture: his texts are easy to believe without inquiring further. And, also, his work can be treated a little as the scriptures sometimes are as a helpful back-up to our own assumptions, values, and prejudices. He lends cultural capital, some long-bearded gravity, to present anxieties about, say, the money markets or the wrecking of the natural world. His words somehow make those worries more legitimate or worth taking seriously because they can claim his posthumous approval. One of the challenges that both energises and dogs the serious study of John Ruskin is that readers can have too much faith in him. And part – but not all – of that problem is that faith can outrun knowledge, or at least that faith can be in a complicated relationship with knowledge. One of the most striking contrasts in this collection is that between Nicholas Shrimpton’s account of Ruskin’s High Tory politics (Chapter 8) that Ruskin absorbed from his father at the beginning of his life and Stuart Eagles’s analysis (Chapter 17) of the inspiration Ruskin’s work gave to the Labour movement at the end of it. Eagles considers a history of reading, of drawing inspiration from ideas that changed as they have travelled through time, from ideas that altered from their origins as they entered the thoughts and imaginations of later readers. Ruskin, for almost everyone, is too capacious to read entirely; a historian of the remaining fragments of the past, he is mostly read in pieces. He is difficult to see steadily and to see whole. And his own capacity for saying things that are, or at least appear to be, contradictory complicates further the business of trying to understand him. Ruskin changes his mind because he thinks hard and long. He endeavours to nuance or refine what he meant earlier, to revise what he had initially thought because now he knows more. The life-long development of his thoughts is so fully documented in his voluminous writing – not least in self-critical footnotes and prefaces that he appends to earlier published work in later editions – that readers can come away bewildered by what appears to be mercurial changefulness. Ruskin, in truth, is rarely mercurial. He is a remarkable commentator on his own continuing education. He persistently revises what he thought he knew, aspiring to understand the revelations amid which he lived. Modern Painters (1843–60) is a journey, not a book. Changefulness comes from emotion, too. Ruskin is a writer from the heart. In turn, his words – in 2
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Introduction
both public and private – are dependent on his mood, which could sometimes enter the foothills of despair and once or twice reached far into darkness. The audacity of the political letters of Fors Clavigera (1871–84) derives partly from the candour with which Ruskin permitted his most dismal, angriest, wittiest, or simply strangest states of mind to enter the public world of print. Often enough, what looks like inconsistency in Ruskin’s work is actually Ruskin thinking aloud. In a far more serious way than Oscar Wilde meant when he described the novelist George Moore, Ruskin conducted his education in public. He can be read as dogmatic and he was once, in the preface to Modern Painters III (1856), obliged dogmatically to say ‘I am not dogmatic’ (v.5). But the person Ruskin is often trying to persuade, with the peculiar clarity and determination of his public voice, is himself. If Ruskin can sometimes sound overly sure, almost intolerably certain, he is often rebuking a portion of his own personality. Sometimes, he is imagining something that he desires and never had. Much of his description of the ideal woman in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, for instance, a text that made Ruskin peculiarly controversial in the 1970s, is a poignant description of a domestic life that Ruskin did not experience personally. He wonders in Modern Painters V (1860) what Turner ‘might have done for us, had he received help and love, instead of disdain’ (vii.454), and he is partly ruminating on his own reception, the challenge to his sense of purpose from those who read him or, rather, did not read him properly. Ruskin is a man who writes down many of his thoughts and feelings on a daily and often hourly basis, a brain working strenuously to get things right. With him, we have an exceptional archive of the evolution, and collapse, of a generous but tormented mind. Ruskin was peculiarly bothered about his own ‘relevance’. He was troubled by being read only in parts, and by being misread. He was, more specifically and theologically, dismayed about what he had managed to do with his talents, as he remarked in St Mark’s Rest (1877–84), a volume badly broken by illness. Introducing the chapter on ‘The Place of Dragons’ (1879) in St Mark’s Rest, Ruskin said that he had imagined there might be some comfort, towards the end of a man’s life, in believing earlier days had been well spent. The ‘sorrowfulness of these feelings [of age] must be abated, in the minds of most men,’ he said, by a pleasant vanity in their hope of being remembered as the discoverers, at least of some important truth, or the founders of some exclusive system called after their own names. But I have never applied myself to discover anything, being content to praise what had already been discovered; and the only doctrine or system peculiar to me is the abhorrence of all that is doctrinal instead of demonstrable, and of all that is systematic instead of useful: so that no true 3
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fr ancis o’ g orma n disciple of mine will ever be a ‘Ruskinian’! – he will follow not me, but the instincts of his own soul, and the guidance of its creator. (xxiv.371)
A modern reader might affirm Ruskin’s significance by declaring he was ‘influential’. But that was exactly what Ruskin did not feel. His significance could not be measured by influence because that influence, he thought, had arisen from misreading or mishearing. We can certainly put our hands on the literal hard stone of Ruskin’s achievement. It is impossible to walk around many towns and cities in Great Britain and Ireland, and some in the United States, Canada, India, Australia, and New Zealand, without being able to identify features of nineteenth-century architecture – a Gothic arch, a carved capital, some polychromatic brickwork, a chimney that looks like a campanile – which could be traced either to Ruskin or to what the builder thought was Ruskin. Yet the author of the architectural analyses The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–3) did not feel this was what he had wanted. When he turned down the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold medal in 1874, Ruskin listed four representative acts of cultural vandalism: 1. The tomb of the Cardinal Brancacci at Naples, which, so far as my present knowledge extends, is the most important example in Europe of the architectural sculpture of the fifteenth century, is at present used as the lumberroom of the church in which it stands, and I found, last month, the folds of the drapery of its caryatides closed by cobwebs. 2. The church of San Miniato at Florence, the most beautiful example of the twelfth-century architecture in that city, has been turned into a common cemetery. 3. As I was drawing the cross carved on the spandril of the western arch of the church of Santa Maria della Spina at Pisa, in 1872, it was dashed to pieces by a mason before my eyes, and the pieces carried away, that a model might be carved from them and set up in its stead. 4. The railway at Furness is carried so near the Abbey that the ruins vibrate at the passing of every luggage train; and the buildings connected with the station block the window over the altar of the Abbot’s Chapel; so that nothing else can be seen through it. These four facts are, as the members of the Institute know, only too accurately illustrative of the general agency of the public, and of the builders employed by them, on the existing architecture of Europe; – consisting in the injurious neglect of the most precious works; in the destruction, under the name of restoration, of the most celebrated works, for the sake of emolument; and in the sacrifice of any and all to temporary convenience.
4
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Introduction For the existence of this state of things we, the members, actual and honorary, of the Institute of British Architects, are assuredly answerable, at least in England; and under these circumstances I cannot but feel that it is no time for us to play at adjudging medals to each other. (xxxiv.514)
This list, Ruskin silently acknowledged, was partly the result of the inability of his own books to make much of a difference, just as the sorrowful last years of J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), ‘the greatest landscape painter who ever lived’ (vii.423), were partly the result of the perceived failure of Modern Painters to make anyone pay better attention to his genius. It is tough to judge Ruskin through what he actually, measurably, achieved. This is because, as he knew more than anyone, the achievement was quite different from the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual revival, conjoined with the reform (but not the throwing-out) of mercantile capitalism for which he had really hoped. Ruskin’s ambitions were colossal. They were not merely to decorate capitals of windows in the high street or encourage builders to use polychromic patterns on walls. As Nicholas Shrimpton says,3 those terms of ‘sage’ or ‘prophet’ easily provide us with the excuse for not attending too much to what Ruskin actually meant. And what he meant, what he desired, was the moderation of capitalism by virtue; the confirmation of a class system as determined by God; the reduction or abolition of mechanised production; the recovery of Christianity as a living national faith; the rejection of experimental science and the sidelining of evolutionary biology; the rejection of the ideas of equality and liberty; the return to the perceived virtues of the European Middle Ages; the recovery of authoritarian leadership: a ‘most sincere love of kings, and dislike of everybody who attempted to disobey them’ (xxvii.168). Ruskin had intended changes that were startling, transformatory, controversial, and mostly unachievable. What we can see in the street, in chimneys, and on window frames is real. But the author of The Stones, of the dispute with modern economics published as Unto This Last (1860),4 and Fors Clavigera, wanted more. Who reads Ruskin? There are distinctive difficulties in reading him in English intellectual culture because he does not have a very easy relationship with institutions. And he writes, generally speaking, in a form that does not have a very settled critical vocabulary for interpreting it: in non-fictional prose. Ruskin began his career as a published author with an essay on geology: his ‘Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine’ for Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History in September 1834. His father – John James Ruskin (1785–1864), an exceptionally important figure in Ruskin’s life – hoped his son would turn out a poet: like Byron, only pious. John James longed for him to be a clergyman too, preaching sermons as eloquent as Louis XIV’s renowned court preacher Jacques-Bénigne 5
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Bossuet’s, only Protestant.5 A High Tory family, the Ruskins would always expect their son to be political and to know about how money worked – or did not work. Ruskin had to reinterpret throughout his life what it meant to be a preacher, a man with a task given by God. He had to interpret what it meant to be a (post-Romantic) poet, too: a man who saw revelation and teaching in the world all around him. He became a preacher in lay orders and a poet in prose. And he became more and more absorbed by politics in the most extended sense: the organisation of a state, the purposes for which human communities are formed and sustained. Ruskin was increasingly thoughtful, too, about the functioning, the blessings and the curses, of money. What he had learned at home stayed with him. Science was not forgotten either. Modern Painters is – as Emma Sdegno explores – a devoted analysis, apart from anything else, of the geology of mountains. Ruskin was still writing science books – promoting his own distinctive way of linking the meaning of empirically documented natural forms to moral truths – in the last creative decades of his life. Ruskin’s diversity is extraordinary. He made his first major mark in art by championing Turner, whom he described as a painter of Christian fidelity to the meaning of the natural world, a painter who belonged in the same long tradition as the North Italian masters of the Age of Faith. Ruskin hoped the British Pre-Raphaelite painters might be part of that tradition too, though he was variously to be disappointed. In 1860, he finished Modern Painters and his work thereafter became yet more diverse. Art was continued – he was elected Oxford University’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1869 – but economics and political problems were the topics of, for instance, Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris (1862/3). He wrote on mythology and crystallography (The Ethics of the Dust, 1866); on Greek myths of the air (The Queen of the Air, 1869); he lectured on the proper way to read books and on gender roles (Sesame and Lilies, 1865); and in the 1870s began his own series of feisty, tangled, and provocative letters on political topics, Fors Clavigera. These became in effect the newsletter of the Guild of St George, the name eventually chosen for Ruskin’s land-management project that still continues today. At the end of his life, which was increasingly broken by periods of mental illness, Ruskin was writing an autobiography, Praeterita (1885–9), and had multiple incomplete projects on hand: a new history of Venice, a history of monasticism, studies of the myths of flowers and birds, collections of illustrated stories of peasant life, and various plans to discuss Greek philosophy. He had started composing music, not without skill. His corpus of creative work, across his whole career, from the early poetry to the exquisite watercolours to the dark brooding sketches of the mid 1870s, formed a significant 6
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Introduction
portion of his work. He was an exhaustless writer of letters and a tireless diarist. Often enough both letters and diaries were illustrated with deft, expressive pen-and-ink drawings. This is almost overpowering, almost alarming, diversity. But it is, in pragmatic terms, hard to find a shelf for. I do not mean that there is simply a lot of Ruskin’s writing. Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn published their Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin between 1903 and 1912 in thirty-nine large volumes. Many other editions of further work, including the correspondence, have followed. No scholar has yet taken on the daunting and probably unachievable task of collecting and editing all Ruskin’s letters (unachievable because we do not know where all the letters are, and there are very many of them). But this capaciousness set to one side, there is still another shelf problem. Into what subject does Ruskin fit? To what discipline does he belong? This matters for how to sell him, even now. But it also matters for how to read him. Matters ‘of any consequence’, Ruskin said in 1858 in an inaugural address to the Cambridge School of Art, ‘are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal’ (xvi.187).6 Part of the consequence of this is that Ruskin does not fit easily into established disciplinary areas. He is outside the institution in this specific sense because he took as his topic the work of God: he spills beyond borders into immensities. Most of the scholars represented in this book, from Great Britain, the United States, and from Italy, work in English (Literature) departments. It is true that the permeable borders of such departments make a reasonably good fit with the permeable borders of Ruskin’s mind. ‘Interdisciplinarity’ suits Ruskin’s wide-ranging work, and that is not foreign to most English departments. But no university department owns Ruskin. And no clear-cut division of knowledge anywhere accommodates him easily. Aptly, here, Geoffrey Tyack is an architectural historian; Stuart Eagles a political historian; Cynthia Gamble a modern linguist. Alan Davis is a scholar of engraving who has written widely on Turner. Invaluable works of Ruskin criticism and biography have been written by literary critics, but also by art critics, sociologists, cultural historians, priests, physicists, businessmen, economists, journalists, and film-makers, both inside and outside the academy. The intellectual backgrounds of those who now write and speak on Ruskin are probably even more diverse than Ruskin’s readers were in the 1870s and 1880s. Yet there can be, at the pragmatic level of curricula and course outlines in teaching and research, a problem. Ruskin can slip through disciplinary gaps, the accepted divisions of human knowledge and interpretive paradigms, because he is never simply one thing. Is Ruskin a thinker or a writer? This question is worth asking because it points to another challenge in reading Ruskin: what do we do with 7
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non-fictional prose? Quoting Ruskin at length is a pleasure. But sometimes it is an evasion. He is best in his own words, and his choice of words is always – as he implied in ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ (1865) – purposive. As with all good writing, there is grave loss in paraphrasing him. But sometimes it is hard to know what to say instead. Non-fictional prose tempts one to reach for paraphrase when not simply quoting. Understanding what Ruskin said begins often enough with describing it, retelling it, and there is a temptation, sometimes, to stop there. Perhaps this helps explain the two distinctive strands of Ruskin criticism over the past seventy years, as I see them, and an emerging third. Each has found its own way of responding to the interpretive issues of what to say about non-fictional prose that is full of ideas but is not ideas only. Ruskin scholarship has been, for many years, deeply empirical. First, there has been the establishment of new hard evidence. This has included the scholarly editing of works not previously published or not previously edited, as well as bibliographical and biographical analysis. John Lewis Bradley, Harold Shapiro, Van Akin Burd, and James S. Dearden are among the most prominent names here. Recently, this research has resulted in further actual full-length biographies: the work of, for instance, John Batchelor, Tim Hilton, and John Dixon Hunt. In tandem with this is a significant strand of more explicitly interpretive criticism that is primarily concerned with Ruskin’s work as an expression of that intensely documented life, which sees Ruskin in important ways as writing from and about himself. Second, there has been a long interest in what could be loosely called Ruskin’s contexts – the intellectual, or aesthetic, historical, gendered, or political environments in which his work makes fresh and better sense. This approach puts Ruskin’s non-fictional prose back into history. Robert Hewison’s account of Ruskin in relation to the Risorgimento in his Ruskin on Venice: ‘The Paradise of Cities’ (2009) and Mark Frost’s book on The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George: A Revisionary History (2014) are two examples of this strand, the exploration of new historical environments that inform and are informed by Ruskin’s thinking. A third strand is emerging, perhaps naturally after the centenary of Ruskin’s death in 2000 and the reassessments that followed: a reconsideration of what exactly Ruskin’s influence had been, a study of his legacies in politics as well as in culture, of his role in the intellectual formation of Great Britain in the twentieth century, of what he said about the challenges of moderating capitalism, and of caring better for what we would now call the environment. All of these strands are present in this book. And often or not there is more than one strand in a single essay. The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin tends towards the empirical, the contextual, the historical rather than the 8
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conceptual as the starting point for criticism. Ruskinians, it is often said, like facts. The essays concern what Ruskin did, what he saw, and where he went: the first portion of this book on ‘Places’, particularly Keith Hanley’s essay,7 might be thought a composite biography. The chapters also concern where he took his ideas from, how he read, and what he read. The essays consider how his texts make sense in particular historical environments, and address particular cultural conditions, which may not be self-evident now. Examples of historically contextual criticism here include David R. Sorensen’s discussion of Ruskin’s much misunderstood relationship with Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881),8 and Nicholas Shrimpton’s analysis of Ruskin’s High Tory politics that are also revealed to be more historically informed than we have usually thought.9 The collection as a whole includes assessment of Ruskin’s self as the prime source of coherence in understanding his ideas or his literary practices: examples are Martin Dubois’s essay on the forms of private meaning in Ruskin’s public writing;10 Dinah Birch’s tracing of the legacy of John James’ ambitions for his son to preach;11 and my essay on religion which is also, in a way, about the legacy of parents including that of Ruskin’s influential Evangelical mother, Margaret (1781–1871).12 Chapters pursuing more literal contexts are rooted in material histories, too, considering concrete things and tangible places in Ruskin’s life: the engraver’s steel is discussed in Alan Davis’s essay;13 what he literally made is analysed in Clive Wilmer’s essay;14 journeys to France and Belgium in Cynthia Gamble’s;15 to the Alps in Emma Sdegno’s.16 And finally, at the close of this volume, there are two essays – by Stuart Eagles17 and Marcus Waithe18 – which pick up the final emerging strand: consequences and inheritances, both political and cultural. These two essays are in different ways histories of reading, of serious efforts to grapple with Ruskin’s work and to reinterpret it for new generations and in new cultural and societal locations. This volume of essays is not only a companion to Ruskin but representative of the principal ways he has been and is read. In this respect, it is also The Cambridge Companion to Ruskin Criticism. But why have all these readers turned to Ruskin? What are the reasons for reading him that bear examination and are fair to Ruskin? I have reservations about some of the prominent and journalistic ways in which Ruskin’s importance has been expressed recently in terms of ‘influence’ and ‘relevance’. Of course there are complex and historically attentive ways in which we can assess Ruskin’s legacies and ongoing significance, as the essays in this collection reveal. But there are other reasons for reading him in his own words too; for thinking about and enjoying his multitudinous writing; for making time to study him seriously. 9
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Ruskin is a writer of praise. Although he is energetic, colourful, and frankly sometimes extreme in his denunciations, the strength of his rejections arises from the depths of his care. And that care is intellectually supported, not merely based on whim. He does not simply ‘dislike’ the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–80), for example, as a matter of ‘taste’, as one might dislike Golden Delicious apples or oysters. He can argue about what is wrong. He perceives Palladian Neo-Classicism to be in principle objectionable – a form of Renaissance arrogance and cold heartedness, a betrayal of nature and of the historical traditions of Christian Europe. In Palladio he discerns the chilling imposition of mathematical straight lines over the fractals of the world that God has made. But Ruskin’s primary business is celebration, not criticism. In his ‘treatise’ on the ‘elementary principles and practice of drawing and painting as determined by the Tuscan masters’ (xv.335), The Laws of Fésole (1877–8), Ruskin said that ‘All great art is praise’ (the title of the first chapter). And in important ways he was talking of his own task as a critic: a champion of what was good in Turner, in the Pre-Raphaelites (or at least what he hoped would be good), in Cimabue and Giotto, in the capitals of Venice’s Palazzo Ducale, and in his father’s sherry importing business where John James acted as an ‘entirely honest merchant’.19 Ruskin is adept at identifying the gifts, however modest, of individual men and women. And he is good at honouring them. He perceives the depth of intellectual and imaginative achievement supremely in front of those works of art in which he sees nothing less than genius. He enriches the act of looking with the gifts of his own exceptional sight. Here, in the Scuola di San Rocco at Venice, is Ruskin in Modern Painters II (1853) speaking of Tintoretto’s The Crucifixion: Perugino fails in his Christ in almost every instance: of other men than these, after them, we need not speak. But Tintoret here, as in all other cases, penetrating into the root and deep places of his subject, despising all outward and bodily appearances of pain, and seeking for some means of expressing, not the rack of nerve or sinew, but the fainting of the deserted Son of God before His Eloi cry, and yet feeling himself utterly unequal to the expression of this by the countenance, has, on the one hand, filled his picture with such various and impetuous muscular exertion, that the body of the Crucified is, by comparison, in perfect repose, and, on the other, has cast the countenance altogether into shade. But the Agony is told by this, and by this only; that, though there yet remains a chasm of light on the mountain horizon where the earthquake darkness closes upon the day, the broad and sunlike glory about the head of the Redeemer has become wan, and of the colour of ashes. But the great painter felt he had something more to do yet. Not only that Agony of the Crucified, but the tumult of the people, that rage which invoked 10
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Introduction His blood upon them and their children. Not only the brutality of the soldier, the apathy of the Centurion, or any other merely instrumental cause of the Divine suffering, but the fury of His own people, the noise against Him of those for whom He died, were to be set before the eye of the understanding, if the power of the picture was to be complete. This rage, be it remembered, was one of disappointed pride; and the disappointment dated essentially from the time when, but five days before, the King of Zion came, and was received with hosannahs, riding upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. To this time, then, it was necessary to direct the thoughts, for therein are found both the cause and the character, the excitement of, and the witness against, this madness of the people. In the shadow behind the cross, a man, riding on an ass colt, looks back to the multitude, while he points with a rod to the Christ crucified. The ass is feeding on the remnants of withered palm-leaves. (iv.270–1)
It would be hard to think how much closer words could come to teaching a reader to see differently. Ruskin is a writer of hope, even out of ruins, even out of Calvary. Much that he cared about fell to pieces or was destroyed during his life time – the centre of Florence, Pisa’s gothic churches, palazzi on the Grand Canal, his favourite rivers and ponds and streams in London, the warships of Nelson’s fleet. There were holes made by Austrian shells in the gilded roof of the Scuola di San Rocco when he first saw The Crucifixion. Water might easily have poured over Tintoretto’s picture which, Ruskin said in The Stones, was ‘beyond all analysis, and above all praise’ (xi.428). When he thought of Turner in 1860 as a painter who ‘only momentarily dwells on anything else than ruin’ (vii.432), Ruskin was partly reflecting back himself and his own absorption with what was in peril. Yet he wrote of what still remained, just as he described what he still remembered. The deep Wordsworthian strain in Ruskin, the intuition that memory can make the world better, produces some of his most unforgettable prose. He is a writer of revisitations – he travels ‘on the old road’20 – to scenes, villages, churches, pictures, and mountains he already knows. His bond with his parents, whose tracks he follows again, was enduring. In a real way, Ruskin was a family man. What the reader persistently perceives in his texts is the cherishing of memories under the scrutiny of present consciousness, a continual testing of ‘now’ against ‘then’ – a practice of comparison that was at the heart of his critical task in general. He senses revelation and he both offers and discerns teaching everywhere. Ruskin is absorbed with learning and teaching in no limited sense. He is attentive to the ways in which all manner of things can tender wise guidance, the benefaction of a helpful suggestion, the tutelage of wisdom. Reading Ruskin is to find an intelligence persistently alert to what of 11
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good might be discoverable in the world around – in a cloud, a painting, a dog, a mountain, or a man. In Modern Painters V (1860), Ruskin remembers the Venice he once knew (the ‘paradise of cities’, Diaries, 1.183) and ponders a time when Venice will only be a memory. And even then, in the face of such loss, the Queen of the Adriatic will still teach. Ruskin’s prose is breathtaking in its salute to the medieval and early Renaissance city as the apex of human creativity, a city traceable now only in Turner’s preoccupied images, in fragments of Giorgione and Titian’s frescos visible from the Ponte di Rialto. This is a city on the verge of being lost altogether except from the mind. ‘I will only point, in conclusion,’ Ruskin says as the labour of seventeen years draws to its end, in the final stages of Modern Painters V, to the intensity with which [Turner’s] imagination dwelt always on the three great cities of Carthage, Rome, and Venice – Carthage in connection especially with the thoughts and study which led to the painting of the Hesperides’ Garden, showing the death which attends the vain pursuit of wealth; Rome showing the death which attends the vain pursuit of power; Venice, the death which attends the vain pursuit of beauty. How strangely significative, thus understood, those last Venetian dreams of his become, themselves so beautiful and so frail; wrecks of all that they were once – twilights of twilight! Vain beauty; yet not all in vain. Unlike in birth, how like in their labour, and their power over the future, these masters of England and Venice – Turner and Giorgione. But ten years ago, I saw the last traces of the greatest works of Giorgione yet glowing like a scarlet cloud, on the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi. And though that scarlet cloud (sanguigna e fiammeggiante, per cui le pitture cominciarono con dolce violenza a rapire il cuore delle genti)21 may, indeed, melt away into paleness of night, and Venice herself waste from her islands as a wreath of wind-driven foam fades from their weedy beach; – that which she won of faithful light and truth shall never pass away. Deiphobe of the sea, – the Sun God measures her immortality to her by its sand. Flushed, above the Avernus of the Adrian lake, her spirit is still seen holding the golden bough; from the lips of the Sea Sibyl men shall learn for ages yet to come what is most noble and most fair; and, far away, as the whisper in the coils of the shell, withdrawn through the deep hearts of nations, shall sound for ever the enchanted voice of Venice. (vii.437–40)
Ruskin’s lasting sense of where beauty can still be found, how it might remain in mind even if lost in actuality, is a companion to his persistent aspiration that value might be recovered from ruin. Persuaded, like Turner, that there is a continual ‘strife of purity with pollution; of life with forgetfulness; of love, with the grave’ (vii.420), Ruskin, like Turner, was sometimes nearly 12
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Introduction
overwhelmed by the forces that contended against hope. He could be as downcast about Great Britain and Europe as about his own achievements. In the end, he went mad, and he believed it was because nothing came of his work. But the memory of precious things was, insofar that anything could be, sustaining. Ruskin could write fiercely. There is an angular, deracinated Modernism about some of his prose in the 1870s and 1880s. Writer of praise, writer of hope, elegist and witness to ruin, articulator of disappointment and of promise: yet in the end it seems to me that Ruskin is finally worth reading simply because he is a writer. What is supremely valuable in his work is the same irreducible and unfakeable quality possessed by all authors of stature and purpose. He has a luminous gift for the expression in words of what is passing in a rich and complex mind. Ruskin’s voice can lacerate and prompt tears, it can inspire and reveal, and it can still annoy. He hardly ever writes an uninteresting sentence. He is the enemy of the cliché and he can maintain control over some of the most extended sentences in the English language. There is inevitability in his prose that is the hallmark of literary power. We need to consider, as well as historicise and comprehend, exactly what Ruskin is saying, what he really meant. He deserves to be understood, though there is no requirement to agree with him. But what should not be forgotten in any cultural hesitancy about non-fictional prose is the power, and the forms of unparaphrasable meaning, which are discerned in the shape, the crafting, the exact verbal terms and rhythms of Ruskin’s ideas as he commits them to paper. In that flowing language is, often enough, his most persuasive way of meaning. Reading Ruskin in his own words, contemplating the dazzling management of his prose, we can perceive how language at its highest reach can shift the view. Such language alters the mind, though the reader does not cease to scrutinise it carefully. In the flow of his prose, we can, nevertheless, perceive the world a little through Ruskin’s eyes. He enables us, daringly, to see with words. N O T ES 1. See John Howard Whitehouse, ed., ‘Ruskin, Prophet of the Good Life’ (Tributes paid to Ruskin at a Luncheon of the Ruskin Society in February 1948) (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). 2. See xviii.448: the lecture was included in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866). 3. See Chapter 8. 4. Unto This Last, with that title, first appeared as four essays in The Cornhill Magazine between August and November 1860 and then in book form (with a preface) in 1862. It is throughout this Companion dated to 1860. 5. See xxxv.185. 13
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fr ancis o’ g orma n 6. The Cambridge School of Art was founded in 1858 and Ruskin gave the inaugural lecture. The School is the starting point of what is now Anglia Ruskin University. 7. See Chapter 2. 8. See Chapter 13. 9. See Chapter 8. 10. See Chapter 15. 11. See Chapter 14. 12. See Chapter 10. 13. See Chapter 12. 14. See Chapter 16. 15. See Chapter 5. 16. See Chapter 3. 17. See Chapter 17. 18. See Chapter 18. 19. Some of the words Ruskin had placed on John James Ruskin’s tomb in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist, Croydon. 20. The title of his collection of ‘Miscellaneous Essays and Articles, 1871–1888’. 21. ‘Blood-like and flaming, so that the pictures with sweet violence ravished human hearts’.
14
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part i
Places
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2 K E I T H HA N L E Y
Edinburgh–London–Oxford–Coniston
Edinburgh Ruskin’s father, John James, was born in Edinburgh in 1785. He was the son of a merchant-grocer who had married into a once-landed family of the manse and who lived in St James Square, just inside the New Town, but whose financial collapse precipitated insanity and suicide. John James was educated at the Royal High School from 1795 where he was classically trained and instructed in the landscape class of the Scottish painter, Alexander Nasmyth. His ambition to become a lawyer was diverted by his father’s pragmatism into a career in the London wine trade, but he remained tied to his Scottish past and responsibilities, undertaking to pay off his father’s considerable debts. Ruskin’s mother, Margaret, came to Edinburgh as a companion to her aunt, Ruskin’s grandmother, but under economic pressure Ruskin’s grandparents moved to a rented house, Bowerswell, on the east bank of the Tay, near Perth. Ruskin describes himself as inheriting the imaginative life of his schoolboy father: ‘by the then living and universal influence of Sir Walter, every scene of his native city was exalted in his imagination by the purest poetry, and the proudest history, that ever hallowed or haunted the streets and rocks of a brightly inhabited capital’ (xxxv.124). Ruskin felt part of a common heritage: ‘It has curiously happened to me also to have been educated in many particulars under the same conditions as Scott, and often in the same places’ (xxix.539). Edinburgh was the city of Romantic feudalism, not of the Enlightenment: the Old Town, not the Georgian New. The New Town he scorned because, as he wrote in his 1839 piece on situating a Scott Monument, despite a ‘command of the sea’, it lacked imaginative richness, ‘as stupid as Pompeii without its reminiscences’, while the Old Town, for all its filthiness, ‘is delicious in life, in architecture and association’ (i.258). While Ruskin proposed a colossal statue on Salisbury Crags, asserting Scott’s evocative presence in the cityscape, what he called ‘a small vulgar Gothic steeple’ (xxvii.565) on Princes Street was instead adopted. 17
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Scott was a major motivation in the family’s attraction to picturesque landscapes and cultural monuments, and they undertook a commemorative tour in the summer of 1838 when Ruskin made several sketches of Edinburgh. He noted that ‘the first picture I ever saw with conscious eyes was of Edinburgh Castle’ (xxix.539), and he perceived cultural continuity in buildings which impressively evoked the history of Scotland while employing the natural location to maximum effect, like the military fortifications at Stirling and Edinburgh. Such major architectural monuments appealed to the patriotism which he deeply felt from childhood whenever he ‘approached the Tweed or Esk’ (xxviii.273) and saw the distant blue hills. The Romantic construction was combined with his mother’s Calvinism and ‘the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force’ (xxviii.603) which he recognised in his ‘Amorite’ Scottish aunt (xxviii.602), and which informed his affinity with Thomas Carlyle. There was a homecoming in 1853 when Ruskin delivered his lectures to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, on Architecture, Decoration, Turner, and Pre-Raphaelitism (Lectures on Architecture and Painting). London If Ruskin drew strength and critical distance from his Scottish roots, he was also a south Londoner. He was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury, a well-appointed area of central north London. Ruskin’s memories of his first four years focused on visual details: carpet patterns, bedcovers, wallpapers, and the turncock’s spouting water. The family then moved to two Camberwell homes, in the then-prosperous suburbs south of the Thames, where he chiefly lived until he was fifty-two. The first, at 28 Herne Hill, was one of four large semi-detached properties on five levels, with an elevated country prospect over the Norwood hills to the south and across London to Windsor and Harrow in the north. There was the addition of a well-stocked garden to the front and back, where the blossoming fruit trees made a life-long impression. He described his regime as a cosseted only son in ‘a little recess, with a table in front of it, wholly sacred to me; and in which I remained in the evenings as an Idol in a niche, while my mother knitted, and my father read to her, – and to me, so far as I chose to listen’ (xxxv.39). Over the years Ruskin progressed from his attic nursery to a study on the second floor where he began to write the first volume of Modern Painters. In 1852 John James purchased the lease on 30 Herne Hill, adjacent to their former home, for Ruskin and his wife, but the couple resided there for less than two years as their relationship deteriorated. In the 1870s and 1880s his former nursery was kept for him as a study 18
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by his ‘cousin’ Joan and her husband, to whom he had presented the retained lease on the occasion of their wedding in 1871. He used it from 1872 until his last visit in 1888 and wrote the preface to Praeterita there. For Ruskin, the business of returning, of re-visiting, was peculiarly important. With increased affluence, the Ruskin family moved in 1842 to 163 Denmark Hill, an imposing detached residence in its own seven-acre ground complete with lodge and carriage drive, orchard, and woods, together with a small holding with cows and a pigsty. There was a team of eight indoor servants and three gardeners. The breakfast, dining, and drawing rooms were adorned with John James’s collection of British paintings, including family portraits. Ruskin had three rooms – one for sleeping, one for mineral collections, and one as a study, where he wrote many of his best-known works. There was selective hospitality, especially for members of the art world. Evangelical gloom descended from Friday to Sunday. Church attendance changed over time. The Ruskins first worshipped at Beresford Street Congregationalist Chapel, Walworth, ‘attended by the families of the small shopkeepers of the Walworth Road, in their Sunday trimmings’ (xxxv.132). A celebrated preacher, the Revd Edward Andrews, ran a school which Ruskin attended, acquiring some Classics and Hebrew and writing paraphrases of the weekly sermons. Then for four years from 1829 Ruskin was taught mathematics, French, and geography by John Rowbotham in his academy near the Elephant and Castle or in the evenings at home. From December 1834 to December 1836 Ruskin was tutored by an eminent Evangelical, the Revd Thomas Dale, incumbent at St Matthew’s Chapel, Denmark Hill, first as a dayboy in his private school near home in Grove Lane, where he made several friends. When Dale became vicar of St Bride’s, Fleet Street, and Professor of English at King’s College, London University, Ruskin travelled into the capital where he heard Dale’s lectures on early English literature and attended tutorials in Dale’s rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. For some time, the family attended Dale’s St Bride’s, but when the Ruskins moved to Denmark Hill they transferred their worship to Camden Chapel in Peckham Road, where the minister, the Revd Henry Melvill, was a noted Evangelical preacher whose sermons Ruskin considered ‘at once sincere, orthodox, and oratorical on Ciceronian principles’ (xxxv.386). Ruskin attended exhibitions of the contemporary British painters he promoted, especially at the Old Water Colour Society and the Society of British Artists. His first regular exposure to Old Master painting was available nearer home, at Dulwich Picture Gallery. This was attached to a charitable school and frequented by students of the Royal Academy of Arts and such leading contemporaries as Constable and Turner. Ruskin began to study with a 19
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drawing master, Charles Runciman, in 1831, proceeded to be instructed by Sir Anthony Van Dyke Copley Fielding, President of the Old Water Colour Society, in 1834, and later took lessons from J. D. Harding from 1841. The local churches were also implicated in his developing architectural interests. Melvill was succeeded by the Revd Daniel Moore, who as a Gothic enthusiast later installed a window partly designed by Ruskin, while Ruskin and a schoolfriend also designed the east window for the rebuilt St Giles Church, for which Ruskin researched the glass at Rouen and Chartres. Visits to his Croydon Aunt Bridget’s bakery were welcome excursions. Life in the London suburbs contrasted with Ruskin’s widening cultural and aesthetic experience on the Continent, leaving him ‘yearning for a glance of the hill-snow, or the orange leaf’ (Diaries, 1.139). He evaded the commercial realities of his father’s partnership in the leading house of the sherry trade, in Billiter Street, leading John James to comment that his son ‘knows the shape of every needle round Mont Blanc, and could not tell you now where Threadneedle Street is’.1 Ruskin’s early love of the Lake District contrasted with the dour London terraces from which he had been released in his first three years for summer weeks ‘breathing country air by taking small cottages’ (xxxv.20) near Hampstead or at Dulwich. In Modern Painters V (1860) he ascribed the sensation of liberation from the claustrophobic ugliness of London to his fellow Londoner, Turner, on his first careerforming northern tour in 1797: ‘Dead-wall, dark railing, fenced field, gated garden, all passed away like the dream of a prisoner’ (vii.384). Ruskin’s eye was acutely observant around Camberwell, and he developed the kind of intuitions he shared with Harding when one spring day in 1842 he noticed – or least retrospectively said he did – on the road to Norwood ‘a bit of ivy round a thorn stem, which seemed, even to my critical judgment, not ill “composed”’ (xxxv.311). This taught him, in E. T. Cook’s words, ‘the lesson of thinking nothing common or unclean, and of seeking beauty through truth’ (iii.xxi), his first understanding of the material-moral design in natural growth. Herne Hill was then still part of the Surrey countryside. Nearby was Croxted Lane: ‘In my young days’, Ruskin remembered in 1880, ‘a green bye road [and] little else than a narrow stretch of untilled field’ (Fiction, Fair and Foul: xxxiv.265). A re-visitation that year revealed to him the physical and moral pollution of Victorian England, prompting a sustained denunciation of newly laid railway lines, speculative building, and unlovely urban sprawl: ‘no existing terms of language known to me are enough to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin, that varied themselves along the course of Croxted Lane’ (xxxiv.266). Ruskin was well situated to have access to such institutional resources of the capital as the British Museum, the Royal Academy, for which he 20
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produced annual Notes on the Principal Pictures (1855–9 and 1875), and the National Gallery, for which he arranged and catalogued the Turner drawings. He served on national committees and addressed many learned organisations located there, though he fiercely rejected whatever he believed promoted contemporary cultural decline, such as the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, and then at Sydenham. Instead he espoused educational initiatives which corresponded with his own views and values. He began teaching drawing in the 1850s, first by offering lessons at the Architectural Museum and then at the London Working Men’s College, founded by Christian Socialists including F. D. Maurice, partly inspired by Ruskin’s chapter in The Stones of Venice on ‘The Nature of Gothic’. He took an evening drawing class for beginners during the winters of 1854 to 1858 and again in 1860, moving with the college in 1857 from Red Lion Square to Great Ormond Street. Another educational institution which he adopted for his special attention was the Church of England Whitelands College, on the King’s Road, Chelsea, for training young women teachers, where he suggested the creation of a May Queen Festival in 1881 to celebrate pre-industrial values of innocence and beauty. A version of the Festival continues to this day. Oxford Ruskin matriculated at Oxford University in the autumn of 1836, entering Christ Church in 1837. A young college tutor, H. G. Liddell, who admired his drawing skills and introduced him to Italian paintings and drawings in the college library, befriended Ruskin and described him as ‘living quite in his own way among the odd set of hunting and sporting men’.2 His position as the son of a prosperous bourgeois merchant placed among the aristocrats who were his fellow Gentlemen Commoners at the most socially prestigious college was awkward. Ruskin’s mother came to live in his lodgings at 90 High Street, taking tea with him every evening after dinner in Hall, and his father visited at weekends. They intended him for the church, and his mother’s letters show his parents’ disabling contradictions – requiring both worldly success and high moral rectitude. The episode of his reading a long and scholarly essay to his dismayed fellow undergraduates in hall – an exercise usually short and perfunctory – shows him caught between his father’s and his noble associates’ expectations. For all his embarrassments, Ruskin writes, ‘I resolved, however, to do my parents and myself as much credit as I could, said my prayers very seriously, and went to bed in good hope’ (xxxv.188). Ruskin took up a range of extra-curricular creative and scholarly interests. He spoke at the Oxford Union and served on the committee, belonged to a 21
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college music society, and frequently visited the magnificent picture collection at Blenheim Palace. He became a member of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture, and his gifts for drawing and poetry attracted admiration from Fellows and other students. Urged by his father to enter for the Newdigate poetry prize, he won it at the third attempt with an imperialist epic, Salsette and Elephanta, and duly read it at Commemoration in June 1839 when he was complimented by Wordsworth, who was receiving an honorary doctorate on the same occasion. Ruskin was also seriously pursuing geological enquiries, already evidenced by early publications in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, on the path to being elected Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840. Encouraged by Dr William Buckland, Canon of Christ Church and Reader in Geology, Ruskin was particularly fascinated by his bizarre and disorderly collections and provided him with lecture diagrams, spending an evening talking with Charles Darwin in his house. He enjoyed friendships with two tutors, his college tutor, the Revd Walter Brown, and his private tutor, the Revd Osborne Gordon, who supplied additional coaching at Herne Hill, and he later published his correspondence with both. He also wrote letters to his undergraduate friend Edward Clayton which particularly concerned religious matters and were published as Letters to a College Friend. But his closest student friendship was with Henry Acland, in whom he found a protector, mentor, and a model ‘of life of English youth of good sense, good family, and enlarged education; we both of us already lived in elements far external to the college quadrangle’ (xxxv.197–8). Ruskin wrote in Praeterita that Acland’s rooms were ‘the only place where I was happy’ (xxxv.197), and Acland was to become a lifelong friend who, as Reader in Anatomy at Christ Church and holding several influential university posts, was to be responsible for Ruskin’s subsequent involvements with the University. Throughout his undergraduate life, and contributing to its stresses, Ruskin experienced the first of his intense and frustrated infatuations – for Adèle Domecq, who was the subject of a steady stream of undergraduate verse. On 28 December 1839, he finally realised: ‘I have lost her’ (Diaries, 1.73). When in the following year Ruskin seriously overworked and started coughing blood, he was immediately removed and withdrew into the close family circle. Late in 1841 he started to read for his degree again and returned in April 1842 to take an ‘Honorary Double Fourth’, an achievement that lay between an Honours and a Pass, becoming an Oxford Graduate – the nom-de-plume of the first volume of Modern Painters (1843). From 1847, in order to promote the study of the natural sciences, Acland campaigned for the construction of a museum, ‘an edifice within the precincts 22
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of the university for the better display of materials illustrative of the facts and laws of the Natural world’.3 Acland advocated a Gothic design and invited Ruskin to help with its implementation. The museum was never actually completed in its entirety. An adjoining building, intended for a chemistry laboratory, was based on the Abbot’s kitchen at Glastonbury, and it was anticipated that additional buildings would be required to accommodate the needs of the sciences as they developed. Ruskin greeted the news of the commissioning of two Irish architects based in Cork, Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward, whom he had himself inspired, as promising the envisaged combination of science and art. The chosen architects’ previous work on the new library at Trinity College, Dublin, in the Venetian Byzantine style had followed Ruskin’s advice in giving the craftsmen an individual licence to carve the decorations. The Oxford design was described at the time as ‘Veronese Gothic of the best and manliest type’.4 The foundation stone was laid on June 20 1855 and it was still being built in 1859, when Ruskin and Acland published a small book, The Oxford Museum, to raise more public support. Ruskin’s intention that the leading Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais should contribute designs did not materialise, but in the summer of 1857 another Deane and Woodward building, the Oxford Union debating chamber (subsequently the Library), was being decorated with painted frescoes illustrating the Morte d’Arthur by a team of eight painters including Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris, who also decorated the ceiling. As the painting was on newly laid bricks and fresh whitewash, the artwork soon began to fade. Ruskin was an active influence, paying for some of the work, though he found the students ‘all the least bit crazy, and it’s very difficult to manage them’.5 While he was in Switzerland in August 1869, Ruskin learned that he had been elected the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. He had acknowledged the University Galleries (built in 1845 in Beaumont Street to house the Arundel and Pomfret collections of ancient Greek sculptures and later a collection of Michelangelo and Raphael drawings) by presenting fortyeight Turner drawings and twelve pages from the artist’s sketchbook which were housed in what became known as The Turner Room. The gift encouraged Acland to secure a professorship for Ruskin when in 1868 Felix Slade endowed the foundation of chairs of fine arts at Oxford, Cambridge, and University College London, as well as the establishment of the Slade School of Art in London. Ruskin was duly elected, initially for three years. Acland’s fellow curator of the galleries, Liddell, who was now Dean of Christ Church, had become apprehensive about Ruskin’s unpredictability that might have been responsible for a slight on Ruskin’s part. He accepted an honorary fellowship 23
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at Corpus Christi College, where he had rooms in the Fellows’ building, when he had already been made an honorary Student (Fellow) of Christ Church in 1858, along with Acland and Gladstone.6 Ruskin delivered his ‘Inaugural Course’ on art in Hilary (spring) term 1870 and on sculpture in Michaelmas (autumn) term 1870 (published as Aratra Pentelici). The first lecture was given on his birthday to an overflowing audience, so that it had to be moved to the Sheldonian theatre. He developed a method of writing out a text from which he frequently departed with improvised remarks and digressions. In 1872 he delivered the ten lectures on science and art which were published as The Eagle’s Nest; in 1873 he gave a course on birds, published as Love’s Meine; then delivered his course on Niccola Pisano, published as Val d’Arno, in the same year. The university to which he was returning had been reformed since his undergraduate days, but its version of a new liberal ethos ran counter to Ruskin’s own values: ‘for the ancient methods of quiet study, for discipline of intellect’, he said, ‘there had been substituted hurried courses of instruction in knowledge supposed to be pecuniarily profitable; stimulated by feverish frequency of examination’ (xxxi.29). He saw his own educational aims as the restoration of an alternative philosophy of education aiming at fulfilling individual potential, and his programme included an innovatory practical element, establishing ‘both a practical and critical school of fine art for English gentlemen’ (xx.27). Accordingly, he founded the Ruskin Drawing School and the Ruskin Art Collection, fitting out a room with teaching cabinets which he designed and paid for himself. Ruskin began by teaching a practical class in 1871, operating in conjunction with the examples of Turner’s and other framed drawings, which he called the ‘Standard Series’, and copies, which became known as the ‘Educational Series’, kept in racks and held in neighbouring rooms. There was also to be another series of visual aids which became the ‘Reference Series’. He appointed Alexander Macdonald as the Ruskin Drawing Master, a post he had created with an endowment of £5,000. He supplemented the ‘Educational Series’ with a ‘Rudimentary Series’ with which Macdonald instructed a town class. Ruskin’s lectures were well-attended and often repeated for the general public, but his drawing class was extra-curricular and never popular: if he were present it numbered ‘some fifteen or twenty–if not to attend, at least to join’, and when he was absent just ‘two or three’.7 A class which Ruskin taught for the town and which was particularly popular with young women became more consistently successful. The wider vision of his inaugural lecture that ‘[t]he art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues’ (xx.39) extended to a Carlylean cultural mission by which England ‘must found colonies as fast and far as she 24
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is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men’ (xx.42) which inspired Cecil Rhodes, who was probably there to hear him. Other students who were susceptible to his influence, which they subsequently carried into their own careers, participated in his road-building scheme that caught the satirical attention of the press, including Punch. The road-building was both a way of keeping his students engaged and also a symbolic gesture about what was valuable labour of the kind Ruskin favoured. Lodging at the Crown and Thistle Inn in Abingdon, south of Oxford, to escape the rowdiness of Oxford, he travelled in and out, around six miles each way, and became depressed by the ill-kept and muddy condition of a lane in the village of Ferry Hinksey. Obtaining permission from the owner, he assembled a team of undergraduates to improve it under the supervision of his elderly gardener, David Downs. In March 1874 the scheme was initiated by a breakfast party in his rooms at Corpus, and his diggers included W. G. Collingwood (later his biographer), Hardwicke Rawnsley (a founder of the National Trust), Arnold Toynbee (the economic historian), and Alexander Wedderburn (later Ruskin’s editor). Ruskin resigned from his professorial position twice, first through illness in November 1878, but ostensibly as a result of the Whistler case, and, he claimed, the general neglect of his teaching (see xxix.xxv). The Whistler case, a prominent late-century argument over the public value of art, arose when the painter J. M. Whistler took Ruskin to court for saying of Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket in Fors Clavigera: ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ (xxix.160). Whistler won his libel case but was awarded a derisory farthing in damages. In the 1887 preface to Lectures on Art (1870), composed of the Slade lectures from Hilary term 1870, Ruskin wrote that the texts ‘were the most important piece of my literary work done with unabated power, best motive, and happiest concurrence of circumstance’ (xx.13). But he felt that after the first four they had been undermined by the effects of his mother’s death and that of Rose La Touche, and he reflected that ‘the period of my effective action in Oxford was only from 1870 to 1875’ (xx.14). Following his 1882 continental tour, however, Ruskin’s health seemed restored and Acland and other Oxford friends supported his proposal to be reinstated – a decision which Tim Hilton considers ‘the major mistake of [his] public life’ (Hilton, 2.455). Following another serious mental reversal in July 1885, and especially in connection with his opposition to experimental research on live animals at Oxford, he resigned again. Another reason he subsequently gave was the university’s refusal to buy two Turners, as a result of which he 25
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cancelled his will in favour of leaving Oxford his best Turner drawings and his ‘Titian’ portrait of Doge Gritti in 1884, and later withdrew other art works from the Drawing School. Coniston In 1871 Ruskin purchased Brantwood on the east bank of Coniston Water, the first home he had chosen for himself, just before his mother’s death that year. It was to remain his home for the next twenty-eight years until his own death, with absences on continental tours and teaching and lecturing duties. Though located in the ‘far’ north, it was no retreat. His time there marked the height of his active influence during his tenure of the Slade Professorship and the disseminating of his social and educational teaching for the nation at large. Yet Brantwood also witnessed Ruskin’s progressive mental decline. From 1889, a mental breakdown more or less silenced him, and we know very little of the last eleven years of his life. During an illness in Matlock in the summer of 1871, the image of the lake became a therapeutic symbol in his fevered state, suggesting that his destiny was ‘to lie down in Coniston Water’.8 Soon after he learned that Brantwood was for sale. In returning to dwell in the Lakes he was turning back to the Romantic north of his early imagination: an antithetical country to that which was concentrated in the new conurbations of the industrial heartlands. The area represented a detached terrain which had been powerfully delineated in picturesque painting and Romantic literature from the second half of the eighteenth century. Brantwood itself was to become an integral part of the cultural landscape of the region known from the 1830s as the English Lake District. Ruskin bought Brantwood for £1,500. Although he did not know the house he already considered the prospect ‘on the whole, the finest view I know in Cumberland or Lancashire’ (Norton, 238) and one of the best in Europe. The fells on the Old Man opposite Brantwood were the subject of Turner’s magnificent oil, Morning amongst the Coniston Fells, Cumberland, 1798, and it was said that Wordsworth had recommended that ‘the beauties of Coniston are beheld to the most advantage’ from that point, so that ‘a seat called “Wordsworth’s Seat”’ was made in the grounds of Brantwood to locate his view.9 Ruskin first visited Coniston as a boy of five in 1824, on a tour with his parents, and they returned briefly two years later en route to Perth. In 1830, aged eleven, he kept a diary with his cousin Mary and composed a poem in four books, Iteriad, describing his visits to Windermere, Keswick, Ullswater, and Coniston. His undergraduate summer tours to the Lakes in 1837 and 26
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1838 informed his ideas on the complementarity of architecture and landscape, which found expression in The Poetry of Architecture. He made a drawing of the lakeside opposite Brantwood on the 1837 tour named Coniston Hall, from the Lake near Brantwood, on which the woodcut for an essay in the Architectural Magazine was based. Ruskin described either that drawing or another now lost as an early representation of his theory of ‘mountain beauty’ in Modern Painters IV (1856). Ruskin found Brantwood run down and in need of immediate repair: ‘It is a bit of steep hillside facing West . . . The slope is half copse – half moor and rock – a pretty field beneath, less steep – a white two-storied cottage, and a bank of turf in front of it – then narrow mountain road – and on the other side of that – Naboth’s vineyard – my neighbour’s field, to the water’s edge’ (Cate, 163). Repairs and the original furnishing cost him £4,000. When he came into residence almost a year later on 12 September 1872, having sold Denmark Hill, it already had an interesting history. The Revd Charles Hudson, a mountaineering enthusiast and founding member of the Alpine Club who had died while on the first successful ascent of the Matterhorn, lived there in the 1840s. The Chartist and republican poet and woodengraver, W. J. Linton, went there in 1852, and from there issued The English Republic and The Northern Tribune, A Periodical for the People. Linton was joined there in 1857 by his second wife, the novelist Eliza Lynn Linton, who wrote several novels there and published The Lake Country, illustrated by her husband, in 1864. Linton’s own self-illustrated Ferns of the English Lake Country came out the following year.10 The poet, Gerald Massey, published works while renting the house from Linton for six years. The original house which was built in 1797 had been extended in the 1830s and again in 1845 by Hudson. Linton remodelled some of the rooms and built another, barn-like outbuilding just south of the cottage where he printed his periodicals. Ruskin himself devised several architectural additions and extensions. He had a bedroom turret built at the corner of the south front in 1871 to provide comprehensive lake views, a separate large lodge further south in 1872–3 to accommodate his valet, and in c.1878–9 he added a new dining room with seven Venetian-style lancet windows to the turret end. After his ward, Joan Agnew, married Arthur Severn in 1871 they made it their second home for sixty years, and as their family grew Joan organised the extension of a back wing, including a second storey added to the rear of the house in the mid to late 1880s, and a large studio was built onto the back of the house for Arthur in 1892. Ruskin crammed the house with furniture, some retained from Denmark Hill and some specially made. His study with its lake prospect is depicted in paintings by Alexander Macdonald, W. G. Collingwood, and others. It was 27
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furnished with ‘a knee-hole writing desk, an octagonal table, an arm chair, several upright chairs, a cabinet for large prints and books, three assorted cabinets for housing framed pictures – and four glazed bookcases and three sets of open bookshelves’ (Library, xlvi). He kept medieval illuminated and original Scott manuscripts there, and Greek vases were also displayed. Originally, Turner’s Geneva was placed over the fireplace later to be replaced by a terracotta and enamel Madonna and Child by Luca della Robbia. A bespoke wallpaper based on a detail from Marco Maziale’s Circumcision in the National Gallery was hung there and in the drawing room. Ruskin’s collection of Turner watercolours was kept in this room and his bedroom, while some of his own paintings, family portraits and others by PreRaphaelites and old masters, including Gainsborough and Reynolds, were distributed throughout the house. His will of 1883 entreated his heirs ‘to accord during thirty consecutive days in every year such permission to strangers to see the house and pictures as I have done in my lifetime’.11 Over the years Brantwood evolved from being a humble late eighteenthcentury mountain cottage of eight rooms into a substantial Victorian lakeside villa of thirty. The history of its various accretions exemplified the organic architectural growth Ruskin favoured, even while it metamorphosed over time into a different kind of building. He insisted on the use of local materials by Coniston builders: ‘the chief difficulties I have had in the minute architectural efforts possible at Brantwood’, he reflected in the preface to his Notes on Samuel Prout and William Hunt (1879–80), ‘have been to persuade my Coniston builder into satisfaction with Coniston slate, and retention of Coniston manners in dressing – or rather, leaving undressed – its primitively fractured edges’ (xiv.386). The motley style of the interior decoration is explained by his focus on individual objects and the emphasis on external setting he had always made: ‘Enthusiasm’, as he said as early as The Poetry of Architecture (1837–8), ‘has no business with Turkey carpets or easy-chairs; and the very preparation of comfort for the body, which the existence of the villa supposes, is inconsistent with the supposition of any excitement of mind’ (i.182). The land attached to the Brantwood estate had been enlarged by enclosure, and Ruskin purchased sixteen acres from Linton, but considerably more land was purchased for Joan Severn so that it eventually came to comprise five hundred acres, including two other houses, a farm, and a small island. Ruskin took great delight in experimenting with the grounds and environment, opening paths and reclaiming several gardening areas from the fells, including a small cottage garden of fruit, flowers, and herbs which he himself tended: the ‘Professor’s Garden’. The gardens expressed his aesthetic, scientific, and economic values increasingly combined with his cousin’s tastes in 28
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horticultural sensation. There was the High Walk created by Joan as a viewing terrace with flowering shrubs and trees, a lower ‘Wild Garden’, a bowling green or tennis-lawn, a Maple Walk and rhododendron bank. In his early years Ruskin planned the ‘Ziggy-Zaggy’ garden of walled terraces which also allegorised an ascent to the paradisal levels above. On the lakeside of the road a tennis court was created, and in 1899 a walk to the shore where a small harbour had been constructed. Special features were created, including the Cascade opposite the front door and a stone seat to observe the falling water in a stream. Ruskin’s secretary, Laurence Hilliard, designed a rowing boat, the ‘Jumping Jenny’, named from Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824). For Ruskin, these projects were more than recreational: they employed the terrain as a laboratory for his ideas and convictions. In the late 1870s he conceived a Moorland Garden high up the fellside, created by draining, terracing, and irrigating rough moorland, engineering a sequence of sluiced reservoirs as a demonstration scheme for productive land reclamation.12 Ruskin became actively engaged in campaigns to open footpaths, protect what we would now call the environment, and oppose the extension of railways into the Lake District. It was at this time that he founded what eventually became known as the Guild of St George, and many of his activities were related to its agenda and projects, especially for craft work. He encouraged the revival of linen fabric production as a cottage industry in a cottage school, St Martin’s, at Elterwater in the Langdale Valley, inspiring local craft-workers to take up the spinning of flax and linen weaving. The skills developed extended to embroidery and ‘Greek lacework’, and he inspired Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley to found the Keswick School of Industrial Art in 1884, becoming noted for fine metalwork and jewellery. Ruskin took an interest in the local community and Rawnsley recorded recollections among the shepherds about his unaffected interest in country lore, and how the schoolchildren and tradesmen were eager to talk with him. He frequently visited Coniston village school where he organised bell-ringing and astronomy lessons, presenting copies of painting and architectural illustrations, and made donations to the Coniston Institute. He paid for a stainedglass window in the local Catholic Church and was on friendly terms with the minister of the Baptist chapel. He called on many neighbours, especially the Beever sisters, the Hilliards, the Marshalls, the Benson Harrisons, and the Collingwoods.13 Ruskin’s earlier years at Coniston were seriously saddened by the frustrations of his relationship with Rose La Touche and her slow decline and death in 1875. He experienced a growing sense of neglect and powerlessness, despite the proliferation of Ruskin Societies and a procession of tributebearing pilgrims and admiring visitors. In effect, the whole construction of 29
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the Brantwood estate stood in critical relationship to the contemporary nation. He viewed the valley as a theatre of conflict between the dragon of industry and the values of natural beauty. The Coniston to Broughton-inFurness railway had opened in 1859. Ruskin observed later in Praeterita that the Waterhead Inn which had previously afforded ‘the view of the long reach of lake, with its softly wooded lateral hills, [which] had for my father a tender charm which excited the same feeling with which he afterwards regarded the lakes of Italy’ (xxxv.95) existed no more. It had been replaced, he had told to his mother in 1867, ‘a quarter of a mile down the lake [by] a vast hotel built on the railroad station style’ (xix.xxxiii). In 1884, Ruskin delivered two lectures at the London Institution, entitled ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, in which he reported meteorological effects he had been noticing since the early 1870s. The main phenomena were a ‘plague-wind’ (xxxiv.31), causing a continuous trembling of leaves, and the darkening of the sky by a spreading and opaque white cloud. If the atmospheric effects that Ruskin observed were the result of the 1872 eruption of Vesuvius and of Krakatoa in 1883 as well as coal combustion, for him they prophesied also the metaphysical death of European civilisation. Ruskin died at Brantwood on 20 January 1900 and was buried in a grave with a large carved cross designed by Collingwood at St Andrew’s Church, Coniston. Ruskin had a rich and cumulative sense of place; as he commented, ‘my romance was always ratified to me by the seal of locality – and every charm of locality’ (xxxv.94), and these four places – Edinburgh, London, Oxford, and Coniston – were the principal centres of both personal and national associative histories which shaped his life and his construction of ‘Great Britain’. NO TES 1. Quoted by E. T. Cook, The Life of John Ruskin, 2 vols (London: Allen, 1912), i.29. 2. Quoted by Cook, Life, i.55. 3. Memorandum, Circulated after the 1847 British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting in Oxford, quoted by H. M. Vernon and K. Dorothea, A History of the Oxford Museum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), 40. 4. See Cook, Life, i.443–4. 5. Quoted in William Michael Rossetti, Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism (London: George Allen, 1899), 192–3. 6. E. T. Cook describes Ruskin’s various Oxford homes and ‘diggings’ in Homes and Haunts of John Ruskin (London: Allen, 1912), 158–77. 7. W. G. Collingwood, The Life and Work of John Ruskin, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1893), ii.148. 8. Quoted in Cook, Life, ii.217. 30
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Edinburgh–London–Oxford–Coniston 9. Quoted from a local guide book by James S. Dearden in Facets of Ruskin: Some Sesquicentennial Studies (London: Skilton, 1970), 24. 10. A full account of Linton’s activities at Brantwood is given by James S. Dearden, ‘Printing at Brantwood’, 2 Parts, The Book Collector, 28 (1979), 236–51, 515–51. 11. Quoted in Cook, Life, ii.540. 12. This and the other schemes are described in W. G. Collingwood, ‘Ruskin’s Gardening’, Ruskin Relics (London: Isbister, 1903), 31–44. 13. See the map of ‘The Brantwood Scene’ in the back cover of Brantwood Diary.
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3 EMMA SDEGNO
The Alps
Ruskin substantially contributed to the myth of the Alps that shaped the imagination and travel habits of the Victorians. Embedded within his massive corpus is a composite work devoted to the Swiss, French, Italian chain: mountains are the ground of his enquiries on vision, on drawing, on architecture, on society, on geology, on mineralogy, and on theology. In each work mountains fulfil some specific functions and meanings, but also develop and change in significance. Ruskin particularly cherished in his late years the Alps as a symbolical place and a ‘home’, and they are extensively present in his autobiography, Praeterita. The corpus Ruskin’s writings on the Alpine region surface late in his published work. In spite of the fact that his numerous travels through the Alps started in 1833 on the Grand Tour beaten track, we have to wait for Modern Painters IV (1856) to find an extended treatment of the Alps. And it is only in the mid 1880s, with the serial publication of Praeterita, preceded by Deucalion (1875–83), that the formative relevance of the Alps for Ruskin was stated at length. Finally, it was through the publication of the Diaries by Oxford University Press between 1956 and 1959 that the outline of Ruskin’s imposing Alpine work and commentary revealed itself in a fuller way. The second volume of Praeterita is devoted to the Alpine region. Accounting for the years 1839–49, the central period of development of Ruskin’s aesthetic ideas, it begins and ends with the Alps’ crossings. This preeminent place of the Alps in the autobiography is declared, even foreshadowed, by Ruskin’s own well-known and provocative statement in the ‘Macugnaga’ chapter, where he defined his transformative encounter with the paintings of Tintoretto in Venice in the Scuola di San Rocco as a fatal one, which diverted him from writing ‘The Stones of Chamonix’ to The Stones of Venice (xxxv.371–2). Here was established what has been identified as a 32
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Venice-Chamonix polarity running through Ruskin’s life. An even wider treatise on the Alps forms later-published sections of Praeterita, describing Ruskin’s Alpine stays in the years 1850 to 1860. Both in the published version and in the unfinished materials of Ruskin’s autobiography, journeys and sojourns in Chamonix, the Alps, and Northern France occupy prominent places (see xxxv.633–4). Manuscript notes of Praeterita reveal that he had planned to write a whole chapter on the source of the Arveron near Chamonix. A draft dated from Brantwood on 31 May 1889, three months before his last attack of brain fever, is among the very last words Ruskin had meant to publish (xxxv.636–7). It underlines the personal and intellectual investment he had in the very first moments of Alpine experience, and their enduring role in shaping who he thought he was. Praeterita is a good starting point for the present essay, and yet some preliminary statements must be made. Ruskin’s autobiography offers a highly selective narrative that overstates and silences episodes of his life, framing experience according to a sense of the past and of memory partly indebted to Wordsworth. Mountains feature as cherished places that the old man evokes, and they are often endowed with a restorative force. More than any other location throughout the autobiography, the Alps appear as what phenomenological discourse calls a ‘home place’, ‘an existential space’, a ‘centre of meaning or focus of intention and purpose’.1 This sense of belonging is partly compensatory for the loss that figures prominently as a major elegiac element of the autobiography. Vicarious homes are those on which Ruskin lingers as resembling his own familiar places. One of these was the Jura region, particularly the Dôle, geographically the point of passage to the Alps together with the Col de la Faucille, in which area, at Mornex, Ruskin rented a house after planning to move his home away from Denmark Hill in the winter of 1863. This place construction gives some personal unity to the work. But it is not the only meaning the Alps had for Ruskin. If in Praeterita mountain landscapes feature as a dominant theme of that ‘long rhapsody on what places, companionship, and the writing of others can do to and for a sensitive mind’,2 throughout his corpus a more complex and dynamic relationship with the Alps is articulated. Against their depiction through the retrospective filter of the 1880s, we can valuably contrast the extremely varied texts he wrote throughout the years from his 1830s juvenilia to Deucalion, all belonging to different discursive contexts and driven by different intentions. Juvenilia Praeterita puts into perspective and establishes the centrality of the Alpine region in Ruskin’s life, and this retrospective centrality was confirmed by the 33
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1891 publication in two volumes of his juvenile poetry. That included his unpublished verse travelogues, Account of A Tour on the Continent (1833) and Journal of a Tour Through France to Chamouni (1835), together with The Crystal Hunter (1834). Ruskin allowed W. G. Collingwood’s publication of the early verses as he claimed they were illustrative of Praeterita (ii. xvii). But there was textual adjustment in the Juvenilia. The major issue was the cutting out of Ruskin’s original prose glosses that accompanied almost every poem. Thus deleted was an important complement to the poetry (only partly reintegrated in the Library Edition) which provided descriptions of the places he visited in a markedly different voice. In fact, while the poems were all written in the first-person plural of the collective travel narrative, the prose passages were records of places and people that were cleverly and diligently supplemented by drawings and sketches, and registered by an ‘I’ whose eye was self-consciously ‘scientific’. These prose passages are variously significant. Some of them contain in nuce important elements that were developed in his later works. The ones given the editorial titles of ‘Chamonix’ (ii.380–2) and ‘The Source of Arveron’ (ii.386–7) are a case in point. Both written soon after the first family tour on the continent in 1833, they conclude climactically the Account of a Tour on the Continent. In both of them the encounter with the place occasions reflections on memory and reverie, and both are of particular importance for the development of Ruskin’s Alpine imagery. The use of prose frees him from the constraints of the poetic models of Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth that had valorised the topos of arrival at those celebrated stations of Romantic pilgrimage. The passages feature the figure of the tourist in a small group or crowd, a figure which Ruskin would develop and caricature in the semi-fictional dramatic tale Chronicles of Saint Bernard, written in 1835 and published only in the first volume of the Library Edition in 1903. In both ‘Chamonix’ and ‘The Source of Arveron’ the encounter with place occurs once the young Ruskin leaves his fellow travellers. In ‘Chamonix’ this evocation starts with considerations of memory and beauty that further develop the eighteenth-century assumption of the beautiful as familiar that Ruskin had first introduced in the prose passage accompanying ‘Andernacht’. There, he had asked: ‘what is it that makes the very heart leap within you at the sight of a hill’s blue outline[?]’ (ii.354). Discarding potentially sublime elements – ‘proximity to the blue heaven’s inaccessibleness’ and the spectator’s ‘littleness’ (ii.354) – Ruskin finds the answer in the recognition that he is amid familiar places: locations that recall loweraltitude British mountains and ones with which he is already acquainted through readings and picture viewing. Chamonix eventually figures as a 34
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sudden vision, and is described in ways that formally anticipate that characteristic correspondence between the expansion of the sentence and the enlargement of the optical view that would inform Ruskin’s later descriptive mode. These poems and their glosses also constitute a significant document of nineteenth-century travelling, where the ‘first sight’ had a capital importance in an itinerary composed of a scenography of discovery, and ‘an orchestration of intensities’, resting on previous views, descriptions, accounts.3 Throughout Ruskin’s work Turner is a major guide to the travelling experience. In Praeterita, Ruskin points in particular at the painter’s vignettes that illustrate the luxury edition of Samuel Roger’s 1830 Italy: A Poem, a romantic verse work he received for his thirteenth birthday, an early viaticus to seeing the Alps (see xxxv.29, 79, 81). Rogers’s volume represented for Ruskin both a model of a travel book and a literal guidebook; he stopped at the stations of Rogers’s romantic tour and wrote verses and completed drawings with the declared intention of making his own version of Italy in his 1833–4 Account of a Tour in the Continent. For Denis Cosgrove this model is culturally relevant, as Ruskin’s ‘consistent purpose was to render [Great] Britain and its people fit to inherit what he regarded as the spiritual and cultural mantle of a European and Christian civilization’ by taking part in what Cosgrove defines as the contradiction characterising European conversation in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This was the ‘searching for national distinction rooted in geography while proclaiming participation in such (newly minted) pan-European movements as “Gothic”, “Renaissance” and “Romantic”’.4 If Ruskin’s first European tours followed Turner’s and Rogers’s footsteps, itineraries varied only minimally throughout his lifetime. Again and again he would cross the channel to Calais or Boulogne to reach Italy, passing through northern France to the Jura, the Rhine valley, and the Alps, via either Fribourg and the Jungfrau or Chamonix and Mont Blanc. He was, in important ways, a traveller as well as writer of repeats, returns, and re-visitations. Although he never opened new destinations, he prompted new ways of responding to old sights, as Hanley and Walton point out, and ‘brought about the revaluation of some sites and artefacts, and the downgrading of others, in the eyes of those who accepted his moral and aesthetic judgments and criteria’.5 Modern Painters Ruskin’s writings on the Alps cut across a variety of fields of knowledge, so that his work appears as one of the last remarkable instances of an allinclusive and multi-directional enquiry into landscape discourse and its 35
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Figure 1. John Ruskin, Glacier des Bois, Chamonix, c.1856.
representations. On Mountain Beauty, the volume title of Modern Painters IV, has a pivotal position in Ruskin’s mature reflections on the Alps and establishes the direction of Ruskin’s aesthetic concerns from the mid 1850s (see Figure 1). Published at a time in which interest in geology and the earth’s process of erosion was at a highpoint and the object of many popular books, the volume became one of the most influential writings on the topic in Great Britain. Modern Painters IV gained Ruskin a belated position in December 1869 as an honorary member of the Alpine Club and caused many British artists to travel to the Alps to seek unprecedented lessons on mountain landscape that rested on acute observation of its constitution and morphology. The encounter with Turner was accompanied by a precocious and unsurpassed passion for geology and mineralogy, as Ruskin himself stated in Deucalion (xxxvi.97). Since 1834 Ruskin had been familiar with HoraceBénédict de Saussure’s Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–96), a book he would quote to the end of his life. He shared with Saussure the same approach to the Alps, going ‘only to look at them, and describe them as they were, loving them heartily – loving them, the positive Alps, more than himself, or than science, or than any theories of science’ (vi.476). Ruskin’s early scientific eye for accurate observation was absorbed with external phenomena. This approach largely informs Modern Painters IV, where he develops an understanding of ‘directly experienced landscape’ rather than scientific explanation. His concern with the morphology of mountain landscape exercises the self phenomenologically. 36
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Stemming from his early empiricism, Ruskin’s fascination with the natural scenes he visited, as well as Turner’s work, led him to analyse more fully the coincidence between place and painted scene. This idea was developed in a series of early, and largely forgotten, writings on perspective published in the Architectural Magazine in the years 1837–8, which constitutes Ruskin’s first extended discourse on mountain representation. In suggesting a method for representing great masses from a distance in the form of mountains and architecture, Ruskin grounds his empirical theory on an examination of Turner’s alpine vignettes in Rogers’s Italy and in Scott’s poetical works. In these articles Ruskin acknowledges his debt to the British picturesque tradition and argues the need to overcome it. His method follows nonmathematical but nonetheless empirical laws of perspective, employing a transparent glass surface on which to draw the outlines of distant mountains. This ‘window pane’ technique, described in detail in these articles, is close to that of the ‘veil’ that Leon Battista Alberti theorised in his De Pictura (1435) as a tool for representing architectural and landscape forms at a distance. This is one of the first occurrences of mountains as objects of minute study. We find them again in the chapters ‘Of General Structure’ and ‘Of Central Mountains’ in Modern Painters I (1843). There the mountain treatment presents a two-fold interest. On the one hand, that volume offers a minute study of sceneries that were popular at the time, so that Ruskin’s descriptions work as an ekphrastic substitute for illustrations that were not yet included in the first Modern Painters volume. On the other hand, and more importantly, the volume reveals Ruskin’s fascination with mountain morphology, since the vignettes in Roger’s Italy, belonging to the 1826–39 ‘expressive phase’ of Turner’s activity as an illustrator, are characterised by a conspicuous abstraction, which functions as a means of unification ‘regulating and compressing forms and superimposing on his landscape a strict and conscious order’.6 The mountain vignettes highlight morphological occurrences in a landscape in which Ruskin was becoming increasingly interested in the 1840s. An entry in his 1841 diary written in Sorrento on 28 February describes this awareness as a contrast between a common landscape form that is shared by different places and the individuating act of memory that roots that generalised form in a definite familiar place: As I get experience in scenery, . . . I find it more and more difficult to get a strong impression; partly because there is, and must be, a sameness in all, even mountain scenery; the same great outlines perpetually recurring. A limestone crag is something very much the same at Cheddar, and among the Jura, and here. Yet, yesterday afternoon, when I got out after a heavy shower up the paved walk to the west of the village, I had some of my old feelings. The rocks 37
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em ma sdegno were like those I used to scramble among in my happiest days, but they were shaded with olives, and several dark figures of priests, mixed with fine eyed peasants, moving up the slopes. (Diaries, 1.158)
Mountain forms are a primary concern in the chapters ‘On General Structure’ and ‘On Central Mountains’ of Modern Painters I, and were considerably developed in volume IV. ‘Of Mountain Beauty’ and aesthetic finalism In Modern Painters III and IV, both published in 1856, mountains acquire central status in the enquiry into the relationship between the external world and its representation in art. This subject is developed in the chapters ‘Of the Use of Pictures’ in Modern Painters III and ‘Turnerian Topography’ in volume IV, forming what Cook and Wedderburn defined as an ‘Interlude’, a group of chapters astride the two volumes that aim at harmonising Ruskin’s past and present theoretical views. The interlude gives coherence to a work written a decade before and its purpose is to clarify the difficulties deriving from Turner’s way of painting. As it deals in particular with the relationship between topographical detail and the essential truth of impression, Ruskin’s treatment of mountains appears as the theoretical ground where he reconsiders nothing less than the aesthetic principles that had informed his previous volumes. ‘Of the Use of Pictures’ is a revision of Ruskin’s early formulation of the difference between idealist and naturalist painting as treated in ‘On Realization’ in Modern Painters I. The chapter starts with a description of an alp from a window, a view which turns out to be a delusion and provides the occasion for discourse on the aesthetic pleasure of landscape painting, of its limits, and its relationship to the referent. Ruskin reflects on ‘objective’ vision and its re-creation by the artist and, through an internal dialogue, he states a co-primacy of nature and art, maintaining that paintings are not to be evaluated as mimetic representations that mirror the external world, but as ‘glasses’ filtering landscape impressions through the painter’s eye, and relying on a necessary cooperation on the part of the spectator to compensate for the limits of the medium. In the chapter ‘On Turnerian Picturesque’, Ruskin revises his earlier arguments about the role of mental associations in the creation of art works. He reconsiders the problem of associationism in an enquiry into the specific type of Turner’s picturesque, which he presents as an aesthetic category. His argument is based on careful readings of Turner’s Pass Faido (1843, original now in Tate Britain) (see Figure 2) and the physical place minutely observed. In the chapter ‘On Turnerian Topography’, Ruskin continues the comparison between external 38
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Figure 2. John Ruskin, The Gates of the Hills, detail from The Pass of St Gothard near Faido, Switzerland, after J. M. W. Turner, 1855.
phenomena and Turner’s painting in a discourse which is actually an ars poetica of landscape painting that focuses in particular on the rule underlying Turner’s omissions. Pass Faido, together with Turner’s The Gates of the Hills, reproduced as the frontispiece for Modern Painters IV, loom large in Mountain Beauty, bearing the function of tropes and abstracting, as Ruskin himself declared, ‘in the most complete and coherent way . . . the most perfect summary of alpine truth’ (vi.380). The bulk of volume IV explores the complexity and variety of Ruskin’s aesthetic experiences related to the mountains. If in Modern Painters I mountains were observed mainly through Turner’s vignettes and paintings, and in the ‘interlude’ chapters as objects of representation, in the larger 39
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section they are observed as objects of creation. The book’s themes and imagery are built around the two focal points of a metaphysical and what I will define as an aesthetic finalism. Volume IV starts with a myth of the artist creator. The chapters develop the idea that the earth was made through an act of sculpture, and from this Ruskin’s aesthetisation of mountains will be accomplished. The idea of a sculptor God is introduced in the chapters ‘The Firmament’ and ‘The Dry Land’, opening the second part of the book and constituting both an exegesis and an amplification of the Mosaic account of the Book of Genesis. These chapters are an introduction to the geo-morphological discussions that follow. The account of the creation of the sky functions as a prologue to a metaphorical identification between God and the Cloud, which will occur in the subsequent chapters. The fusion of the metaphysical and aesthetic planes is accomplished in two ways: on the one hand by the image of the cloud as a sort of refrain every time a scientific question is raised, while on the other by the notion of creation as an aesthetic act. In this way, the account of creation becomes, through the mediation of the biblical word, a form of vision. By weaving a thick fabric of Scriptural metaphors, Ruskin touches on a sequence of questions that were at the centre of contemporary scientific debate, including the planet’s warming and rotation, and the nature of glaciations, the duration of creation. Ruskin avoids providing answers and shifts the focus to the earth’s state of subdued energy after its creation, and the forces manifesting themselves in it, including the action of engraving, sculpting, and modelling. Extended treatment is devoted to various materials – granite, mica, marble, and stone – in relation to the forms they were designed to take in the hand of God the artist who creates, mixes, and shapes his artefacts. Here the argument from design is introduced with a distinctive aesthetic turn. This runs throughout the chapters on mountain materials and form where the beautiful structures of the Alps appear as parts of a world that is decaying and condemned: Death must be upon the hills; and the cruelty of the tempests smite them, and the briar and thorn spring up upon them: but they so smite, as to bring their rocks into the fairest forms; and so spring, as to make the very desert blossom as the rose. (vi.118)
Ruskin’s arguments from design develop a classical topos of religious literature and are set within the tradition of the geo-genesis of natural theology, but also involve a powerful aesthetic perspective that renews this inherited material. Developed in seventeenth-century natural theology, the argument from design enjoyed a renewal of popularity in the 1830s with the Bridgewater 40
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Treatises, which explored various branches of science in order to provide evidence of ‘The Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation’, as the subtitle reads. William Buckland (1784–1856), former professor of geology and then of mineralogy at Oxford, contributed the treatise on geology and mineralogy in 1836. As an Oxford student, Ruskin attended Buckland’s lectures and kept up a steadfast relationship with him to the end of Buckland’s life.7 Within the broad geological context of Mountain Beauty, the design argument – developed in an extended way – echoes with, and possibly pays a tribute to, the lesson of his ‘good master’, who died only a few months before the volume was published. As Brook and Cantor have suggested, the approach of natural theologians such as Buckland, Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), and William Whewell (1794–1866) did not aim to oppose science, but rather to promote its study in the light of religion according to the argument by divine design.8 It was an argument that could not rely on decisive geometrical evidence but had to rest on the idea of the earth’s beauty. Ruskin enormously amplifies this idea and the discourse of natural theology provided him with a frame within which he would try to keep physical science and religion together. Ruskin’s attack on atheists – a recurring figure of natural-theological rhetoric – becomes a way of distancing himself from positivist scientists and their ‘false’ deductions. In this sense and in line with natural theologians’ design arguments, Ruskin’s aim was not ‘to construct a formal proof of God’s existence’, but ‘to argue in terms of taste, of intellectual parallels and of convergent paths towards moral refinement’.9 Ruskin shares aesthetic as well as moral aims as he does not intend to discuss theories but frame them within an order of beauty. Here too he moves within the schemes of natural theology but partly distances himself from them: if ‘natural theologians invariably accepted that nature was a divinely-ordained economy manifesting unity and coherence’,10 Ruskin inserts destruction into this system, as a condition which is external to the divine plan although marked by beauty. Moreover, as natural theologians painted nature in optimistic terms in order to draw attention to a beauty that had gone unnoticed, Ruskin offers a sequence of examples of unexpected beauties. The chapters on the materials and the morphology of mountains engage in the debates on the formation of the earth and implicitly sketch the idea of a ‘progressive creation’ in the terms of William Buckland. But they also ponder aesthetic implications. In this way the chapters on mountains deal with divine design in nature, testifying to an intense effort to resist the de-sacralisation of the universe attempted – as Ruskin was inclined to believe – by the positive sciences. Ultimately Ruskin’s contribution to Victorian religious and aesthetic discourse deserves attention 41
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as it constitutes a remarkable and original instance of a renewed trope of the Maker, which fits within and enriches the rhetorical repertoire of natural theology. If ‘[i]n post-Darwinian natural theology there is a gradual death of the artisan God; but a re-birth perhaps of God the artist’, as Cantor and Brooke put it, and nature ‘is seen as a great canvas on which many creative strokes [are] discernible’, Ruskin’s God the sculptor appears as a remarkable variation on the image of ‘the artist enjoying an ongoing and intimate relationship with that which was being created’.11 A discourse involving geology, religion, and modernity, disengaged from the genre frame of natural theology, would later underlie Deucalion. Mountains and men ‘The Mountain Gloom’ and ‘The Mountain Glory’ chapters end Modern Painters IV. Together with the chapters that form the second part of Modern Painters III (’On Modern Landscape’, ‘On Mediaeval Landscape’, ‘On Classical Landscape’, and ‘On the Pathetic Fallacy’), they begin a train of thought on the relationship and the influence of landscape on human lives. The force and novelty of Ruskin’s discourse inaugurated a line of enquiry through the pages of the British Geographical Review at the turn of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth which reconsidered Ruskin’s assumptions. In January 1894 Douglas W. Freshfield, Secretary of the Royal and Geographical Society and President of the Alpine Club, read a number of lectures to young people, instituted by the London Council, on subjects including ‘The structure and features of mountains, and of snowmountains in particular’, and ‘The discovery of the High Alps’, referring to Ruskin’s authority in the matter.12 Freshfield expanded on the topic of the influence of mountains on men a few years later in a longer article that essentially affirmed Ruskin’s thesis.13 A decade later the American Classicist scholar Walter Woodburn Hyde took up the subject of mountains in literature in two articles that respectively sifted through Greek and Latin, and medieval and modern works, in order to check Ruskin’s assumptions with his specialist’s eye.14 These enquiries acknowledge Ruskin’s pioneering research on the subject, which then paved the way for Marjorie H. Nicolson’s scholarly Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite published in 1959. It should be noted that while Nicolson employs the two Ruskinian terms in order to mark a shift in the history of culture from the pre-modern terror engendered by mountains to their aesthetic appreciation, Ruskin does not employ his two titles as chronological signposts. For him they are essential and simultaneous components of a conflicted sense of mountain landscape. 42
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The object of Ruskin’s ‘Mountain Gloom’ is to describe the characteristics of Alpine people according to an empirical method. Observation of habits and religious practices forms the central part of the chapter, and are gathered with the same minute attention Ruskin had devoted to the material and morphological aspects. His eye is different from Rousseau’s idealized vision as well as from the specialised one of his contemporaries. In his Playground of Europe (1871), for instance, Leslie Stephen does not comment in any detail on mountain inhabitants, for his concerns are mainly with alpinists, tourists, and guides. Through a proto-ethnographic approach, Ruskin instead outlines the general features of mountain life and studies its representative examples. He casts an anthropological eye – inflected by Protestant anti-Catholicism – over the objects of religious devotion disseminated by the Counter-Reformation in the Alpine region, which was exploited as a barrier zone. Sion and the Valais are the main places of observation, already widely represented in images and words by Romantic travellers as cradles of the gloomiest Catholicism and a particular form of the sublime. In this context Ruskin’s criticism was directed against the contemporary taste for the picturesque that aesthetised the places and the forms of life in Alpine countries while remaining blind to their hardships. Hence the powerful polemical vein against modern Great Britain, so characteristic of later Ruskin, which surfaces here, sending the reader back to the beginning of the chapter where Ruskin had contrasted the representation of Switzerland in contemporary London plays with the actual sombre and frugal country. In the ‘Mountain Glory’ chapter that follows, Ruskin recalls this contrast and re-orients his attack on his British contemporaries away from their dubious aesthetic taste to their destructive activism. Ruskin’s argument, in all its striking modernity, testifies to a change that occurred in the 1850s in the relationship of men to mountains, and particularly of the British to the Alps. In the 1850s English rhetoric of conquest informs discourse on mountain discovery. These changes involved new ways of seeing and travelling, of representing and enjoying the Alps. The late works Ruskin saw the far-reaching effects of these changes and responded to them vehemently. The second preface to Sesame and Lilies (1865), with its wellknown attack on alpinism, is part of this response (see xviii.21–30). There Ruskin condemns the military terms that had taken over the discourse of alpinism, underlining the dubious nature of a sport that in England had become a youth’s formative practice. It was written soon after the Matterhorn disaster on 14 July 1865 in which the first ascent ended tragically 43
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with the death on their way down of four British members of Edward Whymper’s expedition and one guide. Several voices were raised against alpinism in the press in the weeks following, and the preface is one of them. It remained in the public memory much longer than most. In his 1919 article on ‘Ruskin and the Alps’, Alfred L. Mumm celebrates Ruskin’s centenary with the aim of giving ‘a somewhat detailed sketch of his Alpine activities’ to people who largely ignore them, so he said.15 Mumm’s ultimate purpose was, however, to deal with Ruskin’s most ‘striking utterances with regard to mountaineering’,16 and he referred principally to the second preface of Sesame and Lilies. Acknowledging Ruskin’s analysis, he defined it ‘a serious and temperate discussion of the subject’ in the aftermath of the Matterhorn tragedy. He correctly pointed out that Ruskin’s persistent charge against the Alpine Club was that of ‘vanity, boastfulness and a spirit of undue competition’.17 Such were indeed the objects of Ruskin’s outright criticism after the 1860s, as he saw such attitudes as the consequence of an epistemic change in the mass enjoyment of both artworks and nature. The Alps were centrally involved in this wide-ranging process of secularisation. Stephen’s The Playground of Europe was his canonisation of mountaineering as a new physical, aesthetic, and exquisitely lay experience. The Alps also attracted Alpinists-Scientists, whose muscular and manly heroism was engaged in serving science as well as empire. With such scientists, as the champions of a new way of experiencing the mountain, Ruskin engaged in debates on geological theories as well as on the epistemological implications they involved. This changed context significantly informed Ruskin’s later writings. Sharing the practice of experiential observation with field scientists, Ruskin after Modern Painters appeared on the public scene with several contributions to geological issues based on the data he had gathered over the years. The topic the lectures revolved around was glacier motion, a matter which was highly debated in the 1860s and 1870s after John Tyndall’s publication of Glaciers of the Alps in 1860. A Royal Institution Professor of Natural Philosophy, Tyndall (1820–93) had put forward his ‘Regelation’ theory, according to which ‘a glacier moves by cracking, filling the cracks with its melting run-off, and then freezing again’.18 Tyndall questioned the soundness and the originality of the theory of glaciers’ viscosity and their motion by flowing advanced by James D. Forbes in his Travels through the Alps of Savoy and Other Parts of the Pennine Chain, with Observations on the Phenomena of Glaciers (1843). Today, incidentally, Forbes’s theory is generally regarded to be closer to truth. Tyndall’s work was well received at the time and, in endorsing Forbes, Ruskin took an apparently rearguard position. But the Ruskin-Tyndall dispute went beyond 44
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geological matters and involved Ruskin’s protest about the secularisation of science as well as the methodological and practical imprecisions of its vulgarisers. Deucalion An outline of the dispute is given in the 1873 Fors Clavigera letter 34 (xxvii.636–43), and runs through Deucalion. Published at intervals between 1875 and 1883, Deucalion is Ruskin’s last major text on the mountains. Originally planned to ‘collect the notices of phenomena relating to geology which were scattered through his former work’ (xxvi.xvii), Deucalion ended up as a collection of additional materials on the subject that show many signs of Ruskin’s troubled later life and his spasmodic activities in various fields. Its fragmentariness and formlessness are common to his later books and are said to have contributed to Ruskin’s alienation from the scientific community. Developing various discourses on the Alps that aim to combine detailed observation with a sense of transcendence, Deucalion attacks the fragmentation of knowledge, and in particular the ‘single vision’ of relativistic science. The mountain is in turn explored in a variety of ways that associates physical and material aspects with symbolical and spiritual values. The work’s loose internal coherence does not obscure the two foci of geology and mineralogy around which the earlier and later groups of chapters respectively aggregate, in some way reproducing the division between morphology and materials that had informed Modern Painters IV. Chapters one to six – which make up parts one and two, both issued in October 1875, and consist of his London Institute and Oxford lectures – deal essentially with Alpine landscapes. Chapters seven to fourteen – written between 1876 and 1883 when Ruskin was organising the Sheffield Museum – devote minute attention to metals and minerals, including discussion of their composition, texture, shapes, and colours, as well as their symbolism in heraldry. The change from far-off landscape to close-up stone involves both a geographical shift from the Alpine region to the local Cumberland and Westmoreland, and a change of audience. While the later chapters are addressed to the ordinary Sheffield reader, the earlier ones on the Alps imply a broader and more cultivated audience, and revive the dispute with Tyndall on glacier motion by giving a factual description of phenomena. The argumentative frame of chapters five and ten stands out as discursively different: in the form of the personal reminiscence they were specifically written for Deucalion. Enabling greater textual inclusion and granting non-questionable experiential validity to subjective statements, this form directly establishes a connection with the introduction and the final 45
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‘Revision’ chapter (xxvi.95–99, 333–46). In these parts Ruskin develops his argument about the inability of modern science to face man’s perennial questions implied in the myth of Deucalion. In the introduction, the Greek pre-figuration of Noah, who, after the deluge, re-peopled the earth by throwing stones behind his back, maintains the superiority of mythopoetic science over ‘the strongest theory’. In the ‘Revision’ chapter, the myth is inscribed within a ‘Betrayal’ and ‘Redemption’ scheme and developed further. As a figuration of the modern fracture between natural religion and natural science, Deucalion points back to the works of H. B. De Saussure and W. von Humboldt as an ‘enlarging’ model of scientific knowledge (see xxvi. 336–9). The two autobiographical chapters from his recent Alpine travel notes recapitulate the foundations of Ruskin’s discourse that throughout the work stress the ‘vital’ – a key word for Ruskin – function of myth and imagination in science (xxvi.335). Chapter ten, ‘Thirty Years Since’, is an extraordinary text sketching a refined, emotional, and ironic self-portrait of Ruskin in the Alps in a way that partly foreshadows Praeterita. Placed among the chapters devoted to British mineralogy, it brings the Alpine setting back through a recollection written on revisiting the Hotel de la Poste at the Simplon Village during his 1876 journey to the continent. Largely amplifying the essential notes of his 1844 journal (Diaries, 1.302–3), Ruskin tells of his first encounter with Principal Forbes, his ascent of the Col to draw the chain of the Bernese Alps, and his initiation into mountain observation under Forbes’s competent eye. Then, in a sudden shift from past to present, the mode of viewing changes and an aged Ruskin confronts the Bernese Alps from his carriage, alternating mountain watching with reading. Flashes of the peaks interlace with the pages of the ‘magnificent but geologically false’ architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, soon superseded by lines from cantos 21, 23, and 31 of Dante’s Paradise. Intertextuality intensifies the ascent and spiritually frames it, as the episode recalls Dante and St Bernard’s ascent to the Saturn sky of the contemplative souls, and Ruskin’s final reference reminds the reader of Dante being seized by the splendour of the Virgin Mary. In a growing identification with the Florentine poet, Ruskin closes his book and contemplates the shining view of the Bernese Alps appearing as the embodiment of that celestial sight. In this crescendo the translucent mist evokes the veil of Lippi’s and Luini’s virgins, and the peaks appear as the ‘oriflammes’ of the mystic rose. The vision abruptly dissolves when the voice of the guide breaks in triumphantly to announce the sight of ‘l’hôtel sur le Bell Alp, bâti par Monsieur Tyndall’ (xxvi.226 [the hotel at Belalp, built for Mr Tyndall]). In a state of ‘diabolic confusion’ Ruskin leaves the carriage and finds himself at St Bernard’s 46
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Hospice – the classical destination of Christian pilgrimage and old-time travellers – now deserted by monks and dogs, whose ‘useless walls’ as ‘blank as snow’(ibid.) are about to be become invisible. The topographical details are curiously imprecise. St Bernard’s Hospice was not abandoned at this date. And a ‘Tyndall hotel’ never existed, the guide probably meaning Villa Lusgen, Tyndall’s house above the Belalp Hotel, the building of which had started in September 1876 and was completed in the following year.19 The guide’s blunder may plainly reveal the contemporary indifference of the tourist industry to factual accuracy. It certainly enables Ruskin to represent the actual change in the mountaineers’ destination towards the Bernese Oberland in the form of an allegory of sacred and secular modes of travelling in the mountains. As is customary with late Ruskin, this climatic moment is overcome by a final factual discourse, where for ‘his Sheffield men’, he surveys the theories of glacier motion by accounting for a visit on the spot. Acknowledging a shift in destination, this passage condenses most of the meanings that the Alps had for Ruskin. It enacts the phases of an enchantment and spiritual investment grounded in an upbringing that had developed his spiritual and aesthetic response to the Alps. And it tells us about the shock of mass tourism, with their new modes of seeing and caring. Also, importantly, it gives a brief though vivid representation of Ruskin’s physical presence in the environment. Far from being an advocate of a purely contemplative response to the Alpine scenery, Ruskin’s engagement involves the whole body as well as the eye. Throughout his composite work, Ruskin on the Alps writes a cultural history of European landscape and travel. That work testifies to the scientific turn that accompanied the discovery of the mountain as characteristic of modernity, and reveals Ruskin’s efforts to retain the cultural, religious, and aesthetic meanings cherished by men and women of the past and necessary to revive, as he saw it, for the salvation of the present. N O T ES 1. See Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976, 2008), 22. 2. Francis O’Gorman, ‘Introduction’, John Ruskin, Praeterita (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xiv. 3. Claude Reichler Les Alpes et leur imagiers. Voyage et histoire du regard (Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2013), 50. 4. See Denis Cosgrove, ‘Ruskin’s European Visions’, in his Geography and Vision. Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: Tauris, 2008, 2012), 135–151 (135, 141). 5. Keith Hanley and John K. Walton, Constructing Cultural Tourism: John Ruskin and the Tourist Gaze (Bristol: Channel View, 2010), 135. 47
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em ma sdegno 6. See Gerald Finley, Landscapes of Memory: Turner Illustrator of Scott (London: Scolar, 1980), 45. 7. This has been recently brought to light by Van Akin Burd’s ‘Ruskin and His “Good Master”, William Buckland’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36 (2008), 299–315. 8. See John Brooke and Geffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Edinburgh: Clark, 1998), 153ff. 9. Ibid., 157. 10. Ibid., 186. 11. Ibid., 163. 12. Extended summaries of the lectures form the article signed by Douglas W. Freshfield, ‘Mountains’, Geographical Journal, 3 (1894), 228–32. 13. Douglas W. Freshfield, ‘On Mountains and Mankind’, Geographical Journal, 24 (1904), 443–60. 14. Walter Woodburn Hyde, ‘The Ancient Appreciation of Mountain Scenery’, Classical Journal, 11 (1915), 70–84, and ‘The Development of the Appreciation of Mountain Scenery in Modern Times’, Geographical Review, 3 (1917), 107–18. 15. Alfred L. Mumm, ‘Ruskin and the Alps’, Alpine Journal, 14 (1919), 328–43 (328). 16. Ibid., 339. 17. Ibid. 18. Caroline Trowbridge, ‘“Speakers Concerning the Earth”: Ruskin’s Geology after 1860’, in David Clifford, Elizabeth Wadge, Alex Warwick and Martin Willis, eds., Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Thinking (London: Anthem, 2006), 17–30 (20). 19. See Trevor Braham, ‘John Tyndall (1820–1893) and Belalp’, Alpine Journal (1993), 193–8) and When the Alps Cast their Spell: Mountaineers of the Alpine Golden Age (Glasgow: Neil Wilson, 2004), 76–8.
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4 N I C H O L AS SH R I MP T O N
Italy
In July 1859, John Ruskin published two letters on ‘the Italian Question’ in The Scotsman. Writing after the Battle of Magenta, he expressed his horror at the ‘men . . . lying . . . in the form of torn flesh and shattered bones, among the rice marshes of the Novarese’, and deplored the refusal of the British and Prussian governments to support the unification of Italy. Though Ruskin had previously ‘regarded the Austrians as the only protection of Italy from utter dissolution’, the Sardinian Government had now ‘shown itself fit to take their place’. Italy was ready for self-government. The time had come ‘to bid her be free’ (xviii.538–40).1 These letters are typical expressions of the interest in Italy shown by English writers of Ruskin’s generation. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the victorious allies had restored the pre-Napoleonic pattern of government in the Italian peninsula. In the south the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies would once again be ruled by a Bourbon monarch. In the centre, the Pope resumed his temporal sway over the Papal States of Lazio, Marche, Umbria, and Romagna. In the north, the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and the Duchies of Tuscany, Modena, and Parma were recreated but placed under the control of the Austrian Empire to ensure that any future French invasion would face serious military resistance. Italy, in Metternich’s famous phrase, was a merely ‘geographical’ expression. The Risorgimento, as the successive attempts to overthrow these arrangements became known, was a natural object of sympathy for liberal opinion and many of Ruskin’s contemporaries wrote enthusiastically about it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1858) regretfully recorded the failures of the uprisings in Tuscany and Rome in 1848–9. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself the son of an Italian political emigré, wrote his sonnet ‘On Refusal of Aid between Nations’ (not published until 1870) to attack British non-intervention in 1849, and his dramatic monologue ‘A Last Confession’ is spoken by a mortally wounded freedom fighter in Lombardy-Venetia. Barrett 49
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Browning’s ‘The Forced Recruit: Solferino’ (1860) and Matthew Arnold’s England and the Italian Question (August 1859) were responses, like Ruskin’s Scotsman letters, to the invasion of Austria’s Italian provinces by the King of Sardinia with support from a French army. This joined Lombardy, Tuscany, Modena, and Parma to Sardinia and Piedmont but left Venetia in Austrian hands. A year later, Garibaldi’s campaign in the south added the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the nascent Italian state. Venetia followed in 1866, after the Austro-Prussian War, and the Papal States in October 1870. Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise marked the end of this literary tradition in the curious sense that they found themselves overtaken by events. Sent to the printer in the summer of 1870, the poems emerged from the press in January 1871, four months after an Italian army had finally entered Rome. Ruskin’s letters in The Scotsman are typical of this English interest in nineteenth-century Italy but untypical of Ruskin. As early as 1845, in a letter from Venice, he had deplored the ‘daubing’ of the Doge’s Palace with ‘the Austrian national distillation of coffins & jaundice’ (Shapiro, 199–201). The objection here seems as much aesthetic as political, however, and four years later John and Effie Ruskin would happily socialise with Austrian officers while gathering material for The Stones of Venice. The events of 1859 brought a change of heart. Ruskin wrote to Charles Eliot Norton on 31 July about ‘the dastardly conduct of England in this Italian war’ (xxxvi.311), and to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in November 1860 about ‘the just cause of the Italians’. Even here, however, the assertions had a conditional flavour: the cause would only succeed ‘[if] the Italians had any real life in them’ (xxxvi.349–50). Writing to F. J. Furnivall in 1864, Ruskin made it clear that his support would remain theoretical rather than practical: ‘though I love Mazzini, and fear nobody, I could not go in for it with him just now . . . I should only swamp myself uselessly, and do Mazzini no good, besides shutting myself out of Austrian Italy’ (xxxvi.473). By the late 1870s Ruskin’s views had hardened in ways that prohibited even this degree of sympathy: ‘The entire teaching of Mazzini . . . was rendered poisonous to Italy because he set himself against Kinghood; and the entire war of Garibaldi . . . was rendered utterly ruinous to Italy, by his setting himself against the Priesthood’ (xxix.96). In St Mark’s Rest, in 1884, Ruskin’s attitude would be dismissive: ‘Viva, Italia! you may still hear that cry sometimes, though she lies dead enough’ (xxiv.280). The Risorgimento had been a Liberal cause, and Ruskin was not a Liberal. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, in other words, Ruskin’s interest in the political problems of the evolving ‘Italy’ which he visited was cautious, occasional, and ultimately inconsistent. Nor was he 50
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much interested in contemporary Italian culture, references to which are rare and usually dismissive: sad music, for example, is ‘demoralizing’ and Verdi’s version of it ‘the most corrupting type hitherto known’ (xxix.234). Instead, like many visitors to Italy before and since, his attention was concentrated on the country’s past. The fact that his engagement was, in this sense, partial does not mean that it was slight. On the contrary, the cultural history of the Italian peninsula raised urgent problems for nineteenth-century intellectuals: Italy was, ‘in arts, still, from her grave, tutress of the present world’ (xxiii.14). It would never be, for Ruskin, the spiritual second home that Switzerland provided, despite the sixteen visits, some of them lengthy, which he made to it between 1833 and 1888. But it would be the place where many of the most important developments in his intellectual life took place, and the workshop from which much of his best writing and thinking emerged. The first major issue which Italy raised was addressed as early as 1843. Ruskin’s purpose in the first volume of Modern Painters was to demonstrate the superiority of modern English landscape painting to the Dutch pictures which conventional taste preferred. But he was also conscious of a liking for paintings of Italy by seventeenth-century French artists, which similarly hindered the proper appreciation of Turner. His set-piece attack on such work contrasted a picture by Gaspar Poussin (or Dughet) with the scenery which it purported to depict. This was the first of the spectacular prose-poems which established Ruskin’s reputation as an exceptional critical writer: There is, in the . . . National Gallery, a landscape attributed to Gaspar Poussin, called . . . La Riccia . . . it is a town on a hill, wooded with two-and-thirty bushes . . . These bushes are all painted in with one dull opaque brown, becoming very slightly greenish towards the lights . . . Not long ago, I was slowly descending this very bit of carriage-road . . . It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue . . . But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano and graceful darkness of its ilex grove, rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in deep, palpitating azure, half aether and half dew. (iii.277–9)
Ruskin’s technical topic here is ‘Truth of Colour’. But the passage has a further, implicit significance: a rejection of the Classical lens through which the landscape of Italy had conventionally been seen. Inspired by Claude, Poussin, and Dughet, and re-created at Stowe and Stourhead, the English sense of what Italy was, or should be, like had become set in a fixed, NeoClassical pattern of pastoral groves and Roman ruins. Ruskin sweeps that 51
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aside and insists, instead, that Italy has a modern, or Romantic, landscape, as susceptible of description in Wordsworthian terms as the Lake District or the Alps, and adequately painted only by Turner. Thus far the dispute between Classical and Romantic values, though still a live controversy in the 1840s, was a relatively straightforward matter. It soon became more complex and, once again, Italy was the place where Ruskin was obliged to engage with it. Romantic poets had been writing about Italy in ways which were no longer Neo-Classical, and Ruskin was familiar with their work. His discovery of Turner had been through the illustrations to Samuel Rogers’s poem Italy (1822–28), and Shelley’s account of Italy as the ‘Paradise of exiles’ in ‘Julian and Maddalo’ clearly suggested Ruskin’s description of Venice as ‘the Paradise of cities’ in his 1841 diary (Diaries, 1.183). But Romanticism was a rapidly developing phenomenon and by the 1840s the Romantic Italy of Byron and Shelley was itself becoming out of date. Medievalism was replacing the cult of Nature as the key topic of Romantic art and, as it did so, the understanding of the Middle Ages on which it relied became more scholarly and substantial. Byron’s preface to Marino Faliero (1821) remarked of Venice that ‘her aspect is like a dream, and her history is like a romance’.2 Twenty years later the sense of ‘romance’ was giving way to a more serious investigation of the Italian Middle Ages. Ruskin came slightly late to this process of artistic rediscovery. Wackenroder, in 1797, had suggested Romantic criteria for the visual arts, and Friedrich Schlegel’s essay ‘On Raphael’ (1803) began to identify a new canon to fit these changing standards. In this spirit, the German Nazarenes founded their ‘Brotherhood of St Luke’ in 1808. Seeking to paint in the manner of the ‘Early’ rather than ‘Old (that is, High Renaissance) Masters’, they moved to Rome in 1810, worked there until the late 1820s, and brought their new, medievalist manner back to Bavaria in the following decade. When the first volume of Modern Painters was submitted to John Murray in 1843, the publisher rejected it on the grounds that the public would be more interested in a book on this modern ‘German School’ (xxx.xxxii). The English ‘Ancients’ were, similarly, working as a group in the 1820s and early 1830s at Shoreham in Kent. Inspired by Blake, and led by Samuel Palmer, they were informed by access to the collection of early Flemish, German, and Italian paintings in the London house of the German businessman Carl Aders. The first extensive survey of such painters had been the Storia Pittorica dell’Italia (1792–6) by Luigi Lanzi. This, however, was little known before its English translation in 1828, and the Histoire de l’art par les monumens depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe siècle (1810–23) by Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt had a more immediate 52
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influence on English taste. Maria Graham and her new husband, the painter Augustus Wall Callcott, devoted their honeymoon in 1827 to the study of early paintings in Holland, Germany, and Italy, and published Giotto’s Chapel in Padua in 1835. By the late 1830s George Darley, as art critic of the Athenæum, was urging the National Gallery to buy Van Eycks, Memlings, Francias, and Peruginos, and Charles Eastlake’s review of Passavant’s Rafael von Urbino (1839) in the Quarterly in June 1840 gave a persuasive account of the importance of the Italian painters of the Quattrocento and of the influence of the Van Eycks on the adoption of oil paint by Italian artists. Such campaigning bore fruit in the Gallery’s acquisition of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait in 1842 and its much-discussed first display there in 1843: the Illustrated London News printed an engraving of the painting on 15 April. When the first volume of Modern Painters was published, just three weeks later, Ruskin could not have been unaware that a close knowledge of the modern English school was, by itself, an insufficient basis on which to sustain a reputation as an art critic. Ruskin had met George Richmond, a former ‘Ancient’, in Rome in 1840. Richmond would become a valuable source of advice about early painters and may have dropped some first hints about them at this date. Then, in June and July of 1843, during an otherwise idle term in Oxford, Ruskin studied the early Italian pictures which William Fox-Strangways had given to Christ Church in 1828 and 1834. This investigation, which Ruskin would later describe as ‘the first of all first beginnings even to look at the religious schools’ (Norton, 269), included the examination of paintings then ascribed to Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto (since re-attributed to Jacopo di Cione, Sano di Pietro, and Niccolo di Pietro Gerini), together with visits to Blenheim Palace to see Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna: an early painting (1505) from the period when the artist was not yet ‘Raphaelite’.3 By November, Ruskin was reading Alexis-François Rio’s influential De la poésie Chrétienne (1836). Seroux d’Agincourt had seen the early Italian painters as an interesting but unsophisticated prelude to the artistic achievement of the High Renaissance. Rio, by contrast, argued that the spiritual sincerity of the Early Masters made them superior to their irreligious successors. As such, their paintings would rapidly become the touchstone for avant-garde artistic practice. The Gothic Revival in architecture had been an earlier and more conspicuous manifestation of this Romantic taste for the Middle Ages but it too became more scholarly and historically authentic in the 1830s. One consequence of this newly rigorous approach was a rejection of the old assumption that the Gothic was a distinctively English style. Instead, there was a belated recognition that its origins were French, and a growing curiosity about Gothic buildings elsewhere in Europe. Robert Willis’s Remarks on the 53
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Architecture of the Middle Ages, especially of Italy, published in 1835, commented in its preface on ‘the undeserved neglect with which the Italian Gothic had been treated’.4 By May 1846 Ruskin had read Willis (Diaries, 1.339). But he needed to see more of such things at first hand, and in 1845 he went to Italy to do so. Ruskin had been to Italy three times before, in 1833, 1835, and 1840–41, though always with his parents, always in a state of nervous Protestant anxiety about the country’s Roman Catholicism, and on the third occasion chiefly for the sake of his health. Now, for the first time, he went without his parents and on what was explicitly planned as a research trip. Genoa was a disappointment. In Carrara, however, he found the medieval Italy for which he had been searching. On 3 May 1845, Ruskin reported that he had visited the church of San Andrea, ‘a perfect gem of Italian gothic, covered with 12th century sculpture of the most glorious richness and interest’ (Shapiro, 49), while the nearby landscapes were those seen in early Quattrocento paintings: ‘the spring skies have been every one backgrounds of Fra Angelico’ (Shapiro, 50). Lucca proved even more rewarding: What in the wide world I am to do in – or out of – this blessed Italy I cannot tell . . . Such a church . . . Lombard – all glorious dark arches & columns – covered with holy frescoes – and gemmed gold pictures on blue grounds. (Shapiro, 51)
Thirty-eight years later, in the epilogue added to the 1883 edition of Modern Painters II, Ruskin would identify this discovery as a turning point in his life: ‘then and there on the instant, I began, in the nave of San Frediano, the course of architectural study which reduced under accurate law the vague enthusiasm of my childish taste, and has been ever since a method with me, guardian of all my other work in natural and moral philosophy’ (iv.347). But Lucca had paintings too, ‘two great Fra Bartolomeos’,5 and a statue, Jacopo della Quercia’s effigy of Ilaria di Caretto, which would be Ruskin’s unchanging ideal of ‘sculpture, as art’ (Shapiro, 55). From Lucca Ruskin went to Pisa to see the frescoes in its Campo Santo. Long before 1944, when these pictures were catastrophically damaged by a stray incendiary bomb, the sense of their exceptional interest had been diminished by their re-attribution to lesser hands. In the 1840s, however, the Pisan Campo Santo was seen as the most important group of early Italian paintings in the world. By 18 May Ruskin could tell his father that, ‘the Campo Santo is the thing . . . You cannot conceive the vividness & fullness of conception of these great old men’ (Shapiro, 67). Ten days later he tore himself away (‘I think I never was so sorry to leave Mont Blanc as I was to leave the above cloister yesterday’(Shapiro, 84)) and moved to Florence, 54
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where he spent six weeks looking at pictures and noting how much his attitudes had changed since his previous visit in 1840: I found myself, unexpectedly, standing on the very spot . . . where five years ago – I stood, refusing to look at the Giottos in the little chapel, and running up . . . to see the mountains. What a wonderful change in me since then . . . Now, I had spent half the remains of my forenoon . . . before three saints of Giotto’s in a chapel of Santo Spirito, and look for him everywhere, the first thing & the last. (Shapiro, 95)6
On 4 June he was studying ‘three perfectly preserved works of Fra Angelico’ on reliquaries in Santa Maria Novella, ‘the centre one of which is as near heaven as human hand or mind will ever, or can ever go’ (Shapiro, 96). Since E. H. Gombrich claims that ‘[the] touchstone of any Victorian’s attitude to what we still call the “Italian Primitives” is always their response to Fra Angelico’,7 it is worth noting that, even at this date, Ruskin’s response was a measured one: he described the little panel as a ‘masterpiece’, but he had been ‘very much disappointed with his large works’ (Shapiro, 96). About ‘the early school of Italy’ (i.493) as a whole, however, Ruskin now spoke with the voice of an enthusiastic convert to the new art-historical orthodoxy, declaring on 4 June 1845 that Raffaelle & M Angelo were great fellows, but . . . they have been the ruin of art. Give me Pinturicchio & Perugino & you shall have all the Raffaelles in the world. (Shapiro, 97)
After a restorative visit to the Alps in July and August (‘Here I am at last in my own country . . . out of Italian smells & vilenesses’(Shapiro, 160)), he spent September and early October in Venice. On the way home, in Beauvais, he paused, ‘to compare the effect of the pure Gothic with the Byzantine and Lombard schools . . . northern Gothic shows decidedly barbaric after them, but not less religious, and always most beautiful’ (Shapiro, 236). Thus inspired, he wrote ‘Of the Superhuman Ideal’, the final chapter of Modern Painters II, published in April 1846, and added a new section (including a discussion of the ‘Religious landscape of Italy’) to the revised, third edition of Modern Painters I which appeared five months later. Ruskin had re-equipped, or re-invented, himself as a knowledgeable medievalist, thereby becoming a fully up-to-date, mid-nineteenth-century art critic. This new status was demonstrated by John Murray’s request that he should supply additional material for the third edition of the Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1847) (xxxviii.326–30), by the invitation to review Lord Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art for the Quarterly in June 1847 (xii.169–248), and by his membership of the 55
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Arundel Society, for which, in 1853, he would write Giotto and his Works in Padua (1853–60). Ruskin’s suggestion, in his 1853 Edinburgh Lectures, that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was the school of Turner (xii.150) is a reflection of the knowledge of historically ‘pre-Raphaelite’ painting which his visits to Italy had given him. The PRB, notoriously, relied on Carlo Lasinio’s engravings (1812) of the Campo Santo frescoes for their understanding of medieval art. Ruskin had studied those frescoes at first hand, so knew what he was talking about when he observed, in The Times on 13 May 1851, that, ‘[t]hey know very little of ancient paintings who suppose the works of these young artists to resemble them’ (xii.321). But there was a problem here; or, rather, two related problems. One was doctrinal. Like many of his Protestant contemporaries, Ruskin’s enthusiasm for the pious sincerity of medieval art was troubled by a consciousness that this had been a Roman Catholic piety. The other was more individual and arose from a transformative experience during the Venice phase of his 1845 trip to Italy. On 24 September he had visited the Scuola di San Rocco and been ‘utterly crushed to the earth’ by the paintings of Tintoretto (Shapiro, 211). The doctrinal problem was less of an issue here because Tintoretto’s subjects, in the Chapter House, are all of scenes from the Bible, so did not disturb Ruskin’s sola scriptura Protestantism. The chronology, however, was very troubling indeed. This was not Quattrocento, or pre-Raphaelite painting. On the contrary, it was work done between 1576 and 1581 by an artist whose career began almost twenty years after the death of Raphael. The last great age of Venetian painting – the era of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese – did not fit into the newly fashionable, medievalist model in which the best art could only be generated by the religious sincerity of a preRenaissance culture. How could this historical anomaly be explained? There was no easy response to that question and Ruskin’s sense of ‘floundering about’ in ‘1846 and 7’ was caused by the intellectual difficulty in which he found himself.8 In Modern Painters II both Tintoretto, on the one hand, and Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Perugino, on the other, would be celebrated, even though they were being judged by different criteria. But this was unsatisfactory. Either the old account, derived from Vasari, of artistic development since the Middle Ages was true, or the new view of artistic decline was, and Ruskin did not yet have a theory which could reconcile his diverse enthusiasms. In search of a solution, he was, ‘swept . . . at once into the “mare maggiore” of the schools of painting which crowned the power and perished in the fall of Venice; so forcing me into the study of the history of Venice itself’ (xxxv.372). His immediate answer was to turn away from the criticism of painting to an investigation of architecture. The next volumes of Modern Painters 56
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would not appear until 1856. Instead, Ruskin devoted almost a decade of his working life to buildings – where the medievalist link between social practice and artistic product could be more easily sustained. He went to Italy again in 1846, this time with an architectural focus. Book reviewing occasionally brought him back to paintings. But even his article on Lindsay’s History of Christian Art, in June 1847, contained an extensive discussion of medieval architecture, and in April 1848 Ruskin took his new wife on a chaste second honeymoon among the Gothic churches of Northern France. The research done there and in Italy was used for The Seven Lamps of Architecture which appeared, in May 1849, with a publisher’s announcement for The Stones of Venice. Like the Pisan Campo Santo, Venice was a key source: the largest surviving group of domestic (rather than ecclesiastical or military) medieval buildings in the Western world. That autumn, Ruskin went with Effie to Italy. They arrived at Venice on 10 November (only two months after the Austrian siege which had suppressed Daniele Manin’s revolution) and would stay until March 1850. This was a cold winter in a badly damaged city. The problem which Ruskin needed to address was chiefly one of chronology. When exactly were the buildings of medieval Venice constructed? He read histories of Italy by Sismondi, Alison, and Daru, consulted the local architectural scholar Pietro Selvatico, and formed a friendship with Rawdon Brown, an English expert on the Venetian archives. As early as 23 November 1849 he believed he had found an answer: ‘I obtained today for the first time a clue to the whole system of pure Venetian Gothic.’9 Ruskin would chase that ‘clue’ through two hundred sheets of drawings, recording ‘every palace of importance in the city’ (xi.265). He returned to England in March 1850 to write the first volume of The Stones of Venice, published on 3 March 1851. But more research was needed and in September 1851 John and Effie went back, this time feeling more like settled expatriates than tourists. After their return to London in July 1852, Ruskin gradually completed the book. The second volume, with its punning title ‘The Sea-Stories’, was published on 28 July 1853. The final volume, covering the Renaissance period and damningly entitled ‘The Fall’, was published on 2 October 1853. The result was the definitive, post-Byronic, English account of Venice and Ruskin’s most extended piece of writing about Italy. His stress on the way in which Venice afforded ‘the richest existing examples of architecture raised by a mercantile community, for civil uses, and domestic magnificence’ (ix.10) made him a powerful influence on the adoption of Italian models for later English Gothic Revival architecture and, at first sight, The Stones of Venice seems also to give a decisive answer to the problem by which Ruskin had been so tormented since 1845, as he ‘floundered about’ between the rival 57
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claims of the Tuscan Primitives and Venetian Colourists. In public he had been a medievalist (as people holding such attitudes were beginning to be called). His letter to The Times on 7 January 1847, for example, denounced the National Gallery for buying, ‘no Angelico, no Fra Bartolomeo . . . no Lorenzo di Credi’ (xii.404). Yet in September 1849, in the privacy of his diary, he could record how profoundly he was moved by Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana in the Louvre, not just for its technique but for its ‘moral feeling . . . and Interpretation of Humanity’ (Diaries, 2.437). Now, at last, Ruskin seems to make his mind up, declaring in his first chapter that, ‘I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8th May, 1418; the visible commencement from that of . . . Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later’ (ix.21). This dauntingly early date is a clear commitment to the medievalist doctrine of the superiority of the Middle Ages, and in architecture the matter is straightforward. Summarising his book, at the end of its third volume, Ruskin insists that Christianity gave birth to a new architecture . . . demonstrably the best architecture that can exist . . . This architecture . . . reached its highest perfection . . . about the close of the thirteenth century . . . In the course of the fifteenth century . . . the Christianity of Europe was undermined; and a Pagan architecture was introduced . . . This is the theorem of these volumes. (xii.356–7)
Such views would prompt the use of Italian examples in Ruskin’s social writing. Lorenzetti’s painted Allegory of Good Government (1338–9) at Siena is used in The Political Economy of Art (1857) as an exemplary text (xvi.54–7); an ideal medieval Pisa is contrasted with modern Rochdale in the 1859 lecture on ‘Modern Manufacture and Design’ (xvi.338–40); and, twenty years later, allegorical images from Giotto’s Arena Chapel would be used as illustrations for the early numbers of Fors Clavigera. In painting, too, Ruskin seems initially to accept the implications of his exacting historical model, suggesting that the great painters must, necessarily, be those of the Trecento or their most immediate successors. Giovanni Bellini, born in the year of Mocenigo’s death, 1423,10 just scrapes in. But there is, of course, no room here for the Venetian Colourists of the sixteenth century: John Bellini, and his brother Gentile . . . close the line of the sacred painters of Venice . . . Bellini was brought up in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the vital religion of Venice had expired. (ix.31)
In the concluding paragraph of the second volume, however, Ruskin says something very different: ‘in the winter of 1851 . . . the Camera di Collegio . . . and the Sala de’ Pregadi were full of pictures by Veronese and Tintoret, that 58
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made their walls as precious as so many kingdoms; so precious indeed . . . that sometimes when walking at evening on the Lido, whence the great chain of the Alps, crested with silver clouds, might be seen rising above the front of the Ducal Palace, I used to feel as much awe in gazing on the building as on the hills’ (x.438–9). How can these two statements be reconciled? The answer is that they cannot, but that a transition towards the later view had begun to be visible in the ‘Instinctive Judgements’ appendix to Volume 1: I perceive a tendency among some of the . . . critics of the day to forget that the business of a painter is to paint . . . A man long trained to love the monk’s visions of Fra Angelico, turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of Rubens which he encounters . . . But is he right in his indignation? (ix.448–9)
Ruskin’s ‘instinctive judgement’ was beginning to assert itself against the avant-garde medievalist orthodoxy. The new opinion would be fully articulated in ‘The Nature of Gothic’. This famous chapter, clearly informed by Ruskin’s experience of Italy though probably written at Denmark Hill in the winter of 1852, is now best remembered for its treatment of architecture. The ‘Savageness, or Rudeness’ of the Gothic accepts ‘the results of the labour of inferior minds’ (x.190). This is, simultaneously, a powerful case for the Gothic Revival, an early statement of Ruskin’s political thought, and a founding text of the Arts and Crafts Movement. But another ‘element’ or characteristic of the Gothic is equally important. Its quality of ‘Naturalism’ is an idea which has grown from the mimetic fidelity recommended in the 1840s into a more complex conceptual device. As recently as the Pre-Raphaelitism pamphlet of August 1851, the word had still meant ‘the inclination to copy ordinary natural objects’ (xii.348). Now, influenced (as he acknowledges) by the Italian words ‘Puristi’ and ‘Naturalisti’ and ‘the established usage of language on the Continent’ (x.224), Ruskin makes Naturalism the term for a mode of art which apprehends both good and evil. Sensualists, who ‘perceive and imitate evil only’, are ‘useless or harmful’. Purists (‘early Italian and Flemish painters . . . Raffaelle in his best time, John Bellini’) represent only the good, valuably but narrowly. Naturalists are the ‘greatest class’, and ‘render all that they see in nature unhesitatingly . . . sympathizing with the good, and yet confessing, permitting, and bringing good out of the evil also’. When Ruskin comes to name his Naturalists, ‘Giotto, Tintoret, and Turner’ can, for the first time, find themselves together in the same list (x.222). In Giotto and his Works in Padua, published the same year, Ruskin will assert that, ‘Giotto was . . . a daring naturalist’ and go on to praise the way in which, as a colourist, he ‘resembled Titian more than any other of the Florentine school’ (xxiv.27–36). Having ‘modernised’ himself, as a medievalist, by means of his 59
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Italian trips in 1845 and 1846, Ruskin used his Venetian studies of 1849–52 to develop a more rounded and individual view of art which included the early painters without allowing them the absolute superiority on which Rio had insisted. Five years later this new attitude would be reinforced by another Italian experience. After leaving Venice in June 1852 Ruskin did not go back to the city for seventeen years, and would not return to any part of Italy until 1858. But in the summer of that year he interrupted an austere holiday in Switzerland to spend six self-indulgent weeks in Turin: ‘a large room . . . a note or two of band – a Parisian dinner – and half a pint of Moet’s champagne with Monte Viso ice in it’, as he described his first evening there (Hayman, 87). He studied Veronese’s Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and, on two successive Sundays, attended a service at ‘the Protestant church’, finding it, ‘a very disagreeable form of piety’ (Hayman 115–6). Nineteen years later, in Fors Clavigera 76, Ruskin would turn these events into what has become known as his ‘unconversion’: I was still in the bonds of my old Evangelical faith . . . the crisis of the whole turn of my thoughts being one Sunday morning, at Turin, when, from before Paul Veronese’s Queen of Sheba . . . I went away to a Waldensian chapel . . . I came out of the chapel . . . a conclusively un-converted man. (xxix.89)
By the May 1888 part-issue of Praeterita Ruskin had further refined this experience into an account which not only reversed the order of events (chapel first, then Veronese) and reduced the Waldensian Church to ‘a little chapel . . . by a dusty roadside’, but also enlarged the witty remark about being ‘un-converted’ (in a building dedicated to conversion) into a solemn declaration that on ‘that day, my evangelical beliefs were put away’ (xxxv.495–6). These revisions might, perhaps, seem disingenuous. But autobiography is an art, not a science, and Ruskin, the literary artist, has identified an incident which can serve as the dramatic encapsulation of a lengthy process of change. He certainly felt, or came to feel, that it was at Turin in 1858 that the balance tipped within his personal beliefs towards a less dogmatic and more inclusive understanding of religion. That shift confirmed, or legitimised, his new theory of art. The remark in the letter to his father about ‘Moet’s champagne with Monte Viso ice in it’ sums the matter up as well as anything. The Waldensians come from ‘the protestant vallies under Monte Viso’ (Hayman, 65). Using ice from that sacred mountain to cool your champagne enacts, rather naughtily, the way in which Naturalism combines the pious and the sensual to create an art which is seriously engaged with morality but which is to be valued for its ethical complexity rather than its purity. 60
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Without revisiting Italy, Ruskin applied this theory in the final chapters of Modern Painters V (1860). Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese are fully acknowledged now, and Giorgione’s first sight of Venice prompts the most striking of all Ruskin’s prose-poems about Italy: A city of marble did I say? Nay, rather a golden city, paved with emerald . . . Deep hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea, – the men of Venice moved in sway of power and war . . . Fearless, faithful, patient, impenetrable, implacable – every word a fate – sate her senate . . . No foulness, nor tumult, in those tremulous streets, that filled, or fell, beneath the moon; but rippled music of majestic change, or thrilling silence. (v.374–5)
It is an eloquent statement but an odd one from the author of The Stones of Venice, since Giorgione did not arrive in the city until the early 1490s, seventy years after the ‘Fall’. The description is, however, not incompatible with the new assumptions of the final section of Modern Painters, where we are told that, ‘Down to Tintoret’s time, the Roman Catholic religion was still real and sincere at Venice’ (v.286). Instead of saying that morally flawed or transitional environments produce greater (because more complex) paintings than the ‘pure’ societies of the period before 1423, Ruskin re-dates the Fall. Having established his mature artistic theory, Ruskin made rather less use of it than he might have done. During the next decade he wrote chiefly about social questions, and visited Italy only twice. In 1862 he went there with Burne-Jones, sending him on to Venice while he stayed in Milan studying the work of Bernardino Luini (praised in the ‘Cestus of Aglaia’ articles in the Art Journal of 1865–6 as an artist who ‘joins the purity and passion of Angelico to the strength of Veronese’(xix.130)). He commissioned young artists to make studies of Italian architecture for him and by 1863 was toying with the idea of acquiring ‘a little bachelor’s den’ in Venice (xxxvi.440). In 1864 he bought a Titian (now attributed to Vincenzo Catena) and in 1866 set off, with friends, to see more of Titian’s work, in Italy, before Pauline Trevelyan’s death obliged the party to turn back at Neuchâtel. Ruskin finally returned to Venice in 1869, where he developed a new interest in the paintings of Carpaccio. In practice, however, he spent more time that summer at Verona (‘my dearest place in Italy’ as he had called it in 1857(Norton, 37)) studying the Scaliger tombs and, while there, received the invitation to be the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Back in England, Ruskin demonstrated his geographical, as well as artistic, interest in Italy by speaking on ‘Verona, and its Rivers’ at the Royal Institution on 4 February 1870. Four days later, he gave his inaugural Oxford lecture. Though the references to Italian painters in this first series were rather occasional, the ‘text-book’ for the lectures was Leonardo’s 61
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Trattato della Pittura (xx.38), and a student later recorded that ‘[m]any members of the University date from that period their first awakening to a sense of the beauty of Italian art’ (xx.xxiii). Ruskin himself clearly felt that research in Italy was necessary for his role as professor and set off in April for a trip which took him to Tuscany for the first time since 1846. His renewed enthusiasm for Tintoretto led him to plan a lecture series entirely devoted to ‘one picture, Tintoret’s Paradise’.11 But his ‘discovery’, in Florence, of Filippo Lippi complicated that scheme and the idea was dropped. Instead, Ruskin spoke in November and December 1870 on ‘The Elements of Sculpture’, concentrating almost entirely on Greek examples. In 1871 he gave ‘Lectures on Landscape’ (chiefly Turner) and, in June, made his controversial attack on Michael Angelo. Here Ruskin once again revised his moral history of Italy to produce a tripartite pattern in which the Fall happens between 1480 and 1520, though Tintoretto subsequently ‘stands up for a last fight; for Venice, and the old time’ (xxii.83). As this suggests, Ruskin was moving back towards a Purist position. His trip to Italy in 1872, which took him as far south as Rome, was chiefly notable for the ‘discovery’ of Botticelli, which informed his Ariadne Florentina lectures in the autumn. But the long stay of seven months in 1874 marked a decisive change. Once again he went south, this time as far as Sicily, where – in an echo of the Carlylean political history of the Val d’Arno lectures of autumn 1873 – he saw ‘the tomb of Frederic II, and knelt at it!’ (xxiii.xxxiii). On the way back, Ruskin had another of his transformative Italian experiences: overwhelmed by Botticelli’s Madonna Enthroned in Florence, he felt ‘more crushed than ever by art, since I lay down on the floor of the scuola di San Rocco before the Crucifixion’ (Diaries, 3.807). He then settled in Assisi to devote himself to the study of Giotto. Installed in ‘the sacristan’s cell’ at San Francesco, he discovered ‘a fallacy which had underlain all my art teaching . . . since the year 1858’. Having, ‘lived sixteen full years with “the religion of Humanity”’, Ruskin now returned to a more conventional, though ecumenical, Christianity and found ‘that Giotto’s . . . work, in all the innocence of it, was yet a human achievement . . . quite above everything that Titian had ever done!’ (xxix.86–91). Ruskin’s lectures on ‘The Aesthetic and Mathematic Schools of Art in Florence’ in November and December 1874 reflected this reversion to an earlier, more medievalist attitude. Though the wheel might seem to have turned full circle (Ruskin used a direct quotation from Modern Painters II for his account of Perugino (xxiii.252)), there is actually yet another model of the history of Italian art on display here. Cimabue and Tintoretto are now the two great names: ‘The greatest man in Venice comes last; in Florence, first’ (xxiii.199). Between these two artists there is, first, a century of Purist or 62
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‘Christian Aesthetic’ art, and then two hundred years, between 1400 and 1600, in which ‘Christian Mathematic art’ and ‘Christian Romantic art’ fight for predominance. Ruskin, of course, prefers the ‘Christian Romantic’ work of Angelico, Botticelli, and Perugino to the ‘Mathematic’ school (xxiii.191), and does not discuss Titian or Giorgione (his topic is Florence). But the notion of a long period of artistic conflict is one which could, potentially, be used to accommodate the previous ‘Naturalist’ ideal of complexity more conveniently than his previous attempts to re-date the Fall, and the celebration of Jacopo della Quercia, despite his ‘Mathematic’ status, suggests that possibility (xxiii.222–8). These lectures were partly improvised and were not published in Ruskin’s lifetime. Some of the material, however, was re-used in Mornings in Florence (1875–7), the first of his popular guides to Italian art. Feeling, very unusually, that the duties of an Oxford professor included giving ‘what guidance I may to travellers in Italy’ (xxiii.293), he also produced A Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice in 1877 and St Mark’s Rest in 1877–84. The pious tone and Purist doctrine of these spirited but, by 1908, old-fashioned books are what E. M. Forster was parodying in his novel A Room with a View (1908), in the figure of the Revd Cuthbert Eager. Ruskin himself made three further visits to Italy. He spent the winter of 1876–7 in Venice, making a valuable contribution to the campaign to save Saint Mark’s from destructive ‘restoration’ and undergoing the visionary, or hallucinatory, experiences in which he believed the dead Rose La Touche was communicating with him through Carpaccio’s paintings.12 In 1882 he went for the last time to Lucca and Florence, noting disapprovingly that ‘Italian mountains, as compared with the Alps, have a look of – demi-monde – as if they spent their lives mainly in pleasure’,13 and facilitating the publication of three rather sentimental accounts of Tuscan peasant life by Francesca Alexander. The final visit to Venice was in 1888. He was a sick man and, during the return journey, lapsed into the mental illness from which he would never fully emerge. Ruskin’s Italy was a very partial version of the peninsula. As he himself suggested, only Lombardy and ‘Etruria’ were of real interest to him (xxiii.35), and his attention, even there, was confined to a single period. Despite those limits, this was the country which provoked many of his best ideas. His theory of work emerged from his study of the ‘Nature’ of Venetian ‘Gothic’. His Naturalist theory of art arose from the need to reconcile the competing claims of the Florentine ‘Primitives’ and Venetian Colourists. Even the ‘Theoretic’ attack on the Aestheticism of Whistler, which led to the 1878 trial, was first made in the Italian context of Val d’Arno (xxiii.49). As well as writing about Italy, Ruskin painted it, creating a body of work 63
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which stretched from the exquisite studies of Lucca in 1845–6, through the meticulous technical drawings of Venetian buildings in the early 1850s, to the vividly colourful sketches made in Sicily and at Pozzuolo in 1874. Tim Hilton has argued that ‘Ruskin’s beautiful watercolours of Italian architecture can stand as his artistic contribution to the aesthetic movement’ (Hilton, 2.275). Italy was also the setting for a series of transformative personal experiences. If Ruskin lost his religious faith in Turin in 1858, he regained it at Assisi in 1874, and his pioneering commitment to conservation was prompted by his enraged awareness of the way in which Italian buildings had been damaged or neglected. It remained a place of work, not solace or amusement, and Ruskin was often ill, angry, or unhappy there. Italy was, however, also a source of inspiration and, occasionally, a manifestation of his highest ideal of human felicity – walking near Lucca in August 1874, he found, ‘the vines, olives, rocks, and Carrara hills beyond all one glow of calm glory, and perfect possibilities of human life’(Diaries, 3.803). It would, in some ways, be entirely appropriate that Ruskin’s unfinished autobiography should reach its de facto conclusion with a recollection, not of Brantwood but of Siena, and of entering the gates of an Italian city, ‘the fireflies everywhere in the sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars’ (xxxv.562). NO TES 1. A third letter (The Scotsman, 6 August) suggests that Ruskin had sent the first two to Peter Bayne, editor of the Witness, and expected them to appear, if anywhere, in that paper (xxxvi.331). 2. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, eds., Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980–93), iv.300. 3. See Gail S. Weinberg, ‘“First of all first beginnings”: Ruskin’s studies of early Italian paintings at Christ Church’, Burlington Magazine, 134 (1992), 111–120, and Diaries, 1.248. 4. R. Willis, Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Deighton, 1835), iii. 5. Ruskin’s copy of ‘Fra Bartolomeo’s Magdalen’ (iv.347) is reproduced in Clegg and Tucker (1992) and in Paul Tucker’s edition of Ruskin’s 1845 notebook, ‘Resumé’ of Italian Art and Architecture (1845) (Pisa: Centro di Ricerche Informatiche per I Beni Culturali, 2003). 6. The ‘little chapel’ was probably the Oratory of S. Ansano which then contained the early Italian paintings now in the Museo Bandini in Fiesole; the ‘three saints’ were probably the Madonna and Child with Four Saints now attributed to Maso di Banco. 7. E. H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art (London: Phaidon, 2006), 155. 64
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Italy 8. See Ruskin’s letter of 15 February 1852 (Bradley, 181). 9. Ruskin’s manuscript ‘Diary M’, f.47, here quoted from Robert Hewison, Ruskin on Venice: The Paradise of Cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 171. 10. Modern scholarship suggests 1434. 11. Letter to his mother, 13 June 1870 (xx.li). 12. See Van Akin Burd, ed., Christmas Story: John Ruskin’s Venetian Letters of 1876–1877 (Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1990). 13. Quoted in Jeanne Clegg and Paul Tucker, Ruskin e la Toscana: Ruskin Gallery, Collection of the Guild of St. George, Sheffield (Sheffield: Ruskin Gallery, Collection of the Guild of St George in association with Lund Humphries, 1993), 120.
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France and Belgium
Continental travel stimulated Ruskin’s creative powers, and France and Belgium were of particular significance for his understanding and exploration of Gothic architecture and Flemish art. He visited France regularly between 1825 and 1888, and present-day Belgium in 1825, 1833, 1842, and 1859. He copied his first map of France on 7 October 1829, when he was ten years old (xxxviii.266), and drew, from memory, a map of Europe at approximately the same time.1 Such activity was ‘an excellent discipline of hand and eye; and the lines drawn for the mountains and sea a most wholesome imitation of steady engraver’s work’ (xiii.503). He received early tuition in French under the guidance of John Rowbotham (xxxv.84). Travelling always had an objective as Ruskin explained in Praeterita: ‘We did not travel for adventures, nor for company, but to see with our eyes, and to measure with our hearts’ (xxxv.119). In France and Belgium, Ruskin, essentially a study-traveller, garnered first-hand material for his voluminous comparative writings, lectures, and illustrations. From the moment he set foot in Calais or Boulogne, he considered the Continent as a vast laboratory in which to work with purpose, intensity, and critical acuity. Ruskin was not the ‘modern fashionable traveller’ whom he satirises in Praeterita as being ‘intent on Paris, Nice, and Monaco [who] started by the morning mail from Charing Cross, has a little recovered himself from the qualms of his crossing, and the irritation of fighting for seats at Boulogne, and begins to look at his watch to see how near he is to the buffet of Amiens, [and who] is apt to be baulked and worried by the train’s useless stop at one inconsiderable station, lettered ABBEVILLE’ (xxxv.153). Ruskin experienced intense feelings of creative freedom and vitality, joy and liberation from the constraints of his Evangelical, Protestant upbringing, pleasure in the aesthetic side of Catholicism, and enjoyment in the more holistic approach to Sunday. In Abbeville in 1835 he found that 66
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France and Belgium art . . . religion, and present human life, were yet in perfect harmony. There were no dead six days and dismal seventh in those sculptured churches; and there was no beadle to lock me out of them, or pew-shutter to shut me in. I might haunt them, fancying myself a ghost; peep round their pillars, like Rob Roy; kneel in them, and scandalise nobody; draw in them, and disturb none. (xxxv.156)
In 1868, in Abbeville again Ruskin was ‘happily at work in the brightest and purest air in the world (which that of North France is, to my thinking)’ (xxxvi.554). He was enthralled by the landscapes of France and Belgium and particularly the river scenery of the Cousin, Eure, Marne, Meuse, Somme, and Yonne, much of which was sketched, described, and even discovered by Joseph Mallord William Turner, one of Ruskin’s inspirational guides, whom he believed had the greatest understanding of those countries. Ruskin thought that France had the best scenery for teaching grace to artists and cited ‘Lowland France, Picardy and Normandy, the valleys of the Loire and Seine, and even the district, so thoughtlessly and mindlessly abused by English travellers as uninteresting, traversed between Calais and Dijon’ (iii.238). For Ruskin, Northern France was ‘a perpetual Paradise’ (vi.419). At Sens, in 1845, the trees even surpassed those of Turner, ‘so wonderful, so finished, so refined’ (iii.238, n.1). He never lost these feelings of wonder and at Avallon, in 1882, wrote: ‘I had a precious walk down the valley of the Cousin, which is altogether lovely and like Dovedale and the Meuse, and the glens of Fribourg, in all that each has of best’ (Diaries, 3.1017). Landscape and landscape in art would be lifelong preoccupations. On his way from Paris to Bar-le-Duc, ‘an old French town of strange fantasy, richness, and quaintness’ (Hayman, 4), Ruskin described apple blossom, young aspens, and the ‘pure fresh green of the young chestnuts [sic], and sycamores’, and concluded that ‘France looked yesterday like one flower garden’ (Hayman, 6). On this same journey, he also traversed ‘the sweet vallies [sic] of Champagne which with their green chestnuts [sic] and purple “Arbres de Judée” are as like Paradise at this spring time as anything can be imagined’ (Hayman, 175). France and Belgium were rich in art and architecture, both religious and secular. Ruskin’s gaze ranged from the humblest French cottage (i.15) or a window at Châtillon-sur-Seine, a newly-constructed railway tunnel at Blaisy,2 a church in the village of Thann in the Vosges (Diaries, 1.204), to the Gothic spire of Antwerp Cathedral (xviii.440). The first continental journey, from 11 May to 13 July 1825,3 marked the beginning of regular, almost compulsive continental travel over a period of sixty-three years. For Ruskin felt a strong need to re-visit with fresh eyes 67
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places that he had left ‘unseen’, including Sens and Rouen (viii.xxxi-ii), in an attempt to grasp their rich architectural wealth. Six-year-old John visited Paris, Brussels, Waterloo, Ghent – with its ‘fantastic gables’ (xxxv.134) – and Bruges before returning to Calais for the cross-Channel journey home.4 What impressed him most of all was a field – the site of the battle of Waterloo, painted by Turner. He relived history as he ‘traversed the field of Waterloo without the slightest inclination to be a soldier’ (xxxv.103). He recalled the ‘slow walk over the field’ without the ‘defacing mound’, yet with traces of the battle (xxxv.105). For his father’s birthday, 10 May 1829, young John composed ‘a book more elaborate than any; sixteen pages in a red cover, with a title-page quite like print: “Battle of Waterloo | a play | in two acts | with other small | Poems | dedicated to his father | by John Ruskin | 1829 | Hernhill [sic] | Dulwich.”’5 However, John’s recollection of Brussels in 1825 was slight: ‘no Hotel de Ville, no stately streets, no surprises or interests’ (xxxv.105). Ruskin’s memories of Paris, then celebrating the coronation of King Charles X, were equally vague, apart from such things and people that were ‘clearly visible and present’ (xxxv.104). He recalled the ‘quiet family inn’ and ‘the soft red cushions of the arm-chairs . . . the exquisitely polished floor of the salon, and the good-natured French “boots” . . . who skated over it in the morning till it became as reflective as a mahogany table . . . the pretty court full of flowers and shrubs in beds and tubs between our rez-de-chaussée windows and the outer gate’ (xxxv.104–05). He remembered ‘a nice black servant belonging to another family, who used to catch the house-cat for me; with an equally good-natured fille de chambre’ (xxxv.104–05). He recalled ‘nothing of the Seine, nor of Notre Dame, nor of anything in or even out of the town, except the windmills on Mont Martre’ (xxxv.105). His interest in architecture would be nurtured in subsequent visits. Eight years later, in 1833, it was a more mature, sensitive, enquiring, artistic fourteen-year-old who revisited some of those places already glimpsed in 1825: Calais, Brussels, Waterloo, and Paris. Ruskin on this tour, from May to September, was guided to some extent by Samuel Prout’s Facsimiles of Sketches in Flanders and Germany (1833), and Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1830 edition), a travel poem with illustrations by J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Stothard, and Samuel Prout. And his travelling was much more comprehensive and on a grander European scale. It comprised a more extensive exploration of Belgium – Tournai, Brussels, Namur and the river Meuse, industrial Liège and Spa; of France to include ‘beautiful Lille’ (ii.345), the ‘little, humble, neglected village of Cassel’ (ii.344), the village of Marquise (xxxiii.36), Clos Vougeot, which was ‘a very large Vineyard enclosed within Stone Walls’,6 the Burgundian towns 68
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Figure 3. John Ruskin, Church at Dijon, 1833.
of Mâcon, Chalon-sur-Saône, Dijon – where Ruskin made a detailed sketch of the church of Saint-Michel (Figure 3) – Auxerre and Sens. Ruskin’s intercultural development continued on many planes, and most of all in art, architecture, and landscape. He was avid of sensations and discoveries and now committed his experiences to paper, in the form of 69
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prose, verse, and sketches. There was a very long account of Brussels–‘a lovely, a queen-like city’ (ii.347)–and an intricate sketch of its Hôtel de Ville. Waterloo, ‘exceedingly beautiful’ (ii.348), now made an even stronger impression on Ruskin and he wrote lyrically and with reverence about the site where ‘[a]ll is peace now’ (ii.348) and expressed English pride mingled with sorrow for ‘Poor Napoleon!’ (ii.348). He also drew the battlefield. Ruskin sketched the scenery along the river Meuse in Belgium, with its vineyards and deep gorges of such geological interest, and reached Namur, with the ‘rich dome of its small but beautiful cathedral’ (ii.348). The ‘magnificent’ Meuse, with its ‘rock scenery in perfection’ (ii.350), was his first initiation into the ‘scenery of Continental rivers’, with its ‘romantic and picturesque fair beauty’ preferable to anything on the ‘far famed Rhine’ (ii.349). He was so transfixed by this experience that in 1867, he sent William Ward, along with George Allen, on a sketching tour in the valley of the Meuse, from Liège to Givet, in the steps of Turner (xxxvi.535). It was with a heavy heart that Ruskin left Namur for ‘the smoky streets and coal wharfs of Liège, and the round, dumpy, shapeless hills of Spa’ (ii.350) on his way to Cologne. In 1842, on his return from a continental tour to the Alps, Ruskin stopped at Liège, Brussels, Louvain, Antwerp, Mechlin, and Bruges. At Louvain, where he made a sketch of the Hôtel de Ville (xxxviii.263), and at Antwerp, where he also sketched (xxxviii.228), he became aware of certain important changes within himself and in his aesthetic development. He ‘thought and looked much more than [he] drew’; his taste in architecture was altering, and he realised that ‘Flemish buildings were by no means so good as [he] had supposed’ (xxxv.627). The influence of Turner was also directing him into ‘new lines of thought with respect to colour’ (iv.344). Ruskin criticised the Flemish schools of painting for their inadequate expression of ‘the effect of age or of human life upon architecture’ (iii.216), citing examples of artificial constructs of ruins ‘broken down on purpose’, or ‘windows open and shut by rule’ (iii.216). At Antwerp, the city so closely associated with Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Ruskin sought out the Flemish master’s works for his art criticism and made extensive notes (xxv.627). In Modern Painters, the ‘Graduate of Oxford’ compared a detail of Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi, which he praised highly when he first saw it in 1842 (Diaries, 1.235), with a landscape by Nicolaes Berghem in the Dulwich Picture Gallery (iii.124), the south London gallery so significant in his early art education. He compared Rubens’s paintings in St John’s Church, Mechlin, with those in Antwerp Cathedral, and deliberated on various Crucifixions and other religious scenes (Diaries, 1.234–7). Jan Van Eyck’s great 70
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altarpiece in Ghent, The Adoration of the Lamb, was an example of ‘exquisitely developed Gothic landscape’ (xxii.57). In his epilogue (1883) to Modern Painters, Ruskin reflected that 1842 was a ‘kind of birth-year’, during which he returned home from the Continental tour ‘in the full enthusiasm and rush of sap in the too literally sapling and stripling mind of me’ and wrote the first volume of Modern Painters (iv.344–5). This tour had also given him enormous confidence in himself and in his aesthetic judgement and was an important turning point. Ruskin’s last recorded visit to Belgium was in May 1859 when he was on his way to Germany mainly to acquaint himself with the masters in the principal Galleries. It was with this focus that he stopped at Antwerp and Brussels to do more work (for the fifth volume of Modern Painters) on Rubens’s religious subjects and to be in a position to make comparisons with Veronese and Titian, whose religious art he concluded was ‘greater’, for they ‘treated the scenes of this human life in a true human manner, pouring into them their religious faith’ (xvi.470). Ruskin was highly scathing of several of Rubens’s works in the Brussels Museum. He singled out Christ Armed with Thunder to Destroy the World in which ‘Christ stands like a dancing master, only with coarse bandy legs’ (vii.329) as an example of ‘all that is most detestable in Romanist doctrine’ (vii.329). It was during this tour that Ruskin changed his mind about religious paintings, as he explained shortly after his return at a talk at the Working Men’s College on 8 March 1860. He used to think that ‘the greatest religious art is that which presents the religious element free from all connection with earthly things’ (xvi.469), but he now came to understand that a ‘greater’ kind of art is when religion is ‘mixed up with the everyday life of man’ (xvi.470). From Brussels, Ruskin continued to Namur, where he recalled a ‘[l]ovely afternoon walk up hill’ (Diaries, 2.540) on his way to Cologne. Ruskin frequently traversed France, via Burgundy, on a familiar route to the Alps known as ‘the old road’ – a title he would take for one of his last volumes – but he devoted three long periods of sustained architectural study exclusively to France in 1848, 1868, and 1880. These were the foundations of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), ‘The Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme’ (1869), and The Bible of Amiens (1880–85), as well as his intended but unwritten studies of Chartres Cathedral, The Springs of Eure, and of Rouen Cathedral, Domrémy. The Seven Lamps of Architecture was a study of churches and cathedrals mainly in Normandy, based on first-hand observations and sketches during his 1848 tour. It was an ideal catchment area for ‘Rouen, with the associated Norman cities, Caen, Bayeux, and Coutances, [represented] the entire range of Northern architecture from the Romanesque to Flamboyant’ (viii.6). 71
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Ruskin’s aim was to compile a taxonomy of Gothic architecture and to deduce from it guiding moral and Christian principles. Shining through was Ruskin’s crusading belief in the superiority of French Gothic, a form based on the natural world emanating from the French and Belgian landscapes he so much admired, together with an idealised view of life in medieval France, especially that of the stonemason and sculptor. In 1868, Ruskin spent two months in the picturesque Picardy port of Abbeville, with its ramparts, streams, and medieval buildings, studying its domestic and religious architecture, writing, and sketching. He was attempting to record and to salvage as much as possible before it completely disappeared as a result of neglect, vandalism, revolutions, and the programme of restoration initiated by, among others, Prosper Mérimée and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, which involved the total destruction of a building prior to its rebuilding. This problem was common throughout France (xxxvi.311), including at the abbey Church of Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer (xvi.432), in spite of essential repairs being undertaken ‘under the firm and wise government of the third Napoleon’ (xii.421). Ruskin examined the Gothic centrepiece, the abbey church of Saint-Wulfran, as well as the church of Saint-Jacques, which was about to be demolished and from which he bought, for five pounds, the front of the porch (xix.xliii). He went to Rue to study the rich Flamboyant Gothic chapelle du Saint-Esprit, the style of which he considered to be ‘corrupt’ (Diaries, 2.651), and to Saint-Riquier, where he found the church ‘scraped clean and spoiled’ and the ‘statues distorted and hideous’ (Diaries, 2.651). Ruskin’s schedule was hectic. By 9 September, he had acquired such a detailed knowledge of the town and ‘every remnant of interest’ that he felt able to envisage, writing, by analogy with The Stones of Venice, a Stones of Abbeville (xix.xli). The immediate aim, however, was to prepare an important illustrated lecture, ‘The Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme’, to be given at the Royal Institution, London, on 29 January 1869. Amiens Cathedral, the Gothic masterpiece that Ruskin studied and drew on many occasions, was the subject of his last major work on France, The Bible of Amiens, which Marcel Proust would translate into French as La Bible d’Amiens (1904). It was the first of an intended series of studies of religious architecture and history under the umbrella of Our Fathers Have Told Us: Sketches of the History of Christendom for Boys and Girls Who Have Been Held at its Fonts. Ruskin’s interest in France and Belgium was not confined to a study of their buildings and their art. With his strong moral compass and sensitive political antennae, he witnessed many social and political changes, including the creation of the Kingdom of Belgium and the coronation of King Leopold 72
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in 1831, and the rise and fall of the French Second Empire between 1852 and 1870. He was awake to the revolutionary movement of the age – the French upheavals of 1848, Italian insurrections (xxxvi.311), Caffre wars in South Africa (xi.261) – and blamed this on the system of European education for despising politics, ‘the science of the relations and duties of men to each other’ (xi.260). But the most distressing event for him was the FrancoPrussian War, about which he wrote: ‘there is probably no other man living to whom . . . the ruin of Paris is so great a sorrow as it is to me’ (xxvii.98). When Franco-Prussian hostilities commenced on 19 July 1870, Ruskin was at the Swiss town of Giessbach, enjoying a continental tour that had to be curtailed. It was a wise decision, for the French Second Empire collapsed in early September 1870, when Napoleon III surrendered to the Prussian King Wilhelm I at Sedan. Prussians soon occupied much of France and after a four-month siege, Paris eventually capitulated. Acts of terror continued during the bloody Commune and its suppression. Ruskin became politically involved in the Franco-Prussian War and reported on the fast-moving events with the energy of a war correspondent from the security of his Denmark Hill home or from the comfort of a ‘quiet English inn’ (xxvii.105), the Crown and Thistle at Abingdon. He shared his private opinions about the war with his North American friend Charles Eliot Norton: ‘The war is very awful to me: being as I think – all men’s fault – as much as the emperors – Certainly as much Prussia’s and England’s’ (Norton, 200). Ruskin entered the public debate on 7 October 1870 with a letter to the Daily Telegraph, prompted by learning about the dangerous circumstances of the French genre painter Édouard Frère, whose work he much admired. Frère, along with fellow artist Rosa Bonheur, had been given special permission by the Prussians to leave Paris for a safe haven after the blockade had begun and had only narrowly escaped death (xxxiv.499). Ruskin felt vindicated in having already written about war in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), extracts of which accompanied his letter. In these, he denounced modern and chemical warfare that was ‘much worse than the savage’s poisoned arrow’ (xviii.472): he argued against colonialism (though his Inaugural lecture at the University of Oxford in 1870 would take a different approach), against grabbing and occupying territories, and made a plea for peace, ‘perfect fellowship and brotherhood’ (xviii.479). He postulated that strength did not depend on the ‘extent of territory, any more than upon number of population’ (xviii.479), but that ‘[t]he strength is in the men, and in their unity and virtue, not in their standing room: a little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools; and only that nation gains true territory, which gains itself’ (xviii.479). 73
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In his next letter of 8 October in the Daily Telegraph, Ruskin expressed anger about the destruction of the capital of Alsace: ‘at Strasburg the Picture Gallery – with the pictures in it? – the Library – with the books in it? – and the Theatre, with certainly two hundred persons in it, have been burnt to the ground under an auxiliary cannonade, the flames at night being “a tempting target”’ (xxxiv.500). Without blaming either the French or the Prussians directly, Ruskin identified the causes of the war as being rooted in the pleasure of vice, ‘vain passions and . . . falsehoods’, in the cult of Napoleon I (memories of his childhood visit to the field of Waterloo), and in the glorification of battle (xxxiv.501). Although Ruskin’s heart was with France and the French, he upbraided their disorder ‘the most exquisite, finished, and exemplary anarchy’ in contrast to the organised Prussian victory achieved by ‘one of the truest Monarchies and schools of honour and obedience yet organized under heaven’ (xxxiv.501). Ruskin launched a plea to Prussia, having shown its might, to agree an honourable ‘unconditional armistice’, and for neutral Great Britain to help France ‘now’ (xxxiv.502). But the greatest tragedy, Ruskin believed, was the loss of a country’s most precious asset, its people. ‘There is no wealth but life’ (xvii.105) was not a vain motto of a previous decade. Ruskin criticised governments of all colours for unemployment and redundancies, ‘of turning workmen out of dockyards, without any consciousness that, of all the stores in the yard, the men were exactly the most precious’ (xxxiv.501). The Franco-Prussian War provided rich material for Ruskin’s monthly letters published as Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. He engaged the readers most of all in Letters 6 and 7, devoted to the unfolding crisis (xxvii.98–131). In Letter 6, poignantly entitled ‘Elysian Fields’ – the deep meaning of which Ruskin scrutinised – he criticised some of the French who regarded the Siege as ‘the Entertainment of the Hour’, and who travelled to the heights of Meudon to view it (xxvii.110). He took a moral stance, blaming, in highly charged Biblical tones, the people for their sins, their blasphemy, and ‘the False Prophets who have taken the name of Christ in vain, and leagued themselves with His chief enemy, “Covetousness, which is idolatry”’ (xxvii.111). Giotto’s grotesque pictorial interpretation of the vice Envy, standing in Hell fire with an ugly serpent disgorging from her mouth and about to re-enter her body via her right eye, was placed as a frontispiece to Letter 6 (xxvii. Plate II, facing page 111) and served as an emblem or visual warning of what awaits the reader. The fighting led Ruskin to question both his and the Parisian notion of the word Communard or ‘Communism’ (xxvii.115). He declared: ‘I am myself a 74
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Communist of the old school – reddest also of the red’ (xxvii.116). He argued that if communism meant that everything belonged to everybody, then logically the Louvre belonged as much to him as to the Prussians (xxvii.116). But communism also meant ‘that everyone must work in common . . . for his dinner’ (xxvii.117). He argued the need for ‘good work’ (xxvii.129), the antithesis of idleness, one of the main causes of social unrest, and blamed war on jealousy and greed (xxvii.126). The Slade Professor of Fine Art alerted readers of the Daily Telegraph (letter of 19 January 1871) to the destruction of more cultural heritage as the situation worsened. Notre-Dame in Paris was a target: so was the SainteChapelle ‘of thirteenth-century Gothic – the most perfect architectural style north of the Alps – there is both in historical interest, and in accomplished perfectness of art, one unique monument – the Sainte Chapelle of Paris’ (xxxiv.503). French Gothic was most dear to Ruskin and he eloquently expressed its uniqueness and the danger it faced using a Gothic cinquefoil image of the great cathedrals radiating from Notre-Dame: As examples of Gothic, ranging from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, the cathedrals of Chartres, Rouen, Amiens, Rheims, and Bourges, form a kind of cinque-foil round Notre Dame of Paris, of which it is impossible to say which is the more precious metal . . . . Nothing else in art, on the surface of the round earth, could represent any one of them, if destroyed, or be named as of any equivalent value. (xxxiv.503)
Practical measures were taken to alleviate suffering by the Bishop of Versailles and clergy, as well as a fundraising committee consisting of the Lord Bishop of London; Dr Manning, Catholic Archbishop of Westminster; the Revd Dr Brock, the Baptist minister; Mr Alfred de Rothschild; and the Lord Mayor of London. Ruskin joined the fundraising initiative along with Professor Huxley, Sir John Lubbock, and James T. Knowles, the architect and co-founder of the Metaphysical Society. Ruskin was particularly pleased to be associated with this ecumenical and scientific group. He contributed £50 to the fund. Ruskin did not return to France of the Third Republic until 1872, when he visited Paris very briefly. Post-war moral and physical degradation was apparent. His first impression of Paris on 13 April 1872 was of a city ‘in ruin’ (Diaries, 2.723). Much of post-war Paris had lost its appeal for Ruskin. On 3 September 1880, he reported that the noise of the ‘republican carts’ outside the Meurice hotel made it difficult for him to sleep (Diaries, 3.984). In November 1882, he witnessed the ‘ruined Tuileries, to be sold for materials, and the harlotry of the streets’ (Diaries, 3.1042). Here, as with Venice earlier in Ruskin’s life, was another fallen city. 75
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The ‘delicious’ bois de Boulogne had been expanded and developed under baron Haussmann, and Ruskin nevertheless enjoyed several rides through it (Diaries, 3.984). But the contrast with the developing suburbs was stark: ‘all the Seine down to St. Cloud [was] one mass of chimneys and wretchedness of desolate new suburb’ (Diaries,3.984). The historic village of Saint-Cloud, with its fine château, had been left in ruin and burnt down by the Prussians. This may explain why Ruskin considered it to be a ‘desolate new suburb’. The physical effects of war were also seen elsewhere in France. In August 1882, Ruskin wrote in his diary, from Calais: ‘I never saw Calais so dismal; but, also, its life has been utterly sucked out of it by the railway, and every shop seems failing, every house becoming ruinous. The war also has first torn down half the suburbs to build barracks, and then left the barracks tenantless! having taxed the town half of what it was worth to build them’ (Diaries, 3.1014). The status of Catholicism was being challenged with the increasing anticlericalism of the Third Republic, a situation that would eventually lead to the clear-cut separation of church and state at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ruskin witnessed this most clearly in Amiens in 1880 when, prior to a performance of Tartuffe in which Molière mocks religious hypocrites, a crowd demonstrated violent anti-religious sentiments (xxxii.117–18). Ruskin recalled that event with its ominous overtones four years later when writing from Brantwood: ‘The sight of that pit, full of unanimous blasphemy, foaming out its own shame within a few hundred yards of the altar of the cathedral which records the first Christianity of France, was a sign to me of many things’ (xxxii.118). Selective reading provided a way of acquiring a sense of moral responsibility that had been so wanting in war-torn France. Ruskin’s wide-ranging repertoire included French history (xviii.133 note), essays by Michel de Montaigne, whose frankness he admired (xxiii.129), and Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) in the medieval setting of one of Ruskin’s favourite Gothic cathedrals (xxix.588). But the French novelists who made the most profound impression on Ruskin were Honoré de Balzac (1799– 1850) and George Sand (1804–76). Both were imbued with a moral sense of justice and respect for the past. It is in Balzac, and specifically Illusions perdues (1837–43), that the reader finds the concept of conservation and of reading a building through its stones and patina. In his 1846 diary Ruskin noted this theme, ‘Effect of age on architecture: French Courtyards’, followed by a slightly modified quotation from Illusions perdues: ‘C’était une maison bâtie en pierre tendre, particulière au pays, et dorée par le temps; c’était la cour de province froide et proprette – une architecture sobre, quasi romantique bien conservée’7 [‘the 76
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house was built of soft stone, characteristic of the region, and over time had become golden; there was a cold and spotlessly clean and tidy provincial courtyard – sombre architecture, almost romantic and well preserved’].8 In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin wrote: ‘the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age . . . it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character . . . that its existence . . . can be gifted with even so much as these possess, of language and of life’ (viii.233–34). In Illusions perdues Ruskin also found an important idea that would shape his thoughts. This is the stark warning Balzac gives to young Lucien, who dreams of becoming a famous writer yet fritters away his time at Madame de Bargeton’s superficial parties: ‘les succès littéraires ne se conquièrent que dans la solitude et par d’obstinés travaux’9 [‘literary success can only be achieved in solitude and through diligent, persistent work and application’].10 This idea, a leitmotiv in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, will remain for Ruskin a guiding ‘lamp’ or principle throughout his life: ‘We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done by halves and shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all’ (viii.219). No good novel could be written, Ruskin believed, without having a moral purpose that lends it vitality (xxix.588). In this George Sand excelled, her power being in her sense of justice and in her ‘enjoyment of the simplicities of real virtue’ (xxix.588). In her introduction to La Mare au diable (1846), George Sand, in her search for ‘la vérité idéale’, explained that a moral intention was more effectively conveyed through expressions of tenderness, simplicity, and care rather than terrifying images of death, hell, and terror. Ruskin was widely read in the works of George Sand, and in particular her pastoral stories of rustic life: La Mare au diable, François le Champi (1847–8), and La Petite Fadette (1849). These three novels, with their narratives of close family ties and valorisation of honest manual work, were also the favourites of Proust. They give an idyllic portrait of contented humble people at work and at home in the depths of rural France. The images are reminiscent of those genre scenes by Édouard Frère that Ruskin so admired for their simplicity and honesty. Ruskin’s bond with his mother was reinforced by their shared reading aloud of François le Champi (Diaries, 2.523), and of La Mare au diable (Hayman, 110). In Paris in September 1856, Ruskin was so engrossed in La Petite Fadette that he was able to think of nothing else. He was intoxicated by ‘the finish and passion of George Sand among French writers, and her sense 77
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of goodness among general thinkers’ (Diaries, 2.521). George Sand was, too, the moral guide he gave to young men at the Working Men’s College in 1857 during his talk about ‘French manners and customs’ (xvi.lxix). He read to them extracts from La Mare au diable ‘to give them’, he said, ‘an idea of the hearts of the French Peasantry’ (Hayman, 110). Ruskin particularly appreciated the passages of concealed love and tenderness by widower Germain towards young Marie, concealed because he does not wish to displease and disobey his father-in-law. Germain is torn between his love for Marie and his duty towards his father-in-law, the head of the family, who has selected a wealthy bride for him. In a letter to Comtesse Maria Montemerli, written from Turin on 8 August 1858, Ruskin explained that writing a novel required sustained hard work, knowledge, and experience, and used George Sand as a model (Hayman, 182). In Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880–81), Ruskin rejected the ‘Cockney literature’ of George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss in preference to the ‘really romantic literature of France’ as exemplified in George Sand’s Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine in which the principal characters, ‘heroic and radiantly ideal’ (xxxiv.377), are set against a landscape that is ‘rich and true with the emotion of years of life passed in glens of Norman granite’ (xxxiv.378). The value of reading for a moral purpose was mirrored by that of the stage. Ruskin thought the theatre was ‘the best and most necessary means of education – moral and intellectual’ (xxxiv.549), and a means by which he was able to ‘think about his work’.11 It was Molière above all whose work embodied these qualities. Ruskin regarded Le Misanthrope and Tartuffe as ‘two perfect plays’ (v.375) and extolled Molière’s ‘natural wisdom’, his ‘capacity for the most simple enjoyment; a high sense of all nobleness, honour, and purity’ combined with ‘an unerring instinct for what is useful and sincere’ (v.357). W. G. Collingwood reports that on arriving ‘at Paris or any great foreign town, [Ruskin’s] first question was always, “What about the opera?”’12 Paris provided a fertile theatrical ground for the trenchant critic who was at times disappointed by the lack of high ideals and by poor standards of the production companies. He denounced publicly Delibes’s music to the new opera Jean de Nivelle at the Opéra Comique as ‘helplessly tuneless’, and likened it to ‘mosquitos and cicadas’ (xxxiv.550). Such was the lack of taste, beauty, and cleanliness at Offenbach’s operetta La Fille du Tambour-Major at the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques (Diaries, 3.986) that Ruskin could feel the harmful moral effects on the spot as the ‘endurance of loathsomeness [was] gaining hourly on the people!’ (xxxiv.550). The abysmal quality of Rossini’s William Tell at the Paris Opera House affected him badly: ‘Ruined W[illia]m Tell. . . . Never was in such a rage about anything’ (Diaries, 3.986). In a letter 78
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to the secretary of the Dramatic Reform Association of Manchester, Ruskin reported that William Tell had been ‘entirely massacred at the great opera house at Paris’ (xxxiv.550). At provincial Avallon in 1882, Gounod’s Faust, relying on minimal pictorial effect ‘except a few old curtains, and a blue light or two’ (xxxiv.34), was an emotionally harrowing experience that inspired strong feelings and morbid thoughts. In his lecture ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ (1884) on climate change and meteorology, Ruskin revived memories of the ‘extremely appalling’ night on the Brocken: [A] strange ghastliness being obtained in some of the witch scenes merely by fine management of gesture and drapery; and in the phantom scenes, by the half-palsied, half-furious, faltering or fluttering past of phantoms stumbling as into graves; as if of not only soulless, but senseless, Dead, moving with the very action, the rage, the decrepitude, and the trembling of the plague-wind. (xxxiv.34)
These storm clouds and plague winds reflect the pollution and moral gloom of society, the consequence of blasphemous behaviour. The theatrical image of the dead men’s souls in perpetual motion is also a metaphor for Ruskin of the ‘waters of death’ that still remain after the Franco-Prussian War (xxxiv.33). Ruskin’s responses to France and Belgium are interwoven into his writings on art, architecture, landscape, history, culture, and politics. Ill health alone prevented him from re-visiting these countries that were of such significance and so inspirational to him in his life and work. It was apt, then, that towards the end of his life, Ruskin was formally honoured by Belgium when, on 8 December 1889, he was elected Honorary Member of the Corps Académique of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts d’Anvers,13 and an Associate Member of the prestigious Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Belgique on 7 January 1892.14 N O T ES 1. Ruskin Museum, Coniston, Cumbria: ConRM 1989. 540. 2. Cynthia Gamble and Matthieu Pinette, L’Oeil de Ruskin: l’exemple de la Bourgogne (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011), 120–21. 3. Lancaster, Ruskin Library, MS RF18, fol.1. Diary of John Ruskin 1871–3. 4. Lancaster, Ruskin Library, MS RF18, fol.1. 5. W. G. Collingwood, The Life and Work of John Ruskin, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1893), i.32. 6. Lancaster, Ruskin Library, MS RF33a, fol.70. Diary of John James Ruskin 1833–46. 7. Lancaster, Ruskin Library, MS RF5c, fol. 58. Diary of John Ruskin 1846. 79
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cynthia gamble My translation. Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues (Paris: Pocket, 1991), 126. My translation. Katherine Newey and Jeffrey Richards, John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1, 13. 12. W. G. Collingwood, Ruskin Relics (London: Isbister, 1903), 155. 13. I am grateful to Jef Van Gool at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts d’Anvers for this information. 14. www.academieroyale.be/n4280/John.Ruskin, last accessed 5 March 2014. 8. 9. 10. 11.
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part ii
Topics
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6 LU C Y HAR TLEY
Art
There is no doubt that Modern Painters (1843–60) is the most important of John Ruskin’s writings on art. The five volumes contain his major statements on the purpose of painting and propose J. M. W. Turner as the greatest of landscape artists, and, in turn, established his authority as the leading art critic in Victorian England. It is essential, however, to recognise that Ruskin’s position on the highest purpose of painting, and its greatest practitioners, changed over the course of writing Modern Painters. This chapter provides an account of those changes, from the first principles laid down in the opening volumes of Modern Painters and the association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the reframing of Turner’s greatness in relation to Tintoretto and reconsideration of the place of art in modern life in the final volume of Modern Painters. It concludes with an assessment of the libel case of Whistler v. Ruskin and Ruskin’s late views of Pre-Raphaelites. My argument is that Ruskin’s ideas of truth and greatness underpin the theory of art he erected in relation to Turner, but that his explanations of beauty and the imagination, and his search for successors to Turner, weaken his conviction about the use, the real use, of art to life. Establishing the principles Ruskin famously wrote the first volume of Modern Painters, published in 1843 ‘By a Graduate from Oxford’ and dedicated to ‘The Landscape Artists of England’, to defend Turner from repeated criticism in the periodical press that his paintings had become fanciful and unintelligible, indeed unnatural.1 The power of the press over public taste was such that, he announced, ‘it becomes the imperative duty of all who have any perception or knowledge of what is really great in art, and any desire for its advancement in England, to come fearlessly forward . . . to declare and demonstrate, wherever they exist, the essence and the authority of the Beautiful and the True’ (iii.4). Even at this early stage of his career, Ruskin relished standing 83
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alone, brave enough to take on the press and redirect the public to ‘what is really great in art’ by teaching ‘the sources of pleasure, or of any other good, to be derived from works of art’ (iii.93). He presented the volume as a battle of styles between the old masters of landscape painting (Canaletto and Poussin, Cuyp and Ruysdael, Claude, and Salvator) and the modern English landscape painters (Prout, Harding, Landseer, and Turner). Claude was the key target because his landscapes represented an ideal that Ruskin found inadequate both in technique and in relation to nature, yet it required, in the words of Patrick Conner, ‘a critic of sufficient self-confidence to attack the citadel: the art of Claude himself’.2 Ruskin’s case for Turner and modern landscape painting rested on two principles. The first related to the source of artistic inspiration: namely, the artist must understand the God-given laws of nature, paying attention to minute details as well as spectacular effects, to achieve the highest artistic ideals. The second referred to the purpose of art: that is, the greatest artists are those with the capacity to stimulate the mind and elevate the emotions by conveying ‘the greatest number of the greatest ideas’ (iii.92). Put differently, Ruskin was proposing a transcendent theory of art on the basis that nature revealed the truth of God’s work and was, therefore, the only stimulus for the inventive work of art and the pleasures it offered the perceiver. The principles of truth and greatness prepared the way for Ruskin to explain ‘what kinds of ideas can be received from works of art, and which of these are the greatest’ (iii.93). He started with five ideas – of power, imitation, truth, beauty, and relation – before setting two aside: ideas of power are merely amplifications of ideas of truth, beauty, or relation, and ideas of imitation are a form of trickery that fool the senses. Ruskin bracketed sublimity, deeming it ‘only another word for the effect of greatness upon the feelings’ (iii.128), and so not a distinctive quality in a work of art. His justification for restricting the study of landscape painting to three ideas was as follows: the study of truth reveals the faithfulness of an artist in their relationship to nature’s objects; the study of beauty illuminates an artist’s capacity to contemplate and imagine the power of nature; and the study of relation enables just comparison of an artist’s originality. Ruskin proceeded to detail the ideas of truth, analysing the particular truths of form and colour in landscape (skies, clouds, earth, water, and vegetation) and the general truths referring to the symbolic representation of nature’s objects via tone, colour, chiaroscuro, and space. Just as he presented two principles of landscape painting, so he identified two classes of landscape painters: the first class, ‘if they have to paint a tree’, convey the ‘exquisite designs’ of the boughs and foliage, and ‘the intricacy of its organization’, whereas the second class ‘endeavour only to make you believe that you are looking at 84
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Figure 4. J. M. W. Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon coming on), 1840.
wood’ (iii.165). Imaginative design over literal copying: this is the crux of Ruskin’s argument for Turner as a greater landscape painter than Claude or Canaletto. While Ruskin referred to approximately forty of Turner’s paintings in Modern Painters I, he singled out Slave Ship (1840, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) as ‘the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man’ (iii.571). This is a notorious example because Ruskin overlooked the horrific drama of Slave Ship, or, in its proper title, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon coming on (Figure 4), and, instead, offered a painting-in-words that imbued the image with transcendental meaning apart from its content. This kind of impassioned response to works of art became Ruskin’s characteristic mode of analysis as he performed the act of looking at nature’s objects in order to corroborate the value (moral, theological, and aesthetic) of landscape painting. The strength of this approach was that greatness was tested via smallness, ‘by observing how he [the painter] uses, and with what respect he views the minutiæ of nature’ (iii.491). The dual audiences, artists and the general public, and the double intent, looking at objects both natural and aesthetic, produced some unevenness in the volume as Ruskin tried to balance technical advice about how to represent nature’s objects with moral counsel on how to 85
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refine discriminations of taste. He returned in the conclusion to the press and public taste, arguing that ‘Modern Art’ was incompatible with ‘Modern Criticism’ because the latter (excluding, of course, his own) inhibited the progress of art and contributed to the unreliability of public taste in ‘always distinguishing . . . between that which is best and that which is worst of the particular class of food which its morbid appetite may call for’ (iii.617). The lament was heartfelt, for, if Ruskin had accomplished the initial goal of explaining Turner’s greatness, he now had in mind the broader goal of restoring moral value to public taste: through beauty. The second volume of Modern Painters (1846) proposed a system for understanding the ideas of beauty and the pleasures beauty offered. According to George Landow, ‘any study of Ruskin’s theories of beauty must begin with the realization that although he proposed a romantic, emotionalist theory of painting and poetry, many of his most characteristic ideas and attitudes were reactions against what he recognized as the limitations of a subjectivist aesthetic’.3 This is an astute observation, which alerts us to a tension in Ruskin’s interpretation between the objective ideas of beauty that subsist in the permanent order of nature and the subjective ideas of beauty that emerge from the artist’s imagination. The subtitle, ‘Of the imaginative and theoretic faculties’, points to this tension in distinguishing between the faculty that perceives beauty in nature and the faculty that invents it in art. With the benefit of hindsight, Ruskin explained in 1883 that the thesis of the volume was that ‘beautiful things are useful to men because they are beautiful, and for the sake of their beauty only; and not to sell, or pawn – or, in any other way, turn into money’. This was, he added, ‘the beginning of all my political economy’ (iv.4). It is interesting, and certainly convenient, that Ruskin retroactively linked his ideas of beauty to the development of his social criticism, but it is not entirely inaccurate. He had toured Italy in 1845 with the express purpose of studying the early Christian painters; his scrutiny of the work of Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Tintoretto became the occasion for the first substantive change in his position on art as he redirected attention from ‘the study of rocks and clouds’ to ‘the Art of Man in its full majesty for the first time’ (iv.354). This did not mean Ruskin had lost interest in Turner, or, indeed, landscape painting; rather, he drew a ‘scale of painters’ with Fra Angelico (‘the school of love’) at the top and Raphael (the ‘school of errors and vices’) at the bottom (iv.xxxiv-xxxv), and determined to explain the use of art via beauty to man and place Turner in a longer heritage. Underpinning Ruskin’s analysis of beauty was the conviction that the pursuit of pleasure through beauty was justifiable if and only if it served a higher, self-sacrificing purpose. To this end, he located the sources of 86
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pleasure in nature and in art outside the purview of the senses; here is the (well-known) rationale: Now the term ‘aesthesis’ properly signifies mere sensual perception of the outward qualities and necessary effects of bodies . . . But I wholly deny that the impressions of beauty are in any way sensual; they are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral: and for the faculty receiving them, whose difference from mere perception I shall immediately endeavour to explain, no term can be more accurate or convenient than that employed by the Greeks, ‘Theoretic’, which I pray permission, therefore, always to use, and to call the operation of the faculty itself, Theoria. (iv.42)
The theoretic is a crucial dimension of Ruskin’s double defence of beauty against the utility principle of maximising pleasure and the rise of aesthetics as a branch of German philosophy. His contrary intention was to render beauty valuable as an instrument of moral and Christian understanding by identifying truth and goodness as the perceptual qualities that transcend ‘mere sensual perception’. Ruskin used ‘moral’, in other words, in the righteous sense of honest, noble, and just. It is for this reason that he sought to safeguard beauty from those ‘morbid’ appetites discussed at the end of Modern Painters I, and, further, that he divided the analysis of beauty according to the revelation of God’s mind in nature and the expression of an artist’s capacity to discriminate between good and evil. Characteristically, Ruskin identified false ideas about beauty in order to clear the space for his own ideas. Against David Hume, Adam Smith, Joshua Reynolds, and Archibald Alison, respectively, he contended that truth is not beauty and beauty is not truth, that beauty is not usefulness, that beauty does not result from custom, and that beauty does not depend on the association of ideas. Beauty, in his contrary view, signifies the external quality of bodies ‘typical of the Divine attributes’, and the vital ‘appearance of the felicitous fulfilment of function in living things’ (iv. 64). In fact, Ruskin’s system consisted of two kinds of beauty (typical and vital) and three kinds of imagination (associative, penetrative, and contemplative). Because typical beauty reflects ‘the Divine attributes’, it can be discerned in six sources of pleasure: infinity (incomprehensibility), unity (comprehensiveness), repose (permanence), symmetry (justice), purity (energy), and moderation (government by law). And since vital beauty discloses ‘certain appearances or evidences of happiness’ (iv. 147), it is explained with reference to sympathy in plants and animals as well as man. It is significant that Ruskin turned to painters other than Turner to illustrate vital beauty, especially Fra Angelico, and that the chapters on vital beauty show Ruskin at his most lyrical as he sets to work classifying plants and animals according to their functions – a 87
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task he would still be pursuing in the late science books of the 1870s and 1880s. And yet such pleasures as he granted in relation to plants and animals proved much harder for him to explain in man. The investigation of the imaginative faculty is surprisingly modest and sometimes confusing. To be sure, Ruskin did not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of this faculty, which translates the sources of pleasure in external creation and thus reflects the healthiness or otherwise of the creative mind. But, having identified three characteristic modes (associative, penetrative, and contemplative) and three related techniques (combination, apprehension, and habit), Ruskin seemingly found it difficult to explain the process whereby the imaginative faculty translates the immaterial in material form. Michael Sprinker has argued that contradictions arise because ‘Ruskin’s theory of the imagination is at once a theory of mimesis and a theory of the phantasm’, and the role of the artist is to be ‘both a witness and a mirror’.4 Ruskin did not resolve these contradictions but illustrated the power of the imagination handled rightly via a jumble of references and spirited descriptions, including the examples of Turner’s Procris and Cephalus and Titian’s St Jerome, and extracts from Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Above all, though, Tintoretto was most often hailed for the achievement of his paintings in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. Ruskin’s descriptions of Tintoretto’s painting dwell, as they had with Turner, on the composition of space and nobility of invention as well as the skilful use of light and shade; hence, he placed Tintoretto at the beginning of the artistic tradition that culminated with Turner. The added significance of the Scuola Grande paintings is that they are definitively Venetian, arising from the historical circumstances of the city-state and speaking to the link between art and religion. Through the valorisation of Tintoretto, it becomes obvious how Ruskin’s theory of painting enlarged to include the ‘Art of Man’ and why it encouraged him to chronicle Venice’s rise and fall. The ‘Turneresque’ period The turn in Ruskin’s writing from Turner to Angelico and Tintoretto in Modern Painters II was followed by another turn to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (or PRB) after the publication of the first volume of The Stones of Venice (1851). While the PRB now have an important place in the history of Victorian art, largely because of the valuable work of Tim Barringer, Robert Hewison, and Herbert Sussman,5 Ruskin’s turn to the PRB was less decisive than it might seem. Following poor sales for the first volume of The Stones, Ruskin’s support for the PRB was, as Francis O’Gorman has 88
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suggested, ‘born partly from the growing pressure of a perceived failure to secure understanding of Turner’s work and from a worry . . . that he would have no success in transmitting the redemptory meanings of a crumbling Venice’.6 In a series of lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1853, Ruskin sought to connect the history of architecture to the history of landscape painting and, similar to The Stones, isolated four periods, ‘Giottesque, Leonardesque, Titianesque’, and ‘Turneresque’, when the style of landscape painting elevated the general standing of art. The rise through the first three periods was broken by a fall into pastoralism, ‘a gulf of foolishness, into the bottom of which you may throw Claude and Salvator’, but the ‘pure, wholesome, simple, modern landscape’ of Turner had ushered in a new period in which the ‘Turneresque’ could, indeed should, prevail (xii.123). The question was how, and through whose hands, given that modern art was, by Ruskin’s reckoning, profane. The PRB presented a possible future for ‘Turneresque’, not to mention an occasion to reaffirm the value of Turner’s aesthetic and his own authority as a critic. As he had defended Turner, so, too, he defended the PRB from the false accusations of the press. But to do so, to claim the art of the PRB was the exception to the rule of profanity in modern art, Ruskin needed to forge an uneasy alliance, recasting Turner as ‘the first and the greatest of Pre-Raphaelites’ (xii. 159), and positioning the PRB artists, especially John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, as the most plausible candidates to sustain the ‘Turneresque’. Ruskin had first defended the Pre-Raphaelite painters against the criticisms of the press in two letters to The Times (13 and 30 May 1851), which were subsequently expanded into a pamphlet on ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ (1851). The backstory is that Coventry Patmore, urged by John Everett Millais, had asked Ruskin to speak on behalf of Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (1849–50, now in Tate Britain) after it was excoriated in The Times. Ruskin was acquainted with members of the PRB, and William Holman Hunt later claimed ‘all that the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood had of Ruskinism’ came from his reading of Modern Painters I.7 Still, the verdict Ruskin reached was bold: the awkwardness of style and literalness in rendering nature, which critics deemed so vulgar, were indicators of a new style of modern English art. ‘I believe these young artists to be at a most critical period of their career’, he wrote in the first Times letter, ‘from which they may either sink into nothingness or rise to very real greatness’ (xii.319). The letter focused on the five PRB works displayed in the current Royal Academy Exhibition: Thomas Combe’s The Return of the Dove to the Ark, Millais’s The Woodman’s Daughter and Mariana, Charles Collins’s Convent Thoughts, and Holman Hunt’s Valentine Receiving Sylvia from Proteus. Of these, four did not, in Ruskin’s opinion, display any errors while the fifth, Mariana, had 89
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only a minor error in perspective. The overall impression produced the grandiose statement from Ruskin that had been ‘nothing in art so earnest or so complete as these pictures since the days of Albert Dürer’ (xii.323), which was intended to make the case for these works to the picture-seeing (and picture-buying) public. It is obvious that Ruskin accorded the PRB the honour of succeeding Turner because of their apparent adherence to the principles established in Modern Painters I and II. ‘Pre-Raphaelitism has but one principle’, he declared, ‘that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature, and from nature only’ (xii.157). Unlike his defence of Turner, though, Ruskin’s backing of the Pre-Raphaelites was not without reservations. In the second Times letter, he quibbled over details in the paintings, primarily ‘the commonness of feature in many of the principal figures’ (xii.324), and principally faults in the rendering of colour and shade. Ruskin concluded by restating the hope that the PRB could ‘lay in our England the foundations of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for three hundred years’ (xii.327). The extent to which it was likely that the PRB could inaugurate a new, ‘nobler’ school of art in England was the ostensible subject of ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ – in actual fact, an extended essay on Turner. To make visible the connection, however conditionally, between Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin volunteered a simple parable. Picture, he said, two men in a mountain valley: ‘one of them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is comparatively nearsighted’ (xii.359). The first man was revealed to be Millais, devoted to faithful scrutiny of minute details in the valley, and the second was Turner, motivated to contemplate the formal effects of weather on the same location. The difference was one of degree, not kind, for Ruskin’s ultimate goal was to show the ways in which ‘Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and the same’, not in subjects or skills, but in ‘painting the truths around them as they appeared to each man’s own mind’ (xii.385). Still, the difference between ‘Turnerism’ and Pre-Raphaelitism was registered in terms of keenness of sight (proximity) and facility of invention (distance). At the start of ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’, Ruskin claimed the PRB were following the advice given to young artists in Modern Painters I: ‘they should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing’ (iii.624). In the course of discussing Turner, however, he offered some more advice to the PRB: they must work less hard and less carefully to 90
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record minute details and, instead, emulate the reverent interpretive and penetrative powers of Turner, for ‘all his greatness, all his infinite luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything that he sees . . . on his forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else’ (xii.384–5). By Ruskin’s reasoning, the necessary condition for greatness in art, established in Modern Painters I, is truth to nature, but the sufficient condition, examined in Modern Painters II, is the capacity for inventiveness. To meet the first condition would be to produce realist art, while to meet the second condition would result in idealist art. Turner, it seems, met the first condition in Modern Painters whereas now, placed in relationship to the PRB, he meets the second condition and the PRB, specifically Millais, have taken his place in faithfully recording nature’s objects. Ruskin’s challenge when he picked up Modern Painters again in the mid 1850s was how to reconcile these two conditions and these two forms of art. The immediate task was to complete the unfinished business of explaining the imagination and, in the process, present a new formulation of greatness in art. Redefining greatness The decade following publication of the second volume of Modern Painters had seen Ruskin shift his attention to Venice and the principles of architecture, and also explore new ways of communicating his ideas via public lectures, weekly drawing classes at the Working Man’s College (with Dante Gabriel Rossetti), and the first of the Academy Notes in 1855. For all this, the third volume (published in 1856 and followed within three months by the fourth), presented substantial revisions to the definition of greatness and the account of the rise of landscape art. The subtitle, ‘Of Many Things’, reflects the multiple layers of a volume wherein Ruskin reiterated the case for Turner and analysed the role of the artistic imagination in pursuing true and false ideals. Nonetheless, the looseness of theme belies a specific purpose: to clarify the apparent contradiction between the championing of Turner in Modern Painters I and of Angelico and Tintoretto in Modern Painters II. The central question there is ‘whether landscape-painting was worth studying or not’ (v.353). Before coming to the expected conclusion that it is, Ruskin adverted to the question of ‘what is it which makes one truth greater than another, one thought greater than another?’ This question was important, he said, because notions of ‘the Great and the low Schools’, and ‘“High Art”, and “vulgar”’, or ‘“low” or, “realist”’ art (v.19), had become conventional in art writing. In particular, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s notion of the Grand Style rested, in Ruskin’s opinion, on a false distinction between poetical and historical painting as characterised by invariableness and 91
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minute detail respectively. To counter Reynolds, he redirected the approbation of ‘high art’ to landscape painting and laid stress on its capacity to represent variability through the labour and inventiveness of the artist’s imagination. In sum, Ruskin rejected Reynolds’s ‘Grand Style’ only to replace it with his own definition of great style. Ruskin’s ‘greatness of style’ (from the title of chapter 3) had four constitutive elements: nobility, love of beauty, sincerity, and invention. These elements illuminated the craft of painting at its highest level of accomplishment as the ‘expression of the spirits of great men’ (v.69). So, where previously he had emphasised the ideas pertaining to greatness, Ruskin now laid stress on the conditions a painter must satisfy in order to achieve the rank of greatness: consequently, nobility is ‘right moral choice’; beauty is ‘right admiration’; sincerity is ‘strength of sense, evenness of judgment, and honesty of purpose’; and imaginative power is ‘swiftness of invention, and accuracy of historical memory’ (v.65–6). These were definitions both capacious and precise, from which Ruskin could shuffle the pack, so to speak, of art-historical tradition. For example, the ‘old Pre-Raphaelite periods’ of Giotto, Angelico, and Bellini were placed in relation to the ‘modern PreRaphaelite school’ to demonstrate how nobility is the ‘perfect unison’ of the artist’s sensibility and their technical skills (v.52). To illustrate beauty, Angelico was given the highest rank for ‘intensely loving all spiritual beauty’, with Paul Veronese and Correggio in the second rank for ‘intensely loving physical and corporeal beauty’. Dürer, Rubens, and the Northern artists were placed in the third rank for being ‘apparently insensible to beauty’ (v.56). The justification for these examples was that truth must always be the first principle and, in consequence, ‘high art differs from low art in possessing an excess of beauty in addition to its truth, not in possessing excess of beauty inconsistent with truth’ (v.56 n). Construed in this way, Ruskin’s notion of great art neither excluded historical nor privileged poetical painting but, rather, set the bar between high and low art according to the pursuit of the ideal. At first, the discussion of the ideal seems merely a repetition of The Stones of Venice, as Ruskin distinguished between two kinds of false ideal, religious and profane, and three kinds of true ideal: purist, naturalist, and grotesque. Actually, though, he narrated the history of landscape painting again so as to set up a hierarchy from Turner as the exemplar of the highest naturalist ideal to the Italian painters of the late sixteenth century and the modern German school as manifestations of the lowest profane ideal. It is curious that Ruskin was so dismissive of the German school, since in the ‘Nazarenes’ were a group of painters who appropriated the visual codes of early Christian art to 92
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reinvent German painting and, in turn, influenced the Pre-Raphaelites. But a reason can be found in his summary of the false religious ideal, where Angelico and Raphael are taken to represent its different aspects: the ‘passionate ideal’ (v.85) of Angelico is false because the details were inconsistent with the Biblical subjects, but still ‘impressive and touching’ (v.76), while the ‘philosophical ideal’ of Raphael is false because his paintings did not represent historical facts but merely ‘cold arrangements of propriety and agreeableness, according to academical formulas’ (v.79). In this light, the modern German school follows Raphael in pursuing the whims of the imagination detached from truth. By contrast, the right uses of the imagination consist in the painter’s treatment of good and evil. The purist ideal, as seen in Angelico (Figure 5), is produced from a deliberate refusal ‘to contemplate the various forms of definite evil which necessarily occur in daily aspects of the world around them’ (v.103–4). The grotesque ideal, in its noblest form, is the ‘gigantic and inexhaustible’ power of personification, which allows the painter to admit ‘picturesque elements and flights of fancy into his work’ (v.135). And, finally, the naturalist ideal, exemplified by Tintoretto (Figure 6) and Turner (Figure 4), is the ‘central and highest branch of ideal art which concerns itself simply with things as they ARE, and accepts, in all of them, alike the evil and the good’ (v.111). The claim is that naturalist painting is the greatest style because it represents ideas, borne out of nature via the reverend imagination, in a moral language. According to Elizabeth Helsinger, the emphasis on the imagination ‘leads to Ruskin’s growing conviction that perception is a matter not just of individual but of cultural health, that it can vary historically, and that it can be directly related to changing social and economic conditions’.8 The greatness of Turner derives from the fact that he meets the necessary and sufficient conditions of faithfulness to nature combined with imaginative power. This is the culminating point in the history of landscape painting, but, as Ruskin made clear, its origins lie in the medieval landscapes of Giotto and Angelico. In effect, then, he resolved the contradiction produced by championing Turner as well as Angelico and Tintoretto by separating symbolic from imitative art. The change from ‘the scene of the event, being firmly outlined, usually on a pure golden or chequered colour background’ to ‘the blue sky, gradated to the horizon’, was a ‘crisis of change in the spirit of mediæval art’, and so, Ruskin admitted, ‘[strictly] speaking, we might divide the art of Christian times into two great masses – Symbolic and Imitative’ (v.262). That is to say, the imperative of truth to nature applies only to the imitative art that emerged after the ‘crisis’, in technical composition while, before the ‘crisis’ the symbolic art produced up to the end of the 93
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Figure 5. Fra Angelico, Ancilla Domini. (vii. Frontispiece). Engraving by W. Holl.
fourteenth century demonstrated ‘the peculiar modification of natural forms for decorative purposes . . . in its perfection’ (v.263). The upshot is that, in chronicling the development of landscape painting, Ruskin judged it necessary to jump from ‘the last landscape of Tintoret, if we look for life . . . to the first of Turner’ because they invent ‘for the sake of the nature, not of the picture’ (v.409). The extent to which art can enable man to achieve 94
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Figure 6. John Ruskin after Tintoretto, Advanced Naturalism. (v. 398)
happiness is a matter left open, but it will become clear that Ruskin grew increasingly pessimistic about the real use of Turner’s art and all other art ‘for the sake of the nature’. The perils of looking There are three events that shaped Ruskin’s reconsideration of the value of modern art in the final volume of Modern Painters – and inflect his thinking later on. The first was his appointment as executor of Turner’s will, which, after much legal wrangling, led to him securing a place for Turner’s works on paper at the National Gallery for the good of the nation. His work at the Gallery in cataloguing the drawings and sketches, ‘upwards of nineteen thousand pieces of paper, drawn upon by Turner in one or another’ (vii.4), took from February 1857 to May 1858. The second and third events were a visit to Turin in 1858 followed by first visits to Dusseldorf, Berlin, Dresden, and Munich in 1859. The German tour confirmed his distaste for the modern German school of art, with the work of Cornelius judged ‘the most atrocious’ (vii.liii); and Turin was the occasion when the coincidence of viewing Paul Veronese’s Queen of Sheba and 95
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attending a sermon in a Protestant chapel in Turin caused him, as he saw it looking back from April 1877, to become ‘a conclusively un-converted man’ (xxix.89). The ‘unconversion’ is sometimes viewed as a decisive moment in Ruskin’s life, which triggered a turn from art to social criticism, but, as we have seen, he believed Modern Painters II was the start of his thinking about political economy, and he certainly raised questions about how art is useful in this and other works before 1858. By 1860, when the fifth volume was published, Ruskin acknowledged his ‘oscillations of temper, and progressions of discovery’ may have caused readers to lose faith in Modern Painters, even though he insisted that ‘[a]ll true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree – not a cloud’ (vii.9). The metaphor is apposite, for, in the volume, Ruskin perceives nature’s objects in open delight, directing the reader’s attention to the particulars of leaf and cloud beauty, and looks around in dismay at modern art, diagnosing its many limitations in invention as a failure to understand the law of help. These modes of looking reflect the roles of Millais and Turner identified in ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ insofar as Ruskin moves from faithfully recording nature to contemplating nature through art. With ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ (the title of Part 6), he extended his analysis of beauty to illuminate the principle of cooperation: each part of a tree, however small, has a role in the development of the whole, and so ‘Tree-loveliness’ depends on ‘harmony, obedience, distress, and delightsome inequality’ (vii.98). Ruskin’s intention was to reveal how the formal relations within nature constitute laws of life and death and determine the composition of art. Accordingly, ‘the Law of Help’ (the title of Part 8, Chapter 1) enshrines the moral relation of art to life. ‘Help’ is the first law of the universe because it means ‘life’, and life requires moderation and cooperation to forestall the threat of anarchy and competition, which mean ‘separation’ and therefore ‘death’ (vii.203). Thus, in works truly composed, the ‘many beautiful things’ are so harmonious with each other that the removal of one would destroy the whole whereas, in works falsely composed, the ‘many beautiful things’ are not related and ‘more usually compete with and destroy, each other’ (vii.209). The broader purpose of Modern Painters V is to relay the themes of Turner’s paintings into sustained reflection on the place of art in modern life. At this juncture, Ruskin was ‘[full] of far deeper reverence for Turner’s art than I felt when this task of his defence was undertaken’, and ‘more in doubt respecting the real use to mankind of that, or any other transcendent art; incomprehensible as it must always be to the mass of men’ (vii.441). To affirm Turner’s pre-eminence among artists, ancient and modern, 96
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Ruskin recounted the history of landscape painting through four schools of development – heroic, classical, pastoral, and contemplative – thereby underlining Turner’s signal contribution in initiating a new, contemplative way of looking at nature as well as his own critical contribution to the understanding of art. Of all the paintings Turner produced, The Goddess of Discord in the Garden of Hesperides (1809, Tate Britain) was, he said, ‘nearly the most wonderful’ (vii.401). This ‘sad-coloured work . . . executed . . . in a sulphurous hue, as relating to a paradise of smoke’ (vii.408) is, by Ruskin’s interpretation, a parable of the defeat of moral purpose by physical appetites. Ruskin construed the painting as a moral lesson for modern England whereby the Dragon represents industrial capitalism, looking over the destruction that will befall the natural landscape, and the Hesperides represent natural life, looking directly at the forces of good and evil. The selection of one of Turner’s early paintings to demonstrate the ‘real use’ of art is provocative because, although it seems a return to the notion of symbolic art, it is actually an instantiation of the capacity of imitative art to speak to the condition, the profoundly secular condition, of modern society in its wilful pursuit of wealth and advancement at the expense of spiritual sustenance, or life and help. Ruskin’s pessimism about the state of modern art reflects the attenuation of his hopes for the PRB and support for Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Holman Hunt. After Modern Painters, his new touchstone for modern art became Edward Burne-Jones, in whose work he perceived the qualities of ‘a great dramatic master’ (xix.206). This claim, from a lecture ‘On the Present State of Modern Art’(1867), underwrites Ruskin’s conviction ten years later that Burne-Jones’s painting is ‘simply the only art-work at present produced in England which will be received by the future as “classic” in its kind, – the best that has been, or could be’ (xxix.159). To substantiate the second claim, from a review of the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery and published as Letter 79, ‘Life Guards of New Life’ (July 1877), in Fors Clavigera, Ruskin contrasted the work of Burne-Jones with that of James McNeill Whistler and, in so doing, set the scene for the libel trial of Whistler v. Ruskin on 25 and 26 November 1878. In essence, Ruskin claimed that Whistler produced the lowest kind of modern art ‘in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture’; and Whistler took umbrage at Ruskin’s remark about the only painting for sale, Nocturne in Black and Gold (now in the Detroit Institute of Arts): ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ (xxix.160). This was not the first time Ruskin had dismissed the artistic 97
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pretensions of Whistler – he levelled the same accusation of ‘impudence’ in one of the Val d’Arno series of Oxford lectures (27 October 1873) – but it appeared to be the first time Whistler had taken notice, and offence. Whistler’s case was that Nocturne in Black and Gold ‘was not painted to offer the portrait of a particular place, but an artistic impression’, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti testified in his favour.9 Ruskin made the case, in absentia, that ‘he only expressed, as he was entitled to do, his honest opinion’, and Burne-Jones spoke on his behalf.10 The verdict was technically in favour of Whistler but he was awarded unsympathetic damages of one farthing. To all intents and purposes, the trial of Whistler v. Ruskin turned on the distinction between invention ‘for the picture’s sake’ or ‘for the sake of the nature’. Each side claimed victory: Ruskin believed he had the right to express an opinion on art (and continued to do so), and Whistler’s work was reasonably identified as art (although he was declared bankrupt in June 1879). This said, the similarities between Turner’s late style in, say, Slave Ship and Whistler’s ‘Nocturnes’, points to the contrariness in Ruskin’s point of view. And as Nicholas Shrimpton has suggested, ‘there is no escaping the fact that Ruskin, in the 1870s, expressed views fiercely hostile to Aestheticism . . . and could also speak and act in ways which seem unexpectedly Aesthetic’.11 Ruskin’s publication of the first of a two-part essay on ‘The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism’ in the very month of the trial sheds further light on the extent to which he has changed his opinion about the future of modern painting.12 The essay amounts to a reconsideration of PreRaphaelite art, with the ‘three colours’ referring to the Romantic art of Millais, the learned art of Rossetti and Holman Hunt, and the transcendent art of Burne-Jones. Ruskin appointed Burne-Jones the real heir of Turner because the first two groups of artists represent ‘things as they are or were, or may be’, whereas Burne-Jones expressed ‘the things that are for ever’ (xxxiv.155, 169). The demotion of Millais and Rossetti in favour of BurneJones was surely not a coincidence for the trial, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Burne-Jones on opposing sides, indicated a new turn in modern art and modern criticism that Ruskin had not anticipated. The rise of an aesthetic ideal associated with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde as well as Whistler under the banner of ‘art for art’s sake’ briefly eclipsed the naturalist ideal espoused by Ruskin. Yet, the teachings of Modern Painters were – and remain – central to the history of nineteenth-century aesthetics. It was, after all, Ruskin who urged modern artists to reject convention in favour of truth and greatness; it was Ruskin who proposed the inter-relation of art, morality, and society; and it was Ruskin who instructed the general reader-spectator how to develop an appreciation of beauty in nature and thereby learn how to look at art. 98
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Art N O T ES 1. The attribution, ‘By a Graduate from Oxford’, was replaced with Ruskin’s full name in the fifth edition of 1851 after being affirmed on the title page of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). 2. Patrick Conner, ‘Ruskin and the “Ancient Masters” in Modern Painters’ in Robert Hewison, ed., New Approaches to Ruskin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 17–32 (19). 3. George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 92. 4. Michael Sprinker, ‘Ruskin on the Imagination’, Studies in Romanticism, 18 (1979), 115–39 (120, 121). 5. Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998); Robert Hewison, Ruskin, Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate, 2010); and Herbert L. Sussman, Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1979). 6. Francis O’Gorman, ‘Did Ruskin Support the Pre-Raphaelites?’ in Keith Hanley and Brian Maidment, eds., Persistent Ruskin: Studies in Influence, Assimilation and Effect (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 81–92 (82). 7. Cited by Landow in ‘The Influence of Ruskin’, Replete with Meaning: William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism published on www.victorianweb.org /painting/whh/replete/ruskin.html. Last accessed January 2014. 8. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 206. 9. Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in ‘Whistler v. Ruskin’ (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 154. 10. Ibid. 164. 11. Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘Ruskin and the Aesthetes’, in Dinah Birch, ed., Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 131–51 (150). 12. ‘The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism’, Nineteenth Century (November and December 1878): iv.925–31 and 1072–82.
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7 GEOFFREY TYACK
Architecture
Ruskin was not an architect and he never designed a building. Yet his ideas on the history and purpose of architecture exerted a profound influence on both architects and the wider public during his lifetime. He wanted his readers to share his own enjoyment of old buildings, to learn to distinguish between what he saw as good and bad architecture, and to encourage a better and more discriminating taste among patrons and architects. Growing up in a world that was undergoing profound and disturbing change, he found solace in unspoiled nature and in the art of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. His architectural writings – repetitive, fragmentary, and often self-contradictory though they sometimes are – spread over the whole of his adult life, from the 1830s to the 1880s. Taken together, they both inspired and infuriated his contemporaries, and have continued to challenge readers down to the present day. Reading buildings Ruskin’s first published writings, compiled in his first year as an Oxford undergraduate, came out in 1838 in the short-lived Architectural Magazine, one of the many literary ventures of the garden designer John Claudius Loudon, a friend of his father (Hilton, 1.34); they were later published separately as The Poetry of Architecture. Deeply influenced by the philosophy and practice of the Picturesque – Great Britain’s greatest contribution to aesthetic theory of the previous generation – the essays endeavoured to explore the connection between national character, a major preoccupation in early-nineteenth-century Europe, and architecture. ‘National character’ (i.1), Ruskin claimed, could be found in the stone cottages of the Lakeland farmers, whose independent way of life had been praised by Wordsworth in his Guide to the Lakes, republished in 1835. These sturdy buildings presented a sharp contrast to the shockingly inadequate housing of the poor of the industrial cities to which the surplus population of ‘unspoilt’ areas were 100
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migrating in ever-increasing numbers. Ruskin’s tours with his parents had already taken him to the Lake District, notably in 1837, and he returned there throughout his life, finally settling in a house of his own at Brantwood, facing Lake Coniston, which he extended piecemeal. His preoccupation with cottage architecture and the housing of the poor resurfaced in some of the most influential writings of his later life. The Poetry of Architecture, like other Ruskin texts, did not contain a single overarching thesis, but his scattered insights contain the germs of ideas that were developed further in his later and better-known writings. One was that architecture needed to embody the creative originality of its makers. Another was his belief that, like the other arts, it could not be understood independently of morality. Buildings should be ‘truly original, yet perfectly pure’ (i.135), he said, warning his readers that ‘All imitation has its origins in vanity, and vanity is the bane of architecture’ (i.187). Examples of the kind of architecture he disliked could be seen in the stylistically promiscuous villas recently erected in the surroundings of large towns by members of the moneyed classes from which he had himself sprung; the facades of houses, he believed, were a ‘national possession’ (cf. i.133), and not a means of self-expression by a tasteless and noveltyseeking mercantile elite – another theme to which he later returned. The idea that buildings can be ‘read’ is implicit in The Poetry of Architecture. But it remained dormant in Ruskin’s mind until 1845 when he made his first journey abroad without his parents. This was not his first visit to the Continent; he went to France with his parents in the 1830s, and in 1841 he had produced highly accomplished drawings of buildings in Venice, Verona, and elsewhere, inspired by the seductively picturesque work of Samuel Prout. But his 1845 drawings are different in character, concentrating not so much on picturesque ensembles as on the minute particulars of colour and texture that enliven the facades of buildings, including the Romanesque San Michele at Lucca.1 Here, Ruskin experienced an architectural epiphany that demonstrated for him for the first time ‘what medieval builders were, and what they meant’ (xxxv.350). Through close observation of the surfaces of buildings, Ruskin came to believe that the viewer could gain an insight into the creative imagination of the medieval craftsmen and the worldview of the men who had employed them, thereby helping the viewer develop an informed judgement that would enable good architecture to flourish once again. He later wrote: ‘I do with a building as I do with a man, watch the eye and the lips: when they are bright and eloquent, the form of the body is of little consequence’ (xii.89). Marcel Proust compared Ruskin’s approach to that of the artist Claude Monet (1840–1926), obsessively recording the West Front of Rouen Cathedral at different times of 101
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day from a seat at a café table.2 This absorption with surfaces and facades helps explain some of the idiosyncrasies of Ruskin’s best-known architectural writings, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–3). The Seven Lamps came out in the year of Ruskin’s thirtieth birthday. It is not so much an architectural treatise or history as a series of discursive essays on principles which illuminate – hence the title – the essentials of good architecture. From Goethe and the German Romantics, he drew the idea that art was matter endowed with spirit: the spirit of the age, as transmitted through artists and craftsmen. The French art writer A-F. Rio’s De la poésie chrétienne (1836) had exposed Ruskin to the qualities of simplicity and ‘truth’ found in medieval religious art. From A. W. N. Pugin (1812– 1852) – whose influence Ruskin nevertheless said that he discounted – and from Robert Willis (1800–1875), whose work Ruskin first discovered in 1846, he gained insight into the close relationship between structure and decoration in Gothic buildings. But Ruskin eschewed deterministic structural explanations of Gothic, declaring in the second edition of The Seven Lamps (1855) that there were ‘only two fine arts possible to the human race, sculpture and painting. What we call architecture is only the association of these in noble masses, or the placing them in fit places. All architecture other than this is, in fact, mere building’ (viii.11). This was a belief that underpinned the argument of the whole book. For Ruskin the first ‘Lamp’, or ‘spirit’, of architecture is that of ‘Sacrifice’, or, in his words, ‘the offering of precious things, merely because they are precious, not because they are useful or necessary’ (viii.30). The ‘Lamp of Truth’ enjoins the avoidance of ‘deceits’, including the concealment of structure or the use of structural iron or machine-made ornament, while that of ‘Power’ refers to the importance of size, mass, and shadow in architecture. Ruskin believed that ‘all the most lovely forms and thoughts’, in architecture as in all the arts, ‘are directly taken from natural objects’ (viii.141). The ‘Lamp of Beauty’ therefore implies the necessity of employing naturalistic ornament in modern buildings, just as in the monuments of the Middle Ages that Ruskin admired. The ‘Lamp of Life’ expresses the creative energy of the craftsman so that ‘the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this: was it done with enjoyment – was the carver happy while he was about it?’ (viii.218). As for the ‘Lamp of Memory’, Ruskin proposes a clear maxim: ‘when we build, let us think that we build for ever’ (viii.233). But we must also respect the legacy of the past, since for Ruskin ‘the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age’ (viii.233–4). That view leads him to state, in one of his most influential utterances, that ‘restoration’ is ‘the most total destruction which a building can suffer’ 102
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(viii.242). Finally, in the ‘Lamp of Obedience’, he rejected the search for a new style that preoccupied so many of his contemporaries: ‘We want no new style of architecture . . . But we want some style’ (viii.252). He went on to suggest four options for modern Great Britain: three Italian and one English. An Italian option was Venetian Gothic, and it was this to which he turned his attention in his next book. Venice Venice was for Ruskin both a constant source of visual delight and a troubling moral lesson. He was not the first, and was certainly not the last, writer to be struck by the beauty of its buildings and by its aura of departed glory. But his aim in The Stones of Venice was not simply to celebrate the city; he also used it to throw light upon the relationship between architecture and society, and in particular the Christian faith and practice of a culture. For Ruskin, the maritime republic reached its apogee in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – the high watermark of Italian Gothic – only to fall into decline in the years when Francesco Foscari (Doge from 1423 to 1457) led it into a sequence of wars. From that point emerged an insidious corruption that in time sapped the vigour and energy of the state and its citizens, leading to Venice’s eventual downfall. From this story of rise, decline, and fall, Ruskin drew conclusions that he believed were applicable to the architecture of his own age, and indeed to that of any age and culture. The Stones of Venice is a long and dense work in which, as in much of Ruskin’s writing, flashes of visual insight are interrupted by long passages about the deeper meanings that lie beneath the surface of things. But the overall case is clear. Good architecture, says Ruskin, can only be produced by men who can freely express their creativity, and this can only happen when social conditions allow it. Christian architecture, he argued, can only flourish within a healthy Christian state where nature is properly reverenced, the moral meaning of God’s creation understood, and the imagination freed to express the joy of creation in natural forms. When society, politics, and religion are corrupted, a fatal rift opens up between the patrons of architecture and its practitioners, leading to an over-intellectualised, faithless, rulebound system epitomised by the architecture of the Renaissance, which Ruskin believed stifled the creativity of the workmen, alienated the public, and led eventually to a mechanistic and utilitarian dystopia. For Ruskin these truths were universal, and they were illustrated especially clearly in Venice. Ruskin has often been criticised for neglecting the structural aspects of architecture, but much of the first volume of The Stones of Venice (1851) – entitled ‘The Foundations’ – is a taxonomy of the elements of Venetian 103
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architecture: walls, roofs, buttresses, apertures, columns, arches. Each is considered in minute detail and each illustrated by diagrams and measurements, laboriously made by Ruskin himself. Ornament – one of the main preoccupations of The Seven Lamps – only makes its appearance in the second half of the volume. Its function, says Ruskin, is partly practical: mouldings and cornices can cast shadows on facades, and features like ball-flower and crockets, often found in English Gothic, can act as visual highlights. But ornament is also one of the main sources of beauty in a building (Figure 7). The capitals of columns can be carved, as in the ground-level arcade at St Mark’s basilica, and the structure of the wall itself be given a ‘wall-veil’ (see chapter 26 of the first volume of The Stones, ix.347–58): a term which could be applied to the colourful striped facades of many North Italian churches, or to the marble cladding of St Mark’s. Echoing his fascination with geology, Ruskin suggested that it is perfectly natural that the different kinds of stone used in its successive courses should be of different colours; and there are many associations and analogies which metaphysically justify the introduction of horizontal bands of colour, or of light and shade. They are, in the first place, a kind of expression of the growth or age of the wall, like the rings in the wood of a tree . . . and again they are valuable in their suggestion of the natural courses of rocks, and beds of the earth itself. (ix.347)
For Ruskin ‘noble ornamentation’ is ‘the expression of man’s delight in God’s work’ (ix.253), demanding, in the words of one modern commentator, ‘continuous evidence of thoughtfulness and feeling’ from the carver.3 From this it followed that copying, mechanically reproducing, or indiscriminately applying ornament in a modern building is not permissible, hence Ruskin’s dislike of the new and superficially Gothic Houses of Parliament in London (1840–60), which were nearing completion as he wrote. But before good ornament – and, by extension, good architecture – could flourish a radical change in the practice of architecture was needed. In the second and third volumes of The Stones, which came out in 1853, Ruskin set out, as he explained in the preface to the third edition (1874), to ‘show how the rise and fall of the Venetian builders’ art depended on the moral or immoral temper of the State’ (ix.14). Venetian architecture originated in the Early Christian and Byzantine era, exemplified first by the churches on the islands of Torcello and Murano, and then by St Mark’s. Then came the Gothic, an import from northern Europe which left its mark on both churches and secular buildings, from the Doge’s Palace to the palaces and smaller houses that line the rii. The main structural elements of Gothic – pointed arches, stone rib vaults, buttresses – had long been recognised. For 104
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Figure 7. John Ruskin, Decoration by Disks, Palazzo dei Badoari Partecipazzi.
Ruskin these were necessary conditions of Gothic, but they were not sufficient, as he explained in the fourth chapter in the second book, ‘The Nature of Gothic’: the most influential of all his architectural writings. Only the 105
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creative input of the architect and the craftsmen – whom Ruskin saw as ideally indistinguishable – could give life to inert structure, and before this could happen he must be free from stifling rules and constraints: ‘You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him’ (x.192). On the one hand there was inventiveness and reverent creativity; on the other, copying, imitation, and an obsession with ‘finish’ for its own sake. Ruskin illustrated the point in a much-quoted passage: And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished . . . Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek . . . [Go] forth to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors . . . [Do] not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children. (x.193–4)
Here, and especially in his statement that the division of labour implied the division of men (x.196), we find the germ of much of Ruskin’s later social thinking. Ruskin’s analysis of the character of Gothic still resonates today. We can still identify Gothic buildings by their steep roofs, their pointed-arched and gabled windows, their cusped and foliated arches. Most lovers of architecture remain fascinated by the ‘strange disquietude’ (x.214) which emanates from many Gothic buildings: the sense of striving for the unattainable. We still enjoy the ‘roughness’ or ‘savageness’ of Gothic churches and the variety of their grotesque or naturalistic carvings, and we can still, if we take the trouble, gain insight into the world of their builders by ‘reading’ their sculpture (cf. x.269). For Ruskin many of these qualities derived from the imperfection and ‘changefulness’ that he believed was an integral part of Gothic. No architecture, he wrote, ‘can be truly noble which is not imperfect’ (x.202); ‘do not let us suppose that love of order is love of art’ (x.205), he added. Proportion, Ruskin thought, was an essential component of good architecture, but it could not be applied through formulae, and the beauty of many of the buildings he most admired, like the West Front of the duomo at Pisa, derived from their subtle variations from an imagined norm. It was a search for a specious perfection that contributed to what Ruskin saw as the collapse of the arts during the Italian Renaissance: the subject of the third volume of The Stones, entitled ‘The Fall’. But this calamity resulted from a deeper moral and spiritual failing. Before the early fifteenth century, 106
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he argued, Venice had been the most Christian of the medieval states; it later became the most corrupt, though ‘magnificent in her dissipation’ (ix.47), brought down by the pride and hubris of its elite and the growing and insidious influence of the Renaissance. For Ruskin the Evangelical Protestant, Italian High Renaissance art and architecture was stultified both by secularism and by the overweening power of the Catholic Church. The Classically inspired buildings of the great sixteenth-century Venetian architects, including Sansovino and Palladio, was ‘rigid, cold, inhuman’ (xi.74), and only intelligible to the learned. Later buildings, including San Moisè (ornate Mannerist façade of 1668) and Sta Maria Zobenigo (now Santa Maria del Giglio) (1678–81), were even worse: ‘insolent atheism . . . totally destitute of religious symbols, and entirely dedicated to the honour of two Venetian families’ (xi.148–9). Even St Peter’s basilica in Rome was impressive only because of its size. For architecture to recover, Classicism – ‘base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable, and impious’ (xi.227) – had to be abandoned so that Gothic could replace it as a new architectural lingua franca, ‘fit alike for cottage porch or castle gateway’ (xi.228). This was an argument that found ready acceptance in the Englishspeaking countries in the 1850s. Modern Gothic The Stones of Venice made Ruskin’s reputation as a popular writer on architecture. Contemporaries seized on his enthusiastic advocacy of French and Italian Gothic, his love of architectural colour and sculptural ornament, his belief that Gothic was as appropriate for secular buildings as for churches, and his demand that buildings should present an intelligible narrative to the viewer. The publication of the second and third volumes coincided with a growing interest among British architects and architectural theorists in ‘development’ in modern Gothic. This was the idea that the Gothic style contained within itself the potential for change; that it was no longer necessary merely to copy the buildings of the Middle Ages, as Pugin and his followers had initially advocated; and that a suitably transformed Gothic could become the definitive style of the modern age. Among those architects was Ruskin’s near-contemporary William Butterfield (1814– 1900), the most creative and original English architect of his generation. And among the few modern English buildings that Ruskin could bring himself to admire was Butterfield’s All Saints’, Margaret Street, London (1850–9), built of brick – a material for which Ruskin usually showed little enthusiasm – but with polychrome patterning both inside and outside. ‘Having done this’, Ruskin wrote, ‘we may do anything’ (xi.229), and ‘the 107
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London of the nineteenth century may yet become as Venice without her despotism, and as Florence without her dispeace’ (xi.230). Though Ruskin admired Butterfield, there is little evidence that Butterfield paid much attention to Ruskin’s writings. Ruskin’s influence on what is usually called ‘High Victorian’ architecture – that of the period roughly between 1850 to 1870 – stems mainly from his involvement with what is now called the Museum of Natural History in Oxford, built in 1855–61 to the designs of Benjamin Woodward (1816–1861), whose slightly earlier Museum at Trinity College, Dublin, was for Ruskin ‘the first realisation I had the joy to see, of the principles I had . . . been endeavouring to teach!’ (xviii.149–50). The guiding spirit behind the Oxford Museum was Ruskin’s slightly older Oxford contemporary Henry Acland (1816–1900), Regius Professor of Medicine. In 1855 Ruskin told Lady Trevelyan: ‘Acland has got his museum – Gothic – the architect is a friend of mine – I can do anything I like with it.’4 The building (see Figure 8) certainly exhibits some of the characteristics that Ruskin identified as integral to the best medieval secular Gothic: steep roofs, structural polychromy and sculptural ornament, though less of it than was originally intended. Two stone-carvers, the O’Shea brothers from Ireland, were given carte blanche to introduce naturalistic ornament around the window jambs and on the capitals of the interior columns. Ruskin
Figure 8. Benjamin Woodward, The Oxford Museum, 1858.
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bestowed qualified approval in 1859, and he even designed one of the window surrounds himself. But he objected to the use of cast iron for the supports of the spectacular glass-roofed interior, supplied by Francis Skidmore, and in 1877 he wrote: ‘I knew from the moment [Woodward] allowed ironwork, it was all over with the building; nor did I ever approve the design – but it was a first effort in [the] right direction’.5 Even more importantly, Ruskin saw the museum project as an opportunity to show that the reverent love of nature and the formal scientific study of it – a novelty in the humanities-dominated university – could be harmoniously joined within a Gothic setting. His disillusionment stemmed not only from the use of structural iron in the interior but even more from the secularist agenda of the occupants, demonstrated for instance by the animal experiments practised within the laboratories. Ruskin’s writings struck a chord with those of the younger English architects of the 1850s who shared Butterfield’s belief in the necessity for ‘development’ in modern Gothic. In his Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages (1855), George Edmund Street (1824–1881) discussed many of the North Italian buildings admired by Ruskin and drew attention to his ‘brilliant advocacy of many truths in which any honest architect ought gladly to acquiesce’.6 Ruskin in turn praised Street’s Venetian-inspired restoration of St Paul, Herne Hill, London (1858) (see xvi.463), and claimed later to have had ‘some direct influence’ on his work (x.459). By the end of the 1850s Gothic was also being used increasingly for secular buildings. George Gilbert Scott (1811–1878), whom Ruskin had known since the 1840s, brought out his Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture in 1857, the year of his first, unexecuted, Gothic designs for new government offices in Whitehall, and some of Scott’s buildings are at least superficially ‘Ruskinian’, as were the Assize Courts at Manchester (1859–63: demolished) by Alfred Waterhouse (1830–1905), which for Ruskin was ‘much beyond anything yet done in England on my principles’ (xviii.lxxv). Such principles were, also, evident in the town hall at Northampton (1860–5) by another younger architect, E. W. Godwin (1833–1886), its carvings of historical figures proclaiming the ‘Lamp of Memory’, just as the bold outline proclaims the ‘Lamp of Power’ and the rich naturalistic sculpture, by a local carver, Edwin White, the ‘Lamp of Life’. In the 1855 edition of The Seven Lamps, Ruskin expressed his belief that ‘the only style proper for modern Northern work is the Northern Gothic of the thirteenth century’ (viii.12), both English and French. He had admired the ‘Flamboyant’ Gothic of fifteenth-century France ever since the 1830s, but in 1848 he became convinced of the quality of the earlier Gothic of the great cathedrals of northern France. The virtues of early 109
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French Gothic were also discovered in the mid 1850s – without any obvious prompting from Ruskin – by Street, Scott, and younger architects, including George Frederick Bodley (1827–1907) and William Burges (1827–1881). Several of their buildings exhibit the sublimity that Ruskin discusses in the ‘Lamp of Power’, and, at least at Bodley’s All Saints’, Selsley, Gloucestershire (1860–2), it seems that the carvers were given considerable leeway in their treatment of ornament. But it would be an exaggeration to call these buildings, and others like them, ‘Ruskinian’. Ruskin had already told readers of The Stones of Venice that the brick-field would be ‘the best academy for [British] architects for some half century to come’ (x.304). Brick buildings with Gothic detailing, including Philip Webb’s Red House (for William Morris) at Bexleyheath, Kent (1859), the monumental Granary on Welsh Back, Bristol, with its Italian detailing (Archibald Ponton and William Gough, 1869), and Chamberlain and Martin’s superb School of Art in Birmingham (1881–5), show that his confidence was not misplaced. So too do Butterfield’s later churches, schools, and colleges, Scott’s University of Bombay (1864–78), and many buildings in the United States. But in the hands of less talented architects and uninstructed builders, ‘Ruskinian’ brick architecture could be painful to an eye and a sensibility trained in Venice, Verona, and the still little-spoiled cities of Northern France. Writing from the house he had inherited from his parents in Denmark Hill, already engulfed by the spread of suburbia, Ruskin lamented in 1872 that he had had: an indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between [Denmark Hill] and Bromley; and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin and bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals copied from the Church of the Madonna of Health or of Miracles [in Venice]. And one of my principal reasons for leaving my present house is that it is surrounded everywhere by the accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making. (x.459, original emphasis)
The only way in which such abominations could be avoided in the future was through educating the taste of patrons, architects, and craftsmen. In November 1853, Ruskin addressed an audience in Edinburgh on the need for a new domestic architecture based not on the monotonous Classicism, as he saw it, of that city’s New Town, but on the ‘two great principles’ (xii.35) of North European Gothic: the pointed arch and the steep gable. This could only be achieved by active and sympathetic attention by the public, who were encouraged to find out what will make you comfortable, build that in the strongest and boldest way, and then set your fancy free in the decoration of it . . . [If] you 110
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Architecture cannot get the best Gothic, at least you will have no Greek; and in a few years’ time . . . the whole art of your native country will be reanimated. (xii.79)
But, as Ruskin told another audience in Bradford in 1864: ‘good taste is essentially a moral quality’ (xviii.434). ‘All good architecture is the expression of national life and character’, he continued in what became The Crown of Wild Olive, ‘and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty’ (xviii.434). Since modern British society was dedicated to market capitalism, or what he called the ‘Goddess of “Getting-on”’ (xviii.448), this false goddess ‘has formed, and will continue to form, your architecture, as long as you worship her; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how to build to her; you know far better than I’ (xviii.448). These are words that can apply as much to our society as to that of the Victorian age. Ruskin had little faith in the architectural profession, and in 1874 he rejected the offer of a gold medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, accusing architects, inter alia, of aiding and abetting the destruction of old buildings by restoring them in return for a commission on the overall cost. He believed that an architect should work ‘in the mason’s yard with his men’ (x.201) and that, as he told the aspiring architect J. D. Sedding (1838–91), ‘Modern so-called architects are merely employers of workmen on commission – and if you would be a real architect, you must always have either pencil or chisel in your own hand’ (xxxvii.199). In a lecture to the recently-founded Architectural Association in January 1857, later included in The Two Paths, Ruskin reiterated his view that ‘the very essence of a Style’ was not be a matter for individual choice but ‘should be practised for ages, and applied to all purposes’ (xvi.349). The new materials introduced in buildings, including the 1851 Crystal Palace – which Ruskin loathed – did not solve the dilemma of style that preoccupied so many Victorian architects: ‘you shall draw out your plates of glass and beat out your bars of iron till you have encompassed us all . . . with endless perspective of black skeleton and blinding square’, but ‘if you cannot rest content with Palladio, neither will you with Paxton’ (xvi.349). More important for Ruskin was the training of craftsmen: without their creative contribution architecture could not come to life. Gilbert Scott had already played a crucial part in the formation of the Architectural Museum in London in 1852, containing approved models of detailing for would-be sculptors of carved ornament. Ruskin, who seems to have seen the museum as a potential training ground for creative artisans, donated some of the casts and subsequently gave three addresses to the students. And it was this belief in the liberation of the worker, albeit under wise authority, which supplied 111
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the inspiration for his later writing on society and economics, from Unto This Last (1860) onwards. Arts and Crafts and beyond In his preface to the third edition of The Stones of Venice (1874), Ruskin bemoaned the fact that two thirds of the volumes had been ‘resolutely ignored by the British public’ (ix.11); when the third edition of The Seven Lamps appeared six years later he called it ‘the most useless [book] I ever wrote’ (viii.15). Charles L. Eastlake, writing in 1872, agreed that ‘the great moral of [Ruskin’s] teaching was overlooked’ by most of his contemporaries: ‘His opinions were regarded by many of the [architectural] profession as utterly absurd and irrational. The general press admired his eloquence, but questioned his arguments, and stood aghast at his conclusions’.7 Yet Ruskin continued to write and lecture about architecture, and his writings attracted a new and wider readership in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. In St Mark’s Rest (1877–84), Ruskin returned to the architecture of Venice, and in The Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme (1869) and The Bible of Amiens (1880–5), to that of northern France. But his long-term influence of his later writings derived mainly from the scattered aperçus in the Fors Clavigera letters and the Slade lectures in Oxford of 1870 and 1872. They helped inspire the Arts and Crafts movement, and their influence on urban planning continues. Ruskin had already, in his Edinburgh lectures of 1853, attributed much of the current malaise in architecture to the anomie and restlessness engendered by industrial society: [T]he wandering habits which have now become almost necessary to our existence, lie more at the root of our bad architecture than any other character of modern times. We always look upon our homes as mere temporary lodgings. We are always hoping to get larger and finer ones, or are forced . . . to live where we would not choose, and in continual expectation of changing our place of abode. (xii.72)
In 1873, Ruskin criticised the recent growth of middle-class suburbia that contributed to his decision to settle in the Lake District: ‘What a pestilence of [houses], and unseemly plague of builder’s work . . . has fallen on the suburbs of loathsome London?’ (xxvii.528). ‘That is the typical condition of five-sixths, at least, of the “rising” middle classes about London’, he went on in this Fors Clavigera letter of May that year: ‘[the] lodgers in those damp shells of brick, which one cannot say they inhabit, nor call their “houses” . . . but packing-cases in which they are temporarily stored, for bad use’ (xxvii.528–30). As for the 112
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workers, they should, as he told his Oxford audience in 1872 in a passage included in The Eagle’s Nest: [P]lan, and to resolve to labour for, the comfort and beauty of a home such as, if we could obtain it, we would quit no more. Not a compartment of a model lodging-house, not the number so-and-so of Paradise Row; but a cottage all of our own, with its little garden, its pleasant view, its surrounding fields, the neighbouring stream, its healthy air, and clean kitchen, parlours, and bedrooms. Less than this, no man should be content with for his nest; more than this few should seek. (xxii.263)
This vision of better homes for the working classes implied a more enlightened approach to the design of cities: ‘You must have lovely cities, crystallized, not coagulated, into form; limited in size, and . . . girded each with its sacred pomœrium [boundary], and with garlands of gardens full of blossoming trees and softly guided streams’ (xx.113). Twenty years earlier, in The Stones of Venice, Ruskin had asserted that ‘[the] outsides of our houses belong not so much to us as to the passer-by’ (xi.226). Now, since aesthetic laissez-faire had clearly failed, city dwellers ‘must have so much civic fellowship as to subject their architecture to a common law, and so much civic pride as to desire that the whole gathered group of human dwellings should be a lovely thing, not a frightful one, on the face of the earth’ (xx.112). Here, Ruskin looked forward both to the Garden City movement and to the building and planning legislation of modern times. Ruskin came to believe in his later life that, as he said in 1870, the architectural arts ‘begin with the shaping of the cup and the platter, and they end in the glorified roof’ (xx.96). This insight was shared by William Morris (1834–96) and his many followers. For Ruskin, Morris was the only person who ‘went straight to the accurate point of the craftsman’s question’.8 Morris first read Ruskin while he was an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1850s, and he later admired the ‘Nature of Gothic’. Morris was the guiding spirit behind the founding of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877, in which Ruskin’s passionate loathing of architectural restoration (as distinct from preservation) found practical expression. Ruskin also inspired several of the younger architects associated with the Morris-derived Arts and Crafts movement in the 1880s. They included Detmar Blow (1867–1939), whom Ruskin discovered sketching at St Wulfran’s church at Abbeville in France in 1888. That was one of Ruskin’s favourite buildings. Blow later spent a year training as a stonemason, and in 1897 became foreman under Ernest Gimson (1838–1919), a former pupil of J. D. Sedding, at a group of cottages built of local stone at Ulverscroft, Leicestershire; these are among the most ‘Ruskinian’ of all Arts 113
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and Crafts-inspired houses. Raymond Unwin (1863–1940), one of the apostles of the Garden City movement, attended at least one of Ruskin’s lectures as a youth in Oxford, ‘avidly’ quoting it in his Cottage Plans and Common Sense, published by the Fabian Society in 1902.9 And M. H. Baillie Scott (1865–1945) quoted Ruskin’s 1870 Oxford lecture in an article entitled ‘On the Choice of Simple Furniture’ in April 1897, later, in 1917, referring to the ‘uncompromising Ruskinism’ which ran through his own work.10 By the time the Arts and Crafts house had reached its apogee in the 1890s, Ruskin had lapsed into silence. But the spirit of late Ruskin pervades the work of architects including C. F. A. Voysey, Gimson, and Baillie Scott. And in early-twentieth-century planned communities including New Earswick, Yorkshire, and Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, it is inescapable: the integration of house and landscape, the love of domestic simplicity, the presence of large, sweeping roofs, the concern for materials, the craftsman-like interiors. Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927) began his magisterial survey of English domestic architecture with Ruskin, to whom he believed England owed measureless gratitude in matters of art . . . [He] was the first to champion the ideals that later became the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement: simplicity and naturalness in art, honesty in tectonic design . . . emphasis on the workmanlike, the characteristic, the indigenous, a synthesis of artistic creation and observation of nature.11
Ruskin presents the paradox of a man who was both captivated by the past and unusually far-seeing in his analysis of the ills of his own society. With our current preoccupations about conservation, environmentalism, and sustainability, his writings on architecture continue to strike a chord, and that is why they continue to provoke and stimulate us today. NO TES 1. Illustrated in Nicholas Penny, Ruskin’s Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1988), 64–5. 2. Alison Milbank, ‘Ruskin and Tradition: The Case of French Gothic’, in Michael Wheeler and Nigel Whiteley, eds., The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 21. 3. John Unrau, Looking at Architecture with Ruskin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 120. 4. Quoted in Michael Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), 125. 5. Quoted in ibid., 127–8. 6. George Edmund Street, Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: Notes of a Tour in the North of Italy (London: Murray, 1855), 4–5. 114
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Architecture 7. Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (London: Longmans, Green, 1872), 271. 8. J. W. Mackail, Life of William Morris, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1911), i.201. 9. Frank Jackson, Sir Raymond Unwin: Architect, Planner and Visionary (London: Zwemmer, 1985), 13. 10. Quoted in James Kornwulf, M. H. Baillie Scott and the Arts and Crafts Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1972), 14, 403. 11. Hermann Muthesius, The English House, ed. Dennis Sharp, trans. by Janet Seligman (1904–5; Oxford: BSP Professional Books, 1979), 13.
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8 NICHOLAS SHRIMPTON
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John Ruskin was, in his own account, ‘a violent Tory of the old school’ (xxvii.167) who took an amused interest in the extent to which his extreme conservatism could overlap with, or resemble, the opinions held by socialists. Three months before he made this remark he had presented himself, instead, as ‘a Communist of the old school – reddest also of the red’ (xxvii.116). Though Ruskin the rhetorician would have enjoyed teasing his readers with an apparent contradiction, his views had not changed. The key phrase in these diverse self-descriptions was the repeated statement, ‘of the old school’. Ruskin’s Toryism was no more the contemporary conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli and the Marquis of Salisbury than his communism was the current ideology of Karl Marx or the Paris Communards. Rather, both were idiosyncratically derived from ancient or medieval models. Ruskin’s ideal Tory was a pious absolute monarch or a chivalrous clan chief from the pages of Sir Walter Scott. His model for a ‘Common-wealth’ was derived from Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus and Thomas More’s Utopia (xxvii.117). ‘I am by nature and instinct Conservative,’ he told Henry Acland in April 1856, ‘loving old things because they are old, and hating new ones merely because they are new’ (xxxvi.239). What Ruskin’s Toryism and the new socialism or communism did share was a common enemy: the free-market liberalism which had become so powerful a discourse in the middle years of the nineteenth century. As early as 1841, in The King of the Golden River (not published until 1850), Ruskin had given symbolic expression to the eighteenth-century Physiocratic economics of Quesnay and Turgot. Their claim that all real wealth derived from the land had been almost immediately superseded by the stress on labour and exchange value in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). But the agrarian focus of Physiocratic thought continued to appeal to Romantic sensibilities, and to inform works including Ruskin’s fairy story. In The Stones of Venice (1851–3), Ruskin would adopt a still earlier alternative to the Classical and Neo-Classical schools of economic thought 116
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inspired by Smith: the political economy of the Christian Middle Ages. By September 1854 he was talking of ‘a great work I mean to write on politics – founded on the thirteenth century’, and the social practice of that era would remain his ideal (xxxvi.176). But in the later 1850s Ruskin turned away from overt medievalism to a deeper, more implicit use of medieval assumptions. Pre-modern concepts, such as intrinsic value and the ‘just price’, were applied to modern problems in a series of controversial books and lectures: The Political Economy of Art, Unto This Last, Munera Pulveris, Sesame and Lilies, The Crown of Wild Olive, and Time and Tide. Finally, in the 1870s, Ruskin would launch his own social movement, The Guild of St George, and publish a monthly commentary on political issues in his one-man journal Fors Clavigera. Written in an increasingly eccentric version of the ‘prophetic’ manner developed by his friend Thomas Carlyle, these texts would seek to suggest an alternative to the industrialism, capitalism, and urbanisation of modern society. What Ruskin was not was an ancestor of the British Labour Party. Some of the founders of that movement had been stimulated by his rhetoric, or moved by his attacks on the capitalism which both he and they deplored. But his influence on them was brief and superficial. Neither the Marxian nor the Fabian branch of English socialism was significantly Ruskinian. Untouched by concepts such as surplus value, alienation, class struggle, or dialectical materialism, Ruskin also opposed democracy, disliked trade unions, and was not interested in the redistribution of income. As this suggests, his politics and economics belong to a different and more marginal tradition which stretches from the Ultra-Tories and Götzists (medievalists) of the 1820s and ’30s, through the Tory Young Englanders of the 1840s, to the Arts and Crafts and ‘back to the land’ movements of the 1880s, and the Guild Socialism and Distributism of the early twentieth century, with partial echoes in some of the Green or Ecological parties of the present day. In his autobiography, Praeterita, Ruskin would give several different accounts of the origins of his political ideas. The most famous of these attributes his social concerns to the research undertaken for the composition of The Stones of Venice. Describing his discovery of Tintoretto during an earlier visit to that city in 1845, Ruskin declares that, ‘Tintoret swept me away at once into the “mare maggiore” of the schools of painting which crowned the power and perished in the fall of Venice; so forcing me into the study of the history of Venice herself; and through that into what else I have traced or told of the laws of national strength and virtue’ (xxxv.372). Two chapters later, however, Ruskin suggests that his political views had been more immediately provoked by the conspicuous consumption and casual 117
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snobbery of the sons-in-law of Pedro Domecq, his father’s business partner in the sherry trade, during their visits to London in the early 1850s: [T]he way in which these lords . . . though men of sense and honour . . . spoke of their Spanish labourers and French tenantry, with no idea whatever respecting them but that, except as producers by their labour of money to be spent in Paris, they were cumberers of the ground, gave me the first clue to the real sources of wrong in the social laws of modern Europe; and led me necessarily into the political work which has been the most earnest of my life. (xxxv.408–9)
Once again, Ruskin links this insight to an earlier sense, in the mid 1840s, that ‘it was already beginning to be, if not a question, at least a marvel with me, that these graceful and gay Andalusians . . . should virtually get no good of their own beautiful country . . . that its precious wine was not for them, still less the money it was sold for’ (xxxv.409). And, elsewhere in Praeterita, Ruskin carries his moment of political enlightenment still further back to a visit to Abbeville in 1835, at the age of sixteen: For here I saw that art (of its local kind), religion, and present human life, were yet in perfect harmony. There were no dead six days and dismal seventh in those sculptured churches . . . Outside, the faithful old town gathered itself, and nestled under their buttresses like a brood beneath the mother’s wings; the quiet, uninjurious aristocracy of the newer town opened into silent streets, between self-possessed and hidden dignities of dwelling, each with its courtyard and richly trellised garden. The commercial square, with the main street of traverse, consisted of uncompetitive shops, such as were needful, of the native wares: cloth and hosiery spun, woven, and knitted within the walls; cheese of neighbouring Neuchâtel; fruit of their own gardens, bread from the fields above the green coteaux; meat of their herds, untainted by American tin, smith’s work of sufficient scythe and ploughshare, hammered on the open anvil; groceries dainty, the coffee generally roasting odiferously in the street, before the door; for the modistes, – well, perhaps a bonnet or two from Paris, the rest, wholesome dress for peasant and dame of Ponthieu. Above the prosperous, serenely busy and beneficent shop, the old dwelling-house of its ancestral masters; pleasantly carved, proudly roofed, keeping its place, and order, and recognised function, unfailing, unenlarging, for centuries. Round all, the breezy ramparts, with their long waving avenues; through all, in variously circuiting cleanness and sweetness of navigable river and active millstream, the green chalk-water of the Somme. (xxxv.156–7)
There is, of course, a good deal of interpretative hindsight in this much later account of a teenage experience. But the picture of Abbeville sets out, clearly and succinctly, the medievalist ideal which will inform all of Ruskin’s later political argument: the ‘uncompetitive’ commerce, the ‘uninjurious aristocracy’, the local food, the artisanal handicrafts, the ‘unenlarging’ static 118
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economy, the fostering of ‘art’, the ecological concern for ‘cleanness and sweetness of navigable river’, and, above all, the sense of a social practice governed by Christian moral values: ‘nestled’ under the ‘buttresses’ of its churches, ‘like a brood beneath the mother’s wings’. Few, if any, of these ideas would have been consciously formulated in 1835. But the early visit to Abbeville supplied a sensory and emotional impression which, at very least, prepared Ruskin for his encounter with medievalist, or Götzist, political theory in the 1840s. Ruskin’s father was a self-made businessman whose commercial career and middle-class status might lead one to assume that he would have been a Whig (the Whig, or Liberal, Party had, at this date, strong links with businessmen and the middle class). In fact, in an era when political allegiance was often determined by religious identity, he was an Ultra-Tory. Staunchly Protestant, and loyal defenders of the constitutional system established by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Ultra-Tories turned against Sir Robert Peel as he led the mainstream Tory party first into giving votes to Roman Catholics in 1829, then to accepting the Whig Reform Act of 1832, and finally to repealing the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846. John James Ruskin favoured free trade. But in other respects he held Tory views and was an admirer of Sir Robert Harry Inglis, the Clapham-Sect Evangelical and leading Ultra-Tory who had taken the Oxford University parliamentary seat from Peel in 1829 (the Clapham Sect was an influential group of Protestant Anglicans based in south London). This was the ideological environment in which the younger John Ruskin grew up, and his political views would include a fierce anti-Catholicism, at least until 1858.1 Strictly speaking, his first wholly political publication was Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds in 1851, a controversial pamphlet developed from material originally intended for the first volume of The Stones of Venice. This attacked the Puseyites (the Oxford Movement High Anglicans) for dividing the Anglican Church at a time when it needed, in Ruskin’s view, to offer a unified resistance to the Vatican’s re-establishment, for the first time since the Reformation, of Roman Catholic bishoprics in England: ‘the Church of England’, must, ‘forthwith unite . . . and take her stand . . . against the Papacy’ (xii.557). The economic dimension of such Tory views was protectionist, interventionist, and hostile to laissez-faire. Their opponents, the Whigs, had been gradually converted to the new theories of Classical Economics and numbered many businessmen and industrialists among their supporters (even the more extreme ‘Manchester School’ followers of Bright and Cobden, though technically Radicals, in practice often voted for Whig measures). The Tories, by contrast, remained the party of church and land, and owed no favours 119
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to mill or factory owners. The Ten Hours Act (1833) and Mines and Collieries Act (1842), the pioneering legislation to protect industrial labourers, were the work of Tory politicians: Michael Sadler and Anthony Ashley Cooper (later Lord Shaftesbury). High Tory economic thought was correspondingly sceptical about the theoretical assumptions of laissez-faire liberalism. As early as 1807, Henry Thornton, the Clapham-Sect Evangelical, Tory MP, banker, and economist, had struck what would be the keynote of Ruskin’s moralised political economy by insisting on ‘the inconsistency of private vice with public virtue’.2 Henry Drummond, like Thornton a banker, Tory MP, and Evangelical, founded the Oxford Chair of Political Economy in 1825, almost certainly in order to attack the subject from within or, in his own later words, to ‘wrest it from the hands of the agents of the devil’.3 Oxford University, shrewdly but disloyally, ignored his wishes and gave the chair to a conventional Classical Economist, Nassau Senior – by which time, fortunately, Drummond had moved on to a new preoccupation with Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church. Despite this subversion of his educational project, Drummond continued to see himself as a ‘Tory of the old school’ and was a paternalistic landlord who, at Albury in Surrey, allotted ‘every labourer on the estate as much land as he pleases from ¼ to 5 acres or more’.4 Drummond was a wealthy eccentric. But views of this kind were widely available in the articles on economics in the Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a journal subscribed to and closely read in the Ruskin household at Herne Hill. The best remembered of these are the four essays on ‘Political Economy’ addressed ‘To the Heads of the University of Oxford’, published between September 1829 and January 1830, and clearly intended as a protest against the appointment to the Drummond Chair of a man who was politically a Whig and economically a Ricardian (that is, a follower of the Classical Economist David Ricardo, 1772–1823). Written by the polemical journalist David Robinson (1787–1849) under the pseudonym (that phrase again) ‘ONE OF THE OLD SCHOOL’, they began with the assertion that, ‘the principles of this asserted Science . . . are essentially fallacious’.5 Harold Perkin, in 1969, saw these essays as a partial anticipation of the Keynesian view of ‘Effective Demand’ and of ‘the social outlook of the Welfare State’.6 More literally, Robinson used the terminology of Classical Economics to construct a case for agricultural protection, dismissing as he did so both the merits of free trade and Ricardo’s doctrine of rent as an intra-marginal surplus parasitic on capital and labour. Robinson’s ideal was a socially responsible landed aristocracy and his solution to the needs of a growing population was the reclamation of ‘inferior land’ (‘Let us suppose,’ he argues, ‘that 3,000,000 acres of waste land are taken into cultivation’).7 This idea, 120
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echoed in Carlyle, would provide the initial definition of purpose in Ruskin’s General Statement Explaining the Nature and Purposes of St George’s Guild in 1882: ‘This Guild was originally founded with the intention of showing how much food-producing land might be recovered by well-applied labour from the barren or neglected districts of nominally cultivated countries’ (xxx.45). Ruskin was, of course, only ten years old when these articles appeared, and Robinson moved to Fraser’s Magazine shortly afterwards. But other writers were expressing similar views in Blackwood’s throughout the 1830s. One of them was the London clergyman George Croly who, as Tim Hilton has shown, was a friend and frequent guest of the Ruskin family (Hilton, 1.31–2). Another was the editor of Blackwood’s, John Wilson, better known by his pseudonym ‘Christopher North’. In 1836, for example, Wilson published an essay on ‘Definitions of Wealth’. This reviewed the accounts of wealth given by Adam Smith, Ricardo, Lord Lauderdale, Malthus, Torrens, and Say, noting that, ‘We have found . . . a general agreement in considering that . . . the ground of the idea of wealth, is some human utility or pleasure which the object regarded as wealth is capable . . . of affording.’ Wealth, in other words, is not merely a matter of exchange value, and Wilson’s summary of Smith’s views specifically introduces the word ‘life’ into the account of what is ‘included’ in the concept: an owner: a subject in which the wealth is, which may be sensible or immaterial: which may be external to himself, or may be himself: in general, the idea of exchangeableness, or price: in some instances, a value consisting in the power of yielding various human enjoyments without that idea; and in all instances . . . the ultimate tendency to procure such enjoyments as the life and indispensable condition of the value.8
Ruskin may ignore the ‘in some instances’ qualification to create his celebrated assertion that ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE’ (xvii.105), but his economic thought has its roots in such discussions. Though many of these Tory economists were (as the Ruskin family would, in the 1830s, increasingly become) Evangelical Anglicans, the ‘Evangelical economists’ identified by Boyd Hilton in The Age of Atonement (1988) were only a sub-set of the group. These thinkers, most notably Thomas Chalmers, accepted the insights of Classical Economics but ‘evangelicalised’ them, a process which can be summed up as interpreting the uncharitable harshness (as it was seen) of laissez-faire assumptions as God’s punishment of a fallen humanity. Ruskin was influenced by a different branch of ‘Christian economics’, found in Blackwood’s Magazine, and by a tradition which Boyd Hilton saw as ‘romantic, high Tory, and 121
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anti-utilitarian’, and, as such, not really economic at all: ‘Its exponents included nostalgic agrarians like Robert Southey . . . populists like William Cobbett, and prophets like S. T. Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle.’9 Such writers, as Alice Chandler showed in her book A Dream of Order (1971), based their criticism of the modern world less on economic theory than on history. The new industrial society was sharply distinguished from a previous era in which co-operation (or, at least, compassionate despotism), rather than competition, had supposedly been the norm. Cobbett’s A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1824–6) shockingly suggested that the suppression of the monasteries in the sixteenth century had destroyed a benign and effective system of social welfare. Southey’s Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829) debated the relative merits of pre- and post-Reformation England, and its conclusions were very much in favour of the former. Though Macaulay wrote a famously dismissive review of Southey’s Colloquies (‘He is . . . a violent Ultra-Tory’, who ‘makes the picturesque the test of political good’),10 the medievalist mode of social criticism continued to flourish. Thomas Carlyle suggested that it had begun in Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen (1773), coined the term ‘Götzism’ to describe it, and himself published a major example of the form in Past and Present (1843). There were obvious parallels here with the contemporary rediscovery of medieval (or ‘Pre-Raphaelite’) art and the ‘Gothic Revival’ in architecture. Ruskin declared his enthusiasm for medieval painting in a section added to the third edition of Modern Painters I in 1846, began to celebrate Gothic buildings in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and by the end of the decade had joined the ranks of the medievalist social critics. His last ‘Lamp’, the ‘Lamp of Obedience’, denounces liberty, praises ‘Obedience, Unity, Fellowship, and Order’, and even sows the first seeds of the Arts and Crafts ideal in its suggestion that the European revolutions of 1848 had been caused by a lack of ‘work in the sense of mental interest’. There is, Ruskin suggests, ‘a vast quantity of idle energy among European nations at this time, which ought to go into handicrafts; there are multitudes of idle semi-gentlemen who ought to be shoemakers and carpenters’ (viii.261–2). Two years later, in the first volume of The Stones of Venice, Ruskin described ‘the first period’ of Venetian history as one in which the people had been governed ‘by the worthiest and noblest man whom they could find among them, called their Doge or Leader, with an aristocracy gradually and resolutely forming itself around him’ (ix.20). In the periods before its ‘Fall’ in the early fifteenth century, Venice produced the great Byzantine and Gothic architecture which Ruskin celebrated. Such buildings were, in his analysis, directly 122
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attributable to the political, economic, and religious character of the society in which they were created. Medieval Venice was a clever choice for Götzist argument because, as a maritime trading nation, it more closely resembled nineteenth-century Great Britain than the agrarian economies with which the modern world had previously been compared. Set on its islands in the lagoon, Venice could grow almost nothing. Instead, like Ruskin’s father the sherry merchant, Venetian traders imported foreign commodities and sold them on. How could this be done in a morally acceptable manner? The answer was that ‘the vitality of religion in private life’ purified the operations of the market. In medieval St Mark’s: Men met . . . from all countries of the earth for traffic or for pleasure; but, above the crowd swaying for ever to and fro in the restlessness of avarice or thirst of delight, was seen perpetually the glory of the temple, attesting to them . . . that there was one treasure which the merchantman might buy without a price . . . in the word and the statutes of God. (x.140)
Eleven years later, Ruskin would use the word ‘traffic’ as the title of a lecture (published in The Crown of Wild Olive, 1866) which accused modern Great Britain of hypocrisy: a double standard symbolised by the contrast between its Gothic churches and Neo-Classical domestic buildings. In medieval Venice, by contrast, the architecture was consistent and St Mark’s was the effective ‘Bible’ of the city, embodying the message that, ‘He shall return, to do judgment and justice’ (x.141, quoting Genesis 18.19), and thereby enforcing a business ethic of fair trading, just pricing, and charitable self-sacrifice. In a note added to the second edition of Unto This Last in 1877, Ruskin would mention an inscription on the Venetian church of San Giacomo di Rialto: ‘Around this temple, let the Merchant’s law be just, his weights true, and his contracts guileless’ (xvii.20). Ruskin’s other ingenious addition to the techniques of Götzist political argument was his identification of the Renaissance, rather than the Reformation, as the historical event which fatally undermined the values of medieval society. Preferring the artistic and social practices of a Catholic era, and blaming the Reformation for their extinction, had always been uncomfortable for Protestant medievalists. Some of them, including Kenelm Digby and A. W. N. Pugin (whose Contrasts, in 1836, was one of the masterpieces of Götzist polemic), had responded by converting to Roman Catholicism. Ruskin both shifted the blame to a cultural, rather than religious, phenomenon and subtly attributed a quasi-Protestant identity to Venice by stressing its disagreements with the Pope. 123
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The most original political achievement of The Stones of Venice was, however, of a different kind and occurred in the sixth chapter of the second volume, ‘The Nature of Gothic’. Here Ruskin saw ‘savageness’ or ‘rudeness’ (x.184) as a key characteristic of the Gothic style and linked it to the way in which Christianity valued every soul, however imperfect. In Classical buildings the architect monopolised the creative function, while slave-like building workers mechanically executed his designs. In Gothic buildings, Ruskin claimed, individual stonemasons were left free to invent the irregular details of the naturalistic carving with which such structures were enriched. Humble people were thereby released from slavery to enjoy the ‘work of mental interest’ which Ruskin had desiderated in The Seven Lamps. The problem with modern society was ‘not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread’ (x.194), and ‘there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lord’s lightest words were worth men’s lives . . . than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke’ (x.193). This is both the intellectual foundation of the Arts and Crafts movement and Ruskin’s most distinctive contribution to Political Economy: a call for the redistribution, not of wealth or power, but of work. Why should some people do all the interesting and creative tasks while others spend their lives in repetitive labour? Why can’t creative and uncreative jobs be more equally distributed? Ruskin put the negative implications of his idea into practice in 1874, when, as Slade Professor of Fine Art, he took Oxford undergraduates to work as navvies on his Hinksey Road (or sewer) project, and modern life has, since then, spontaneously echoed that symbolic act by obliging the middle classes to do their own shopping, cooking, cleaning, gardening, and driving. The positive implication, however, remains elusive. William Morris imaginatively enacted it in the second chapter of his novel News from Nowhere (1890), where we are introduced to a character who works as a weaver and ferryman for one half of each year and as a professor of mathematics for the other, and praised ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (even after his own conversion to Marxism) as ‘one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century’.11 After The Stones of Venice, Ruskin moved gradually from explicit medievalism to a more conceptual and implicit use of its assumptions. In December 1857 he published The Political Economy of Art, later reissued as ‘A Joy for Ever’; (And Its Price in the Market), two lectures arguing for government involvement in the production and distribution of art. Here he began by remarking ‘how absurd it would have appeared in the days of Edward I, if the present state of social economy had been then predicted as necessary, or even described as possible’ (xvi.10), before depicting ‘the 124
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perfect economist’ in terms drawn from the Book of Proverbs (xvi.20). Carlyle’s distinction, in his Götzist Past and Present, between the unscrupulous modern ‘Buccaneer’ and the self-sacrificing medieval ‘Chevalier’ is then developed into a military model of ideal rule (‘a government which shall have its soldiers of the ploughshare as well as its soldiers of the sword’) and an insistence that, ‘the notion of Discipline and Interference lies at the very root of all human progress or power . . . the “Let-alone” principle is in all things which man has to do with, the principle of death’ (xvi.26). A year later, in ‘The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy’ (a lecture published in The Two Paths in 1859), Ruskin would make very similar points but turn to nature, rather than to historical precedent, as his source of authority. The presence of iron in the soil and in blood gives the world its colour and vitality. Therefore iron is significant, and its three most familiar manifestations are as ‘the Plough, the Fetter, and the Sword’ (xvi.395). Both the plough (agriculture, handicraft, and the just sharing of laborious work) and the sword (chivalry) are obviously good things. But Ruskin does not shrink from saying that his third symbol, the fetter, is a good thing as well. Unable to accept the Classical Economists’ account of the way in which apparently disorderly economic activity spontaneously generates benign and orderly outcomes (through the action of what Adam Smith had metaphorically termed the invisible hand of the market), Ruskin insists on a literal or traditional account of ‘order’. The liberty of laissez-faire (‘the “Let-alone” principle’) is a bad thing: ‘the power and glory of all creatures, and all matter, consist in their obedience, not in their freedom,’ and, ‘as the first power of a nation consists in knowing how to guide the Plough, its second power consists in knowing how to wear the Fetter’ (xvi.408). The same point was being made in his contemporaneous art criticism, where it was linked (in Modern Painters V) to compositional order in paintings: ‘Government and co-operation are in all things the Laws of Life; Anarchy and competition the Laws of Death’ (vii.207). Disturbed by a bitter strike in the building industry in 1859, Ruskin set out in 1860 to write a systematic attack on the theoretical assumptions of Classical Economics. The free market had, it seemed, left building workers underpaid and at odds with their employers. Ruskin’s proposed solution was a military model of fixed wages and permanent employment (‘soldiers of the ploughshare’), and he offered the recently founded Cornhill Magazine a series of articles which would demolish the laissez-faire case against such regimentation. Four essays were printed between August and November 1860 and republished as ‘Unto This Last:’ Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy in 1862. 125
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In The Political Economy of Art, in 1857, Ruskin had rashly declared that, ‘I have never read any author on political economy, except Adam Smith, twenty years ago’ (xvi.10). Though he was, in fact, slightly better equipped than this suggests, his attempts to refute Smith, Mill, and Ricardo were, in technical terms, unconvincing, and the significance of Unto This Last is really of a different kind. As he himself indicates in the preface written for the book edition of 1862, it was the ethical basis of Classical Economics, rather than its analytical insights, with which he was concerned. One way of interpreting this would be to say that Ruskin was resisting the process by which economics (like many other sciences) had gradually emerged from the ‘moral theology’ of the Middle Ages and established itself as a separate discipline. Ruskin accuses economists of being immoral. Economists themselves were, by the mid-nineteenth century, insisting that their work was an amoral and disinterested enquiry into natural and social processes: a ‘positive’ rather than ‘normative’ science. Another way of explaining Ruskin’s moral preoccupation would be to acknowledge that there had been, not just an institutional change, but a real shift in the philosophical understanding of the human condition. In 1705 Bernard Mandeville published a poem called The Grumbling Hive, adding an extensive prose commentary when it was reissued as The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits in 1714. Mandeville described a prosperous community of bees which was plunged into poverty when its members abandoned greed and fraud and became universally honest. Economic success, in other words, is generated by rational self-interest, rather than by self-abnegation, however much human beings might like to believe otherwise. In 1776 Adam Smith turned the central claim of The Fable of the Bees into an economic principle. Within the circle of our own family and friends we use an ethic of sympathy (Ruskin read Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments with his mother in 1829; Library 320). But outside those limits we operate on a different basis: . . . man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail, if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them . . . It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.12
The Tory ‘Christian economist’ Henry Thornton had indignantly asserted ‘the inconsistency of private vice with public virtue’ in 1807. Half a century later, Ruskin was making the same claim, or trying to turn the clock back to a pre-Enlightenment view of morality as absolute, consistent, and uniformly 126
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operative across the private and public spheres. Unto This Last stresses honour (‘The Roots of Honour’) and justice (‘Qui Judicatis Terram’) to suggest that there are other motives than greed and other purposes than prosperity. This was a philosophical medievalism which sought, anachronistically, to reclaim a vanishing set of ethical assumptions. In 1862 Ruskin embarked on another series of economic articles, printed in Fraser’s Magazine between June 1862 and April 1863 as ‘Essays on Political Economy’ and republished as Munera Pulveris in 1872. After the attack on Liberal economics in Unto This Last, this was to be a positive statement of Ruskin’s alternative system. But the procedure was only briefly systematic, moving instead, in the third essay, into a poetic mode which sought to show how Ruskin’s moral imperatives were embedded in language: the Latin word ‘merces’ (wages), for example, is seen as the root of both ‘merchant’ and ‘mercy’, thereby suggesting that commerce should be governed by generous, rather than self-interested, motives. Time and Tide (a series of newspaper letters ‘to a Working Man of Sunderland’, first published between February and May 1867, and reissued as a book that December) is more political than economic, and much concerned with dissuading the working-class men who would be enfranchised by Disraeli’s Reform Act from making use of their new political power. As always, Ruskin’s model of good government is the absolute authority of a ‘king’ or ‘Master’. The stress on ‘justice’ was, however, accompanied by a recommendation of ‘gentleness’, or the opportunity for delight in both play and work. The newspaper-letter format of Time and Tide may have helped to suggest the single-author, monthly journal mode of Fors Clavigera, or ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’, published in ninety-six instalments, first from January 1871 to March 1878, and then, intermittently, between 1880 and 1884. With his thoughts on art now channelled into his Oxford lectures, Ruskin used Fors for reflections on social issues, combining disparaging comments on contemporary circumstances with restatements of his political doctrine. By May 1871 he had perceived a way in which his views could be given a practical implementation. Initially a charitable ‘Fund’, then briefly a ‘Company’, the project was renamed ‘The Guild of St George’ in 1877. Its key purposes were to ‘institute, in practice, the wholesome laws of laborious (especially agricultural) life and economy’, to acquire ‘plots or tracts of land’, and ‘the erection of Schools, Museums, and other educational establishments’ (xxx.5). Ruskin himself was, of course, the Master, and the Companions, never very numerous, were meant to contribute a tenth of their income. Ruskin’s ‘sixteen aphorisms’ in Letter 67 (July 1876) set out his larger aims, including the organisation of labour by the state, the provision of food, fuel, clothes, and education to those who needed them, a requirement 127
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that all people should ‘work with their hands for their bread’, and the banning of steam-powered machinery (xxvii.651–6). In the event, the Guild acquired a few acres of agricultural land in Worcestershire and Yorkshire, together with some cottages at Barmouth, and established a museum which successfully made art available to the iron and steel workers of Sheffield. Though Ruskin’s literary gifts gave it a distinctive formulation, his social thought was not unique. It derived from the Tory economics of the 1820s and ’30s, and from the work of Götzist writers, above all Carlyle – whose profound though reactionary influence Ruskin frequently acknowledged. Seen from an international perspective, too, Ruskin’s political ideas were not unprecedented. The ‘Völkisch’ school in Germany, especially the work of the Munich art historian Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–97), has many similarities. Völkisch ideas, notoriously, would influence the Nazi Party, and Ruskin’s most obvious British successor, the Arts and Crafts architect and Guild Socialist A. J. Penty (1875–1937), would, in his later career, take a sympathetic interest in Mussolini and Oswald Mosley. If this seems sinister, the fact that Ruskin’s social thought could be linked with both socialism and fascism, and admired by figures as diverse as Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw, reminds us how unsystematic and miscellaneous it really was. Like all utopian schemers, his fundamental weakness was an inability to allow for change. Even James Clark Sherburne, who admiringly places Ruskin in the context of Romantic organic thought, acknowledged that this was a ‘static organicism’.13 Did Ruskin realise that the charmingly old-fashioned air of Abbeville in 1835 was a result of the exodus of its highly skilled, Protestant inhabitants after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes? Probably not, though independently minded young people might similarly have been expelled from, or rebelled against, Ruskinian communities, had they ever been established. It is Ruskin’s descriptive genius, rather than his powers of analysis, which makes his political writing interesting, and makes his account of Abbeville an alluring vision of what might, at least sometimes, and at least in part, constitute the good society. NO TES 1. For a previous account of Ruskin’s Ultra-Tory background, see Robert Hewison, ‘Notes on the Construction of The Stones of Venice’ in Robert Rhodes and Del Ivan Janik, eds., Studies in Ruskin: Essays in Honor of Van Akin Burd (Athens Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1982), 131–52. 2. The Christian Observer (February 1807), 139. 3. Henry Drummond, Letter to the Bishop of Winchester on Free Trade (London: Hatchard, 1846), 18. 128
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Politics and economics 4. Henry Drummond, letter to John Wilson Croker, 26 February 1825, here quoted from Hector Bolitho & Derek Peel, The Drummonds of Charing Cross (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), 137–8. 5. [David Robinson], ‘Political Economy. No. I’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 26 (September 1829), 510. See F. W. Fetter, ‘The Economic Articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Their Authors, 1817–53’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 7 (1960), 213–31. 6. Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge, 1994), 244–50. ‘Effective Demand’ is the aggregate amount which consumers are both willing and able to spend on goods and services. John Maynard Keynes distinguished this from ‘Notional Demand’ (the amount which consumers are willing but unable to spend) to attack Say’s Law (which posited an automatic equivalence between supply and demand) and support government intervention to reduce unemployment. 7. [David Robinson], ‘Political Economy. No. IV’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 27 (January 1830), 35. 8. [John Wilson], ‘Definitions of Wealth’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 39 (June 1836), 827, 824. 9. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 39 and 36. 10. [T. B. Macaulay], ‘Southey’s Colloquies on Society’, Edinburgh Review, 50 (January 1830), 533 and 540. 11. Morris’s preface to the Kelmscott Press edition of The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter of the Stones of Venice (London: Allen, 1892) here quoted from x.460. 12. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols, ed. R. H. Campbell and R. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), i.17. 13. James Clark Sherburne, John Ruskin, or the Ambiguities of Abundance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 11.
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9 JU D I TH S TOD D AR T
Nation and class
If historians have argued over the genesis of the concept of the nation, few have disputed that late-nineteenth-century political writing is the locus classicus of modern understandings of nationality. Well before such influential formulations as Ernest Renan’s ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ (1882), contemporary observers sensed that the history of their time would be framed through their probing of that question. The ‘contested nationality’ of territories within Europe was being ‘passionately debated by Continental writers’, The Athenæum observed in 1862; now was the time to reject ‘historical citations’ of old myths and traditional affiliations and define new principles of national organisation that looked ‘steadily in strength and hope upon the future’.1 Of all theories of social organisation, Lord Acton wrote in the same year, nationality is ‘the most recent in its appearance, the most attractive at the present time’, and, he predicted, ‘the richest in promise of future power’ to determine the course of political history.2 Never before had the world seen so many nations ‘in the act of forming’, the German-born political scientist Franz Lieber noted in 1868 as he began his influential work on the codification of nations in international law; from the purview of the future, ‘the present period will be called the National Period’.3 In the many accounts of the emergence of modern nationality, John Ruskin hardly figures. Recognised then and now as a central force in the shaping of modern aesthetics, a trenchant critic of political economy, and an innovative voice in debates about modern education, Ruskin generally falls outside of discussions of late-nineteenth-century nationalist theories. Scholars have attended to the ways in which Ruskin links the qualities of art to the rise and fall of national cultures and ties climate and landscape to modes of representation.4 Despite the fact that his most prolific span of explicitly political writing coincides with the period of intensifying discussions of what constitutes a nation, and the fact that many of his late works are either specifically situated within a nationally bound context – lectures on the ‘The Future of England’ (1869), The Art of England (1883), The Pleasures of 130
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England (1884) – or explicitly aim to establish a national mythology and common history – his writings on the Guild of St George, or the home library series, Bibliotheca Pastorum – Ruskin’s work is seldom approached through the frame of the National Period. So it comes as something of a surprise to find that Ruskin plays a central role in Edward Said’s classic re-evaluation of nationalist discourse in Culture and Imperialism (1993). As Said convincingly argues, most late-nineteenthcentury articulations of English (and European) nationality were firmly embedded in a logic of global expansion: coherent nationality required an Other against which to define and test its boundaries. National character was presented as both a justification for imperial power – superior nations had a duty to spread their culture – and a natural result of it: superior cultures emerged through a struggle for domination in diverse climates and against inferior competitors. Said focuses on Ruskin in part, he argues, because previous scholars had not acknowledged the nationalist overtones in his work. Analysing an extended citation from Ruskin’s 1870 inaugural lecture as Slade Professor of Fine Art, Said makes his rhetoric exemplary of the way that culture was deployed to underwrite political action. In a passage from that lecture that begins, ‘There is a destiny now possible to us – the highest ever set before a nation . . . still undegenerate in race’, and ends with a call for England to ‘guide the human arts, and gather the divine knowledge[,] of distant nations, transformed from savageness to manhood, and redeemed from despairing into peace’, Ruskin, Said contends, ‘connects his political ideas about British world domination to his aesthetic and moral philosophy’. The fact that this passage had received little critical attention, Said suggests, is hardly surprising, as the connection had gone unremarked in its original context: in the late nineteenth century, ‘high or official culture still managed to escape scrutiny for its role in shaping the imperial dynamic and was mysteriously exempted from analysis’.5 The connection between culture and imperialism no longer seems to go without saying, and there is much in this long passage that makes current readers squirm (e.g., Ruskin’s assertion that England must ‘found colonies as fast and as far as she is able . . . seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on’ (xx.42)). There are a couple of contextualising circumstances that make it hard to glide past this hortatory message, even for those who are used to Ruskin’s rhetorical style. One is mentioned by Said: the person who did call attention to this passage was Ruskin himself, and that is underscored by the Library Edition apparatus, which notes that Ruskin later described it as ‘“the most pregnant and essential” of all his teaching’ (xx.41, n.2). Though Ruskin does use that phrase in an 1884 Slade lecture, the full context for the remark is revealing. He is much more specific than the 131
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editors’ note would suggest: the earlier passage is ‘of all the pieces of teaching I have ever given from this chair [the Slade Professorship], the most pregnant and essential to whatever studies, whether of Art or Science, you may pursue, in this place or elsewhere, during your lives’ (xxxiii.422). In other words, it assumes a particular audience – Oxford students – and an application – to undergird their field-specific learning. So when Ruskin quotes much of the same passage from 1870 that Said includes in his study, it might seem something like self-congratulatory preaching to the same old choir. Who should be better prepared to take at face value Ruskin’s description of national destiny than an educated elite already well versed in imperialist rhetoric, many of whom were preparing for leadership roles in the colonies? In that place and that time, wouldn’t the nationalist conclusion of his 1870 inaugural lecture be the logical opening for his 1884 lecture series, The Pleasures of England? And yet the second set of circumstances, which Ruskin himself adduces as he introduces the earlier passage, challenges such a reading. The reason that he indulges in self-citation is not to revisit a triumph, but to revive a message that fell flat the first time around. ‘[For] the matter, no less than the tenor’ of his words, he recalls of the earlier occasion, ‘I was reproved by all my friends’, and those words were deemed ‘irrelevant and ill-judged’ (xxxiii.422). Perhaps the course of events in the intervening years will ‘have convinced some of my immediate hearers that the need for such an appeal was more pressing than they then imagined’ (xxxiii.423). Is Ruskin suggesting here that his first audience was not yet fully convinced of the importance of England’s mission? That in light of such events as the rise of Germany as a nationalist power, the First Anglo-Boer War, and the Second Anglo-Afghan War, this generation of Oxford students would be more aware of England’s importance on a world stage? Or perhaps that his friends had felt that stirring up nationalist sentiment in 1870 went well beyond the purview of the Slade Professor of Art, but that time had revealed the necessity of approaching aesthetics through a political landscape? Yet again, Ruskin undercuts these seemingly logical conjectures about why he repeats himself. For those who might read his vindication of his own words as a vindication of the manifest destiny of England, he quickly poses an exercise of the imagination, asking whether the imperial capital of London, ‘as it is now, be indeed the natural, and therefore the heaven-appointed outgrowth of the inhabitation, these 1800 years, of the valley of the Thames by a progressively instructed and disciplined people’ (xxxiii.423). In their assessment of this lecture, The Saturday Review noted Ruskin’s gesture. When he began to recite his earlier statements, the reviewer imagined that ‘surely his numerous and youthful disciples held their breath in 132
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enthusiastic expectation’ that they would finally, after all these years, be told what they could do in the national cause; instead, they encountered yet more Ruskinian ‘dark sayings’ and ‘stale jibes’ about the condition of England.6 Ruskin’s undercutting of the seemingly nationalist tenor of his own rhetoric was familiar to those who had heard his earlier lectures. Rather than receiving his 1870 diatribe as an ‘unmistakable’ statement that ‘England is to rule the world because it is the best’,7 contemporary listeners and readers had taken home a different message. Lord Acton, who had written about the importance of nationality as an historical force, took issue with Ruskin’s ‘quarrel with the inexorable march of events’: his ‘abjuration of the present’ state of national development seemed by implication to ‘banish art from the nations which manifest most capacity to tame the rude forces of nature, and to appropriate it to those who lazily keep in the rear of progress’.8 The Spectator reviewer was affronted by the ‘earnestness with which [Ruskin] assails what he thinks the littleness and the badness of our time’. Ruskin cast doubt on exactly those things that constituted England’s national power: he would have the nation ‘sacrifice . . . her manufacturing supremacy’ in favour of pretty landscape, and he challenged British citizens’ ‘natures of manly strength’ by suggesting they should give up their fairly won wealth in a socialist scheme that amounted to little more than ‘acceptance of national poverty’.9 These were serious challenges at a moment when, as an article in the same issue of The Spectator noted, Germany’s success in the beginning of the FrancoPrussian campaign showed the importance of national unity and the persuasive force of national wealth and industrialisation. The Saturday Review lamented the poor state of the national militia in the face of a possible German or French challenge, but felt the need in the same issue to dismiss Ruskin’s ‘denunciation of the age’ in his 1870 Slade lecture: contrary to Ruskin’s dismal picture, ‘the population is better clothed, better housed, and better fed than it has been in any former period of national history’.10 Like Said, this audience definitely construed Ruskin as centrally engaged in the conversation about nationality as it played out on a global stage. But what they heard was neither affirming of nor in line with a recognised discourse of Englishness (or that even more problematic concept, Britishness). The point of singling out these moments of reading and rereading – as well as of writing and rewriting – is not to exculpate Ruskin. Rather, it is to bring out two issues in trying to assess Ruskin’s place in thinking about nation. First, Ruskin saw himself as very much a part of what his contemporary had labelled the ‘National Period’. Restaging his own formulations, Ruskin deliberately constructs a thread through his writings from 1870 to 133
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the mid 1880s that would speak to the question of what is a nation. His version of nationality is both recognisably of his time – so that an abstracted passage can serve as exemplary of the thinking of late-century England – and stubbornly at odds with it, in ways that made and continue to make his writing on the subject difficult reading. Extracting the essence of Ruskin’s ideas, which he so clearly invites his readers to do, often masks the fact that he delighted in toying with unspoken assumptions (‘whomsoever I venture to address’, he wrote in 1866, ‘I take for the time, his creed as I find it; and endeavour to push it into such vital fruit as it seems capable of’ (xviii.393)). And yet it would be too easy to say that Ruskin is simply a Swiftian satirist, invoking jingoistic nationalism for the sake of critique. As we will see in a moment, he took seriously the project of nation building, though he challenged the progressivist foundations of most narratives of British domination. He had decided opinions on whether vital nation states were the product of cumulative tradition or intentional construction, a difference hotly debated throughout the various European revolutions of the nineteenth century. But what Ruskin’s recitation of his own speech emphasises is not only that he was engaged in this debate: it highlights the ineffectiveness of his nationalist vision. And this emphasis on failure is also integral to his thinking about nation. If in 1870 he claimed that a healthy state should be deliberately formed or ‘crystallized’ according to planned principles, rather than simply ‘clotted and coagulated’ by the force of experience (xx.113), he soon began to chart how even the most clearly defined structures fracture under the pressure of daily life. On the one hand, he adhered to what one critic has called ‘aesthetic statism’,11 a view of the nation as an imaginative construction that organises its subjects according to a prescriptive ideal. Speculating about the destiny of England and the role of the English race in the midst of a Slade Art lecture made sense, from this perspective, because national bodies were inherently aesthetic: they were ideal abstractions operating at a macro level, theoretically powerful precisely because they could be construed apart from individual experience. On the other hand, he narrated at some length throughout the 1870s and 1880s an unruly subjectivity that escaped coherent constructions. Ruskin’s interest in the aesthetic rarely remained at the level of abstraction: as one modern architect puts it, for Ruskin, ‘art is not an appearance but an act’, and he explored an ‘aesthetics that is lived in the present’.12 Many of the same lectures and essays that lay out Ruskin’s ideals of the nation include some of his most memorable accounts of the vagaries of individual action, the very kind of divagations his ideals were meant to constrain. These contradictory documents provide a compelling account of the tensions between and within nineteenth-century theories of the nation 134
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state. As Ruskin’s abstractions become cluttered with the stuff of ordinary experience, they paradoxically provide a clearer indication of his conclusions on contemporary questions. As Ruskin began his tenure of the Slade Lectureship in 1870, there was little question what kind of nation-state seemed to be triumphant: as Lord Acton put it, in the same article in which he discussed Ruskin’s inaugural lecture, ‘the great characteristic feature of the Prussian State is its artificial formation, which is the exact contradictory of historical continuity’.13 Along with many of his contemporaries, Ruskin made no secret of his attraction to this model of social life. Already in the 1860s, as Prussia asserted its territorial claims against Denmark and Austria, Ruskin had criticised England’s established Burkean version of the nation rooted in the custom and coherence of domesticity, which produced a national policy based not on principles but on sentimental ‘instincts’ that amounted to little more than the determination that ‘[we] will take care of our own families and our own pockets’ (xviii.549). Instead, Ruskin advocated a model of home rule derived from classical sources and played out in German nationalism: ‘a state of disciplined citizenship, in which the household . . . is . . . subjected always in thought and act to the deeper duty rendered to the larger home of the State’ (xix.202). He admired the enforced unity at ‘the root of modern German power’ (xxvii.47), and saw its military model of obedience as the necessary foundation for an empire which ‘in peace, is entirely happy . . . and, in war, irresistible’ (xxviii.68). The German nation-state aligned with contemporary European theories of nationality that emphasised the flattening of the local in the forging of newly formed stories of modern communal life. Such portable theories of ‘imagined community’ were easily mobilised in the cause of imperialist expansionism.14 Ruskin’s attraction to these theories is perhaps most apparent in his model for the Guild of St George, the ideal community he sketched out in the 1870s and 1880s. This utopian community would be made of citizens who ‘act together in effective and constant unison’ in their unwavering pursuit of ‘the health, wealth, and long life of the British nation’ (xxviii.638). The ideas underpinning the Guild began to take shape in Ruskin’s series of public letters, Fors Clavigera (1871–84), and they were situated from the outset within the debates about the nature of nationality. These letters start from the question of the nation-state, first as it relates to the ‘the great national quarrel’ of the Franco-Prussian War, and then more generally on the geopolitical grand stage: by the second paragraph of the opening letter, Ruskin invokes recent nationalist and colonial disputes in Russia, America, India, China, Japan, New Zealand, and southern Africa (xxvii.12). His conception of the Guild follows a similar trajectory: initially envisioned in Fors as a 135
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counter to the republican principles of the Paris Commune, the Guild, he claims in his 1881 ‘Master’s Report’, would soon ‘extend its operations over the continent of Europe, and number its members, ultimately, by the myriads’ (xxx.32). Though dedicated to cultivating plots of land, these citizens – or companions, in the parlance of the Guild – would have no established local ties; rather they would work ‘barren and neglected districts’ (xxx.45) bought by or given to the Guild, building new communities there around shared principles and a common loyalty to the Guild’s Master. These are the colonies which Ruskin proposes that a newly configured nation should found ‘as fast and as far as she is able’ (xx.42) both within and outside her geographical borders. If ‘the weight of national evil increases upon us daily’ (xx.44) through an unthinking participation in the forces of industrial capitalism, Ruskin exhorts his contemporaries to re-imagine communities literally from the ground up. Occupying the spaces rejected or neglected by existing political and social practices, the Guild’s companions would be ‘polluted by no unholy clouds’ (xx.43) and could construe the terms of their allegiance to a communal ideal figured apart from present-day England. With its own currency, selected canonical library, and museums displaying a common iconography, the Guild would be a pattern imagined community. Schooled in this shared repository, the companions would be united ‘in common feeling, rather than in common interests, for the preservation of national happiness and the refinement of national manners’ (xxx.58). Ruskin’s insistence on feeling rather than interests as the essence of national community calls attention to his view of the nationstate as an inherently aesthetic construct with an affective appeal. At the same time, the contrast deliberately draws his Guild into dialogue with an alternate discourse of imagined community current in the 1870s and 1880s: the International Working Men’s Association. The principles of the International derived from Marx’s contention that nationality was simply bourgeois ideology dressed up as if it were a common interest; only a transnational association of workers united by their true economic interests could disrupt the false community that kept them from recognising their needs. Ruskin’s critique of Classical Political Economy in the 1860s had also called attention to the ways that capitalist ideology operated through ‘resolutely dishonest, wilful, and malicious sophisms, arranged so as to mask, to the last moment, the real laws of economy’ (xvii.265) as they affected the condition of labourers. He shared the International’s suspicion of nationality as it functioned in practice: a ‘commercial body of European gentlemen’ had ‘laid down a code of economical science’ that masqueraded as national interest, persuading 136
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‘the populace of Europe’ that they should ‘supply soldiers, or submit to taxes’ in the name of nations in which they were ‘compelled to live in a state of costly armament of reciprocal defiance’ (xix.186–7). In 1868 he questioned whether political economy amounted to more than ‘the operation of the laws of hostility under certain conditions of persuasion in the minds of the two classes’, and spoke out in support of combinations that could be ‘a safeguard to workmen’ against its obfuscations (xvii. 537). So when Ruskin started to rail in an early letter of Fors about the ‘Real war in Europe’ between ‘the Capitalists . . . and the workman, such as these have made him’ (xxvii.127; original emphasis), and began to sketch out an alternative social formation, some readers might have anticipated support for an association constructed around common interest rather than national affiliation. While he mentions the International at several points in Fors Clavigera, Ruskin’s position in relation to it is made clear in the series’ subtitle: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. To unite around class interests, he argued in Fors and elsewhere, would be to perpetuate rather than revolutionise the logic of capitalism; it would amount to ‘a duplicate power of political economy’ that instead of doing away with ‘laissez faire’ would re-inscribe it as ‘laissez refaire’ (xxvii.116; original emphasis). Not only would it replicate class division; it would mirror the universalist reach of an economic system that was regarded as deriving from ‘natural laws’ rather than practices ‘founded on the particular habits of men at any given time’ (xvii.537). Ruskin insisted throughout his work that rank was a natural social phenomenon – there would always be masters and followers, and his Guild was divided between leaders and those who operated without ‘much independent action of any kind’ (xxviii.545) – but he consistently described class as an historical by-product of industrial capitalism. There might be, he argued, ‘unconquerable differences in the clay of the human creature’, but the ‘enormous difference in bodily and mental capacity’ between classes ‘has been mainly brought about by difference in occupation, and by direct maltreatment’; given equal conditions, ‘a beautiful type of face and form, and a high intelligence, would become all but universal, in a climate like this of England’ (xvii.405–6). To create a transnational association of working men would be to risk obscuring the specific material conditions through which class was produced, and thus blunting the force of their critique. Whereas the International sought to sidestep nationality, Ruskin exploited nationality precisely because it could not easily be extracted from the effects of particular environments and lived communities. ‘Communists of the old school’, he claimed, ascribed to principles of affiliation that worked against the terms of modern-day capitalism: they did not recognise artificial 137
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divisions between classes but acknowledged their situatedness in an environment in which the ‘poverty’ and ‘prosperity of their neighbours is, in the end, their own also’ (xvii.122, 126). Companions in his Guild would understand that their fates were mutually constrained within a community, not under ‘the command of private will’ (xxviii.649). Rather than starting from the terms of the modern ‘civilized nation’ that ‘consists broadly of mob, money-collecting machine, and capitalist’ (xxviii.640), Ruskin re-scripts the language of class in his ideal nationstate. Instead of marking each group’s relations to the means of production, he pinpoints their relative contribution to the welfare of ‘the entire body of the British nation’ (xxviii.642). The ‘highest class’ – the ‘Companions Servant’ – ‘devote their main energy to the work of the Company’; the ‘middle class’ – the ‘Companions Militant’ – perform manual labour or ‘any work . . . for the fulfilment of the Society’s functions’; the ‘lowest order’ – the ‘Companions Consular’ – are those who are primarily ‘occupied in their own affairs’, but tithe their income to further the aims of the whole (xxviii.539). In this social peripeteia Ruskin re-imagines a labour theory of value in which worth is measured by the amount of work expended towards a common goal. But it is through his designation for the broad middle class that Ruskin signals the radical nature of his message. Here the martial language has a particular target: Herbert Spencer’s justification of British liberal capitalism, published the same year as this passage. In Spencer’s influential evolutionary sociology, nations are divided into two broad classifications: militant and industrial. Militant societies, the lowest form of social organisation, are characterised by loyalty to an abstract ideal: their members are driven by ‘the belief’ that they ‘exist for the benefit of the whole and not the whole for the benefit of its members’.15 From this ‘primitive condition’ nations evolve ‘through stages of increasing freedom like our own, in which all who work and employ, buy and sell, are entirely independent; and in which there is an unchecked power of forming unions that rule themselves on democratic principles’, including ‘combinations of workmen and counter-combinations of employers’.16 In Ruskin’s view, if liberal economists argued that selfinterest and competition were natural instincts, then ‘civilized’ societies should logically be those capable of quelling primitive instincts and furthering abstract benefits. In the 1860s Ruskin had warned that those who applied developmental biology to the study of political formations should think carefully about the potential implications of importing the notion of ‘advancement’ from one domain to another. Chronological progression could just as easily result in degeneration as progress, a point that would become increasingly popular in the 1870s and 1880s. ‘The mid-age and old 138
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age of nations is not like the mid-age or old age of noble women’, Ruskin quipped; ‘national decrepitude must be criminal’ (xix.29). Only in their militant youth, united under the ‘grand instinct of manly discipline’, could nations ‘manifest themselves as a pure and beautiful animal race, with intense energy and imagination’ (xix.391). Ruskin was not alone in questioning the application of evolutionary schema to the organisation of national life. One unlikely ally was Thomas Henry Huxley – a figure with whom Ruskin most often found himself at odds – who spoke out in 1870 against what he called the craze for ‘political ethnology’: the sorting of national types according to supposedly natural characteristics. To assert ‘that any quality needful for this, that, or the other form of political organization is present in the one and absent in the other’, Huxley argued, was a ‘statement . . . as baseless in natural science as it is mischievous in politics’.17 British histories from the mid nineteenth century attempted to sort out the predominance of Teutonic, Roman, and Celtic traits in national culture. So, Oxford Regius Professor of History William Stubbs set out to demonstrate in his Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development (1874–8) that ‘the freedom of modern Europe is based not on the freedom of Greece or Rome, but on the ancient freedom of the Teutonic nations, civilised, organised, and reduced to system’, a view largely shared by his successor to that post in 1884, Edward Freeman.18 Ruskin joked about such views in his 1884 Slade lectures, The Pleasures of England, noting the ‘fervour’ of their ‘self-gratulatory ecstasy . . . in praise of the British constitution’ (xxx.437–8). Such ‘modern ideas of Development imply that you must all turn out what you are to be . . . by the inevitable operation of your anterior affinities’, a view Ruskin gently mocks as he begins to construct his own tangled history of Great Britain’s origins, proliferating lists of character traits and types of the ‘races of England’ (xxxiii.425). In a related section of Valle Crucis, one of the books intended for his proposed history series for young readers, ‘Our Fathers Have Told Us’, Ruskin prefaces his account of the ‘British Period’ of national history with a two-page explanation of the constructed nature of his enterprise. In order to ensure that his narrative is ‘clearly limited for successive examination’ of his ‘younger readers’, ‘I must’, he declares, ‘introduce reference not to times only, but to countries, and to distinctions of race’, which will ‘force us to break up that chronology into pieces that sometimes overlap one another, and sometimes leave interstices between one another’ (xxxiii.206). As he launches into describing ‘a broad first period of “British” history’, he remarks on ‘the impossibility of . . . merely chronological limits’ for 139
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classifying racial and national types, when, for example, the ‘Saxon invasion terminates the flow of none, though it presents a new condition of embankment, and new fields for irrigation to all’ (xxxiii.207; original emphasis). Acknowledging some confusion, he imagines that ‘the reader will find it nevertheless convenient to arrange the studies . . . of his own country’ according to neatly ‘successive heads, and spaces of time’, which Ruskin then proceeds to do. Spaces of time are arranged for the convenience of the printed physical space; when pages are tight, he cuts out a few hundred years and ‘leave[s] the reader to gather what he can find from other sources’ (xxxiii.217; original emphasis). Where he does draw a causal link between present and past history, it is not to current advantage: while other historians exalted the might of the British navy, Ruskin points to recent naval accidents as a product of the ‘sorrowful remnant of . . . the ancestral habit’ of incompetent navigation skills, while any triumphs ‘we owe entirely to the French, Dutch, and Germans’ who settled in England (xxxiii.217, original emphasis). While the Library Edition editors note that Ruskin never completed the planned chapters in Valle Crucis on the Saxon and Norman periods (xxxiii.209, n.1), it seems he makes much of his point in this initial survey. No matter its subject, national history is always a matter of cutting and pasting, sorting and categorising, not an objective tracking of the progress of civilisation. For Ruskin, that makes narrating history that much more important. To tell the story of a nation is deliberately to shape a story to which its citizens can become attached. For citizens are not merely the result of anterior affinities, as proponents of ethnic nationalism would have it, but, in the language of civic nationalism, more like ‘a plastic vase’ to be shaped and moulded by common narratives (xxxiii.425). Ruskin’s argument is not so different from the one articulated a few years earlier by another prominent critic of political ethnologies, Ernest Renan, who asserted that ‘ethnographic politics is no very stable thing’. The only way to build a strong nation, he maintained, was to replace old affinities with new stories, a practice he sums up in one of his most frequently quoted lines: ‘It is good for everyone to know how to forget’.19 And yet, as much as Ruskin remained committed to a version of imagined nationality, Valle Crucis helps to illustrate both its conceptual underpinnings and its practical weaknesses. This purportedly sweeping history of Christendom takes off from a most unlikely reference: ‘Lucy Gray’, ‘the most finished of the poems which Wordsworth dedicated to the affections’, Ruskin explains (xxxiii.205). If this reference seems at first to support the importance of communal attachments around particular stories – and perhaps of the role that national poet laureates might play in creating them – Ruskin reminds his readers twice of the subtitle of Wordsworth’s poem: 140
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Solitude. Why begin a communal history with solitude? Though Ruskin explains that tracking modern attitudes towards monastic solitude will help him reveal the unruly habits of the ‘English mind’ (xxxiii.206), the force of his opening example resists his aim. The relation of the poem’s story to Ruskin’s larger national themes is curious: Lucy Gray, that model of unquestioning obedience to authority, wanders off in a snowstorm and dies, only to become a ghost child who ‘sings a solitary song’ (l.63). Lucy might, if anything, seem a cautionary tale either of the dangers of a too-quick obedience, or of the ineffectiveness of cultural authority to contain the inattentive child ‘who trips along | And never looks behind’ (ll.61–2). As much as Ruskin’s late work expounds a coherent vision of nationality, it repeatedly invokes this figure of the detached, wayward citizen who will not properly exemplify the story Ruskin wants to tell. One of the most extended examples is in his writing about the Guild of St George. Many critics have pointed to the failures of Ruskin’s model community, but none so consistently as Ruskin himself. Even as he outlines his ideals, he narrates the individual squabbles that defeat them in practice, and his intermittent ‘Master’s Reports’ of the Guild, published in periodicals and as separate pamphlets, include as much about what does not work as what does. Indeed, so much did this become a part of these discussions that in the report for 1881 he calls attention to the fact that he will not ‘describe accidental hindrances – lament my own inefficiency – or catalogue other causes of disappointment’ (xxx.32), a determination he breaks in the subsequent paragraph. Most often the solitary, inattentive citizen is Ruskin himself. In Fors Clavigera, even as he urges his readers to pull together the threads of his national narrative in the interest of forgetting the capitalist worldview with which they are surrounded, he foregrounds his own inability to attend to the task at hand. ‘I forget’ is a persistent refrain in the various letters, most often either in relation to a story he is telling (e.g., ‘I forget what becomes of the mother’ (xxix: 432)), or a promise he has made to expound a particular issue, or his own body of texts (‘I have told it you before indeed, but I forget where’ (xxvii.88)). After chastising his readers about their inattention to national history, as he tries to remember the details of a battle, he admits, ‘I forget, myself, now’ (xxvii.102). What distracts Ruskin are the details of everyday life: newspaper articles, accidental meetings, dinner parties, illnesses, fatigue. Forgetting may be the precondition for the citizen’s adherence to a new abstract nation, but it may be at the same time the human tendency that prevents attachment to an abstract ideal. As Ruskin recognises in his constructed national histories, learning a consistent story that will hold up to ‘successive examination’ requires a deliberate focus which he himself rarely displays. What Ruskin 141
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explores in the 1870s and 1880s is what twenty-first-century theorists of nation-states have called ‘everyday nationhood’, a corrective to the ideas of constructed nationalism: he shows by example the way in which ‘a singular focus on the nation’s contents fails to take into account the everyday context in which those contents are embedded’.20 Ruskin is perhaps the sharpest critic of his own deployment of nationality as a corrective to the problems of modern social formations. Adherence to a nation involves iterative affective and cognitive acts, a lived attention in the present of which the modern citizen may no longer be capable. Nationality might well be the wave of the future, as his contemporaries claimed, but Ruskin hints that it might have emerged too late. NO TES 1. Rev. of The Contested Nationality: Russia and Poland by V. de Porochine The Athenæum (13 September 1862), 337. 2. Lord Acton, ‘Nationality’, The Home and Foreign Review, 1 (July 1862), 1–25 (4). 3. Francis Lieber, Fragments of Political Science on Nationalism and Internationalism (New York: Scribners, 1868), 6, 7. 4. See e.g., Lynne Walhout Hinojosa, The Renaissance, English Cultural Nationalism, and Modernism, 1860–1920 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 46–52; Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Ruskin and the Politics of Viewing: Constructing National Subjects’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 18 (1994), 125–46. 5. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 104, 107. The original passage from Ruskin appears in The Lectures on Art, xx.41–3. 6. ‘Professor Ruskin’s Pleasures of Learning’, The Saturday Review (25 October 1884), 530. 7. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 104. 8. Lord Acton, ‘Contemporary Literature’, North British Review, 53 (1870), 230–315 (301, 302). 9. ‘Mr Ruskin’s Philosophy of Art [First Notice]’, The Spectator (6 August 1870), 951–3 (951, 953). 10. ‘Professor Ruskin’, The Saturday Review, 30 July 1870, 145. 11. David Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2. 12. Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design (V2_Publishing, 2012), 229, 308. 13. Lord Acton, ‘Contemporary Literature’, 290. 14. See especially Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) ch. 6; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 4. 15. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, 3 vols (1876; 2nd ed. London: Williams and Norgate, 1877), i.583. 16. Ibid., 588. 142
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Nation and class 17. Thomas Huxley, talk transcribed in ‘Professor Huxley on Political Ethnology’, Pall Mall Gazette (10 January 1870), 8–9 (9). 18. Stubbs, cited in Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 93. 19. Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, translated in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 49. 20. Jon E. Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, ‘Everyday Nationhood’, Ethnicities, 8 (2008), 536–63 (557).
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10 F R A N C I S O’ G O R M AN
Religion
At one level, Ruskin’s religious life is a history of change. In the plainest of doctrinal terms, he began as an Evangelical Protestant, at home in the nonconformist chapels of London. He certainly did not end there. At another level, some of the most profound of Ruskin’s theistic beliefs remained the topics of consideration throughout his life, including during the tumult of the 1860s and the darkest moments when he became, as he said in 1862, ‘a Pagan’ (Norton, 74). Ruskin is not an example of a Victorian who, in some decisive or permanent way, suffers a loss of faith. He is a man who suffers because of his faith and he suffers from a difficulty in reconciling deeply held but tormented convictions with a world that increasingly did not seem to fit them. Ruskin wrote about, and out of, what he believed. To my mind, he makes little sense without an understanding of his religious commitments – though he found it hard to understand them himself. The history of Ruskin’s belief – insofar as it is ever possible to write about a human being’s relationship with, and understanding of, God – is at the troubled heart of his authorship, the intellectual source of his sorrows, and the toughest issue in what he understood he had done with his life. The first thing to realise about Ruskin as a young Evangelical Protestant is that he believed himself called to use his critical gifts in the service of God. The second is that he suffered gravely when he began to perceive that his work was in vain. The governance of the world under divine law was the starting place of Ruskin’s Christianity. That was so thoroughly consistent with nineteenth-century Christian conviction generally that a version of it was assumed by non-Christians. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, briefly Ruskin’s friend in the mid 1860s, did not question the existence of purpose, or telos, in the ordering of the world even though he was scornful of organised Christianity and hazily non-committal about spiritual powers generally. ‘That chance is the ruler of the world’, Swinburne said mildly, ‘I should be sorry to believe and reluctant to affirm’.1 John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) assumed, differently, that the establishment of freethinking 144
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and rational debate would result in a coherent and content society, that the One really did make sense in relation to the Many. His ideas were anchored in an assumption of design. Ruskin’s designer, of course, was God. He taught through the revelation of the scriptures and the revelation of the world He had made. God ascribed to mountains as He ascribed to men distinct purposes; He gave to all created things individual responsibilities. ‘God appoints to every one of his creatures a separate mission’, Ruskin said in Modern Painters I: ‘and if they discharge it honourably, if they quit themselves like men and faithfully follow that light which is in them . . . there will assuredly come of it such burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall shine before men, and be of service constant and holy’ (iii.173). Whatever an individual’s role, from sweeping floors to ruling a nation, the work could be completed well or badly. Such labour could be undertaken as a sacred duty or ignored as an act of defiance. To God must all finally answer. And for work well done, Ruskin told himself as a young author, there was certain reward. Faithfulness to divine instruction, to the ways in which God communicated purpose, was life’s obligation. Fidelity to the words of scripture, which Ruskin read over and again with his mother as a young boy, was joined in his early writing with reverent respect for the world that God had fashioned for human instruction, support, and delight. To explain, like a Biblical exegete, an artist’s worshipful attention not only to the literal forms of the natural world but also to divine teaching through nature was Ruskin’s duty in the first half of his authorial life. A truthful artist, truthful to form and intention, laboured in the service of God, and so did the critic who discerned, explained, and praised that artist’s achievement. Modern Painters admired the best interpreters of God’s nature. Looking back in 1860 to the seventeen years of that project, Ruskin observed that, while his opinions had grown and shifted, the whole of the five books had been coherent. There is ‘no variation, from its first syllable to its last’, he asserted: ‘It declares the perfectness and eternal beauty of the work of God; and tests all work of man by concurrence with, or subjection to that’ (vii.9). Turner was supremely the faithful modern interpreter and not merely the copier of nature. He was, in turn, a noble Christian painter in a line of descent from the (generally Italian) masters of the Age of Faith. The reverent interpretation of nature was visible for Ruskin in the exuberant but tenacious fidelity of the Gothic architectures of France and northern Italy. The Age of Faith had built the Gothic domestic buildings of Venice and the great churches of France – while, from the thirteenth century onwards, the English had shamefully built ‘like frogs and mice’ (viii.136). In The Seven Lamps, Ruskin admired the two ‘Intellectual Lamps of Architecture: the one 145
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consisting in a just and humble veneration for the works of God upon the earth, and the other in an understanding of the dominion over those works which has been vested in man’ (viii.102). And as it was possible to be truthful in building, so it was possible to lie. Deception might be found, plainly, in any attempt to make one material look like another (marble like drapery) or in deceit or distraction in structures themselves. The filling-up of Gothic windows with elaborate tracery, for the sake of the tracery not the window, struck Ruskin in 1849 as the first betrayal of the Gothic’s structural and moral clarity: veritably the first ‘cause of the fall of Gothic architecture throughout Europe’ (viii.87). Once respect for veracity had been compromised, the spirit of architecture could not recover. In the infidelity of the Renaissance, The Stones of Venice found the moral cause of the Sea City’s decline. Renaissance builders had turned further and further from reverence for God’s purposes. They had left truthfulness of form and meaning behind, constructing, in their final ‘degradation’, buildings that were clumsy, impious, ridiculous, monstrous, and foul (see xi.397). The architects had ceased to be interpreters of God’s world and chosen to display, at their worst, the disgraceful fantasies of sinful imaginations. Contained in the fall of Venice was, admonishingly, the stark outlines of what might happen to contemporary England if she too forgot that the purpose of humanity was to learn God’s will not to follow man’s. Ruskin, the Evangelical Protestant, celebrated the pre-Reformation Catholic architecture of Gothic Venice. Here was potentially a conflict. But Ruskin insisted more on domestic buildings than ecclesiastical. And where he considered the Basilica di San Marco, he made it welcome to a ‘Protestant Beholder’ (x.27) because it was, in its teaching as a whole, like ‘a great Book of Common Prayer’ – a foundational text of the reformed faith. In the mosaics of the Basilica’s golden walls, Ruskin the scripture reader found also the ‘illuminations’ of a great Bible, the first book of God’s revelation. In those illuminations ‘the common people of the time were taught their Scripture history’, Ruskin said. ‘They had no other Bible’, he added (x.129). The Byzantine achievement of San Marco was, in this deft manoeuvre, transformed into an Evangelical one, welcomed in the dissenting chapels of Camberwell. The Basilica was the soundest Bible teaching. But the Protestant Ruskin in the 1850s was struck by problems that would grow in magnitude. If the world had been ordered by God, it was not always clear what His will could be. The earth under divine governance contained both the mysterious and the malign. In Seven Lamps, Ruskin mused on the role of shadows in architecture, establishing a connection, characteristically, between physical form and moral meaning. Architecture, he observed, ‘should express a kind of human sympathy, by a measure of darkness as 146
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great as there is in human life’ (viii.116). But how much darkness was there? And, beyond that, what was the use of such darkness, or the role of pain, frustration, failure, and ignorance in a world in the care of God? In ‘The Mountain Gloom’ in Modern Painters IV, Ruskin faced a sharp version of this problem as he endeavoured to understand why, at once, God had created the Alps – a form of sublimity through which humanity might grasp the meaning of grandeur – yet left the most sickly of people to live among them. There was something awry, something that blocked God’s purposes with pain. It was hard, Ruskin went on in his meditation on the meaning of suffering, to understand the ‘mystery of the punishment of sin’. But it was harder still to ‘unravel the mystery of the punishment of NO sin’. Can a man, he continued: entirely account for all that happens to a cab-horse? Has he ever looked fairly at the fate of one of those beasts as it is dying, – measured the work it has done, and the reward it has got, – put his hand upon the bloody wounds through which its bones are piercing, and so looked up to Heaven with an entire understanding of Heaven’s ways about the horse? (vi.415)
How could the divine scheme admit of this real and emblematic punishment of innocence? And behind the cab-horse, considering what work had been done and what reward had been received, was Ruskin himself. In Modern Painters IV, Ruskin articulated forces that contested the divine plan. He began to think of a mysterious and inexplicable ‘correspondent darkness’ (vi.416), an antagonist to God’s design that was bafflingly part of the divine order too. In Venice in the early 1850s, Ruskin had pondered the testimony not of the Alps but of Venice herself, supreme among the works of men. Supreme, yet ignored. Venice had proposed a lesson of fidelity that had been scorned. The fact that the Sea City had not been understood, built then destroyed, constituted one of the ‘heaviest mysteries of this strange world’, one of the conundrums ‘which mark its curse the most’ (x.178). And in Ruskin’s own failure, as he perceived it, to protect Venice, to explain her teaching in The Stones, was dismaying evidence of the same curse at work in his own life. Where was the plain reward for a duty done, a divine commission answered? Ruskin’s troubles were intensified by his discovery, after Turner’s death in December 1851, of the painter’s un-exhibited sketches and drawings. Looking through the Turner Bequest had prompted, Ruskin told Lady Trevelyan, ‘many new and difficult questions’ (Reflections, 141). The questions were only new, however, insofar that they related to a hitherto unknown Turner. It seemed that the man who was at once an interpreter of God’s nature was also capable of going badly astray. Though an artist whom 147
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Ruskin had earnestly tried to place in the greatest of religious traditions, a painter of intense fidelity and moral understanding, Turner was also – it now was revealed – capable of the slovenly, idle, and inaccurate. What malignity in the world could have permitted that? Turner’s mind had been ‘encumbered’, Ruskin told his father in 1858, ‘with sensuality – suspicion – pride – vain regrets – hopelessness – languor – and all kinds of darkness and oppression of heart’ (Hayman, 52). It is sometimes said that the problem with the Turner Bequest was the collection of erotic drawings Ruskin discovered among the enormous collection of other material. But that is to miss the point. What was intensified for Ruskin in the thousands of Turner drawings was an ongoing theological problem: here was evidence of the apparent death of Turner’s faith, of truthfulness, and of hope, and thus more evidence of impediment in the work of visionary men.2 Modern Painters, to this extent, had been predicated on a mistake, an overenthusiasm. What good had Modern Painters done if Turner, as Ruskin declared in 1860, had himself died ‘without hope’ (vii.421), forgotten and unadmired? But the revelations of the Bequest made him wonder, before that, if he had misunderstood Turner, ‘the greatest man of our England’ (vii.408), in any case. In 1858, Ruskin’s theological life experienced a crucial doctrinal change. He relinquished, after much trouble, the Evangelical tenets of his youth – the narrow sense of what was acceptable human behaviour, the constricted conception of what made for a good and useful life. Ruskin narrated his final rejection in Praeterita as a moment of ‘unconversion’ in Turin in the late summer of 1858. But the insufficiency of his inherited teaching had long been a trouble. ‘I had been educated in the doctrines of a narrow sect’, Ruskin said, looking back from 1871, in a preface to a re-issue of many of his earlier works. That education had, he now perceived, damaged his writing. And so, from any re-issue, Ruskin confessed, ‘I shall omit much’ (xviii.31). Those four words poignantly captured Ruskin’s disappointment in his purposes, revealing that he thought the best and most faithful efforts of his youth to answer to a call of God had been in part misdirected. And with the loss of Evangelical faith came a deepening, darkening sense that the troubles of a God-guided world were too baffling to comprehend. Ruskin in the early 1860s was, theologically, a different man. Having earnestly believed that he was discharging a divine appointment, he now suffered the lowest of spirits, perplexed by what God’s intentions were. ‘I do what I can’, he said to Lady Trevelyan in early 1860, ‘and feel more and more inclined to cease talking’ (Reflections, 140). He seemed ready to give writing up altogether. Ruskin felt, he said to Charles Eliot Norton in February 1861, only ‘[intense] scorn of all I had hitherto done or thought’ (Norton, 61). The 148
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desolation of his writing in public at this point could be arresting. In Modern Painters V, for instance, Ruskin reflected on the view of a Scottish clergyman that he had read, proclaiming a Highland scene as certain evidence of the goodness of God. But Ruskin remembered a different scene, barren of meaning and love. He recalled sitting by a small pool in which the water circles slowly, like black oil; a little butterfly lies on its back, its wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly quivering; a fish rises, and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I can just see over a knoll, the green and damp turf roofs of four or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few ill-set stepping-stones, with here and there a flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight, and at the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog – a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving. I know them, and I know the dog’s ribs also, which are nearly as bare as the dead ewe’s; and the child’s wasted shoulders, cutting his old tartan jacket through, so sharp are they. (vii.270)
This is helpless despondency, a bleak sense of the vacancy and indifference of an empty world. Part of the problem was Ruskin’s inability to accept any longer the hope of immortality. He had both given up his narrow Evangelical doctrines and lost his faith in the promise of perpetuity. Without a secure notion of the continuing spiritual life, Ruskin found that God’s care and His plan made even less sense. Without immortality, humanity could be conceived only materially. Life was easy to imagine as morally irrelevant since human beings could receive neither reward nor punishment whatever they accomplished. Where Ruskin had once thought there was mystery in God’s purposes, he now discerned betrayal. It was a ‘fearful discovery’, he told Norton in August 1861, ‘to find how God has allowed all who have variously sought him in the most earnest way to be blinded’. ‘I looked’, he added, ‘for another world – and find there is only this’ (Norton, 66). Human suffering and stupidity were, in turn, more intensely felt when Ruskin understood that, if God had called men and women to their work, He offered them hope neither of blessing for devotion nor promise of chastisement for error, laziness, and sin. The ‘folly and horror of humanity enlarge to my eyes daily’, Ruskin said to Norton in March 1863 (Norton, 77). The querulous and sometimes intolerant public voice of the 1860s derives in part from this apprehension of unguided humanity. But Ruskin did not readily present his private gloom in public. Indeed, as a lecturer and writer in the shadowy years of the early 1860s, he inventively probed new ways of speaking about moral meanings and fresh sources of 149
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moral authority. In ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, for instance, Ruskin tried imaginatively to recuperate the wise continuance of the dead.3 If there was no hope of life beyond the tomb then at least a man or woman might leave good work that endured in the memories of those who followed. A use, a reason, for writing was faintly recovered. We turn to the ‘great concourse of the Dead’, Ruskin declared in Manchester, ‘not merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them what is Just’ (xviii.80). That was quite different from the private man who had, only a few years earlier, told Norton: ‘What message I have given is all wrong: has to be all re-said – in another way, and is – so said – almost too terrible to be serviceable’ (Norton, 66). Trying out in public new foundations of authority and hope in the 1860s, Ruskin endeavoured, despite his private grief, to find things of service to relate. Looking to the testimony of good books in the mid 1860s, Ruskin thought about radically different belief systems too. He was busy, he told Norton in August 1864, with the faiths of ancient Egypt, the myths of ancient Greece, and ‘all sorts of problems in life & death’ (Norton, 80). He was daringly seeking more adequate and less constraining vocabularies to express his (conflicted) understanding of divine presence without returning to the problems of Christianity. He was still daring to be serviceable. In the curious but inventive dialogue about minerals and the meaning of natural form, The Ethics of the Dust, Ruskin mused, for instance, on the presence of design in the natural world, recuperating the idea of God’s ordering of all things in fresh, non-Christian, and empirically visible, terms. In the structure of crystals, their immaculate ordering, could be seen, Ruskin promised his listeners, ‘the presence of the spirit which culminates in your own life’ (xviii.346). Purpose, intention, wisdom were still legible if you looked for them with an open mind. At the close of the 1860s, ancient Greece had taken the place of ancient Egypt. Ruskin was able, in the lectures of The Queen of the Air, to contemplate the sincerity and meaningfulness of ancient Greek religion that still – like the books in ‘Of Kings’ Treasures’ – contained enduring wisdom worth remembering. Myths, including those of Athena that Ruskin discussed in The Queen of the Air, were lasting repositories of permanent truths, ‘founded on constant laws common to all human nature’ (xix.310). They provided a disorientated Ruskin with a source of moral meanings that was liberated from the problems of a fractured Christianity. The JudaeoChristian God’s purposes for human beings were cloudy, blocked by mysterious curses and uncertain in reward. But, contemplating the testimony of ancient myth, Ruskin could admire the faith of other sincere religions that spoke of general moral verities, of matters important ‘to all human nature’. The ‘Greek mind’, Ruskin had said loftily in Modern Painters III, was the 150
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same as that ‘of a good, conscientious, but illiterate Scotch Presbyterian Border farmer of a century or two back’ (v.245). But now he admired the moral understanding of a richly thinking sincere culture. Privately, there remained a gloomy man. The 1870s, beyond public forms of address, began with no significant change in Ruskin’s sense that his early life had been blinded. ‘What can I say to you’, he asked of Norton on 6 March 1872: ‘Life – and Death – have long been to me as horrible dreams, – both of them’ (Norton, 258). Enduring the ongoing conflict in his understanding of why he had been made, Ruskin’s interrupted relationship with Rose La Touche did not help convince him that God’s purposes were benign. He was made to suffer again, and personally. Ruskin’s life, it seemed, was permanently to be blighted. With her fervent Protestantism, Rose had been shocked by Ruskin’s unconversion: ‘for the sake of all Truth, and Love,’ she had written, ‘you must not give the one true Good – containing all others, God, – up’ (La Touche, 83). Rose’s death in May 1875 brought Ruskin sorrow but unexpectedly it also led to restoration. He experienced, in unconventional but persuasive ways, a partial regeneration of his earlier conviction that his life was lived under law. Rose’s death – ‘I’ve just heard’, Ruskin wrote sadly, ‘that my poor little Rose is gone where the hawthorn blossoms go’ (La Touche, 133) – began a qualified renewal. The important events included a semi-mystical preparatory experience in Assisi in 1874 (before Rose died) and, afterwards, the happenings of Christmas 1876 and New Year 1877. Ruskin spent that period in Venice. Here, through a sequence of peculiar coincidences and unexpected events, he began to feel that he was being guided by divinity less ambiguously. It is easy to by sceptical about what happened. But the consequences were as real as they were welcome. The surprising, suggestive occurrences included the coincidental arrival in the post of sprigs of the plant Ruskin was studying in Carpaccio’s Il Sogno di Sant’Orsola and his sudden realisation of the ‘full meaning of the end of the Lord’s prayer’,4 a realisation that came to him as if sent from above. Ruskin felt, more generally, that he was experiencing a prolonged period of supernatural and loving intervention in his life. During his long Christmas Day walk through Venice to visit the Carpaccio cycle of SS Giorgio, Trifone e Girolamo at the Scuola San Giogio degli Schiavoni, Ruskin concluded that he had experienced something like a miracle. He had, he said, ‘not moved foot nor thought thought, but under a guidance to some good or lesson, which was directly and instantly in connection both with my public duty and my true love, in their relation to Heaven’.5 The events of what he called ‘Christmas Story’ helped convince him of a truth that he had once found impossible to doubt: that love survives the grave; that human 151
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personality continues; that men and women live on earth under heavenly guidance though even if they cannot discern it. This was revelation – and it was a partial return. This was an ‘entirely prosperous [time]’, Ruskin told Joan Severn on 30 December, a ‘week of continued teaching of the meaning of my work and life’.6 Here was encouragement. And inextricable from this renewed acceptance that gifts came with a purpose was Ruskin’s inclination to believe, once more, that human souls did not go merely where the hawthorn blossoms go. The return of Ruskin’s faith in immortality had already been suggested, shortly after Rose’s death, in a séance. Christmas Story, with its own séancelike element of revisiting personalities, had been anticipated by Ruskin’s visits in 1875 to his friends the Cowper-Temples at Broadlands in Hampshire. The sources of his renewed beliefs were, indeed, diverse. He took guidance where he could find it. Ruskin’s dismay at losing Rose made him, certainly, susceptible to the claims of a medium. With the CowperTemples and the medium Mrs Acworth, Ruskin came to appreciate – unless, he said, ‘the most horrible lies were told me, without conceivable motive’7 – that Rose’s ghost was regularly seen besides Mrs Cowper-Temple. With the uncanny assurance provided by this extraordinary revelation – which Ruskin would never uncritically, never merely naively, accept – he was made ready to listen with attention to Venice’s teaching about the persistence of the dead. ‘Every day’, Ruskin said on 16 January 1877, ‘brings me more proof of the presence and power of real Gods, with good men; – and the Religion of Venice is virtually now my own’ (Norton, 389). Exactly how long Ruskin remained convinced by the lessons of Christmas Story is hard to know. Certainly, in the active years remaining to him, he offered a variety of descriptions in public of his new, broad-minded, wide-reaching religious faith, even if private troubles remained. Claiming Venice’s religion for himself in 1877, Ruskin implied that he had become partly Catholic. But later in 1879, in St Mark’s Rest, he corrected that impression: ‘Don’t think I speak as a Roman Catholic, good reader’, he said, ‘I am a mere wandering Arab, if that will less alarm you’. There was no easy label for his theological position. He did not want to confine himself with a name. But clearly Ruskin was, broadly, theistic, embracing an eclectic Christianity with no confined sympathies. He was far from what he now deplored as his ‘pert little Protestant mind’ (xxiv.277). The science books of the later 1870s and early 1880s were not remote from his continuing theological explorations. They endeavoured, quirkily but with reverent intention, to explain, in botany, geology, and ornithology, what natural forms had meant, intellectually and morally, to previous generations. They defied what Ruskin considered to be the cold, merely materialist science 152
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of the present day and endeavoured to a put a divine Maker back into natural history. Ruskin was extending and re-interpreting his conviction in Modern Painters that divine law was visible in physical law. The mysteries of nature, he declared in Proserpina, were not to be explained by Darwinism or the arrogance of ill-informed materialism, but were ‘in the hand of the God of all Spirits, and of all Flesh’ (xxv.332). That was his characteristically openended description of the power that, in his late career, he recognised ordering the world. Away from the science, Ruskin deplored the failure of politicians and narrow-minded churchmen to attend to what he now asserted were the essential verities of a wise and reverent understanding, the basic tenets of a generous, broad-minded theism. In The Bible of Amiens, Ruskin spoke of ‘the two ignored powers – the Providence of Heaven, and the virtue of men’ (xxxiii.38). Earthly life was still under law. And to the sustaining of that life, to practical charity and good works, Ruskin turned in the Guild of St George from the mid 1870s, intending to succeed in his continuing mission by helping men and women in local, directly practical ways. What the Guild required in theological terms was, in turn, an open and non-doctrinaire understanding of God and His role in human life. The Guild, Ruskin said in the ‘Abstract of the Objects and Constitution’ (1877), was to comprise a body of persons who committed themselves, ‘if God help them, to live in godliness and honour, not in atheism and rascality’ (xxx.3). There were no sectarian definitions of what a life of goodness and honour was now. The Bible of Amiens, from the first half of the 1880s, declared much of what Ruskin now thought in public about Christianity. If he were provocatively a ‘wandering Arab’, he was also committed to what still could be learned of value from witnessing Christ. Revealingly, The Bible of Amiens – the title of which dimly recalled the aims of The Stones to find in San Marco a bible in marble and mosaic – was envisaged for children. Ruskin’s address to ‘an intelligent Eton boy or two, or thoughtful English girl’ (xxxiii.22) partly reflected the fact that his words had begun as a lecture at Eton. But the new audience also, implicitly, indicated that Ruskin thought many adults had ceased attending to what he had to say. The Bible of Amiens declared a distinction between the literally and the eternally true. The only history worth narrating, Ruskin said, was that which revealed the workings of a benign power; which provided evidence of a world guided by love. ‘Under all sorrow,’ Ruskin declared now, ‘there is the force of virtue; over all ruin, the restoring charity of God. To these alone we have to look; in these alone we may understand the past, and predict the future, destiny of ages’ (xxxiii.39). History was praise. And Ruskin’s history would assist a reader to discern without distraction the benign plans of the God of Spirits. 153
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Ruskin began The Bible of Amiens with stories of St Martin of Tours, whom he offered as a model of sensible, practical, and non-dogmatic Christianity. Indeed, St Martin’s most famous act – dividing his cloak with a beggar – occurred, Ruskin notes with satisfaction, when Martin was not a Christian. Good works could be done by anyone with the right heart. Records of the saint’s miracles were forms of teaching to be read with the right heart too. One legend concerned St Martin giving away his Episcopal cloak to another beggar on his way to celebrate Mass. As the only partially clothed saint stood at the altar, Ruskin observes, ‘a globe of light appeared above his head; and when he raised his bare arms with the Host – the angels were seen round him, hanging golden chains upon them, and jewels, not of the earth’. The point for Ruskin is not whether this miraculous story is literally true or not. The point is that, ‘read with the heart’, the story concerns the ‘chastisement and check of every form of the Church’s pride and sensuality’ (xxxiii.43). With such a conception of ‘moral reading’, Ruskin invited his young audience to understand ‘exemplary charity’ (xxxiii.46), the eternal meanings of noble human actions, and the value of decent, reverent, caring, and sincere instruction. Attend, he was saying, to wise teaching wherever you can find it. The mysteries, the pains of living, were still privately dismaying. After the mental illness of 1878, Ruskin reconsidered the Christmas Story events, when, as he put it in a personal letter, he ‘went crazy about St Ursula and other saints’ (Norton, 412). Christmas Story had helped not merely to restore his faith but, he now recognised, helped pitch him into madness. Thereafter Ruskin feared with a new urgency that his days were numbered and that his purposes were finally to be stalled by the literal intervention of death. Such anxiety revived old disquiet about what he had achieved. When Norton was considering a selected edition of Modern Painters, Ruskin said with dismay in August 1879 that filleting his volumes could not have been ‘a more crushing testimony to the total worthlessness of Modern Painters’ (Norton, 433). Looking back, Ruskin saw the old story of talent misdirected and effort unrewarded, of duty fulfilled without either recompense or success. ‘The doctors said that I went mad, this time two years ago, from overwork’, Ruskin said candidly about his 1878 illness in Fors Clavigera for March 1880: But I went mad because nothing came of my work. People would have understood my falling crazy if they had heard that the manuscripts on which I had spent seven years of my old life had all been used to light the fire with, like Carlyle’s first volume of the French Revolution. But they could not understand that I should be the least annoyed far less fall ill in a frantic manner, because, after I had got them published, nobody believed a word of them. (xxix.386) 154
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Facing the old theological problem – the legacy, so to speak, of a literal reading of the Parable of the Talents (Matthew, 25:14–30) – Ruskin perceived more evidence that the most valuable of human teaching, the testimony of nature and of architecture, was being ruined. That to which he had given his life was, literally, being torn up. ‘There seems to me no question’, Ruskin said on 16 October 1882, ‘but that this generation is meant to destroy – of the good works of men and of God, pretty nearly all they can get at’ (Norton, 453). Yet Ruskin, in his last years, did not yield in public to the final conclusions of this deep pessimism. For the most part, he still entertained, even with some fierce irony, the hope that he could do the right thing; that his words could still be in some ways useful. Ruskin, I think, began an autobiography as a final, if faint, gesture of a still unextinguished hope. Praeterita, it might be thought, says little about Ruskin’s mature theological views. He has, to be sure, a lot to report about his Evangelical upbringing. Yet Praeterita wrestles with, and arises out of, the abiding problem of what sense Ruskin’s life had made. It is elegiac. Ruskin regrets the loss of buildings that belonged to the Middle Ages. Movingly, he remembers the still-surviving ‘great street leading into the Baptistery square’ at Florence with its ‘irregular ancient houses, with far projecting bracketed roofs’, first seen in 1840. ‘I mourned over their loss bitterly in 1845’, Ruskin remarks: ‘but for the rest, Florence was still, then, what no one who sees her now could conceive’ (xxxv.359). Praeterita marks out, in moments like this, the destruction of what men and women should have recognised as the precious remains from a better, wiser, and more faithful past. It marks out how little difference Ruskin’s books had made. But alongside this regret, Praeterita tries, despite Ruskin’s failing health and the demands of other projects, to describe the sources of his moral understanding and purposes, the ‘roots of everything I had to learn and teach during my own life’ (xxxv.398). Ruskin was uncertain what purpose and pattern his life revealed, uncertain why he had not more clearly succeeded in discharging a divinely appointed duty. But he was still trying to communicate, however modestly, what had been worthwhile. Praeterita is not the testimony of a man who feels there had been no significance to his life; that there was no value in thinking over the past; that there was nothing to see from his own history but wasted effort and mistaken faith. It is easy to think Ruskin’s preface to his autobiography is a disingenuous justification for missing out subjects that modern readers would like to know more about, including his marriage. But the preface, dated 10 May 1885 from his former nursery at Herne Hill, is primarily theological, a last word on the problem this essay has considered. The autobiography, Ruskin says, records 155
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fr ancis o’ g orma n what it gives me joy to remember, at any length I like – sometimes very carefully of what I think it may be useful for others to know; and passing in total silence things which I have no pleasure in reviewing, and which the reader would find no help in the account of. (xxxv.11)
This is a personal version of the ambition of The Bible of Amiens, the determination only to retell history that is profitable; the determination to omit the baffling and sorrowful. Here, Ruskin says, will be a personal account which, however diffidently, will disclose some purpose, some good. Here, Ruskin’s preface promises, will be a story from which it is possible, however mildly, to learn. In turn, the narration must conceal sorrows and pains. And it will certainly hide the greatest sorrow of all: Ruskin’s dismay about the forces that have baffled his work and led him, in his gloomiest moments, to mistrust the ways of God with men altogether. To know in public of such suffering would not be to teach but to spread a curse. In Praeterita, what theological problem has not been solved, despite a life of effort, can at least be concealed. By the end of the 1880s, that is all Ruskin can do to make his personal history valuable; the only way he can narrate the fitful, even doubtful, traces of benign intention in an unhappy life. Ruskin was disturbed by many things and he took nothing easily. But what was at the root of his pains was the puzzle of pain itself; the mystery of punishment for NO sin. Here was the mystery of a man called by God whose name was John who was seemingly forbidden to know God’s purposes and seemingly forbidden to discharge his responsibilities in a way that brought hope. The story of Ruskin’s faith belongs with J. M. W. Turner more than with anyone else. It is the history of a great man’s decline into cheerlessness in a century where it was becoming harder and harder to believe, despite Ruskin’s earnest desire otherwise, that the sun and the other stars were moved by love. In the end, the best hope Ruskin could offer his readers was, alas, not to tell them everything that was on his mind. NO TES 1. Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1889), 129. 2. See Alan Davis, ‘Shedding Light on the “dark clue”: Ruskin, Turner, Sex and Death’, Turner Society News, 119 (2013), 10–14. 3. There is a sustained argument about Ruskin’s theology of wisdom in Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4. Christmas Story: John Ruskin’s Venetian Letters of 1876–1877, ed. Van Akin Burd (London: Associated University Presses, 1990), 234. 5. Ibid., 256. 6. Ibid., 214. 7. Ibid., 130. 156
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11 S HA R O N A R O N O F S K Y W E L T M A N
Sexuality and gender
Among John Ruskin’s most widely read books – indeed, his most popular work in the United States for decades – was Sesame and Lilies (1865), a small volume of initially only two essays (in later editions, a third was added).1 It sold over 160,000 copies by 1905 (xviii.5) and was widely taught in American high schools throughout the 1930s. It contained ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, Ruskin’s single most important document on gender roles and his foray into the Woman Question debate that was discussed throughout the Victorian period. The significance of Ruskin’s art criticism and critique of political economy overshadows this vital aspect of his work; yet his importance to women’s education in his own century and afterward is clear, and his often-quoted (and often-misunderstood) statements in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ continue to bear on Victorian studies today. While frequently patronising in tone and grounded in restrictive notions of separate spheres for the sexes, Ruskin’s essay nevertheless argues powerfully for expanding women’s domestic realm. He envisioned a far broader range of action than did other writers who romanticised female domesticity, including Coventry Patmore and Charles Dickens. But a topic even more misunderstood than Ruskin and gender is Ruskin and sex, long a subject of confusion and misinformation, and still an area of mystery. There are three major episodes in Ruskin’s biography that fuel speculation. First, Ruskin’s six-year marriage to Effie Gray (the theme of several films, dramas, radio plays, even an opera) ended not because of a sex scandal but because of a no-sex scandal: allegedly proved by medical examination to be a virgin, in 1854 Effie annulled her marriage to Ruskin on the grounds of non-consummation so that she could marry Ruskin’s protégé, the painter John Everett Millais. All three of them had just spent a summer living in a cramped cottage in Scotland, where Millais was painting Ruskin’s portrait. Although we know virtually nothing for sure about Ruskin’s sex life (or lack of it), this fact of non-consummation has provided the lens through which historians and critics have read virtually everything else 157
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about Ruskin’s romantic ties and his ideas about gender as well as sex. The second incident, boosting Ruskin’s standing as the preeminent Victorian prude, is the long-held belief – repeated often in biographies, but now disproven – that he destroyed J. M. W. Turner’s pornographic drawings when cataloguing the great artist’s bequest to the state in 1857–8, burning them in disgust, despairing and disillusioned with his hero. The third event occurred in 1866 when, at the age of forty-six, Ruskin proposed to the eighteen-year-old Rose La Touche, whom he had known for about nine years; he was a friend of her family and, increasingly as time went by, of the intellectually precocious teenage girl herself, as they corresponded regularly. It was their religious difference rather than their age difference that worried Rose’s devout parents: she and her family were fervently Protestant, while he was experiencing a period of unbelief following what he called his ‘unconversion’ experience in 1858 (xxxv.496). The twenty-eight-year gap nonetheless was (and remains) hard to ignore, though it was not unique in the nineteenth century. Because the sexual issues encapsulated by these three episodes have provoked so much discussion about Ruskin, and because they colour readers’ understanding of his writing and often distract from apprehension of his literary, cultural, political, and historical significance, this essay will first tackle the cipher of Ruskin’s sexuality and the issues its unknowability raises. Then it will turn to focus more fully on how gender functions within key texts and on the practical effects of Ruskin’s ideas about gender. Sex The story of Ruskin’s marriage and annulment seems the stuff of soap opera. In fact, it became a real opera: in 1995, the Santa Fe Opera mounted Modern Painters, based on Ruskin’s life. This was but one of three major stage productions in the last half-decade of the twentieth century in which John Ruskin is featured as a character. First, the opera (composed by David Lang with libretto by Manuela Hoelterhoff) depicts not only Ruskin’s failed marriage but also his doomed love of Rose, reduced in age by five years, calling unmistakable attention to the spectre of paedophilia. Next came Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1997), which tells the story of Ruskin’s student A. E. Housman; Ruskin represents the frigidity of desire deflected onto art. Finally, Greg Murphy’s The Countess, New York’s longest running new play to open in 1999, concentrates on the disintegration of Ruskin’s relationship with Effie. Mounting three important theatrical works about a Victorian art critic within a five-year span seems an unlikely phenomenon, even in the days leading up to the centenary of Ruskin’s death in 2000. But it 158
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doesn’t end there: more recently, Ruskin’s deteriorating marriage and passionate love for Rose features prominently in a highly inaccurate but much-discussed BBC television series, Desperate Romantics (2009). And the film Effie Gray (2014), written by Emma Thompson and starring Dakota Fanning, Greg Wise, and Thompson, returns to the story of Ruskin’s marriage and its dissolution, provoking its own controversies, news stories, and legal battles over copyright. All of these representations depict Ruskin chiefly as a foil for our self-conscious and self-congratulatory modernity: ‘we’re better than they were’, such depictions imply, no longer so repressed and prudish, no longer so sexist or downright creepy. As a stage, TV, or film character, Ruskin becomes our pathological, ultra-Victorian, old-fashioned Other. The assumption underlying all of these depictions of Ruskin and Effie’s disastrous wedding night is that he was afraid of the adult female form. In a famous letter written long afterwards to defend her course of action in leaving the marriage of six years, Effie reports that on their wedding night, upon seeing her naked for the first time, Ruskin declared disgust with her person.2 Ruskin later agreed he had found Effie not formed to excite desire.3 Neither of them said what exactly he found unattractive or defined their terms in any way. Nevertheless, they remained married, sleeping in the same bed, travelling and dining together, appearing at times to be happy and at times less so, for six years. Ever since these letters alluding to their first night together came to light, scholars have puzzled over the problem. In Parallel Lives (1983), a popular and widely influential group biography narrating five Victorian marriages, Phyllis Rose contends that the sight of Effie’s pubic hair repulsed the sheltered Ruskin. She speculates that he had previously imagined female genitals to be hairless, having learned all he knew of women from the adroitly draped Renaissance paintings and classical sculptures about which he wrote so much.4 Although it has provided no end of cocktail conversation and has been repeated many times in scholarship and popular culture, no evidence supports this theory: indeed, it is hard to imagine what such evidence could be. Tim Hilton offers counterevidence (including the strong likelihood that Ruskin had reasonable prior exposure to the sight of naked women – or representations of them – in their natural state), and speculates on a few of the many possibilities of what could have gone wrong on their honeymoon (see Hilton, 1.114–19; 2.135–6). Regardless of the cause, the young couple seem not to have engaged in sexual intercourse (although other kinds of sexual activity could have occurred), and the marriage ended. Effie went on to wed Millais. That marriage was consummated and produced eight children.5 159
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Ruskin’s reputation as repressed and sexually naïve derives in part from a story about art. Turner died in 1851; sorting, cataloguing, displaying, and preserving Turner’s bequest to the state was Ruskin’s major task from 1857 to 1858. Among Turner’s effects, Ruskin found sexually explicit drawings. Until 2005 it was thought that, in the basement of the National Gallery in London, he supervised a bonfire of Turner’s sketches ‘of the most shameful sort–of the pudenda of women’.6 Scholars have assumed that he acted to protect the great artist’s good name because Ruskin decided that Turner could only have sketched them ‘under a certain condition of insanity’.7 Critics believed that the erotica (about one hundred drawings out of nineteen thousand in the Turner Bequest) shocked and horrified Ruskin, supposing that he grieved for years over Turner’s moral decline in having created such apparently obscene images. But in the early 2000s, Ian Warrell, curator at Tate Britain in London, discovered the pornographic drawings intact. Far from having burned them, Ruskin had buried them in an elaborate cataloguing system. Ruskin’s not having destroyed the drawings after all made a splash in newspapers around the world in December 2004 and January 2005. But just because Ruskin did not burn the sketches, which include graphic images of coitus and fellatio, does not mean that he was unsurprised by their discovery among Turner’s collection. Historians have long pinpointed the moment as one that deeply disillusioned Ruskin. Alan Davis refutes the notion that the disenchantment was because of the erotica, however, pointing out that the shoddiness (in Ruskin’s opinion) of the majority of the other drawings in the bequest deeply distressed him. They proved Turner to be more similar to the painter John Constable, to whom he had always contrasted his idol, than Ruskin had previously realised. Ruskin’s passion for excellence in art and his apparent lack of interest in sex makes this explanation plausible. The old story of torching Turner’s naughty sketches, combined with the various speculative stories that circulate around Effie and Ruskin’s wedding night, has produced widespread conjecture about what version of embodied femininity would arouse Ruskin. His tragic love of the teenage Rose La Touche, whom he met when she was a child, has led to the frequent suggestion that he desired the form of the prepubescent girl. But although Ruskin met Rose as a friend of her parents when she was nine and they began corresponding shortly after (she sent him smart, lively, amusing letters), he did not love her romantically until later. The age at which it is clear that he is in love with her is far too young for the comfort of twenty-first century readers, but not young enough to indicate an attraction to prepubescent girls. When Rose was around fifteen, he writes that he ‘can no longer make a pet of her’ (Hilton, 2.50, 53), and must end their childish games, which included teasing for (non-sexual) kisses to cure his 160
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headache, as had been their custom. That he loved her when she was fourteen is without question (whether he loved her romantically at this moment is unclear); but by fifteen, his own evolving desire as well as indecorum would make such play impossible. What is certain is that in 1866, when she was eighteen and he was fortysix, he proposed to her. Rose asked him to wait three years for her answer. At twenty-one, she would not need her parents’ consent to marry, but also this would give her time to consider the disagreements in their religious beliefs. The quasi-engagement ended when Ruskin’s ex-wife, now married to Millais, wrote to Rose’s parents. There are various explanations of what Effie wrote and why, including the possibility that Ruskin and Rose’s union would produce offspring, which she might have feared would invalidate her annulment as it had been based on Ruskin’s ‘incurable impotence’, thus making her a bigamist and bastardising her children (Hilton, 2.135). The La Touches forbade contact between Ruskin and their daughter, yet Rose’s final rejection did not come until 1872. Meanwhile, friends helped them exchange letters and arranged a few meetings. It was during this time, in July 1871, that Ruskin became ill with fever, vomiting, and delirium that initiated an increasingly ruinous mental illness. Rose also sickened in mind and body, perhaps suffering from anorexia. She died in 1875 at the age of twenty-seven. Despite all that we know of Ruskin, we know little of his sexual feelings or actions. Critics, biographers, playwrights, screenwriters, librettists, students, teachers, and curators all seem mystified by his inactivity as we seek an appropriate identity label for, perhaps, an as yet unnamed sexual orientation. Understanding Ruskin’s sex life (or lack of it) has necessarily centred my discussion thus far on biography and questions about his desire. Shifting next to gender, I focus on questions of ideology, politics, and language. Ruskin’s love life plays an important role here because he wrote most of his output directly dealing with gender roles for a double audience: his regular readership and Rose. All of his writing from around the time of his proposal to Rose and beyond, including ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, contained private messages for her. Gender roles When not fixated salaciously on Ruskin’s failed marriage to Effie or his love for Rose, analyses of Ruskin and gender for a long time focused on bemoaning his ‘decidedly Victorian’ ideas about women.8 In 1968, Kate Millett’s ground-breaking classic of second-wave feminism, Sexual Politics, attacked Ruskin in one of the few revised PhD dissertations ever to become a 161
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bestseller.9 She rightly pointed out that, in contrast to John Stuart Mill’s 1867 feminist treatise ‘On the Subjection of Women’, Ruskin’s Of Queens’ Gardens’ is a conservative essay; she denounced ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ as ‘the very stuff of the era’s pet sentimental vapors enshrined in notions such as “the angel in the house”’.10 Her book sparked decades of debate between those who agree with Millett and those who defend Ruskin on feminist grounds, both practical and theoretical. Despite the substantial body of subsequent scholarship that demonstrates Millett’s assessment to have missed crucially progressive elements of Ruskin’s ideas and his concrete efforts to improve education and opportunity for women, her observations remain immensely influential. In many excellent works of criticism, a brief quotation of a few sentences from ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ illustrates the generality of Victorian patriarchal attitudes towards women (attitudes that privilege male control of society’s power structures), leaving readers with the impression that these comments tell the whole story. That selectivity ignores the complexity of Ruskin’s position, the nuances of his prose, his efforts to reform women’s education, and his practical support in funding and advising women in such fields as art and social work. ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ helped Victorian feminists to validate their fight for education, jobs, and the vote. Three texts are crucial to understanding Ruskin’s ideas about women, all written in the mid to late 1860s: ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (1865), The Ethics of the Dust (1866), and The Queen of the Air (1869). As he moved with Unto this Last in 1860 from writing aesthetic to overtly social criticism, Ruskin analysed gender as part of that critique. As he explains in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ about the roles men and women play in society, no subject is more vital to human happiness (xviii.111). During this period, Ruskin taught at the progressive Winnington School for girls, which provided him direct practical experience in the reforms he outlines and justifies in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’. He recorded his lessons with his students in a series of ten Socratic dialogues between an ‘old lecturer’ and school girls (or ‘little housewives’) that constitute The Ethics of the Dust. He also delved into Greek myth, already important in Modern Painters V (1860): The Queen of the Air is a study of the goddess Athena, whom Ruskin links in important ways with the British housewife-queens he describes and mythologises in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’. ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ directly broaches the subject of gender roles, delineating women’s powers in relation to men’s; it also presents those powers figuratively in mythic terms. It calls for improved education for girls, explicitly requiring equality with boys’ education, and for improved circumstances and respect for girls’ teachers. In this essay – it was originally a lecture – Ruskin challenges middle-class women to repair England’s societal 162
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ills, rather than to isolate themselves in their homes. The philanthropic work he advocates for them remains strictly domestic metaphorically: Ruskin represents women’s new role as feeding, clothing, and sheltering the needy, as well as cleaning the environment. But he exhorts them to ‘be no more housewives, but queens’ because it is also their job to tell men what to do (xviii.137). By couching social and ecological activism in terms of domestic achievement and in terms of queenly duty, Ruskin evokes a model of womanhood that is at once culturally acceptable and profoundly radical, urging women to use their critical and analytical faculties to mend the world. Most often cited is this expression of an ideology of complementary gender roles: We are foolish . . . in speaking of the ‘superiority’ of one sex to the other . . . The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy is for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle, – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. (xviii.121–2)
The differences delineated here might make a twenty-first-century reader toss this book across the room. But a nineteenth-century reader would recognise that Ruskin argues against conservatives like Coventry Patmore (whom Ruskin quotes and with whom he is often conflated), who states baldly that women are inferior to men; women are ‘nothing in original intellectual or moral force of any kind’ (‘The Weaker Vessel’, 162–3). Moreover, the power for ‘rule’, for ‘ordering, arrangement, and decision’ and – as the passage continues – ‘judgement’ resembles Queen Victoria’s function, as Walter Bagehot describes a constitutional monarch’s legal powers in 1867: ‘the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn’.11 Furthermore, as Dinah Birch has pointed out, Ruskin gives women a role (decision and judgement) remarkably like his own as art and social critic.12 We have seen Millett identify Ruskin’s queen with Coventry Patmore’s eponymous homemaker in his book-length poem Angel in the House (the first part of which was published in 1854), which has become a widespread stereotype of Victorian assumptions about women. One might expect Ruskin’s ideal to most closely resemble Patmore’s in Ruskin’s renowned glorification of the home, a passage that even Millett has to admit is a prose ‘classic of its kind’.13 Here the queen is ‘in the House’ along with the domestic angel, but Ruskin’s is a mythic figure of colossal stature. Far from immuring his queen, he obliterates the distinction between inside and outside 163
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that constitutes the fundamental division of Victorian sex roles and the basis of The Angel in the House: This is the true nature of home – it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division . . . And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her . . . shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless. (xviii.122–3)
Impervious to the ‘night-cold grass’, Ruskin’s queen commands the ‘glowworms at her feet’ to build her a hearth in the wild in an image both fanciful and witchlike. She not only symbolises home but also encompasses it. By imagining his queen as controlling stars and fireflies, creating a home in the wilderness, Ruskin conjures up an image of ideal womanhood that erases the public–private divide. The sturdy, prosaic Queen Victoria does the same, which is why it is so significant that Ruskin’s ideal is a queen, not an angel. As Adrienne Munich has noted, Victorians found it difficult to conceptualise ‘the apparent contradiction of a devoted wife, prolific mother, and extravagant widow who is also Queen of an Empire upon which the sun never sets’.14 Because Ruskin sees through a mythic lens, he perceives no conflict in these roles, for Victoria or for any woman. A laudatory contemporary review of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ appeared in Emily Faithful’s feminist magazine Victoria, run entirely by women; even the title confirms Queen Victoria as a symbol of embodied female power. The reviewer praises Ruskin’s astute psychology, commending his disapproval of women’s squandering their potent influence over men on mere flirtation. This is yet another way in which Ruskin’s queen differs from Patmore’s Angel in the House, who shuns power over men. As Virginia Woolf later illustrates in ‘Professions for Women’, even to write an honest review of a book written by a man, a woman writer must strangle her inner-Angel because that demure Victorian icon never speaks her own mind.15 In contrast, Ruskin praises the power instinct: ‘Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of man, and of the heart of woman, God set . . . the desire of power! . . . desire it all you can’. The mythologised power he invokes, ‘power of the sceptre and the shield’, is royal (xviii.137), not angelic. Gender and education But can ordinary women be readied for such regal responsibility? In Fors Clavigera (1871–84), Ruskin lays plans for St George’s Guild schools requiring egalitarian courses of study for boys and girls, but his real-world, 164
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practical efforts to improve women’s education are clear much earlier. He mentored, funded, or recognised women artists including Elizabeth Butler, Anna Blunden, Elizabeth Siddal, and Kate Greenaway. He directly contributed to women’s education not only by teaching at the Winnington School in the 1860s, but also by opening many of his Oxford university lectures to women, as well as at other women’s colleges at Cambridge, Whitelands College, and Cheltenham Ladies’ College.16 He theorises a curriculum for girls, exhorting his audience of parents in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ to provide their daughters with an education equal to their sons, in ‘material’, ‘course’, and ‘spirit’: ‘let a girl’s education be as serious as a boy’s . . . Give them the same advantages that you give their brothers’ (xviii.132). Just as Jane Eyre declares from the rooftop of Thornfield Hall that girls need a range of action as great as their brothers need, Ruskin speaks out for equality in education. Among Ruskin’s specific suggestions for bettering girls’ schooling are improved treatment for girls’ teachers (equal to boys’), physical education, uncensored reading, courses in science, and exposure to unsullied nature. Ruskin promotes respect for girls’ teachers in consonance with Emily Davies, struggling at this historical moment to advance the rights of governesses and female teachers. He asks well-to-do parents: ‘Is a girl likely to think her own conduct, or her own intellect, of much importance, when you trust the entire formation of her character, moral and intellectual, to a person whom you let your servants treat with less respect than they do your housekeeper[?]’ (xviii.132–3). An appeal to improve the standing of girls’ governesses, which earlier he contrasts explicitly with the loftier status of boys’ tutors, goes to the heart of the Victorian feminist movement. Like Plato in his ideas about teaching boys, Ruskin’s main priority in girls’ education is physical training. Ruskin emphasises its importance when he urges parents to provide it for their daughters: ‘The first of our duties to her – no thoughtful persons now doubt this, – is to secure for her such physical training as may confirm her health, and perfect her beauty; the highest refinement of that beauty being unattainable without splendour of activity and of delicate strength’ (xviii.123). Although Ruskin tells his readers that no thoughtful person doubts that girls need exercise, he knew that Winnington was unusual in providing team sports. Throughout the passage, he shrewdly links the terms that will gain the sanction of his gender-conscious, socially aspiring middle-class audience (‘beauty’, ‘delicate’, ‘refinement’) with words that make his real point (‘health’, ‘physical training’, ‘activity’, ‘strength’). He advances a new aesthetic of hearty attractiveness that combines health, strength, and action. Third, Ruskin enjoins parents to let their daughters read without censorship: ‘if she can have access to a good library of old and classical books, there 165
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need be no choosing at all . . . turn her loose in the old library every wet day, and let her alone. She will find what is good for her; you cannot’. He repeats, ‘Let her loose in the library, I say’ (xviii.130–1). This is the same free access to book collections that Victorian feminist Bessie Parkes advocates.17 To Victorians, the recommendation that girls read volumes from an old library without censorship or pre-selection means she will encounter bawdy novels and revolutionary non-fiction of the eighteenth century, rather than the Podsnappery of the nineteenth. She would dive into uncut Shakespeare, not Bowdlerised versions. Ruskin’s advice contrasts with Lewis Carroll’s wish that someone should write a ‘“Shakespeare” for girls’ because existing editions ‘are not sufficiently “expurgated”’ for girls aged ten to seventeen.18 In contrast, Ruskin wants girls to read Greek and Latin classics in their original languages; these include sexual, military, political, and philosophical commentary. Ruskin makes no distinction between boys and girls on this. Next, Ruskin promotes women’s scientific education: ‘she should be trained in the habits of accurate thought . . . she should understand the meaning, the inevitableness, and the loveliness of natural laws; and follow at least some one path of scientific attainment’ (xviii.125–6). Victoria’s approving review pokes fun at Ruskin for his justifying this curricular innovation on the grounds that it will help students converse with their future husbands, but the practical effect is that Ruskin eliminates any difference between boys’ and girls’ course of study; he uses exactly this formula for the all-male Oxford, where he feels that in order to procure a ‘very good first-class’ degree a student should achieve a high level of proficiency in either ‘chemistry or botany or physiology’ (xvi.453, emphasis is Ruskin’s). Ruskin applied this idea by teaching mineralogy along with art and other subjects at Winnington, and he recorded some of those lessons fancifully in his mineralogy and ethics textbook for girls, Ethics of the Dust. He wrote two other scientific books partly with girls in mind, Proserpina (1875–86), on botany, and Love’s Meinie (1873–81), on ornithology. The Eagle’s Nest (1872), his series of Oxford lectures reconciling art and science, includes examples of women studying astronomy. He repeatedly links the girls he hopes will read his science books to science and to nature itself. In Ethics of the Dust, perhaps the most astonishing sentence connecting girls with the subject matter they study, the process of crystallisation, is a description of how water functions within the compressing and contracting rock: ‘water . . . congeals, and drips, and throbs, and thrills, from crag to crag; and breathes from pulse to pulse of foaming or fiery arteries, whose beating is felt through chains of the great islands of the Indian seas, as your own pulses lift your bracelets, and makes whole kingdoms of the world quiver in deadly earthquake, as if they were light as aspen leaves’ (xviii.333). The girls afford both the scale to gauge the vast, pulsing organism of the earth, and a type for it. 166
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Surprisingly, Ruskin recommends candid sex education, a radical notion for his time. To a friend who wants to teach continence (what today we might call ‘abstinence only’), he writes: ‘But I shall at least ask of modern science so much help as shall enable me to begin to teach them at that age [fifteen] the physical laws relating to their own bodies, openly, thoroughly, and with awe . . . But really, the essential thing is the founding of real schools of instruction for both boys and girls – first, in domestic medicine and all that it means; and secondly, in the plain moral law of all humanity: “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” with all that it means’ (xxviii.529). Ruskin – who never had sexual intercourse with his own wife, who felt uncomfortable discussing how plants reproduce, who conceived of feminine perfection as the virgin Athena – urges candid explanation of bodies and their function to young people of both sexes. Finally, Ruskin considers nature vital to girls’ education, not surprisingly because – as is true of Victorian culture more generally – Ruskin perceives women and nature to be closely connected, as we have seen. Because nature teaches children, we must protect it: ‘Do not think that your daughters can be trained to the truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God made at once for their schoolroom and their playground, lie desolate and defiled’ (xviii.135). Even baptism is tainted because English waterways have been despoiled, ‘waters which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship only with pollution’ (xviii.136). Although Ruskin’s most famous denouncement of pollution comes in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), he links what we would now call environmental activism to education throughout his writing. Gender and myth ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ and The Queen of the Air share more than a word in their titles: the model woman Ruskin describes in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ strongly resembles the deity he later conjures up as Athena in The Queen of the Air. Here Ruskin describes Athena as both an ideal that real women incarnate and an abstraction of the qualities he considers feminine. He reminds his audience that Athena was for the Greeks the goddess of air as well as of wisdom, war, and weaving. But Athena comprises earth, too. Ruskin illustrates her duality in his well-known extended contrast between bird and serpent. The bird and snake sit at opposite ends on the earth–air continuum (xix.360). For Ruskin, the bird symbolises Athena’s creative power, while the snake represents the powers of destruction that the goddess incorporates from Medusa, whose head she wears on her shield. Ruskin describes the bird as ‘a drift of the air brought into form by plumes . . . it 167
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rests upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it; – is the air’ (xix.360). The snake, ‘that running brook of horror on the ground’ (xix.362), horrifies as well as fascinates. ‘That rivulet of smooth silver . . . one soundless, causeless march of sequent rings . . . with dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in its coils’ is a ‘divine hieroglyph’ representing the ‘demoniac power’ of the earth (xix.362–3). The paradoxical essence of beautiful destruction (‘Startle it; – the winding stream will become a twisted arrow; – the wave of poisoned life will lash through the grass like a cast lance’), the serpent exposes our defective evolutionary fate (xix.362–3). It is ‘a disease, plague, or cretinous imperfection of development . . . as if the [human] race itself were still half-serpent, not extricated yet from its clay; a lacertine breed of bitterness – the glory of it emaciate with cruel hunger, and blotted with venomous stain: and the track of it, on the leaf a glittering slime, and in the sand a useless furrow’ (xix.365).19 A phallic symbol, the serpent becomes feminine for Ruskin not only in The Queen of the Air but also in The Ethics of the Dust. By hypothetically transforming one of the schoolgirl characters into a serpent and identifying all the girls in the book with glow-worms or fireflies (recalling the glow-worms from ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’), Ruskin fuses in that image of flying worm both bird and snake. In fact, in The Ethics of the Dust the serpents live in trees and sing like sirens, reinforcing their identification with birds and women, linking them to the serpent in Eden, who brought evil into the world (xviii.213–14). Ruskin also highlights the serpent’s flowing curves and feminine beauty. In The Queen of the Air Ruskin associates the serpent with Athena, Medusa, Demeter, Proserpina, and even with his girlish flowers such as the snapdragon, which devolves under serpentine influence and enacts both rose and worm (xix.376–7). Ultimately, the snake’s significance for Ruskin rests in its capacity both to transcend gender and to embody another stereotypically feminine principle, that of change and metamorphosis. Ruskin idealises women. In this, he shares in a long-standing cliché, but he translates his ideal into a deliberate expansion of women’s role in concrete ways. But even more surprising than Ruskin’s practical effort at reforming women’s education and their scope of action is that through mythopoetic prose, Ruskin – patronising though he undoubtedly is – disrupts both conventional gender categories and his own implication in them. Ruskin’s prominence as the author of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, at once a principal statement of Victorian gender opposition and a principal justification for improving women’s education and enlarging their sphere of action, makes him perfect for analysis demonstrating the power of mythic discourse to challenge gender dichotomy. 168
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Sexuality and gender N O T ES 1. See Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Defining Voices, 1837–1883, from The Woman Question, 1837–1883, 3 vols (New York: Garland, 1983), i.96. 2. Mary Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins (New York: Vanguard, 1967), 156. 3. Ibid., 191. 4. Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (New York: Knopf, 1983), 287. Her source is Mary Lutyens, Young Mrs Ruskin in Venice: Unpublished Letters of Mrs John Ruskin Written from Venice Between 1849–1852 (New York: Vanguard, 1965), 21. 5. Robert Brownell’s Marriage of Inconvenience (London: Pallas Athene, 2013) hypothesises that Ruskin was relieved when Effie left him, in part because he had long believed her to have married him for his money, and so contested neither the annulment nor its grounds (354–6). 6. See Frank Harris, My Life and Loves (New York: Grove, 1963), 400. 7. Ian Warrell, ‘Exploring the Dark Side: Ruskin and the Problem of Turner’s Erotica’, British Art Journal, 4 (2003), 5–14 (12). 8. Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 154. 9. Kate Millett, ‘The Debate over Women: Ruskin Versus Mill’, Victorian Studies, 14 (1970), 63–82, adapted from Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1968). 10. Ibid., 80. 11. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867), 103. 12. Dinah Birch, ‘Ruskin’s Womanly Mind’, Essays in Criticism, 38 (1988), 308–24 (312). 13. Millett, ‘The Debate over Women’, 72. 14. Adrienne Auslander Munich, ‘Queen Victoria, Empire, and Excess’, Tulsa Studies in Women and Literature 6 (1987): 265–81 (265). 15. Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), 237–8. 16. Dinah Birch, ‘“What Teachers Do You Give Your Girls?”: Ruskin and Women’s Education’, in Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman, eds., Ruskin and Gender (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 122. 17. See Linda H. Peterson, ‘Feminist Origins’, Ruskin and Gender, 97. 18. Lewis Carroll, ‘Sylvie and Bruno’, in Edward Guiliano, ed., The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: Avenel, 1982), 497. 19. Lacerta (‘lizard’ in Latin), was Ruskin’s nickname for Rose’s mother.
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12 ALAN DAVIS
Technology
In a letter to the weekly magazine Tit-Bits, dated 31 March 1888, the humble bicycle bore the full force of one of Ruskin’s most vitriolic protests: I not only object, but am quite prepared to spend all my best ‘bad language’ in reprobation of the bi-, tri-, and 4–5–6 or 7 cycles, and every other contrivance and invention for superseding human feet on God’s ground. To walk, to run, to leap, and to dance are the virtues of the human body, and neither to stride on stilts, wriggle on wheels, or dangle on ropes, and nothing in the training of the human mind with the body will ever supersede the appointed God’s ways of slow walking and hard working. (xxxiv.617)
If we were to take this diatribe seriously, the horse-drawn carriage (a favourite form of transport for Ruskin) ought to be similarly dismissed, as might the boat (another favourite). It would be easy to find other statements of similarly irascible tone and, by careful selection, build up a picture of a cranky, reactionary, anti-technological Ruskin. But it would be entirely misleading. The letter quoted above, for example, was written late in Ruskin’s life, following a number of mental breakdowns, and not long before his final catastrophic mental collapse of 1889. Yet within its curmudgeonly statements can be found echoes of key elements of Ruskin’s lifelong engagement with technology which, at its best, was neither absurd nor eccentric, and which began early.1 (When the sixteen-year-old Ruskin visited the Alps in 1835, he equipped himself not only with a geological hammer but also with a homemade cyanometer, whose readings of the sky’s blueness he recorded in his diary: see xxxv.152.) In fact Ruskin welcomed technological innovation where he found it helpful and life-enhancing, but his primary concerns were with fundamental issues of living, working, and the way we perceive our relation to the world – not with technological advance in itself. In Robin Holt’s words, Ruskin encourages a life ‘organically rather than mechanically constructed’; he ‘takes machines seriously, recognising in them a power that has potential, but that has become something unchecked’.2 170
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The approach adopted in this essay is based on the premise that Ruskin’s opinions are best understood (and of greatest value) in technological contexts where he was himself highly experienced, directly involved, and expert, rather than merely an onlooker and commentator. To that end, strong emphasis is placed on the fields of photography and printmaking; no attempt is made to catalogue the full breadth of Ruskin’s responses to the range of technological issues that confronted him. We begin by considering his response, in Fors Clavigera, to the reporting (on 7 April 1870) of the successful completion of a telegraph link to India: That telegraphic signalling was a discovery; and conceivably, some day, may be a useful one. And there was some excuse for your being a little proud when, about last sixth of April . . . you knotted a copper wire all the way to Bombay, and flashed a message along it, and back. But what was the message, and what the answer? Is India the better for what you said to her? Are you the better for what she replied? (xxvii.85)
Ruskin was not unimpressed by the achievement, but clearly had little interest in it for its own sake. What concerned him was how it might be employed; its moral implication; whether it availed towards life in its richest sense. What should be said is far more important than the technology employed in saying it. These themes recur, regardless of the type of technology involved. Ruskin was, for example, consistently critical of the railways, though he was aware of the technological triumph of the design and construction of the steam locomotive, and was sensitive to the way it appeared to dwarf the importance of the things he most valued: I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into th at ! . . . What would the men who thought out this – who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will – feel or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of water-colour, which I cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else – mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them? (xix.60–61)
Yet despite his recognition of the scale of the technological achievement, he would gladly have destroyed ‘most of the railroads in England, and all the railroads in Wales’ (xxvii.15), because (to quote merely one reason): No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour . . . will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world 171
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a l a n da v i s than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. (v.380–1)
As Jeffrey Richards observes in his comprehensive analysis of Ruskin and the railways, Ruskin rejected the assumption that advance in technology is automatically beneficial: ‘If anything, Ruskin sees it as obscuring the sources of true happiness’.3 Richards identifies three principal reasons for Ruskin’s criticism of the railway: ‘It interfered with the process of detailed observation, it encouraged mental torpor, and it destroyed the very scenery that the traveller should be observing’.4 Indeed, Ruskin did not consider going by railroad to be ‘travelling’ at all: ‘it is merely “being sent” to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel’ (v.370). It compared poorly with his favourite mode of travel (the horse-drawn carriage) which, he argued, did not involve a miserable suspension of real living, but offered a life-enriching extension of it. He made one of his most memorable remarks about the railways on one wild March day in 1865 as he looked out of his window, contemplating the leaves and bits of straw being blown by the wind, and the puffs of steam from the railway carrying passengers to Folkestone: In the general effect of these various passages and passengers, as seen from my quiet room, they look all very much alike. One begins seriously to question with oneself whether those passengers by the Folkestone train are in truth one whit more in a hurry than the dead leaves. The difference consists, of course, in the said passengers knowing where they are going to, and why; and having resolved to go there – which, indeed, as far as Folkestone, may, perhaps, properly distinguish them from the leaves: but will it distinguish them any farther? Do many of them know what they are going to Folkestone for? – what they are going anywhere for? and where, at last, by sum of all the days’ journeys, of which this glittering transit is one, they are going for peace? For if they know not this, certainly they are no more making haste than the straws are. (xix.95–6)
That contrast between the advanced technology of the doing, and the questionable nature of what is being done, is observed again with heavy irony in Letter 5 of Fors Clavigera (1871): To talk at a distance, when you have nothing to say, though you were ever so near; to go fast from this place to that, with nothing to do either at one or the other: these are powers certainly. (xxvii.86–7)
Ruskin understood that the pace of technological progress in communication, locomotion, and industry was far outstripping the moral and spiritual development of human nature. ‘Base war, lying policy, thoughtless cruelty, senseless improvidence . . . have been, up to this hour, as characteristic of 172
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mankind as they were in the earliest periods; so that we must either be driven to doubt of human progress at all, or look upon it as in its very earliest stage’ (xi.197). Despite such profound reservations, Ruskin used the railways, explaining why in Letter 49 of Fors Clavigera (1875): ‘I use everything that comes within reach of me . . . The wisdom of life is in preventing all the evil we can; and using what is inevitable, to the best purpose . . . I am perfectly ready even to construct a railroad, when I think one necessary’ (xxviii.247). It is not, then, that Ruskin fails to see the benefits of technological advance; rather, he highlights the discrepancy between moral and technological progress, and warns that moral and spiritual losses may accompany the technological gains. He is reluctant to recommend the use of the microscope, for example: ‘I do not often invite my readers to use a microscope; but for once and for a little while, we will take the tormenting aid of it’ (xv.405). He explained his position in a letter of 1878: ‘the first vital principle is that man is intended to observe with his eyes, and mind; not with microscope and knife’ (xxv.xxx). Ruskin is concerned that the restricted vision offered by the microscope will lead to the loss of contextual awareness and, being incomplete, will take us further from the truth rather than closer to it: [T]he use of instruments for exaggerating the powers of sight necessarily deprives us of the best pleasures of sight. A flower is to be watched as it grows, in its association with the earth, the air, and the dew; its leaves are to be seen as they expand in sunshine; its colours, as they embroider the field, or illumine the forest. Dissect or magnify them, and all you discover or learn at last will be that oaks, roses, and daisies, are all made of fibres and bubbles; and these again, of charcoal and water; but, for all their peeping and probing, nobody knows how. (xxxv.430)
This insistence on the importance of such holistic perception anticipates aspects of the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead, where ‘every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the universe’.5 The use of the microscope – where technology is employed to enhance vision – highlights an issue of special importance to Ruskin: clarity of perception, and the expression of what is perceived. This is not merely a matter of developing the right lenses: You do not see with the lens of the eye. You see through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye. . . . Sight is an absolutely spiritual phenomenon. (xxii.194–5)
Further, and famously (and most significantly in the present context): ‘the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way’ (v.333). Given that intensity of emphasis, we 173
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should expect to find Ruskin’s attitude to technology particularly revealing where it concerns the visual. And, indeed, it is here that we find Ruskin engaging most deeply with the technologies appropriate to his work, actively involved with the making of photographs, engravings, book illustrations, and the large diagrams used as teaching aids in his lectures. Ruskin recalled, in Praeterita, how in his last days as an Oxford undergraduate he had learned of ‘the original experiments of Daguerre’, and fancied that the plates sent to him from Paris at that time may have been ‘the first sent to England’ (xxxv.372). They were not, but the exact dates hardly matter: the point is that Ruskin involved himself in the new invention of photography very early. He first recognised its power in Venice in 1845, writing enthusiastically to his father: I have been lucky enough to get . . . some most beautiful . . . Daguerreotypes of the palaces I have been trying to draw; and certainly Daguerreotypes taken by this vivid sunlight are glorious things. It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself; every chip of stone and stain is there, and of course there is no mistake about proportions . . . It is a noble invention . . . and any one who has worked and blundered and stammered as I have done for four days, and then sees the thing he has been trying to do so long in vain, done perfectly and faultlessly in half a minute, won’t abuse it afterwards. (iii.210 n)
Photography’s potential for recording architectural treasures threatened by restoration was not lost on him: ‘It is certainly the most marvellous invention of the century; given us, I think, just in time to save some evidence from the great public of wreckers’ (iii.210 n). He speedily acquired equipment for making Daguerreotypes, and his manservant John Hobbs became responsible for using it. Ruskin later recalled that he had taken ‘the first image of the Matterhorn, as also of the aiguilles of Chamouni, ever drawn by the sun’ (xxxv.452–3), and although that claim may be inaccurate,6 it indicates how involved Ruskin became in these early developments, and how keen he was to use photography in his alpine studies. He accumulated a large collection of Daguerreotypes (many still survive), and photography significantly influenced the development of his thought: while Ruskin dismissed the idea that photography might supersede fine art, it undeniably affected his approach to drawing, as Ray Haslam has explained.7 According to Lindsay Smith, Ruskin’s use of photography influenced the construction of The Stones of Venice and actively strengthened his wish to document the details of Venetian architecture.8 Smith also observes that photography provided ‘a new reference point against which Ruskin might measure Turner’s “truth to nature”’:9 Ruskin notes, for example, that ‘a delicately taken photograph of a truly Turnerian subject, is far more like Turner in the drawing than it is to the work of any other artist’ (vi.82). 174
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Photography developed rapidly during the years Ruskin was concerned with it, and his perception of its value gradually changed. Several strands of his involvement can be identified – for example, the use of photography for gathering ‘memoranda of the facts of nature’ (v.9), and its value for recording architecture under threat of restoration, as already mentioned – though always for Ruskin it was a means of representing static facts, rather than expressing atmosphere or motion. Also, as the technology progressed beyond the limitations of the Daguerreotype (which lacked the capacity for duplication), he keenly anticipated its potential for reproducing works of art and illustrating books: ‘I believe a new era is opening to us in the art of illustration’, he wrote in 1853 (x.356). But despite his enthusiasm, he was always aware of the problematic character of photography’s mechanistic representation of the world; photographic images lack, he noted, ‘the very virtue by which the work of human mind chiefly rises above . . . any . . . mechanical means that ever have been or may be invented, Love’ (iii.169). By the mid 1850s he was expressing reservations about photographic distortion: photography ‘either exaggerates shadows, or loses detail in the lights’ (vi.82), and fails to give a truthful image of forms set against a bright sky (xv.73). By the 1860s he had recognised that photographs could be seriously misleading: ‘They are popularly supposed to be “true”, and, at the worst, they are so, in the sense in which an echo is true to a conversation of which it omits the most important syllables and reduplicates the rest’ (xix.150). Most significantly, the photograph of a landscape (or of a work of art) could yield little of value, he advised his reader, until you have given the appointed price in your own attention and toil. And when once you have paid this price, you will not care for photographs of landscape. (xx.165)
It was a matter of how fully we engage with the world. There was no technological shortcut to experiencing the kind of epiphany that Ruskin associated with his experience of drawing an aspen at Fontainebleau in 1842 – a remembered incident that, with hindsight, came to symbolise the dawn of his understanding of the value of seeing and drawing truly, and of the crucial role that the imagination played in that process (xxxv.314). (The factual accuracy of Ruskin’s recollection in Praeterita may reasonably be questioned (see, for example, Hilton, 1, 68), but his account of the incident, whether real or imagined, remains significant as an indicator of the importance he came to invest in the act of accurate drawing as an essential aid to seeing.) The taking of a photograph could record facts of a certain type; it could not transform experience in the way that drawing could. 175
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So although Ruskin employed photographic methods to illustrate his later publications, accepting the benefit of advances in photographic reproduction, his enthusiasm for the photographic worldview eventually faded. In 1868 he wrote to the photographer Julia Cameron: ‘Fifteen years ago, I knew everything that the photograph could and could not do; – I have long ceased to take the slightest interest in it’ (xxxvii.734). When it came to the reproduction of paintings, there was no question about the matter: [A] square inch of man’s engraving is worth all the photographs that ever were dipped in acid . . . photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud’s wax-work can do against sculpture. That, and no more. (xix.89)
Printmaking (etching, line engraving, mezzotint engraving, wood engraving, and lithography) was the branch of technology about which Ruskin was most fully informed, and with which he was most deeply involved, for most of his active adult life. Some technical printmaking terms and concepts should be understood at the outset. There is, for example, an important distinction between etching, line engraving, and mezzotint on the one hand, and wood engraving on the other. The former are intaglio techniques, whereby marks are etched or cut into a flat metal surface which, when filled with ink, and the surface wiped clean, is transferred onto paper under great pressure. The incised marks therefore print black. By contrast, wood engravings are printed from the inked surface of a wooden block – the areas that are to be white in the final printed image having been cut away. This means that wood engravings can be easily printed alongside letterpress, as indeed they often are in Ruskin’s books. Intaglio etchings and engravings need to be printed in a different kind of press, and are included in Ruskin’s books as separate ‘plates’. The range of techniques required for the illustrations to Ruskin’s later books – Aratra Pentelici (1872), for instance – was extended to include photographic methods such as ‘autotype’, but it should be stressed that engraving techniques never lost their primary importance for Ruskin. Between 1849 and 1860 alone, Ruskin was responsible for producing more than 150 etched, engraved, and lithographed plates, and more than 200 wood engravings, for The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, and Modern Painters – a startlingly high average production rate of about one new print every ten days over an eleven-year period. This statistic alone marks out printmaking as a technological engagement of enormous significance in Ruskin’s work. He etched some of the finest plates himself, beginning with the innovative soft-ground etchings for The Seven Lamps (1849), ‘bitten . . . (the last of them in my washhand basin . . .) by 176
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myself, with savage carelessness’ (viii.15). The soft ground etching technique ‘was old-fashioned by 1849, yet in [Ruskin’s] hands it proved capable of producing images of great originality’.10 But his Seven Lamps plates, though brilliantly expressive, failed to withstand the practical demands of the printing process, and in the 1850s Ruskin, ‘deeply influenced by his study of Turner’s etched work in the Liber Studiorum’,11 took Turner’s model for his ideal, etching in pure line (sometimes with the addition of mezzotint by an engraver), and restricting the use of multiple biting. Most of the plates in Ruskin’s books were made in collaboration with highly skilled professional engravers, under Ruskin’s careful supervision. Printmaking, however, was far more important to Ruskin than the mere need for book illustrations might suggest. The technical difficulties, the weeks of labour involved in the engraving of a steel plate, the permanence of the result, and the potential for printing hundreds or thousands of impressions – these placed a heavy responsibility on the printmaker. ‘[Where] will you look for a chance of saying something nobly, if it is not here?’ Ruskin asked (xix.101). The symbolic character of the act of engraving is crucial to an understanding of Ruskin’s approach to it, and invites comparison with Blake who, in Plate 11 of his Job series of engravings, ‘clearly intends the means of producing the plate to be an essential part of the symbolic structure’.12 The engraver’s burin13 was for Ruskin, as for Blake, the ‘iron pen’ of Job: Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! (Job 19:23–24)
This symbolic conception of engraving was not a mere aesthetic phantasm. Driven by a moral impulse, it was informed by more than a decade of Ruskin’s involvement in the practicalities of ink, paper, etching grounds, acid, steel plates and wood blocks, together with detailed consultation and proof-checking with his engravers. The importance of engraving in Ruskin’s work is easy to miss: today, Modern Painters, Seven Lamps, and The Stones of Venice are usually read in late editions, illustrated by reproductions of the original plates – but the reproduction process introduces a layer of fog that often defeats Ruskin’s intention to stretch his reader’s visual perception beyond the ordinary. Significant nuances and subtleties of gradation that Ruskin intended his reader to see may not be visible in reproductions of the engravings. For Ruskin, the multiplicability of engravings created a potentially serious moral predicament, arising from the ability of the cheap illustration to penetrate into the home, and influence large numbers of people at an intimate level through continual exposure: 177
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a l a n da v i s [This] multipliable work will pass through thousand thousand hands, strengthen and inform innumerable souls, if it be worthy; vivify the folly of thousands if unworthy. Remember, also, it will mix in the very closest manner in domestic life. (xix.101)
Unfortunately most of the engravers of Ruskin’s day, though immensely skilled and working under difficult conditions for long periods of time for little reward, were in Ruskin’s opinion not employed in ‘saying something nobly’ at all. Despite the intervention of Turner, who had effectively trained a school of engravers to make prints after his works under his personal supervision, engravers tended to work to a formula: ‘a tradition . . . regulated every method of interpretation, and, leaving nothing to the instinct and feeling of the workman, prescribed for him where to put thick lines and thin lines, and lozenges with dots in the middle’.14 This was hopelessly ill-matched to Ruskin’s ambition to demonstrate his organic vision of the natural world, or to interpret Turner’s work, or the finest architecture. In works such as The Stones of Venice, and the later volumes of Modern Painters, Ruskin was driven to urge his engravers to new heights of expression and representation. We can understand the character of his intention, and judge the extent of his success, by considering Figure 9, the upper half of which reproduces an illustration from Modern Painters (vii.128). It was engraved by J. C. Armytage, after a portion of a Turner watercolour,15 and we may compare it with the same portion of the engraving that J. T. Willmore had made under Turner’s supervision and published with his approval in 1828 (see the lower half of Illustration 9). The contrast is startling. Willmore used patterns of lines that do little more than establish tone and a crude sense of texture, whereas Armytage, under Ruskin’s supervision, has portrayed a richness of nuance in Turner’s watercolour that is completely absent from Willmore’s engraving. These differences are crucial to Ruskin’s arguments about the truth to nature of Turner, and the penetrating capability of his visual imagination. Admittedly, the comparison is an unfair one: Armytage worked on a larger scale, and on steel, whereas Willmore had worked on copper; also, finer lines could be engraved in the harder metal, which had greater resistance to wear during printing. But the important point is that Ruskin was willing to use any technological means to achieve the accurate illustration of Turner’s work to an appropriate degree of ‘finish’ – a word which is central to his approach to engraving. Merely covering the paper with decorative patterns of lines (as in the Willmore engraving) has no part to play in Ruskin’s concept of ‘finish’. True ‘finish’, for Ruskin, ‘does not consist in smoothing or polishing, but in the completeness of the expression of ideas’ (v.155, original emphasis). It is a matter of ‘telling more truth’ (v.168). There can be ‘no refinement of execution where there is no thought . . . and never imagine there 178
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Figure 9. Comparison of engravings of J. M. W. Turner’s By the Brook-side (Richmond from the Moors, made for Turner’s England and Wales series of engravings) by J. C. Armytage under Ruskin’s supervision (above), and by J. T. Willmore under Turner’s supervision (below).
is reason to be proud of anything that can be accomplished by patience and sand-paper’ (x.199). For Ruskin the engraver’s task was to study every nuance in the work at hand (a Turner watercolour, say), and to create a series of engraved lines most closely analogous to the tones, colours, and textures of the original. Every line should be loaded with meaning, such that the final result was not a construct of habit, tradition, and formula, but an imaginative and truthful creation by a thoughtful and sensitive interpreter. 179
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Ruskin never lost his heightened sense of the value of engraving. John Hayman has suggested that this preoccupation may have been nostalgic in nature,16 but this is to overlook the forward-looking character of Ruskin’s approach – towards a future progressive school of engraving which ‘is Phoenician in immortality and fears no fire’ (xix.89). Ruskin’s hopes, however, were not realised: from a commercial point of view, photomechanical processes would increasingly dominate the reproduction of art, and the Art Journal, for long reliant on the use of steel-engraved plates for its most prestigious illustrations, would publish its final steel engraving in 1890. It is part of Ruskin’s tragedy that by the time he was best equipped to influence the future of engraving, its technology was on the verge of becoming old fashioned and commercially unattractive. By contrast, the exploitation of wood engraving during the period was of a character that made Ruskin deeply unsympathetic to it – a subject to which it is now necessary to turn, for it illuminates Ruskin’s concerns particularly well. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a school of wood engraving arose in Great Britain that would come to dominate the illustration of books and magazines during the period. Broadly gathered under an umbrella of ‘The Sixties’, it could be said to have begun in the middle of the 1850s, and to have come to an end in the early 1870s. It depended entirely on the development of an astonishing level of expertise, nurtured in workshops such as those of the Dalziel Brothers,17 and it attracted original work by (among many others) most of the leading artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. Yet Ruskin ignored almost all the wood-engraved art of this period, and when he did mention it, it was usually with disdain. It was not that Ruskin deplored wood engraving in itself; quite the contrary. As usual, it was the use to which the technology was applied that created the problem. The basic processes of making a Sixties wood engraving are simple to describe, though difficult to do. The artist drew a design on the prepared flat surface of the wood block, and passed the result to the engraver, who proceeded to cut away the wood around the lines drawn by the artist. The idea was to leave the design standing in relief so that, when the surface of the block was inked and pressed onto paper, the design would be printed on the paper in reverse. (This process necessarily involved the destruction of the original drawing on the block, though it was not long before techniques were developed which allowed the engraver to work with a photograph of the design on the block – thereby preserving the original drawing.) The engravers developed extraordinary degrees of skill in cutting away the wood amid the most intricate pencilled entanglements, so as to mimic the touch of the artist. They were so successful that most wood-engraved illustrations of the Sixties look very much like pen and ink sketches, and not much like wood engravings. 180
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It is here, with the idea that the typical Sixties wood engraving tried to appear to be something else (a pen and ink sketch), that Ruskin’s chief objections lay. Lines scrawled in seconds by the artist on the woodblock required hours or days of painstaking labour by the wood engraver in order to make the final print seem to be what it was not. Sixties wood engraving was, then, a process rooted in artistic impropriety. Ruskin, understanding this completely, damned it with ironic praise: ‘if we accept its false conditions, nothing can surpass the cleverness of our own school of Dalziel’ (xix.155). This is not to say that Ruskin himself did not take advantage of the expertise of the wood engravers of his day: the pages of the later volumes of Modern Painters (1856–60), and The Elements of Drawing (1857), for instance, are liberally sprinkled with wood-engraved reproductions of his own sketches, made according to the same ‘false conditions’. Like his use of the railways, it was a choice driven by expediency: the wood engravings were needed to make essential visual points in his books, not to pose as examples of fine wood-engraved art. Ruskin’s central ideas on the art of wood engraving are most comprehensively stated in the set of Oxford lectures published as Ariadne Florentina (1876). They broadly follow from the ‘abstract principle of doing with each material what it is best fitted to do’ (xix.136) – a concept rooted in Ruskin’s organic vision of the natural world, where all things have a designed purpose and function in relation to the whole. Ruskin explains the symbolic nature of the wood-engraver’s basic tool – ‘a solid ploughshare’ (xxii.348) – which cuts a v-shaped furrow into the surface of the block. If greater pressure is applied, the tool cuts a deeper, wider groove; with less pressure, the cut is shallower and finer. Because it is the surface of the block that carries the ink (the block is printed in the same way as letterpress), furrows cut by the engraver will appear in the final print as white lines – uninked paper – whose width is modulated by the engraver’s touch. To produce a black printed line, the engraver must cut away the wood on either side of the artist’s pen stroke, leaving a ridge standing in relief. Ruskin explains that this has significant consequences: ‘it requires extreme precision and skill to leave a thin dark line, and when left, it will be quickly beaten down by a careless printer. Therefore, the virtue of wood engraving is to exhibit the qualities and power of thick lines’ (xxii.350). The engraver, then, needs to be very sensitive to the strength, durability, and elasticity of his material – and so, by implication, does the artist who drew the image. (In due course, it became common practice to print from electrotype facsimiles that were more durable than the original engraved woodblocks, but the aesthetic impression of weakness, created by very thin wood-engraved black lines, remained.) 181
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So a well-designed wood engraving requires the delicate cutting of carefully chosen grooves and ridges, in sympathy with the restrictions of the medium. Ruskin was keenly aware that the concept of using a wood engraving to reproduce a sketch necessarily implies an abuse of the medium: ‘what appears to you a sketch on wood is not so at all, but a most laborious and careful imitation of a sketch on paper . . . [And] so far as we do in reality try to produce effects of sketching in wood . . . our work is wrong’ (xxii.349). This wrongness is most clearly seen in the use of cross-hatching – typically a sign of failure in the artist’s sympathy with the requirements of the medium and the task of the engraver. The draughtsman, with his pen, may dash in an area of cross-hatched shading in seconds, leaving a network of tiny lozengeshaped white spaces which the engraver must laboriously cut out with careful precision to maintain the illusion of the free sketch: if, Ruskin calculates, ‘I carelessly draw six strokes with my pen across other six, I produce twentyfive interstices, each of which will need at least six, perhaps twenty, careful touches of the burin to clear out, – say ten for an average; and I demand two hundred and fifty exquisitely precise touches from my engraver, to render ten careless ones of mine . . . And Mrs Beecher Stowe and the North Americans fancy they have abolished slavery!’ (xxii.359–60). Ruskin’s objections concerned the wellbeing of both engraver and viewer. The engraver – already working long hours under difficult conditions – was required slavishly to follow the requirements of the artist with painstaking craftsmanship, but with relatively little thought of his own; while the viewer was invited to enjoy an image that was created with no feeling for the rightness of the medium – or perhaps worse, to be unaware of the requirements of the medium at all. It is telling that Ruskin seems to have had no quarrel with the various technological advances made during the Sixties, such as the replacement of the artist’s original drawing on the block by a photographic reproduction, or the manufacture of metal electrotype facsimiles of the engraved woodblock to facilitate the printing process. His objections lay elsewhere. Ruskin’s dismissal of Sixties wood engraving led him to overlook a small amount of wood-engraved work that closely adhered to his principles. (Such a tremendous quantity of wood-engraved illustration was generated in the period that it was, one supposes, inevitable that he would miss the few that he would have found heartening.) One such print is Frederick Sandys’s Until Her Death (Figure 10), published in Good Words in 1863, which illustrates Ruskin’s principles admirably. The accompanying detail of the woman’s hair in the lower half of Figure 10 reveals the full extent of the sensitivity of the design, and of its engraving. The marks are conceived, not as pen strokes, but as cuts made by the engraver’s burin. Through each white 182
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Figure 10. Wood engraving after Frederick Sandys’s Until Her Death, Good Words, 1863 (above), with enlarged detail (below).
line articulating the tresses of hair we feel the sure and delicate touch of the engraver’s tool on the woodblock, widening or narrowing the groove, as the applied pressure changes. We sense the movement of the tool as it cuts through the wood, simultaneously responding not only to the guidance of the artist’s design, but to the need for harmony with the other markings, and to the engraver’s intuitive feel for the elastic properties of the material. The 183
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design of the artist and the work of the engraver operate together in a kind of symbiotic relationship – a specific application of Ruskin’s Law of Help (vii.203–216), and a symbol of organic unity. As Ruskin explained when writing about Hans Holbein’s series of wood engravings, The Dance of Death, it is impossible to say of any standard old woodcut, whether the draughtsman engraved it himself or not. I should imagine, from the character and subtlety of the touch, that every line of the Dance of Death had been engraved by Holbein; we know it was not, and that there can be no certainty given by even the finest pieces of wood execution of anything more than perfect harmony between the designer and workman. (xxii.360)
This mutually helpful intent, linking artist and engraver creatively together, is largely missing in Sixties wood-engraved illustration, and its absence primarily explains Ruskin’s dismissive attitude. The Sixties wood engraver contributes his skill, patience, and determination, but is permitted to bring little life of his own to the joint endeavour. As ever, with Ruskin, it comes down to this issue of life, at its best, with all its inherent richness of interlinked helpful cooperation; and he did not find it in the wood engravings of the Sixties. They offended his principle of ‘rightness in work . . . in my own mind the foundation of every other’, which he wished ‘to be made plain, if nothing else is’ (xix.388–9). This principle provides the key to understanding Ruskin’s attitude to technology. Working from an over-arching sense of what God had made human beings fit for, Ruskin was a strong advocate for creative hand labour in general, and the work of the thoughtful and creative engraver was a perfect symbol of it. As Stuart Eagles writes, for Ruskin, only ‘creative labour can be truly productive of human happiness, for only this type of labour considers the human being as an organism at one with nature, rather than as a machine seeking blasphemously to improve upon it’.18 The Guild of St George represents Ruskin’s attempt to frame a model of society in which such an approach to creative labour is intrinsic. And so, writing about Holbein’s ‘The Last Furrow’19 – one of the ‘best wood engravings ever produced by art’ (xxii.352) – Ruskin brings art, printmaking, ploughing, life, and death together, in a symbolic unity of text, image, and purpose, that makes it hard to know where one strand of thought ends and another begins. Engraver or ploughman? The exact nature of the technology hardly matters. What counts is the permanent value of a life’s diligent and creative toil: The husbandman is old and gaunt, and has passed his days, not in speaking, but pressing the iron into the ground. And the payment for his life’s work is, that he is clothed in rags, and his feet are bare on the clods; and he has no hat – but the 184
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Technology brim of a hat only, and his long, unkempt grey hair comes through. But all the air is full of warmth and of peace; and, beyond the village church, there is, at last, light indeed. His horses lag in the furrow, and his own limbs totter and fail: but one comes to help him. ‘It is a long field,’ says Death; ‘but we’ll get to the end of it to-day, – you and I.’ (xxii.355)
Figure 11. The Last Furrow
N O T ES 1. ‘Technology’ is here interpreted in its broadest sense as the use of tools, machines, crafts, and systems to achieve desired ends. (Thanks to Ray Haslam for his interesting observation that the word ‘technology’ does not appear anywhere in the Library Edition of Ruskin’s works.) I am grateful to Sara Atwood, Ray Haslam, and Francis O’Gorman for their invaluable suggestions about earlier drafts of this essay. 2. Robin Holt, ‘The credit crisis and some gothic relief’, The Ruskin Review and Bulletin, 5.1 (2009), 19–39 (30). 3. Jeffrey Richards, ‘The Role of the Railways’, in Michael Wheeler, ed., Ruskin and Environment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 123–43 (128). 4. Ibid., 135. 5. A. N. Whitehead, Essays in Science and Philosophy (London: Rider, 1948), 64. 6. See Stephen Wildman, Ruskin and the Daguerreotype (Lancaster: Ruskin Library, 2006), 11, n.18. 7. Ray Haslam, ‘Ruskin, Drawing, and the Argument of the Lens’, The Ruskin Review and Bulletin, 2.1 (Michaelmas, 2005), 17–24. 185
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a l a n da v i s 8. Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 77. 9. Ibid., 78. 10. Alan Davis, ‘“What I intended the plates to be”: Ruskin’s etchings for The Seven Lamps of Architecture’, The Ruskin Review and Bulletin, 1.1 (Lent term, 2005), 3–11 (5). 11. Alan Davis, ‘The “dark clue” and the Law of Help: Ruskin, Turner, and the Liber Studiorum’, in Robert Hewison, ed., Ruskin’s Artists. Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 31–51 (37). 12. Alan Davis, ‘Job’s “Iron Pen”: Ruskin’s Use of Engraved Illustration in Modern Painters’, in Michael Wheeler, ed., Time and Tide: Ruskin Studies 1996 (London: Pilkington, 1996), 98–116 (106). 13. The burin (or graver) is the tool with which an engraver cuts lines into the surface of a metal plate or woodblock. 14. P. G. Hamerton, Etching and Etchers (1876; rpt. Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1975), 17. 15. ‘Richmond from the Moors’, made for Turner’s England and Wales series of engravings, is reproduced in Eric Shanes, Turner’s England (London: Cassell, 1990), 185. 16. John Hayman, John Ruskin and Switzerland (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990), 9–10. 17. Pronounced ‘Dee-EL’. 18. Stuart Eagles, After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 37. 19. The tailpiece reproduces, as Figure 11, a facsimile engraving by Arthur Burgess after Holbein, commissioned by Ruskin, from the Dance of Death series.
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part iii
Authorship
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Published online by Cambridge University Press
13 D A V I D R. S O R E N S E N
Ruskin and Carlyle
Ruskin’s career as a critic was marked by personal frustration and public controversy as he tried to navigate a secure passage between Arnoldian objectivity and Carlylean provocation. His efforts to reconcile these two largely incompatible modes of critical discourse – the liberal and the inclusive, and the illiberal and the antagonistic – exhausted him emotionally and intellectually. In basic respects Ruskin was the ‘young lieutenant of Carlyle in his war on Utilitarian Radicalism’.1 But ironically, he enlisted in this campaign in the mid 1850s when Carlyle – the dominant critic, historian, and prophet of his times – was experiencing acute doubts about his standing as an enduring figure of authority. The story of their friendship was mythologised by James Anthony Froude in his Life of Carlyle (1882, 1884) as a meeting between a venerated ‘Sage’ who ‘had hitherto been preaching alone in the wilderness’ and his ambitious disciple, ‘a true “man of genius”’.2 But contrary to the assumptions of Ruskin criticism, the record of their writings and letters indicate that from the outset, their association was never as harmonious as appearances suggested. Notwithstanding their joint attempts to maintain the illusion of themselves as ‘a minority of two’,3 striking differences of opinion remained. Perceiving themselves as embattled Jeremiahs, they circumvented this discord to preserve the illusion of unanimity. Despite frequent prickly patches in the friendship, they lent one another crucial support, comfort, and encouragement over a span of twenty-five years. The effect of this uneasy alliance on Ruskin’s performance as a public critic was more taxing and less ennobling than Froude indicated. Carlylean prophecy proved to be a heavy burden to them both, embroiling them in exhausting public debate and exacerbating their fears that they had failed to awaken the forces of change that might save the nation from its ‘Niagara’ plunge towards the Benthamite, democratic abyss. Carlyle always distrusted Ruskin because he was an adherent of the ‘Fine Arts’, a trend that Carlyle had denounced in ‘Jesuitism’, the last of the 189
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Latter-Day Pamphlets published in August 1850. Ruskin may have initially thought ‘that he was Carlyle’s target’ (Hilton, 2.32) in ‘Jesuitism’, but after a closer reading of the piece, he shrewdly ascertained that he and Carlyle were not as far apart as the latter’s harsh rhetoric implied. In ‘Jesuitism’, Carlyle had outlined a role for art criticism that seemed tailored to Ruskin’s ambitions of moral and aesthetic pedagogy. The real ‘target’ of the essay, as the liberal evangelical journalist Peter Bayne (1830–96) rightly surmised in Lessons from my Masters (1879), was Goethe. Bayne observed, ‘I can hardly conceive anything that would have affected Goethe with a keener sense of antipathy than the Latter-Day Pamphlets’.4 Carlyle’s ‘affinities’ with Goethe had always been ‘selective’. The German colossus may have freed the Scotsman from the constraints of theological orthodoxy and taught him that that ‘the true things in Christianity survived and were eternally true’,5 but Goethe never assuaged Carlyle’s doubts about ‘Kunst [art]’, which Carlyle described to Emerson in July 1847 as ‘a great delusion’.6 Carlyle had long harboured suspicions about Goethe’s cult of genius, by which he had rendered art as a religion and sanctified literature as the dignified contemplation of timeless and beautiful forms. Goethe’s ideal of ‘bildung’ – the enhancement of self-awareness through art and culture – tempted acolytes to retreat from untidy reality into purer dimensions of observation and meditation, where they could privately conduct what Matthew Arnold called in the 1853 preface to his poems, a ‘dialogue of the mind with itself’.7 Carlyle feared that Goethe had privileged sensitivity, discrimination, and refined perception above action, duty, and earnestness. Carlyle’s ‘deep-rooted ambivalence’ about ‘his vocation as a man of letters’ was swayed by the conflict in his mind ‘between Goethe and Grub Street’.8 But Carlyle’s mind was made up about Goethe well before he discreetly excluded him from the ‘Hero as Man of Letters’ chapter in Heroes and Hero Worship (1841). At the conclusion of Sartor Resartus (1833–4), Teufelsdröckh abandoned his Goethean ‘Wahngasse [‘dream house’, ‘illusion house’] watchtower’ and descended ‘into the angry noisy Forum, with an Argument that cannot but exasperate and divide’. He had closed both his Byron and his Goethe, and embraced a life of protest and prophecy, determined to satisfy his ‘wish to proselytise’.9 In principle Ruskin was attracted to this Teufelsdröckhian vocation, but he was intellectually and temperamentally averse to the din and distraction of the ‘angry noisy Forum’. At an early stage he discovered that ‘there was no middle ground between Olympian detachment from the world’s sufferings and total immersion in them. He was unable to make the descent into darkness as a dispassionate observer . . . and every increase in his knowledge exacerbated his grief and fed his anger’.10 But he persevered in his plan to 190
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Ruskin and Carlyle
meet and to correspond with the Chelsea seer, rightly gauging that what separated them might be less important than what united them. In ‘Jesuitism’ Carlyle had left open the possibility that the advocates of the ‘Fine Arts’ could salvage their creed if they acknowledged its ‘higher potentiality’: ‘Ever must the Fine Arts be if not religion, yet indissolubly united to it, dependent on it, vitally blended with it as body is with soul’. For Carlyle, art should move closer to history and epic and away from ‘Falsehood, Fiction and suchlike’, aspiring to the form of the Hebrew Bible, a ‘great Poem’ that sprang from ‘the Interpreting of Fact’.11 Ruskin, who began The Stones of Venice (1851–3) by reminding readers of the ‘sternness of [the] warning’ delivered by the ‘Prophets of Israel’ (ix.17) against the kingdom of Tyre, correctly intuited that he was already following a Carlylean path. He sent him the first volume of The Stones of Venice in March 1851. Carlyle responded with cordiality and enthusiasm. In this ‘strange, unexpected, and . . . most true and excellent Sermon in Stones’, Ruskin had satisfied the author of ‘Jesuitism’ by fusing art with religion. Carlyle was impressed by the dense historical sweep of the book, and by the author’s ability to weave the past and present in his narrative. Ruskin was employing methods that were germane to Carlyle as a historian and a critic. Thanking Ruskin for his copy, Carlyle declared that these ‘Critical Studies’ were ‘a singular sign of the times . . . and a very gratifying one’.12 A three-year hiatus in their correspondence followed, which was largely attributable to Carlyle’s gloomy descent into what his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, bitterly referred to on 16 January 1860 as ‘“the valley of the shadow” of Frederick the Great’.13 This was a stage of Carlyle’s career marked by professional insecurity, a psychological version of the earlier spiritual crisis that he had dramatised in the ‘Everlasting No’14 chapter of Sartor Resartus. It began in the wake of the critical reception accorded to Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) and The Life of John Sterling (1851). Carlyle’s respective condemnations of the British political and religious establishments in these works had provoked an equally hostile counter-assault, which left him stunned and uncharacteristically vulnerable. Normally impervious to criticism, he was chastened by the intensity of the outrage. In a letter to Harriet Lady Ashburton on 9 November 1852, he worried that he had become a ‘humbug and fool’ in the eyes of the reading public, and admitted that these ‘black days’ had weakened his will. In his journal he chastised himself for being guilty of ‘Cowardice’ and conceded that ‘the votes of men, the respectabilities . . . have been too sacred to me’.15 During this phase of extreme disillusionment, Carlyle wrote a series of reflections on his critical and religious beliefs, which Froude inaccurately published as ‘Spiritual Optics’ in the second volume of his biography of Carlyle. 191
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In these anguished fragments, Carlyle reiterated his commitment to an abrasive and provocative style of critical idiom that he would soon urge Ruskin to employ. He questioned whether he should take a more inclusive stance as a social commentator, given the ferocity of the attacks against him, but he rightly reasoned that such a volte-face would only compromise his reputation further. Those offended by his cruel racist caricatures of Negroes, Jews, and Irish Catholics, or by his harsh condemnation of the ‘beggarly Twaddle’16 of contemporary Christianity, would never forgive him for his jibes, even if he justified them by arguing that his satire was aimed at the powerful rather than the powerless. Carlyle regretted that so few of his contemporaries were prepared to pursue the solitary course that he had mapped out in Latter-Day Pamphlets. In his letter of 23 January 1855, Ruskin sought to establish his credentials as a member of this select coterie of outcasts: I entreat you not to think when . . . you glance at anything I write, and when you come as you must sometimes, on bits that look like bits of yourself spoiled, – to think that I have been mean enough to borrow from you knowingly, & without acknowledgment. How much your general influence has told on me, I know not, but I always confess it, or rather boast of it, in conversation about you. (xxxvi.184)
There was something peculiarly enabling for Ruskin in the creative imagining of alienation. Though undoubtedly flattered, Carlyle remained personally convinced that he himself was a wasted force, and that notion of wasting would soon haunt Ruskin too. In a letter to Ruskin of 23 May, he explained that the underlying cause of his resignation could be traced to his Prussian research. In a striking comparison, Carlyle likened himself to the British military authorities who were responsible for the Crimean debacle: ‘My Prussian affairs are as bad almost as Balaklava; and indeed resemble that notable Enterprise of the Turk War in several respects – in this especially, that I had no business at all to concern myself in such an adventure . . . and that a good result to it does not seem . . . so much as possible!’17 It was no coincidence that his interest in Ruskin’s career as a ‘Sage’ grew during the thirteen years in which he researched and wrote his five-volume biography of Frederick the Great (1858–65). From the outset Carlyle harboured qualms about the character and deeds of this ‘last of the Kings’ who ‘usher[ed]-in the French Revolution . . . [f]inishing-off forever the trade of King’.18 The title of the book itself betrayed his scepticism: History of Friedrich II. Of Prussia Called Frederic the Great. With unusual severity, he admitted in the proem to his epic that Frederick was ‘a questionable hero; with much in him which one 192
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could have wished not there, and much wanting which one could have wished’.19 In the final section of the chapter ‘Discouragements’, Carlyle confessed that his expectations of ‘presenting, in this Last of the Kings, an exemplar to my contemporaries . . . are not high’.20 He was troubled by the predilection – one that would later be reinforced by the indifferent reviews of the volumes as they were published – that his decision to write Frederick’s life would accelerate the process of his decline as a ‘Prophet-Historian’.21 Carlyle saw parallels between his impressionable ‘young lieutenant’ and Frederick. Ruskin was ‘questionable’ for similar reasons. Like the young ‘Fritz’, he had started his career as an aesthete. Shortly after meeting him for the first time in December 1850, Carlyle described Ruskin in a letter to his brother John as ‘a small but rather dainty dainty dilettante soul, of the Scotch-Cockney breed’.22 These same ‘dainty dainty’ qualities were evident in the character of the young Prussian crown prince. As a boy Frederick had dismayed his stern father with his dislike of manly realities: ‘[He] likes verses, story-books, flute-playing better; seems to be of effeminate tendencies . . . affects French modes, combs-out his hair like a cockatoo, the foolish French fop, instead of conforming to the Army-regulation’ (12:422). Like Frederick, Ruskin possessed a strong curiosity about ‘what exists, what has being and reality around him’.23 But too often, Carlyle noticed, Ruskin reverted to the vantage point of the aesthetic Goethean ‘watchtower’. In a letter to Lord Ashburton on 16 May 1856, he mused that in ‘Ruskin I have found in all things to mean well . . . but he strikes me always as infinitely too hopeful of men and things, – in fact as having soared aloft out of all contact with the rugged facts; which class of objects accordingly he contemplates, as with outspread level wings, very much at his ease, far up in the azure aether’.24 Nonetheless, Carlyle also detected in Ruskin a penchant for Frederician ‘Reality’25 that clearly distinguished him from other votaries of the aesthetic creed. Carlyle wrote to his brother John on 27 November, characterising Ruskin as ‘a bottle of beautiful Soda-water . . . only with an intellect of tenfold vivacity. He is very pleasant company now and then. A singular element – very curious to look upon – in the present puddle of the intellectual artistic so-called “world” in these parts’.26 In a curious ‘conflux of two eternities’,27 Carlyle unconsciously took the role of Friedrich Wilhelm in his relations with Ruskin, his own heir-apparent. In this plot Carlyle played the part of the inflexible ‘Rhadamanthine Father’ (named after Rhadamanthus, the merciless judge of the Greek underworld), to Ruskin’s wayward crown prince, who ‘takes unto Voltairism, piping, fiddling and belles-lettres’. Overconfidently, Carlyle anticipated that Ruskin would eagerly pursue a course similar to that of Frederick the Great, audaciously waging war on the battlefields of journalism and letters 193
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against the falsities of his age. Prone to self-obsession – John Stuart Mill archly observed in 1854 that the author of Latter-Day Pamphlets had ‘become a mere commentator on himself’28 – Carlyle failed to notice how emotionally unsuited Ruskin was to the coarse tenor of public debate. Unlike Frederick, Ruskin could never conceal his feelings behind a mask of stoicism, nor was he ‘accomplished in endurance . . . for the injustices of men and things’.29 In a letter to Carlyle on 23 December 1861, Ruskin confessed that ‘the least mortification or anxiety – makes me ill so quickly that I shall have . . . to live the life of a monster’ (Cate, 98). But Carlyle urged him to persevere with his attacks against political economy, sensing that his own redemption as a ‘Prophet-Historian’ was bound up with Ruskin’s activism. Ruskin was destined to frustrate this aspiration because his conversion to social criticism in 1860 was never as unequivocal as either he or Carlyle proclaimed. His writings ‘would continue to be a mixture of art and politics, as they had been for more than twenty years’. The difference in his writing was, as Nicholas Shrimpton rightly says, ‘less a change of topic than a change of medium’.30 Ruskin may have ‘borrowed’ the rhetorical clothing of LatterDay Pamphlets, but he knew from his reading of Sartor Resartus that ‘his Vestments and his Self are not one and indivisible’.31 Ruskin’s moral vision was underpinned by a spirituality that put him at odds with Carlyle, whose faith was a mercurial muddle, poised awkwardly as it was between ‘Calvinism without the theology’ and liberal agnosticism.32 In contrast, Ruskin had disowned his evangelical inheritance and was espousing a ‘theology of works’ that ignored salvation and otherworldliness in favour of ‘New Testament teaching’.33 His objective, Michael Wheeler suggests, was to teach people how to live. In a letter to an evangelical clergyman in 1859 he declared that the ‘plain words & plain dealing of Christ are all I accept – & by those I stand – Thou shalt Love thy neighbour as thyself’.34 This was not a creed that the author of Frederick the Great could take seriously, as he strove to recreate the life of a king whose country was surrounded by ‘enemies as innumerable as the sea-sand’.35 Ruskin’s early assaults against the ‘Dismal science people’ – the political economists who shaped Victorian social policies – heartened Carlyle considerably and coalesced in his imagination with Frederick’s daring military exploits. In his letters to Ruskin, his language was rife with martial metaphors. He felt ‘exhilaration’ and ‘exultation’ at the stormy reception that greeted the publication of Ruskin’s essays on political economy in The Cornhill Magazine between August and November 1860. On 29 October he wrote to congratulate him: ‘Such a thing flung suddenly into a half a million dull British heads on the same day, will do a great deal of good’. He was equally heartened by Ruskin’s ruthless style of exposition, and by ‘the 194
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Lynx-eyed sharpness of yr logic, at the pincer-grip (red hot pincers) you take of certain bloated cheeks and blown-up bellies’.36 Ruskin’s core thesis, that ‘the modern soi-disant science of political economy’ was based on a ‘code of social action [that] may be determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection’ (xvii.25), echoed Carlyle’s own criticism of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), which he had read and extensively annotated in 1848–9. But the terms of Carlyle’s praise for Ruskin also defined the limits of his sympathy for what Ruskin was doing as a social critic. He speculated that if Ruskin could ‘work out’ in the field of political economy ‘what [he had] done in Painting: yes, there were a “something to do”’.37 How Carlyle interpreted what Ruskin had ‘done’ for painting became clearer in a letter that he wrote to Thomas Erskine on 4 August 1862, in which he advised him to read Unto This Last: ‘He seems to me to have the best talent for preaching of all men now alive. He has entirely blown up the world that used to call itself of “Art”, and left it in an impossible posture . . . If he could do as much for Political Economy (as I hope), it would be the greatest benefit achieved by preaching for generations past’.38 Carlyle’s military tropes here revealed his own priorities. Frederick the Great had countered the ‘Gospel of Free Trade’39 by imposing strict protectionists measures and, when necessary and expedient, by seizing control of land and resources. But in Unto This Last, Ruskin had not ‘blown up’ either laissez-faire economics or art. Instead, he treated aesthetic matters as if they were inseparable from the laws of supply and demand, and placed the obligation for social change in the hands of individual consumers rather than the state. The purchaser possessed the power to change the logic of production. Propounding the case for an ethic of consumption, Ruskin denied Mill’s contention that it made no difference whether a labourer produced ‘green velvet, with seed and a scythe, or red velvet, with silk and scissors’. Ruskin countered, ‘if our consumption is to be in anywise unselfish, not only our mode of consuming the articles we require interests him, but also the kind of article we require with a view to consumption’ (xvii.103). He repeated the point in a more overtly Carlylean fashion in Munera Pulveris (1872), which originated as a series of essays that Froude, at Carlyle’s encouragement, began publishing in Fraser’s in June 1862. Again, Ruskin’s emphasis was on the connection between the quality of consumption and the integrity of a worker’s life: ‘If he produce or make good and beautiful things, they will Re-Create him; . . . if bad and ugly things, they will “corrupt” or “break in pieces” – that is, in the exact degree of their power, Kill him’ (xvii.151). Buoyed by the intensity of Ruskin’s ‘pincer-grip’, and keen to promote further ‘preaching’, Carlyle tempered his criticism. In the final paragraph of 195
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his letter of 29 October, he gingerly explained to his friend that his one reservation about Unto This Last was centred on the author’s final plea for the wealthy to eschew luxury because it ‘can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the [cruellest] man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold’ (xvii.114). But true justice, as Frederick the Great had showed, could only be attained by strict state regulation of ‘the Gospel of Free Trade’. There would have been no Prussia, Carlyle would insist in the last volume of his history, had any aspect of its economy been left ‘Free’.40 Ruskin had not quite gone far enough in disciplining the owners of capital: ‘It is not Philanthropisms that will do there; it is Rhadamanthisms (I sorrowfully see) whh are yet at a very great distance!’41 Carlyle was equally appreciative of the first instalment of Munera Pulveris, but his response was similarly tactical. In a letter to Ruskin on 30 June 1862, he wrote, ‘I approved in every particular; calm, definite, clear; rising into the sphere of Plato’.42 Ruskin must have guessed that this was qualified praise, since he did not accept Carlyle’s judgement that Plato had been right to expel poets from his Republic because of the threat they posed to morality. Contrary to what Carlyle intimated here and elsewhere, Ruskin had not lost faith in the beneficial power of art, even if he became uncertain of the basis for defending that faith. Perhaps recalling Frederick the Great’s expulsion of Voltaire from Berlin, Carlyle was keen to reaffirm a consensus that did not exist. Ruskin hinted at this friction in the third essay of Munera Pulveris, observing that Plato’s ‘logical power quenched his imagination, and he became incapable of understanding the purely imaginative element in poetry or painting’ (xvii.226). Ruskin still felt that he was realising the ‘higher potentiality’ for the ‘Fine Arts’ that Carlyle had outlined in ‘Jesuitism’. On 25 December 1862 he told Thomas and Jane that he was reading the essay again, and he wondered why ‘Mr Carlyle wants me to write anything more for – if people don’t attend to [the pamphlet], what more is to be said?’ (Cate, 102). He could reconcile the tensions between himself and Carlyle in his economic writings because, in practice, his critical method was far less ‘intolerant’ than Carlyle pretended. In a variety of respects, Ruskin had accommodated the qualities that Arnold celebrated two years later in his essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864): disinterestedness, many-sidedness, and comprehensiveness. Ruskin’s theories of art, like Arnold’s, ‘were originally framed as conceptions not only of the good work of art but of the good life’.43 To unfold the beauty of God’s design ineffably inscribed in the physical world constituted the true ‘wealth of life’ for Ruskin. As a result, he could be immersed in practical matters without losing his grasp of their wider aesthetic and spiritual implications. In The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) he declared, ‘I do not speak, nor have I ever spoken . . . in any proselytizing 196
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temper . . . I take for the time [a person’s] creed as I find it; and endeavour to push it into such vital fruit as it seems capable of’ (xviii.393). Arnold’s own deep indebtedness to Carlyle’s ‘ideas, techniques, and catchphrases’44 in the 1860s prompted him to confuse Ruskin’s voice with his mentor’s. In Arnold’s estimate, Ruskin’s ‘pugnacious political economy’ reflected his failure to resist the impact of Carlyle’s ‘furious raid’ into ‘the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere’ in LatterDay Pamphlets. Arnold was not alone in believing that Ruskin had been ‘blackened’45 by the figure whom he castigated as a ‘moral desperado’.46 A critical consensus was building during the decade that would put further pressure on Ruskin to decide between Arnoldian composure and Carlylean truculence. The strain of Carlylean discipleship wearied Ruskin, forcing him to negotiate between what he called the ‘mob’s’ (xxxvi.346) disapproval and his prophet’s admonitions. In July 1863 he lamented to Charles Eliot Norton that he was torn ‘between the longing for rest and for lovely life, and the sense of the terrific call of human crime for resistance and of human misery for help’ (xxxvi.450). Carlyle too was plagued by anxiety over his part in exhorting Ruskin to ‘exasperate and divide’. His explosive reaction to Anthony Trollope’s review of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) in the July 1865 issue of the Fortnightly Review illustrated his insecurities. In the article Trollope had regretted that ‘in these preachings of his, [Ruskin] has become essentially Carlylesque’. But in comparison with Carlyle’s fiery denunciations, Ruskin’s diatribes were ‘pure rodomontade’. His graceful expressions and ‘well-arranged, vigorous words’ lacked the ‘innate, conspicuous wisdom which alone can make such preachings efficacious’.47 These were the literary attributes of a great teacher of art, not a polemicist. Carlyle’s furious response to the article disguised his nagging reservations about the strength and durability of Ruskin’s convictions. Though he had not read Sesame and Lilies, he lambasted Trollope in a letter to Jane of 27 July, cursing him for his ‘considerable insolence stupidity & vulgarity’.48 His outburst was a symptom of his broader frustration at the tepid reaction to the publication of the final volume of Frederick the Great. His friend Thomas Woolner conveyed a lucid account of his psychological state in a letter to Louisa Lady Ashburton in a letter of 4 September: ‘I think the almost entire want of intelligent notice of his great work now completed must make him feel depressed; a few words to show that his toilsome struggle has at least been recognized would surely be not too much to expect from easy-going fellow creatures’.49 Ruskin’s own ‘words’ acted as a powerful counterweight to these negative currents, but Carlyle’s misgivings about his friend’s aesthetic and philanthropic inclinations did not abate. 197
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He had good reason to be worried. In Frederick the Great Carlyle had woven his views on a wide variety of contemporary topics into the narrative, including the Crimea War, Italian unification, African-American slavery, the American civil war, Napoleon III, France and French foreign policy, Bismarck, German unification, and Polish independence. Had he examined his scribe’s opinions on these subjects – Ruskin had widely circulated them in lectures, articles, and letters to newspapers throughout the decade – he would have discovered considerable dissent. Ruskin’s outlook was consistently more liberal and ‘disinterested’. Even in the case of the Governor Eyre controversy, he went much further than Carlyle in striving to uphold the Arnoldian precept of seeing the ‘the object as in itself it really is’.50 In the circumstances, this was a risky attitude for Ruskin to adopt. Carlyle’s mood was volatile in the aftermath of the popular triumph of his Edinburgh rectorial address and the subsequent death of Jane Welsh Carlyle in April 1866. He was disgusted by the ‘universal acclamation’51 that greeted his Edinburgh speech. The political establishment had tried to tame his message and sentimentalise his achievement, with The Times lauding him in an editorial of 4 April for the ‘singular mellowness’52 of his speech. Soon after Carlyle gave the address, a best-selling pirated edition of it was published together with a biography that represented his life as ‘a conventional rags-to-riches success story’.53 To Carlyle, the experience had served as a stark warning both to him and to Ruskin: public adulation, together with the marketing machinery that generated it, was a greater threat to their independence as ‘Sages’ than critical neglect. The death of his wife – Carlyle’s most treasured and trenchant reader – buttressed his feelings of antagonism towards the literary world and its ‘empty talk, laborious hypocrisy, dilettantism, [and] futility’.54 In the Eyre controversy, Ruskin’s deep sympathy for the grieving Carlyle was delicately balanced with his stubborn desire to be fair. The violent outcry and the mass protests against Eyre had unsettled him enough to consider the evidence against the governor more scrupulously than Carlyle, who was in no mood for appeasement. In his speech to the Eyre Defence and Aid Fund on 5 September 1866 that was published in November, Ruskin prefaced his defence of Eyre’s actions with a stout apologia of his own motives. He had joined the committee ‘in the simple desire of obtaining justice, not for black men only, nor for white, but for men of every race and colour. He detested all cruelty, and all injustice by whomsoever inflicted, or suffered’.55 For Carlyle, this language was uncomfortably close to the sentiments of the ‘ballotboxing, Nigger-emancipating’56 reformers whom he was in the process of assailing in Shooting Niagara: and After?, which he began writing in August. But knowing how formidable an ally Ruskin was to the cause – and how 198
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reluctant other major figures were to step forward and lend active support – Carlyle tolerated his friend’s mild apostasy. Re-clothing Ruskin’s address in the garb of Frederick the Great, Carlyle described it to his friend Caroline Davenport Bromley on 15 September as ‘a right gallant thrust . . . While all the world stands tremulous, shilly-shallying from the gutter, impetuous Ruskin plunges his rapier up to the very hilt in the abominable belly of the vast blockheadism’.57 Ruskin was less certain. He read a detailed report of Eyre’s incompetence and corruption sent to him by George Price (1812–90), a liberal-minded Jamaican planter and a prominent member of the Legislative Assembly. In turn Ruskin forwarded the material to Carlyle, who briskly discounted it in a letter of 19 September as a ‘mere heap of flaming soot’.58 Ruskin survived the ordeal of the Eyre controversy largely by acquiescing to the will of Carlyle. But the episode was yet another painful reminder of the schism in his psyche between art and ‘resistance’. It was a division that Carlyle had unwittingly intensified by the relentless severity of his demands. As early as 1867, Ruskin plotted his release from the grip of his ‘Rhadamantine’ father. In Time and Tide (1867) he voiced the need to ‘disburthen my heart of the witness I have been, in order that I may be free to go back to my garden lawns, and paint birds and flowers there’ (xxvii.377). Ruskin loved ‘retired ground’ as much as Arnold’s ‘ScholarGipsy’. His envisaged ‘spark from heaven’59 manifested itself in Fors Clavigera (1871–84), a series of political letters to ‘the workmen and labourers of Great Britain’ that served as a kind of Carlylean catharsis, ‘a byework to quiet my conscience, that I might be happy in what I supposed to be my own proper life of Art-teaching, at Oxford and elsewhere; and, through my own happiness, to help others’ (xxviii.485). In ‘disburthening’ himself of his social conscience, Ruskin also freed himself of the incubus of Carlyle in a biting idiom that ‘outdid his master’ (xxvii. xxiv). But happiness remained as elusive as ever for him, though Fors did represent a practical step towards his goal of regenerating humanity through criticism and pedagogy, even if it too was haunted by the pale spectre of a wasted purpose. Unlike the ‘Scholar-Gipsy’, Ruskin had powerfully and openly revealed his cure for the ‘strange disease of modern life’.60 When asked by W. B. Yeats who had inspired the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris responded, ‘O Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes’.61 Paradoxically, it was the ‘punch’ that Carlyle had administered to Ruskin in the 1850s that had reinvigorated the latter’s campaign against the ‘accumulated falsities’ of his times. Ruskin may have won more battles than he realised, but he was never the ‘Sage’ that Carlyle wanted him to be, or that subsequent critics assumed him to be. As a 199
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public intellectual, he yearned to belong to the world whose misguided ways he sought to reform. NO TES 1. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, in A. S. Dale, ed., The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), xv.447. 2. James Anthony Froude, Life of Carlyle, 4 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1882–4), iii.244–5. 3. Carlyle to Ruskin, 29 October 1860, in Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, and David R. Sorensen, eds., The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1970–ongoing), xxxvii.30. 4. Peter Bayne, Lessons From My Masters (London: Clark, 1879), 110. 5. William Allingham, A Diary, ed. H. Allingham and D. Radford (London: Macmillan, 1907), 253. 6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, in Edward Waldo Emerson, ed., The Complete Works, Centenary Edition, 12 vols (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1903–4), v.276. 7. ‘Preface to Poems, 1853’, in R. H. Super, ed., Complete Prose Works, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), i.1. 8. Richard Salmon, The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 41. 9. Sartor Resartus, ed. Rodger L. Tarr, Strouse Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 20, 12, 215. 10. Edward Alexander, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and the Modern Temper (Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 1973), 213. 11. Latter-Day Pamphlets, in H. D. Traill, ed., Works, Centenary Edition, 30 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–99), xx.319, 323. 12. The Collected Letters, xxvi.43–4. 13. Ibid., xxxvi.47–8. 14. Sartor Resartus, 120. 15. The Collected Letters, xxvii.351, 354–5. 16. David Alec Wilson, Carlyle at his Zenith (1848–1853) (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929), 372. 17. The Collected Letters, xxix.317. 18. Frederick the Great, Works, xii.6. 19. Ibid. xii.14. 20. Ibid., 17. 21. John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (London and Hamden: Archon, 1962), 28. 22. Ibid., xxv.312. 23. Frederick the Great, Works, xii.22, 431. 24. The Collected Letters, xxxi. 97. 25. Frederick the Great, Works, xii.14. 26. The Collected Letters, xxx.121–2. 27. ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829), Works, xxvii.59. 28. Letters of John Stuart Mill, ed. Hugh S. P. Elliot, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), ii.361. 200
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Ruskin and Carlyle 29. Frederick the Great, Works, xxii.430. 30. ‘“Rust and Dust”: Ruskin’s Pivotal Work’, in Robert Hewison, ed., New Approaches to Ruskin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 51–67 (51). 31. Sartor Resartus, 44. 32. Froude, Life of Carlyle, ii.2. 33. Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 155. 34. Quoted. in Wheeler, 156. 35. Frederick the Great, Works, xii.4. 36. The Collected Letters, xxxvii.29. 37. Ibid., xxxvii.30. 38. Ibid., xxxviii.125–6. 39. Frederick the Great, Works, xix.11. 40. Ibid. 41. The Collected Letters, xxxvii.30. 42. Ibid., xxxviii.106–7. 43. Alexander, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, 207. 44. David J. Delaura, ‘Carlyle and Arnold’, PMLA, 79 (1964), 104–29 (106). 45. ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, Complete Prose Works, iii.275. 46. Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, 23 September 1849, in Cecil Y. Lang, ed., The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 6 vols (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996–2001), i.156. 47. Anthony Trollope, Review of Sesame and Lilies, Fortnightly Review, 1 (15 July 1865), 635, 634. 48. The Collected Letters, xlii., forthcoming. 49. Ibid. 50. ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, Complete Prose Works, iii.258. 51. Froude, Life of Carlyle, iv.306. 52. The Times, 4 April 1866, 8. 53. Chene Heady, ‘Carlyle “versus the Devil and All Men”: The Ironic Rhetorical Success of Carlyle’s Reminiscences’, Carlyle Studies Annual, 28 (2012), 107–20 (107). 54. Latter-Day Pamphlets, xx.320. 55. [Hamilton Hume], ed., The Eyre Defence and Aid Fund (London: Pelican, [1866]), 21. 56. Shooting Niagara: and After?, Works, xxx.30. 57. The Collected Letters, xlii., forthcoming. 58. Ibid. 59. ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, in Miriam Allott and R. H. Super, eds., Matthew Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), ll.71, 171. 60. ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, l. 203. 61. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas Archibald, in Collected Works, 14 vols (New York: Scribner, 1999), iii.134–5.
201
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14 DI NAH B IRCH
Lecturing and public voice
In her appreciative review of Modern Painters III (1856), George Eliot remarked that ‘very correct singing of very fine music will avail little without a voice that can thrill the audience and take possession of their souls. Now, Mr Ruskin has a voice, and one of such power, that whatever error he may mix with truth, he will make more converts to that truth than less erring advocates who are hoarse and feeble.’1 In suggesting that the correctness of Ruskin’s arguments mattered less than their eloquence, Eliot’s comments exemplify the kind of response that came to exasperate him. In his later years, Ruskin was to identify the supposed distraction of the highly wrought language of his early works as a reason for his developing a plainer style: ‘People used to call me a good writer then: now, they say, I cannot write at all; because, for instance, if I think anybody’s house is on fire, I only say, “Sir, your house is on fire.” Whereas formerly I used to say, “Sir, the abode in which you probably passed the delightful days of youth, is in a state of inflammation.” And everybody used to like the effect of the two ps in “probably passed,” and of the two ds in “delightful days”’ (xxvii.xxiv). Ruskin’s writing became more forcefully direct, often achieving its effects through satire or allusive symbolism rather than sumptuous word-painting. However, as Martin Dubois points out, it did not become less personal.2 Private preoccupations and public responsibility merge in Ruskin’s work as a lecturer. The role became central to his identity as his criticism became more actively political in the late 1850s, in a movement which accelerated after the appearance of the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters in 1860. Lecturing provided opportunities for immediate communication with a variety of audiences. In 1866, at the age of 47, Ruskin was half-seriously calling himself the ‘Old Lecturer’ in The Ethics of the Dust (1866), one of his most self-referential works. The image of the ‘Old Lecturer’ was a playful reflection of the complex myth that Ruskin was constructing from the material of his own life. Francis O’Gorman, reflecting on the composition of Praeterita, notes that Ruskin shared Wordsworth’s Romantic impulse to reflect on ‘how 202
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his mind had grown into what it was’.3 He was driven by inward and often autobiographical impulses, but his changing perception of how the strategies of public performance might support the practical consequences of his work was indispensable to the development of his voice throughout the middle and later periods of his career. Lecturing, teaching, and preaching George Eliot’s remarks were partly prompted by Ruskin’s claim for impeccably logical powers of thought in the preface to Modern Painters III: ‘any error I fall into will not be in an illogical deduction: I may mistake the meaning of a symbol, or the angle of a rock cleavage, but not draw an inconsequent conclusion’ (v.7). She saw this as a comic moment: ‘When he announces to the world in his Preface, that he is incapable of falling into an illogical deduction – that, whatever other mistakes he may commit, he cannot possibly draw an inconsequent conclusion, we are not indignant, but amused, and do not in the least feel ourselves under the necessity of picking holes in his arguments in order to prove that he is not a logical Pope.’4 Ruskin’s hostility to Catholicism was strong in the 1850s, and the suggestion that he might have thought of himself as a Pope, logical or otherwise, would have infuriated him. Nevertheless, an assumption of secure authority is a consistent feature of his public voice. Audiences were divided in their response to his firmly instructive approach. Many found Ruskin’s certainty reassuring, or inspiring. Others resented ‘the inopportune introduction of his religious and didactic bias, which darkens the lucidity of his observation, and often counteracts the good effects his teaching would otherwise have’, as the influential archaeologist Charles Waldstein loftily observed in 1893, at a time when the reaction against the moral assumptions of mid-nineteenth-century movements for reform were beginning to gather momentum.5 Ruskin asserts his infallibility in secular terms in his 1856 preface. But his stubbornly maintained conviction that the power of his work depended on its logical truth, and not its rhetoric, had its origins in his early religious experiences and in his family background. These were the circumstances that formed his identity as both a writer and a public lecturer. Ruskin had an Evangelical training as a child. He was taught that the fulfilment of his ambitions would depend on his own disciplined intelligence and powers of observation, but that the substance of his teachings must rest on what Tim Hilton describes as the ‘fervour’ of Evangelicalism, with its ‘insistence on the authority of the Scriptures, its stress on salvation in the atoning death of Christ, its belief in the importance of preaching and its lack 203
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of interest in liturgical worship’ (Hilton, 1.19). Within this framework of Evangelical belief, the vagaries of personal opinion could never amount to anything more than an expression of fallen human nature. Ruskin’s acceptance of this fundamental precept survived the loss of his faith, and it was a defining characteristic of his critical identity. Far from acting as a constraint, his belief that he was the servant of unchangeable truths that transcended any ‘errors’ of his own making liberated him from anxieties that might otherwise have paralysed his work. His confidence grew from his conviction that he was not speaking for himself, but reflecting a body of unchanging truth constituted outside what Wordsworth uneasily called the ‘uncharter’d freedom’6 of the individual mind. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), ‘The Lamp of Obedience’ develops the point: ‘Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere subjugation, but that freedom is only granted that obedience may be more perfect; and thus, while a measure of license is necessary to exhibit the individual energies of things, the fairness and pleasantness and perfection of them all consist in their Restraint’ (viii.250). Ruskin’s reference here is a religious one. He is not addressing himself exclusively to Evangelical readers, for ‘that Service which is defined in the liturgy of the English Church to be perfect Freedom’7 is essential to all Anglican doctrine. Throughout his long life as a writer, Ruskin challenges the liberally individualistic inclinations of his diverse audiences with uncompromising vigour. Writing in 1874, thirty years after the publication of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin explained that children taught according to the educational principles of his utopian Guild are to be trained in ‘habits of instant, finely accurate and totally unreasoning obedience’ (xxviii.20). He is able to maintain this unwavering position because his voice emerged from a powerful tradition of religious service. In his account of Ruskin’s precociously sophisticated sermons on the Pentateuch (that is, the first five books of the Bible’s Old Testament), composed when Ruskin was twelve or thirteen years old, Van Akin Burd notes that ‘obedience receives the greatest attention’ among the ideals in conduct that Ruskin enumerates. When ‘children begin first even to think, they generally begin to assert independence of judgement, this is a very strong example of human depravity and it must be checked at once’, the pious young Ruskin remarked.8 Praeterita famously remembers Ruskin’s very first public performance, as a small boy called upon to entertain his mother’s friends. He was already a serious child, in the weighty Evangelical sense of that word, and his mother’s ambitions for him revolved around his religious life. Ruskin, writing long after he had rejected his early beliefs, recalls that she 204
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Lecturing and public voice took me very early to church; – where, in spite of my quiet habits, and my mother’s golden vinaigrette, always indulged to me there, and there only, with its lid unclasped that I might see the wreathed open pattern above the sponge, I found the bottom of the pew so extremely dull a place to keep quiet in, (my best story-books being also taken away from me in the morning,) that, as I have somewhere said before, the horror of Sunday used even to cast its prescient gloom as far back in the week as Friday – and all the glory of Monday, with church seven days removed again, was no equivalent for it. Notwithstanding, I arrived at some abstract in my own mind of the Rev. Mr. Howell’s sermons;9 and occasionally, in imitation of him, preached a sermon at home over the red sofa cushions; – this performance being always called for by my mother’s dearest friends, as the great accomplishment of my childhood. The sermon was I believe, some eleven words long; very exemplary, it seems to me, in that respect – and I still think must have been the purest gospel, for I know it began with, ‘People, be good’. (xxxv.25)
From the very first, the acceptance of obedience carried the authority of instruction. This anecdote, like Ruskin’s image of himself as an aged lecturer in The Ethics of the Dust, is disarmingly self-deprecating. Ruskin claims the reader’s sympathy by describing the rigid Evangelical rituals that spoiled his childish Sundays, while giving his recollection the personal and visual particularity that characterises his writing – his readers are distracted by ‘the wreathed open pattern above the sponge’ alongside the bored child. ‘As I have somewhere said before’ – it was in Fors Clavigera for December 1872 that Ruskin had said this, more bitterly, in a sustained attack on the Evangelical practice of draining any possibility of enjoyment from Sunday activities: ‘when I was a child, I lost the pleasure of some three-sevenths of my life because of Sunday; for I always had a way of looking forward to things, and a lurid shade was cast over the whole of Friday and Saturday by the horrible sense that Sunday was coming, and inevitable’ (xxvii.421). The nostalgic tone of Ruskin’s story of his first sermon in Praeterita is gentler and more humorous. Nevertheless, it reflects deep concerns in Ruskin’s writing, marking his later repudiation of Evangelical narrowness, while retaining his commitment to ‘the purest gospel’ – ‘People, be good’. Throughout his career on the lecture platform, Ruskin’s strategies were fundamentally those of the preacher, whose formal responsibility it is to elucidate the Word of God as it is expressed in a Biblical text, rather than putting forward his personal views. However, as he distanced himself from the rigidities of Evangelical doctrine, he adapted the traditions of the sermon in the light of his changing priorities as a critic and reformer. The divinely ordained text may be other than Biblical; a leaf, a cloud, a sculpture, or a 205
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building might offer as much as an emblematic catalyst for analysis and instruction. There were, after all, two books of revelation. Other patterns of public discourse also came to influence his rhetoric as a lecturer. Thomas Carlyle, formed like Ruskin within an assertively Protestant culture, provided an early alternative to the paternal authority of John James Ruskin. The uncompromising insistence of Carlyle’s moral perspectives was appealing to Ruskin. So too was Carlyle’s rebarbatively Scottish identity, for the Scottish background of Ruskin’s own family was important in confirming his sense of an outsider’s identity as a radical dissenter and innovator in the literary circles of mid-nineteenth-century London.10 On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), a collection of six lectures delivered in the spring of 1840, established Carlyle’s characteristic voice, and helped to demonstrate the persuasive potential of the published lecture. But Carlyle did not altogether share Ruskin’s preacherly inclination to develop his thinking on the basis of the exposition of an authoritative text. His emphasis is on the human, rather than the divine or the natural, and though he identifies religion as ‘the chief fact’ to be noted in the character of a hero, his interest in ‘the Great Men sent into the world’11 prioritises their resolute autonomy rather than their devotion. The exclamatory and often comic idiosyncrasies that became marked in Carlyle’s style were alien to the more instructive, expository approach that evolved in Ruskin’s early writing. Ruskin’s first publications appeared in periodicals – articles on geology in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History in 1834, when Ruskin was fifteen, and a more ambitious piece on ‘The Poetry of Architecture’ (1837–8) in Loudon’s Architectural Magazine. The primary aim of these essays was to establish Ruskin’s credentials as an instructor, and they are full of the detailed observations and researches that occupied his adolescent years. They are, like much of Ruskin’s writing, intended to be educational; yet they are not simply designed to convey information. ‘Dead, and cold, and lightless is information unassisted and alone’, Ruskin remarked in a letter to his father, written when he was a high-spirited seventeen-year-old. ‘Thought flashes through it like lightning through ice’ (Family Letters, i.383). ‘The Poetry of Architecture’ bears out this early conviction. Its title is significant, for alongside the influence of the sermon as a formative model in the development of Ruskin’s public voice is that of Romantic poetry. If Ruskin’s mother hoped that her son might become a zealous Evangelical clergyman, his father, a successful and widely travelled businessman, harboured more worldly ambitions for his only child. Ruskin’s tone in Praeterita is again one of mild mockery, as he described how his father had fondly hoped that he would ‘enter at college into the best society, take all the prizes every year, and a double first to finish with; marry Lady Clara Vere de Vere; 206
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write poetry as good as Byron’s, only pious; preach sermons as good as Bossuet’s, only Protestant; be made, at forty, Bishop of Winchester, and at fifty, Primate of England’ (xxxv.185). John James Ruskin undoubtedly longed to see his talented son win the social success that he felt he had never quite achieved himself. However, his interests and aspirations were more complex than Ruskin is willing to acknowledge here. He was a keen amateur artist and a wide and discriminating reader, with largely Romantic tastes inflected by loyalty to his Scottish roots. John James’s enthusiasm for landscape painting, the fiction of Walter Scott, and the poetry of Byron provided the foundation for Ruskin’s cultural identity. It was in his father’s company that he first looked at buildings with interest, as he accompanied John James on his business trips. Family loyalty and affection were bound up with the religious foundations of his earliest formation as a writer. The Poetry of Architecture reflects these beginnings in that it focuses on modest domestic buildings rather than monuments to civic or ecclesiastical grandeur, thereby developing the Romantic argument that the construction of cottages or villas should harmonise with natural surroundings and national character. As the teenaged Ruskin defines it in this essay, architecture emerges as a product of both thought and feeling, rather as Wordsworth had described the origins of poetry in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads (1800) as ‘continued influxes of feelings . . . modified and directed by our thoughts’.12 For Ruskin, architecture ‘is, or ought to be, a science of feeling more than of rule, a ministry to the mind, more than to the eye’ (i.5). What the preacher and poet have in common, as their identities converged in the distinctive public voice of Ruskin’s maturity, is an insistence on the primacy of a disciplined inward experience, grounded in careful analysis and observation, and culminating in the scrupulous communication of a body of truth with implications common to all human experience. The public lecture The confluence of Evangelical faith and Romantic feeling formed Ruskin’s identity as a writer. Yet he became neither an ordained minister nor a poet. His sense of public responsibility did not allow for a life wholly devoted to the creative arts, while his commitment to a Romantic aesthetic, and his wish to reach a wide audience, could not accommodate a clergyman’s everyday duties to his parish and his bishop. The five expansive volumes of Modern Painters (1843–60), one of the last great works of European Romanticism, gave Ruskin scope to move between art and ethics. But Modern Painters, like The Stones of Venice, was an expensive and demanding work, and only readers with money and leisure at their command could assimilate the full 207
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range of its sustained arguments. The public lecture, a widely popular medium for instruction and entertainment in Victorian Great Britain, offered an alternative means of reaching those who might never be in a position to study his major works. The rise of the public lecture was in part due to the influence of the model developed in North America, where the Lyceum movement had promoted adult education through a variety of dramatic performances, debates, and speeches through the early decades of the nineteenth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures in Manchester in 1847–8 became celebrated, or notorious, as an attempt to reproduce the success of this movement for English audiences. They attracted widespread notice for their dense and confrontational intellectual material, delivered without theatrical flourishes. But many hearers were affronted by their blunt challenge to cultural, political, and religious orthodoxies. Martin Hewitt notes that the resulting controversy reflects the ‘contested nature of the lecture platform, and the complexity of the cultural roles and meanings of the public lecture itself’.13 Lectures could entertain, rouse, inform or politicise their audiences – or they could provide a living for the diligent lecturer, for accomplished performers could expect significant payment for their efforts. As Matthew Bevis explains, ‘the age’s growing fascination with public speaking’ has generated increasing levels of interest among social and political historians.14 The work of these historians has revealed a world much closer to the rough and tumble of mid-century Victorian polemics and popular culture than anything that the sheltered Ruskin had previously experienced. Ruskin’s father was beginning to be an old man when Ruskin began to turn to the lecture podium, and he was dismayed. Substantial and beautifully produced publications including Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, or The Stones of Venice seemed to him appropriate reflections of the social distinction he had wanted for his son. He saw lecturing, with its associations with American publicity seekers and people who needed to earn a living, as a vulgar business which would diminish his son’s prestige and distract him from what he considered to be more worthwhile activities. Hilton reports John James’s protests as Ruskin began to develop an interest in communicating his thoughts as a public lecturer in 1853, as Modern Painters still lay unfinished: ‘I don’t care to see you allied with the platform’, he wrote, ‘though the pulpit would be our delight – Jeremy Taylor occupied the last & Bacon never stood on the former (Hilton, 1.205). In a sequence of letters written in August 1853, Ruskin spoke defensively to his father about his plan to give a group of formal lectures on architecture and painting in Edinburgh: ‘I do not mean at any time to take up the trade of a lecturer . . . all that I intend to do is merely, as if in conversation, to say to these people, 208
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who are ready to listen to me, some of the simple truths about architecture and painting which may perhaps be better put in conversational than literary form . . . I shall assuredly have plenty to say, and shall say it in a gentlemanly way, if not fluently’ (xii.xxvi–vii). Ruskin’s four Edinburgh lectures, on architecture, decoration, Turner and his works, and Pre-Raphaelitism, were polished and published as Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1853). They were extraordinarily popular. Each attracted an audience of more than a thousand, largely drawn from the great and the good of his father’s home city. This might have made Ruskin nervous. One contemporary account suggests that his performance as a lecturer at this point in his career, as he experimented with the potential of the form, was uncertain in tone, as it shifted between the gravity of a composed text and a more informal manner: ‘And now for the style of the lecture, you say; what was it? Properly speaking, there were in the lectures two styles essentially distinct, and not well blended, – a speaking and a writing style; the former colloquial and spoken off-hand; the latter rhetorical and carefully read in quite a different voice – we had almost said intoned . . . the effect of the transition was often strange, and the audience, too, evidently sometimes had a difficulty in following the rapid change, and did not always keep up with the movement’ (xii.xxxii). According to E. T. Cook, Ruskin’s biographer and editor, who attended Ruskin’s later lectures in Oxford, a degree of distinction between highly worked sections and more informal passages continued to be characteristic of Ruskin’s approach to public speaking ‘in most of his Oxford discourses’ (xii.xxxiii). As he grew in experience, however, Ruskin learned how to manage his lectures more effectively, forging a strong personal connection between speaker and audience that depended on a carefully handled balance of instruction, challenge, and entertainment. Some of his growing confidence and expertise was gained at the newly established Working Men’s College in Red Lion Square, in London, where Ruskin taught regularly from the autumn of 1854 until May 1858. Without the pressures of the intimidating audiences who had come to hear him in Edinburgh, Ruskin experimented with improvised lectures that drew on stories, or dramatic questions, combined with moral and practical instruction. One member of his audience recalls the effect: ‘Formless and planless as they were, the effect on the hearers was immense. It was a wonderful bubbling up of all manner of glowing thoughts; for mere eloquence I never heard aught like it’ (quoted in Hilton, 1.205). Class distinctions had a part to play in this liberation. In speaking to the students of the Working Men’s College, Ruskin was not addressing his social equals. This allowed him a safe space to practise his techniques as a public speaker, without the sense of 209
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constraint reflected in his father’s anxieties that in doing so his standing as a gentleman might be compromised. Ruskin never quite freed himself from the social uncertainties that shadowed the lives of his parents, and was always at his most relaxed and forceful as a teacher and speaker when he was addressing audiences that could be seen to possess lower status than his own – young people, women, and girls, or working-class men. His relations with powerful men of his own class were always touched with tension and some defensiveness. In this respect, popular performances of the kind that John James Ruskin feared would damage his son’s literary reputation turned out to be a liberation, opening a range of possibilities for the extension of his work as a critic and social reformer. As Hilton notes, it allowed for the beginning of ‘a style that Ruskin would explore in print in years to come, in works that were nominally addressed to working-class audiences; to Thomas Dixon, the cork-cutter of Time and Tide; and then to all the ‘workmen and labourers of Great Britain’ in Fors Clavigera (Hilton, 1.205–6). In soothing the anxieties of his father in preparing for his Edinburgh lectures, Ruskin had claimed that ‘all my real efforts will be made in writing’ (xii.xxvi–vii). This was not wholly true, but it remained the case that Ruskin used his lectures as the basis for many published works that formed the basis for the expansion of his oeuvre after the completion of Modern Painters in 1860. Contemporary reports, read alongside surviving manuscripts, often suggest that these published texts differed to some extent from the lectures as they were originally delivered. Nevertheless, the sense of an informal, sometimes combative connection with a particular audience gathered to listen at a specific event remains strong, and Ruskin is careful to retain this impression of immediacy. In 1857, a successful lecture series, published as The Political Economy of Art,15 marked a turning point in his career as a critic, confirming that issues of social justice were inseparable from his concerns as an art critic. Even John James was beginning to resign himself to his son’s changing public profile, observing in a letter to his friend Jane Simon that, as far as political economy was concerned, ‘on this weary subject a few new ideas will do no harm’ (Hilton, 1.247). These lectures were delivered in Manchester, and in 1858 Ruskin declared an ambition to ‘give lectures in all the manufacturing towns’ (xvi.xx). He did not quite manage that, but his active itinerary as a lecturer took him up and down the country over the next twenty years, speaking to a variety of audiences at least three or four times every year. His lectures were usually published soon after their delivery. Lecturing engagements led Ruskin to visit towns and cities that he would otherwise have known only by reputation, and this was one of the ways in which the work extended his understanding of social and economic 210
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conditions in Great Britain. Occasionally he would choose to speak in places with family connections, as he had in delivering his Lectures on Architecture and Painting in Edinburgh. In 1858, his cousin, George Richardson, persuaded him to lecture in the Kentish spa town of Tunbridge Wells, where Richardson was working as a doctor. Ruskin had often stayed in the resort as a child. In taking ‘The Work of Iron, In Nature, Art and Policy’ as his subject, Ruskin developed characteristic links between personal memory, observation of the natural world, and social and political issues. As Nicholas Shrimpton notes, the lecture reflects new levels of confidence and accomplishment in weaving his characteristic concerns into a tight ‘imaginative fabric’.16 The lecture begins with Ruskin’s recollections of childhood visits to Tunbridge Wells: When, long ago (I am afraid to think how long), Tunbridge Wells was my Switzerland, and I used to be brought down here in the summer, a sufficiently active child, rejoicing in the hope of clambering sandstone cliffs of stupendous height above the common, there used sometimes, as, I suppose, there are in the lives of all children at the Wells, to be dark days in my life – days of condemnation to the pantiles and band – under which calamities my only consolation used to be in watching, at every turn in my walk, the welling forth of the spring over the orange rim of its marble basin. The memory of the clear water, sparkling over its saffron stain, came back to me as the strongest image connected with the place; and it struck me that you might not be unwilling, to-night, to think a little over the full significance of that saffron stain, and of the power, in other ways and other functions, of the steely element to which so many here owe returning strength and life; – chief as it has been always, and is yet more and more markedly so day by day, among the precious gifts of the earth. (xvi.375–6)
As he was later to do in Praeterita, Ruskin engages the sympathy of the reader with half-rueful recollections of the confinements imposed on his childhood. Here, too, his memories are not simply nostalgic. That ‘saffron stain’, the visual text on which he builds his secular sermon, is caused by the iron in the spring water which gave Tunbridge Wells its name and its identity, and it was the ‘work of iron’ that established the foundations of the industrialisation that his generation had witnessed, in what Matthew Arnold termed, in his elegy for Wordsworth, ‘the iron age’.17 It is characteristic of Ruskin’s perspective that he understands the creativity of this work to be a product of imperfection, for it is iron in its processes of oxidisation, or rust, which interests him, rather than the metal in a condition of gleaming perfection. It was one of the legacies of Ruskin’s early Evangelical religion that he understood growth to be inseparable from the recognition of imperfection 211
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and decay, and this conviction informed his understanding of both natural and human value. He explains that ‘in a certain sense, and almost a literal one, we may say that iron rusted is Living, but when pure or polished, Dead’ (xvi. 376–7). Rusty iron combines the metallic element with oxygen, the breath of life; in this state it reflects and serves our own human experiences and values. Ruskin vividly demonstrates the role of iron in what we recognise as the sustaining beauty of landscape and architecture. Iron is what makes sand golden, rather than grey; it adds ‘rich scarlet colour’ (xvi.380) to bricks and tiles, warmth to the pigments of rock and gravel, and fertility to the soil. What had seemed an unfortunate stain, spoiling the purity of the marble basin, becomes a testament to the vitality of nature. In art, the meaning of iron is more ambivalent. Ruskin turns to ‘the work of iron’ in its social context, its ‘ductile and tenacious’ (xvi.387) qualities translated into the destructive divisions represented by the ubiquitous iron railing: [W]hat meaning has the iron railing? Either, observe, that you are living in the midst of such bad characters that you must keep them out by main force of bar, or that you are yourself of a character requiring to be kept inside in the same manner. Your iron railing always means thieves outside, or Bedlam inside; it can mean nothing else than that. (xvi.390)
In its political action, the work of iron is represented by ‘three great instruments’ (xvi.395): the plough, the fetter, and the sword – cultivation, discipline, and struggle. Here, too, Ruskin insists on the fundamental virtue of obedience: ‘the power and glory of all creatures, and all matter, consist in their obedience, not in their freedom’ (xvi.408). In its closing sections, the lecture moves from exegesis to open exhortation. It approaches the register of the sermon more directly, with a Biblical peroration that is almost apocalyptic in its nature. What had begun with comforting complicity ends with an allusion to Isaiah’s prophecies of judgement in the ‘last days’: ‘nor will it be by patience of others’ suffering, but by the offering of your own, that you ever will draw nearer to the time when the great change shall pass upon the iron of the earth; – when men shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; neither shall they learn war any more’.18 Ruskin intends to unsettle his readers, not to soothe them. The professor A rhetorical strategy which fuses personal memory and reflection with satire, close observation and analysis, and densely worked patterns of cultural allusion and uncompromising moral challenge continues to characterise the 212
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published texts of Ruskin’s lectures throughout the 1860s. Major examples include ‘Traffic’ (Bradford, April 1864), ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ (Manchester, December 1864), ‘The Relation of National Ethics to National Art’ (Cambridge, 1867), and ‘Athena Chalinitis’ (London, 1869), but the complex network of meaning that Ruskin weaves across these diverse texts amounts to more than the sum of their separate parts. Published at relatively affordable cost in associated groups, including Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), or The Queen of the Air (1869),19 they became among Ruskin’s most popular works, exercising an influence that reached well into the first half of the twentieth century. Ruskin was elected as Oxford’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1869, and his work as a lecturer changed. For the first and last time in his diverse career, he had acquired formal responsibilities to an employing institution. Though the fulfilment of his Oxford duties was never entirely regular, in the early years of his term of office Ruskin’s lectures became less personal and more recognisably professional, if less creatively innovative. Consciously addressed to the perceived needs of a youthful audience, his inaugural Lectures on Art, published in 1870, stand among the clearest expositions of his cultural aesthetic, while his lectures on ‘The Relation on Natural Science to Art’, delivered in 1872 and published later that year as The Eagle’s Nest, adroitly summarised much of his earlier work. However, Ruskin’s relations with the university became more contentious as the years passed, and distractions crowded in. The Guild of St George, founded as St George’s Company in 1871, absorbed time and energy; so too did Brantwood, his new home in the Lake District. The serially published letters of Fors Clavigera (1871–84), written in association with the work of the Guild and addressed to the ‘workmen and labourers of Great Britain’, provided an alternative forum for Ruskin’s increasingly contentious political and cultural arguments. His development of this radical format was in part a return to earlier Carlylean models of communication, and a reaction against what he had come to see as the irksome constraints of Oxford. Ruskin’s lectures at the university became more intermittent, and less carefully disciplined. Nevertheless, he gave eleven courses of lectures in all, and they attracted large and enthusiastic audiences in Oxford. He occasionally delivered them twice, to accommodate the press of people wanting to hear what he had to say. The lectures drew numerous hearers from outside the academic community, including many women, and were widely reported in the press. They were judged to be a great popular success. The motives of his audiences were mixed. Some were serious students, whether or not they were enrolled with the university, who attended the 213
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lectures in order to learn. But Ruskin was undoubtedly a national celebrity, and not simply a professor, and many of his hearers were simply taking advantage of the opportunity to encounter this great man in person. Others wanted to experience the drama of these diverting public events, for as Ruskin tired of sober professorial conventions, his lectures became more theatrical, and often more eccentric. He made innovative use of visual aids, commissioning large diagrams and pictures to illustrate his arguments, concealing and revealing them as the lecture proceeded. As Martin Hewitt notes, ‘the culture of the popular lecture in Victorian Britain was a culture of spectacle’,20 particularly in the field of science, and Ruskin exploited these new techniques in the more traditional context of Oxford’s lecture halls. Quasi-comic digressions, or vehement attacks on scientific or political orthodoxies, become more frequent. ‘In the decorous atmosphere of a University lecture-room the strangest things befell’, as the respectable G. W. Kitchin (then Dean of Durham Cathedral) recalled, remembering the ‘flappings of his MA gown’, and the ‘scorn and wrath’ of his attacks on Darwinian theories.21 After a mental breakdown in 1878 led to his temporary resignation of the chair, Ruskin briefly resumed his professorial duties in 1883, giving two increasingly provocative series of lectures, ‘The Art of England’ and ‘The Pleasures of England’. In 1885, enraged by the university’s decision to allow vivisection in its laboratories, he left Oxford for good, and his lecturing career reached its conclusion. Ruskin’s public voice, as a lecturer or in print, had never fitted easily into conventional definitions. He was not a pedagogue of the kind that filled the civic halls of mid-Victorian Great Britain, and though he clearly benefited from an increasing appetite for such instruction, he was sometimes scornful of ‘the marvellous stupidity of this age of lecturers’ (xvi.387). His idiosyncratic strategies were formed by his early religious experiences, enriched with an exceptionally diverse range of connected cultural references. He was a deeply learned lecturer, but even as a pioneering professor in Oxford, his objectives were not primarily those of the scholar. Published or unpublished, his public discourses were intended to deepen the moral understanding of his audiences, and change their behaviour. Fulfilling, after all, his parents’ thwarted ambitions, he became Great Britain’s most brilliant preacher. NO TES 1. George Eliot, ‘Art and Belles Lettres: Review of Modern Painters III’, Westminster Review, 65 (April 1856), 625–33 (627). 2. See Chapter 15. 3. Francis O’Gorman, ‘Introduction’, in John Ruskin’s Praeterita (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xiii. 214
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Lecturing and public voice 4. Eliot, ‘Review of Modern Painters III’, 627. 5. Charles Waldstein, The Work of John Ruskin; Its Influence Upon Modern Thought and Life (New York: Harper, 1893), 86. 6. William Wordsworth, ‘Ode to Duty’, Poems in Two Volumes, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1807), i.72. 7. The Second Collect, for Peace, in the Church of England’s Order for Morning Prayer refers to the service of God as ‘perfect freedom’. 8. Van Akin Burd, ‘Ruskin’s Sermons on the Pentateuch’, in Robert Hewison, ed., New Approaches to Ruskin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 8. 9. The Reverend William Howels, the Welsh minister of the Episcopal Chapel, Long Acre, was celebrated for his eccentric sermons. See Hilton, 1.20. 10. Helen Gill Viljoen gives a detailed account of the Scottish influences on Ruskin’s intellectual formation in Ruskin’s Scottish Heritage: A Prelude (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956). 11. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Odin’, in Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel, eds., On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 3. 12. William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), i.127. 13. Martin Hewitt, ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Dawson, and the control of the lecture platform in mid-nineteenth century Manchester’, Nineteenth Century Prose, 25 (Fall 1998), 1–23. See also Hewitt’s ‘Aspects of Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 29 (Spring 2002), 1–32, and H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Great Britain, 1860–1930’ in P. J. Waller, ed., Politics and Social Change: Essays Presented to A.F. Thompson (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 34–58. 14. Matthew Bevis, ‘Volumes of Noise’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31 (2003), 577–91 (578–9). 15. The lectures were reissued in 1880 as A Joy for Ever: (and its Price in the Market). 16. Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘Rust and Dust: Ruskin’s Pivotal Work’, in Robert Hewison, ed., New Approaches to Ruskin: Thirteen Essays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 51–67 (59). 17. Matthew Arnold, ‘Memorial Verses, April 1850’, l.17, in Kenneth Allott, ed., The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London: Longmans, 1965), 227. 18. ‘And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’ (Isaiah 2:4). 19. Sesame and Lilies was priced at 3s 6d; The Crown of Wild Olive at 5s; The Queen of the Air at 6s. When the three volumes of The Stones of Venice were first published as a complete set in 1874, they cost £5 15s 6d. 20. Martin Hewitt, ‘Beyond Scientific Spectacle: Image and Word in NineteenthCentury Popular Lecturing’, in Joe Kember, John Plunkett, and Jill A. Sullivan, eds., Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840–1910 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 79–95 (79). 21. G. W. Kitchin, Ruskin in Oxford and Other Studies (London: Murray, 1903), 41.
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15 M A R TI N DUB OI S
Diary journals, correspondence, autobiography, and private voice
In public, Ruskin was often private. His late works of natural history engage what Dinah Birch has described as an ‘obsessive inward language’, particularly in their embedded reference to Rose La Touche (Ruskin to himself would sometimes alter the title of Proserpina, his study of plants, to ‘Rosepina’, in recognition of its hidden dedication).1 A much earlier work, Unto This Last (1860), shares in a different way the desire to imbue public pronouncement with private significance, paying subtle tribute to the success of his father’s business life in its censure of Victorian capitalism.2 Conversely, what began for Ruskin as private would frequently later be turned public. This is most obviously the case in Praeterita, his autobiography, in which personal correspondence, as well as diary entries originally made ‘wholly for my own use’ (xxxv.281), become matter to be shared. But it also goes more widely in Ruskin’s later life and career, when his habit of encouraging correspondents to publish his replies to their queries prompts Tim Hilton to remark on ‘the indistinction between the private and the public Ruskin’ (Hilton 3, 697). In examining Ruskin’s private voices, then, we also need to attend to the way in which they had, or were later given, public inflection. It is with the complex interrelation of internal and external pressures in his diary journals, correspondence, and autobiography that this chapter is concerned. Diary journals The keeping of a diary journal was for Ruskin a filial inheritance. His earliest surviving journal, of which he was probably the sole author,3 was compiled when he was eleven years old to cover a three-month tour to the Lake District, and is clearly written in imitation of the journals his father traditionally kept of the annual family holiday, and done at his father’s encouragement. That, thirty years later, parts of Ruskin’s diary journal from 1871–2 are to be found in notebooks John James Ruskin had originally used for his own travel journals (to which, looking back, they also make 216
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reference) indicates how far the practice remained one of the bonds linking father and son. Yet Ruskin’s diary journals served a more various purpose than his father’s. Part of their reason was religious, existing to document spiritual life in a recognisably Evangelical manner, and closely occupied with scripture, not least in the regularity with which entries are headed by cherished Bible verses that provide consolation as well as matter for self-rebuke. At points in his life they were also working books, a store of notes from his Continental tours, complete with sketches of architectural and other forms; later they served as the register of his emotional state, an exercise in exploring his capacity for self-control, and as a warrant of mental stability when completed (or of its opposite when not); at other times still they were a record of life, a means of marking what had passed, ‘a kind of catalogue of what I have done’ (Diaries, 248), enabling strange patterns to be discerned in its course, especially in the marking of special date coincidences. All of these uses rely on a distinction between private and public that Ruskin in Praeterita, drawing widely on his diary journals as both an aid to recollection and as material to be cited, would render fragile. Our knowledge of Ruskin’s diary journals is limited by the fact that major elements of them have not survived, such as the ‘other diary’ alluded to in 1868 (Diaries, 2.645) or the ‘long diary’ mentioned a decade later (Diaries, 3.996); these may have been among the papers Ruskin destroyed in the 1880s. Another difficulty is that the major edition we have of the diary notebooks that do survive arguably gives only a partial sense of their character. Their editor, Joan Evans (the owner of the manuscripts, John Howard Whitehouse, is also credited as co-editor), isolated what she considered diary entries from the other notes that surround them in manuscript, including only the former. In reality the notebooks were often composite, fusing the personal and observational. Ruskin sometimes attempted some regimentation of his own of these writings – ‘I have determined to keep one part of diary for intellect and another for feeling’, begins an entry of 1840 (Diaries, 1.74), marking the opening of a separate ‘book of pain’ (Diaries, 1.109) that has not survived – but what is preserved of their contents is not always easy to categorise. From 1840, Ruskin observes of his diary journals in Praeterita, ‘I wrote only to keep memory of things seen, for what good might come of the memory anyhow’ (xxxv.285). His entries of this decade are accordingly much taken up with anecdotes and records of conversation drawn from encounters in his expanding social world, in an effort to register ‘the casual knowledge that we gain so much of every day, in conversation, and generally lose every to-morrow’ (Diaries, 1.74). Yet, in documenting his continental tours, the journals also evidence a keenness of visual perception that is far from casual, as Ruskin himself acknowledges in the same place in Praeterita when he 217
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writes that his journal entries of the Continental tour of 1840 reveal that ‘I saw everything first in colour, as it ought to be seen’, as well as anticipate ‘the constant watchfulness upon which the statements in Modern Painters were afterwards founded’ (xxxv.285, original emphasis). At the end of this decade, in the journals of 1849–1850, Ruskin’s diary journals are working books, devoted to preparatory notes for The Stones of Venice.4 Later they are again composite productions, mixing architectural and other notes with a record of daily life and feeling. Gradually they turn increasingly inward, and, as Jay Fellows observes, ‘the shape of the Ruskinian diary moves towards the claustrophobic condition of a diarist writing about himself for himself’.5 This is apparent in two of its later preoccupations, prominent from the late 1860s onwards: dreams and weather. The record of dreams, in which Rose La Touche is implicitly or explicitly a frequent presence, is anxious and dark, and seems often to have at its root a fear of inadequacy, occurring very obviously in the shadow of Ruskin’s mental instability (he termed his episode of madness in 1878 ‘The Dream’). This was also the period of Ruskin’s obsession with dark cloud and ‘plague-wind’, and his diaries are frequently a record of the apocalyptic belief that ‘Nature [is] herself sick’ (Diaries, 3.874). Of these entries it is impossible to imagine Ruskin saying, as he did of his 1840 diary, ‘It is a great bore to keep a diary but a great delight to have kept one’ (Diaries, 1.129); instead, the daily record provided him with current evidence against the mind’s fracturing, at a time when Ruskin felt (as he wrote in 1876), ‘A thousand things in my head pushing each other like shoals of minnows’ (Diaries, 3.923). In this context, the failure to maintain the record was felt ominous: ‘Diary being given up a woful sign’ (Brantwood Diary, 57). The manner of its completion could in truth provide an equally dire forecast, as is clear from entries in the so-called Brantwood Diary composed in the approach of his first madness, in 1878. Here is part of an entry for 17 February of that year: February 17. – Sunday. Stopped upstairs behind Kate to pray, a little – after ‘seeing my way’ at last at ½ past three this morning – with beata Vigris help – and Ophelias. – Let in – that out – Departed, never more
The devil put a verse into my head just now – ‘let us not be desirous of vain glory’. I am NOT oh Devil. I want useful Glory. – ‘provoking one another’ – Oh 218
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Diary journals, correspondence, autobiography, and private voice Devil – cunning devil – do you think I want to provoke Beata Vigri and little Ophelia then – ? I will – pro – voke – Somebody else, God willing ‘to day’ and to purpose. And Bishop Laertes, – you had as lief take your fingers from my throat – The Devil will not take my soul, yet a while – Also – look you – and also looking other [things may be at YOUR throat before long.] (Thou pray’st not well – even by your own account and the Devil will not answer you therefore [)] and least said is soonest mended – for – if up when the scuffle comes – the foils should be Sheffield whettles – it is dangerous work – Laertes – ‘very’ – as Mr Jingle said, even the public press & Mr Jingle will advise you of that. Public press Mr Jingle, in then! and St George of England both Advise you of that (Brantwood Diary, 92–3)
Helen Gill Viljoen’s annotations to this passage in her edition of the Brantwood Diary – published separately from Ruskin’s other diaries – allow us to follow its thread of association. Pairing Rose La Touche with Shakespeare’s Ophelia ‘as the victim of parental folly and of personal shortcomings, because of which she had failed her lover and had herself gone mad’ (Brantwood Diary, 107), Ruskin entertains and then repudiates the sexual connotations of her song in Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V, lines 48–54 (from which the phrase ‘Departed, never more’ comes), subsequently invoking St Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: ‘And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another’ (5:24–6). The remaining section continues in the same vein, engaging Laertes’s warnings to Ophelia against Hamlet, and his later lament for her, as well as the garrulous Alfred Jingle from Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–7), ‘whose remarks are tagged “very”’ (Brantwood Diary, 93). This is Ruskin in private voice, yet it bears the imprint of intended public activity: ‘I wrote rather a pretty bit about Ophelia almost the last thing before I fell ill’, he told George Richmond in May 1878, after his recovery, ‘which I think is really better than I could have done if I hadn’t been going crazy – but I’m not going to correct it for press yet awhile’ (xxxvii.247). This piece, never published, and not now available, would perhaps have involved the same train of associations witnessed in the diary; it is close in manner to the allusive and associative patterning of Fors Clavigera, which equally mixes public and private significance to strange effect. The line between what was intended as public writing and what for private use is one that in the case of his diary notebooks Ruskin was increasingly willing to cross. This is true not only of their appearance in Praeterita, discussed below, but also in the lectures given in 1884 and published as The Storm-Cloud of the 219
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Nineteenth Century, which cite several entries from Ruskin’s diary, including this one, from 22 February 1883: Yesterday a fearfully dark mist all afternoon, with steady, south plague-wind of the bitterest, nastiest, poisonous blight, and fretful flutter. I could scarcely stay in the wood for the horror of it. To-day, really rather bright blue and bright semi-cumuli, with the frantic Old Man [of Coniston] blowing sheaves of lancets and chisels across the lake – not in strength enough, or whirl enough, to raise it in spray, but tracing every squall’s outline in black on the silver grey waves, and whistling meanly, as if on a flute made of a file. (xxxiv.38)
This and other passages are introduced into the lecture with a flourish that makes their original status as diary entries into a token of veracity. Conscious that his notion of diabolical weather is liable to be seen as eccentric, Ruskin produces his diary as a plain record able to provide ‘sequences of accurate description’ (xxxiv.36). The maniacal violence of the writing hints otherwise, of course, not least in the vicious image of ‘a flute made of a file’, but Ruskin’s rhetorical design requires that the difference between his private and public voices is recognised in the very manner by which one is absorbed into the other. Correspondence ‘[I]t is too much the habit of modern biographers to confuse epistolary talk with vital fact’, Ruskin observes in Praeterita (xxxv.124). Many of Ruskin’s letters have the spontaneity of talk, being written in the informal, dash-heavy style he habitually adopted in his private correspondence, a style he named (perhaps in slight echo of the location of his father’s office in Billiter Street) as his ‘Billingsgate’. Even admitting the danger of which Praeterita warns, however, it is clear they are also of vital fact, and not only for Ruskin’s biography. There may be few essential expressions of his main ideas in Ruskin’s private letters, but it is possible to trace in his correspondence many of the lines as well as the circumstances of their development. His correspondence is of vast size. There was communication by letter that Ruskin wanted to maintain but, once famous, there was plenty that he would have preferred to be without: ‘Fancy what it is to answer fifteen or twenty letters a day’, he complained to Benjamin Jowett in 1881, ‘every one on teazing and difficult business – and not a penny fee! The bestial egoism of the public is wholly immeasurable’ (xxxvii.349). The largest mass of Ruskin’s private letters is to his parents, to whom he wrote daily when abroad. They are of a rare intimacy, but also frequently quarrelsome, and prone on occasion to be lecturing, as in Ruskin’s furious answer in 1852 to his father’s 220
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misgivings over how much had been spent on purchasing works of Turner: ‘Either I know this man Turner to be the man of this generation – or I know nothing . . . If you have any faith in my genius, you ought to have it in my judgment also’ (xxxvi.134, emphasis in the original). The intensity of Ruskin’s bond with his parents is perhaps why so much else of his correspondence is also conducted along familial lines. In this it answers to a persisting juvenile identity, to what Catherine Robson has described as ‘Ruskin’s essential, end-stopped being’.6 Ruskin sometimes took a fatherly role in correspondence, not least to the young girl friends to whom he liked to write. The letters he addressed to the girls of the progressive Winnington School reveal the sympathy and understanding he felt when addressing his thoughts to children and young adults: ‘I write with greater ease to myself, and less fear of starting controversial tempers by any careless expression, than if I thought of grown people’ (Winnington, 155). He just as often sought to take the opposite part, to imagine himself as a child, in a mode of relation he seemingly could not do without. Carlyle was after a time addressed as ‘Papa’, and, on Ruskin’s Continental tour of 1874, was the addressee of daily letters, received by Carlyle as ‘little showers of manna’ (Cate, 208), that put Carlyle quite consciously ‘in place of the father who used to be so thankful for his letter, – and content with so little’ (xxxvii.123–4). Nor was Carlyle alone in the appellation: the bookseller and publisher F. S. Ellis was, on occasion, ‘Papa Ellis’ (xxxvii.282); Rawdon Brown, Ruskin’s friend in Venice, could equally be addressed as ‘Dearest Papa’ (xxxvii.222). An 1875 letter to Georgiana Cowper-Temple (‘Grannie’, as Ruskin called her, with Lord Mount-Temple known to him as ‘Grandpapa’) gives a sense of how this private retreat into the domestic space of a family circle provided relief from the burden of public responsibility: ‘it is so precious to me to be thought of as a child, needing to be taken care of, in the midst of the weary sense of teaching and having all things and creatures depending on one, and one’s self a nail struck in an insecure place’ (xxxvii.173, emphasis in original). This need for secret intimacy manifests itself in a variety of ways in his letters, not least in games of correspondence chess, which involved a literal encoding of privileged understanding through the use of symbols and notations. Its most remarkable evidence is to be found in the baby-talk Ruskin adopted in letters to the cousin who cared for him in his last years, Joan Severn. Here is the fifth of a series of letters Ruskin wrote to Joan from Verona in July 1869: Dearest wee Pussie. No 5 isn’t worth numbering – 221
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ma rtin d u bois – only poo wee Donnie so dedful coss that he must send it dust to teep his wee temper. Nobody ite. Donie any etties – Donie to dull: – Donnie daw till he dop pencil out of hand – him so seepy: Den Donnie det nooffin to wake him up. If Donnie no get ice ettie from his wee ’amie mammie to day – Donnie dump as high as gas shoppies with passion. and paps tome down again again – nobody know where – Evy – deemamie oos poo wee Donnie JR.7
A month after writing this letter, Ruskin was elected Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. The baby-talk letters to Joan reveal his interest in prattle and pampering, mock tantrums and childish burble. Certain of their offspring – the curious poems Ruskin named ‘Pigwiggian Chaunts’ – make an unlikely appearance in Praeterita. Even so, they stand more generally as an exception to Ruskin’s declaration in Fors that ‘I never wrote a letter in my life which all the world are not welcome to read, if they will’ (xxviii.449). The baby-talk letters may appear to participate in a fantasy of arrested development, but they are perhaps more fundamentally a means of creating intimacy through the privacy of a ‘little language’ special to its users. They also need to be seen alongside Ruskin’s tendency to make myth out of his personal relations. A delight in punning in other languages with both people and places develops in his letters into a preference for pet names which have regular origins but enigmatic ends. Marion Watson, house guest at Brantwood in the mid 1880s, was ‘Tenzo’, a name which arose from the refrain of a hymn to the Virgin in Chinese she used to sing: ‘Tenzo Tanzo Malia’ (xxxvii.660). Many of Ruskin’s pet names arose from similar kinds of inconsequence, later to be loosed into consequence, none more so than the most famous of all, the ‘Bun’, ‘Crumpet’, and ‘St Crumpet’ triad developed with Rose La Touche, later to be recalled in Praeterita: Rosie had shortly expressed her sense of her governess’s niceness by calling her ‘Bun’; and I had not been long free of the schoolroom before she wanted a name for me also, significant of like approval. After some deliberation, she christened 222
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Diary journals, correspondence, autobiography, and private voice me ‘Crumpet’; then, impressed by seeing my gentleness to beggars, canonized me as ‘Saint Crumpet’, or, shortly and practically, ‘St C.’, – which I remained ever afterwards; only Emily said one day to her sister that the C. did in truth stand for ‘Chrysostom’. (xxxv.56)
‘St C.’ appears in the baby-talk correspondence with Joan; it is also a preferred signature in many of Ruskin’s letters to his intimates. In Ruskin’s correspondence with Mary Gladstone we even find ‘St C.’ writing to ‘St C.’, St Chrysostom writing to the woman he had christened ‘St Cecilia’, an injoke which gave rise to what an early edition of Ruskin’s letters to Mary and Helen Gladstone calls, ‘The Letter that puzzled the butler’, being addressed to ‘Santa Cecilia of Hawarden, c/o The Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, Hawarden Castle, Chester’ (xxxvii.651). Its continuing presence in Ruskin’s private correspondence confirms how his love for the person he variously named ‘Rosie-posie’, ‘Irish roses’, and, later, despairingly, ‘Tukup’, ‘But’, and ‘Flint’, shaped all of his later being; that presence also tells us something about the extreme associativeness of Ruskin’s naming practices, the tendency for his names to accrete reference and implication, not all of which we can now confidently mine. ‘Tukup’, ‘But’, and ‘Flint’ are more or less narrow descriptors; with a nickname for Rose of 1886, ‘Perpetua’, or with Praeterita’s explanation of the young Ruskin’s calling his earliest love Adèle Domecq, when her sisters called her ‘Clotilde’ – Ruskin preferred Adèle ‘because it rhymed to shell, spell, and knell’ (xxxv.180) – we are in altogether more ample and uncertain territory.8 ‘St C.’ acquired for Ruskin a similarly rich and obscure expressiveness, and fragility of mind in his later years allowed such expressiveness to prosper. Ruskin’s correspondence with Rose was among the most precious of his life. It does not survive, having almost certainly been among the papers destroyed by Charles Eliot Norton and Joan Severn in 1901, after Ruskin’s death. The loss is very great, for theirs was an intimacy maintained to a considerable degree by letter, something true of many of Ruskin’s friendships, not least with Norton himself. With the latter Ruskin corresponded at long distance, a fact which encouraged the sharing of confidences – about Rose, especially, but also about matters of religious faith – that were felt by Norton so private that he was again led to censor their contents after Ruskin’s death. In one way the act was faithful to Ruskin’s own instincts: he once told Norton of his private letters that he would ‘often make a holocaust of what it pains me to sacrifice, and of what I would keep among my treasures if I could be sure they would be buried with me’ (Norton, 286). But in another sense it belied them, answering to Norton’s first impression of Ruskin as a man for whom ‘[t]he deepest currents of his life ran out of sight’ 223
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(cited in Hilton, 3.234) without making sufficient allowance for the way in which he was also drawn to bring these to the surface. ‘Some wise, and prettily mannered, people have told me I shouldn’t say anything about Rosie at all’, Ruskin confides in Praeterita, by way of introduction to first letter he received from her. ‘But I am too old now to take advice, and I won’t have this following letter – the first she ever wrote me – moulder away, when I can read it no more, lost to all loving hearts’ (xxxv.529). It is fair to say that Norton never really understood this aspect of Ruskin. Praeterita’s disclosures are by no means complete, yet, as will be discussed below, the feeling that the public expression of private treasures offered a means to their preservation is a large impulse in its writing. Autobiography The limits of autobiography in Ruskin are hard to determine. An article in The Times appearing after Ruskin’s death claimed of his works that ‘[e]ach book was an instalment of an autobiographical romance’, an idea which, in various guises, has continued to find favour.9 The early part of his autobiography proper, Praeterita, begun in 1885, was not altogether a new departure, for the majority of the first two chapters is reprinted mostly unchanged from Fors Clavigera, hence the abruptness with which the book opens: ‘I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school; – Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s’ (xxxv.13). It is a disorientating start, but one that also places Praeterita as part of a continuing and intensely personal project. The difference might be that in Praeterita the turn to personal experience is not made in an effort to teach or instruct. Indeed, the nature of its ambition is hard to denote exactly. Ruskin’s preface states that its ‘sketches of effort and incident in former years’ have been written ‘for my friends; and for those of the public who have been pleased by my books’, going on to align their interest exactly with the author’s own: ‘I have written them therefore, frankly, garrulously, and at ease; speaking, of what it gives me joy to remember, at any length I like – sometimes very carefully of what I think it may be useful for others to know; and passing in total silence things which I have no pleasure in reviewing, and which the reader would find no help in the account of’ (xxxv.11). As it progresses, however, the sense of shared purpose becomes less entire, not only in Ruskin’s refusal to indulge the curiosity of friends (in their desire for further knowledge of his undergraduate years at Oxford, for example – see xxxv.260–261), but also in the difference observed between his own response to what he writes and that of his readers. The opening to the ‘Cumae’ chapter puzzles over the impression of Ruskin as a young man given by the book to its reader: 224
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Diary journals, correspondence, autobiography, and private voice Does he think me a lucky or unlucky youth, I wonder? Commendable, on the whole, and exemplary – or the reverse? Of promising gifts – or merely glitter of morning, to pass at noon? I ask him at this point, because several letters from pleased acquaintances have announced to me, of late, that they have obtained quite new lights upon my character from these jottings, and like me much better than they ever did before. Which was not the least effect I intended to produce on them; and which moreover is the exact opposite of the effect on my own mind of meeting myself, by turning back, face to face. (xxxv.279)
The remark is knowingly self-dramatising, of course, but at such moments in Praeterita – and there are several – Ruskin gestures to his narrative as inner-directed and as having meaning for him that is difficult for others to comprehend: he directs attention to what remains private in his public expression. Praeterita passes over many things in ‘total silence’. It is a partial record not only in that it remained unfinished at his death, but also in what it leaves out. There is no reference to Ruskin’s failed marriage or to his work as a social critic. Venice is displaced to the margins of his personal history by the claim that Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa have been the ‘three centres of my life’s thought’ (xxxv.156). Ruskin is, moreover, often factually inaccurate in what he does record, and sometimes vastly unreliable in his assessment of others: the account given of his parents’ relationship, for example, claims that ‘My father chose his wife much with the same kind of serenity and decision with which afterwards he chose his clerks’ (xxxv.126) when the evidence of John James Ruskin’s letters suggests he held Margaret Ruskin in greatly more intense, and even ecstatic, love. Praeterita’s omissions and partiality have been for some readers a cause for regret and complaint, but they are now more often seen as necessary to its achievement, in the sense remarked by Clive Wilmer: ‘Unreliability is perhaps the source of the imaginative alchemy that turns fact into impression and memoir into literature.’10 Composed in spurts, over several years, Praeterita appeared in instalments, beginning in 1885, with the last appearing in 1889, and so was published as it was written: in pieces. The process was haphazard, to the extent that fragments of the manuscript exist on scraps of paper sent to the publisher to incorporate. Its circulation was small, being received mostly by friends or allies, meaning that (like some other of Ruskin’s later texts, most especially Fors Clavigera in its particular address to Ruskin’s followers in the Guild of St George) it has something of the character of a private letter, written as if to specific individuals. Praeterita proceeds more by association than by chronology, with individual chapters formed around what are usually fairly separate memories, though many follow the same method, linking a place with a theme or event, hence their emblematic titles. 225
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Ruskin writes of his childhood as solitary and secluded. He recalls the routines of his undergraduate years at Oxford, where he felt himself to be differently cocooned, at a time when ‘my mind was simply in the state of a squash before ’tis a peascod’ (xxxv.261). He interprets his own history through the history of his reading, from the chapters of the Bible read aloud as a child under his mother’s instruction to the different influences on him of (among others) Walter Scott, Shakespeare, Byron, and George Herbert. He evokes his early encounters with Turner and the nature of his aesthetic education. He describes travelling to the Alps, Italy, and France, in journeys which yielded the moments of revelation proposed to have shaped the course of his life. In this way Praeterita can be understood to be organised around what George P. Landow calls ‘centres or moments of personally achieved vision’.11 There is his first view of the Alps from Schaffhausen in 1833, after which ‘I went down that evening from the garden-terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful’ (xxxv.116). In one of Praeterita’s great set pieces, there is also his first view of the Jura two years later, which ‘opened to me in distinct vision the Holy Land of my future work and true home in this world’ (xxxv.167). Yet the story is not told steadily or concertedly, and Ruskin’s digressive and discursive manner is liable to make it appear uncertain in ambition. The resistance to linear development is sometimes taken to be a product largely of the difficult and broken circumstances in which it was written and published, with some commentators additionally (and controversially) observing that Ruskin lacked access to his diaries at crucial stages in its composition. Others suggest that it is part of Praeterita’s experimentalism, whether made in the effort to reflect Ruskin’s ‘peculiar sensibility’, as Elizabeth K. Helsinger proposes, ‘which time and events will not change’, or, alternatively, as a response to a characteristically modern predicament: the awareness, as Max Saunders puts it, that ‘we cannot experience our own experience as we live it’, but can only do so in memory, to which autobiography responds by ‘by disrupting linear chronology, and following instead sequences of mnemonic association’.12 Certainly Ruskin often seems to find that reminiscence involves a disordering rather than a confirmation of self-knowledge, opening Volume II with the observation that ‘as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought’ (xxxv.243). Part of the difficulty of categorising Praeterita is that this combines with a strikingly emphatic sense of what endures in a life. Of a summer tour made in his youth, for example, Ruskin writes that ‘so stubborn and chemically inalterable the laws of the prescription were, that now, looking back from 1886 to that brook shore of 1837, whence I could see the whole of my youth, I find myself in 226
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nothing whatsoever changed. Some of me is dead, more of me stronger. I have learned a few things, forgotten many; in the total of me, I am but the same youth, disappointed and rheumatic’ (xxxv.220, emphasis in the original). The remark ends, typically for Praeterita, on a gently comic note of retrospection that also marks out true sadness. The lightness with which Ruskin frequently views his youthful self is in this way also often a vehicle of regret, for opportunities missed as well as for chances badly taken. Had Charlotte Withers, daughter of a friend of Ruskin’s mother, remained with them ‘a month longer’ during her stay of 1838, ‘we should have fallen quite melodiously and quietly in love; and they might have given me an excellently pleasant little wife, and set me up, geology and all, in the coal business [her father’s trade], without any resistance or farther trouble on my part’. As it was, ‘[a] little while after-wards, her father “negotiated” a marriage for her with a well-to-do Newcastle trader, whom she took because she was bid. He treated her pretty much as one of his coal sacks, and in a year or two she died’ (xxxv.222). The idea of their love is an idle thought, as the manner of its telling makes apparent, but one characteristic of the way Praeterita often slips into what William Arrowsmith names as ‘paradisal autobiography’: according to Arrowsmith, ‘Praeterita shows us how Ruskin – having never lived at all, or having started too late – might have lived, could have lived, had he only known how, known earlier.’13 Allied to this is a strong sense of the intersection of fate and accident that work to shape a life, and which can even, in the most unfortunate of cases, serve to end it. Ruskin’s account of his beloved cousin Charles’s drowning at sea identifies it as above all unlucky, occurring in a manner that is wretchedly arbitrary; it closes with Ruskin’s memory of his uncle’s report of the tragedy: ‘They caught the cap off of his head, and yet they couldn’t save him’ (xxxv.137). This preoccupation with what mischance cuts short or places out of reach lends urgency to Praeterita’s acts of commemoration. These are many and varied, extending from the small mention of the unidentified ‘beautifully featured Scottish youth of three or four and twenty’ comforted in his dying hours by Ruskin’s father at Terni in 1840 (xxxv.292–293), to the large tribute Praeterita makes overall (in the words of its preface) to ‘parents who trained my childhood to all the good it could attain, and whose memory makes declining life cheerful in the hope of being soon again with them’ (xxxv.12). There is in the latter dedication a foretaste of the combination of serenity and mournfulness present throughout Praeterita’s work of recollection. This combination is nowhere more evident than in the majestic last passage Ruskin was able to compose for Praeterita before his final breakdown (among other possible factors) seems to have prevented its completion. 227
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It traces over what was already a persistent image in his writing to arrive at a rich harmony of past scenes and events: How things bind and blend themselves together! The last time I saw the Fountain of Trevi, it was from Arthur’s father’s room – Joseph Severn’s, where we both took Joanie to see him in 1872, and the old man made a sweet drawing of his pretty daughter-in-law, now in her schoolroom; he himself then eager in finishing his last picture of the Marriage in Cana, which he had caused to take place under a vine trellis, and delivered himself by painting the crystal and ruby glittering of the changing rivulet of water out of the Greek vase, glowing into wine. Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, ‘Cor magis tibi Sena pandit’ [‘More than her gates, Siena opens her heart to you’], and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars. (xxxv.561–2; emphasis in original)
The movement of these sentences, which swell and ramify, but also circle and return, enacts what their opening promises, a binding and blending together into wholeness. It is an intensely elegiac passage which yet achieves a remarkable unity of memory, perhaps in part because it is not externally directed, driven by no purpose to moralise or instruct, but rather stays intimate and internal. Released from the demand to find public significance in his inner reflections, the last words Ruskin wrote for publication show his voice mellowing to inhabit a newly private eloquence. NO TES My thanks to John Batchelor and Robbie McLaughlan for their advice on earlier versions of this chapter. 1. Dinah Birch, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 4. 2. See Francis O’Gorman, Late Ruskin: New Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 9–30. 3. In material intended for Praeterita, Ruskin observed that the 1830 diary was written jointly with his cousin Mary Richardson (xxv.622), yet almost all the entries appear to have been written solely by him. See A Tour to the Lakes in Cumberland: John Ruskin’s Diary for 1830, ed. James S. Dearden with an introduction by Van Akin Burd (Aldershot: Gower, 1990). 228
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Diary journals, correspondence, autobiography, and private voice 4. The Venetian Notebooks are now available in electronic form from the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University: www.lancaster.ac.uk/depts/ruskinlib/eSoV /index.html. See also http://tundra.csd.sc.edu/vllc/. 5. Jay Fellows, The Failing Distance: The Autobiographical Impulse in John Ruskin (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 112. 6. Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 127. 7. Letter of 7 July 1869, in John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense Letters, ed. Rachel Dickinson (London: Legenda, 2009), 113. 8. For ‘Perpetua’, see the editorial note in Norton, 497: ‘The first syllable may derive from Rose’s signature in her letters to Ruskin, “P. R. P.”, an abbreviation for “Posie-Rosie-Posie” . . . The second half embodies a pun: “pet-you-are”’. 9. Leader article from The Times (22 January 1900), repr. in Elizabeth Gaskell, the Carlyles and John Ruskin by Their Contemporaries: Volume III: John Ruskin, ed. Simon Grimble (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), 334. 10. Clive Wilmer, ‘Back to nature: Ruskin’s aspen and an art in the service of the given’, Times Literary Supplement (1 December 1995), 4. 11. George P. Landow, Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 83. 12. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, ‘The Structure of Ruskin’s Praeterita’, in George P. Landow, ed., Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1979), 92; Max Saunders, Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83. 13. William Arrowsmith, ‘Ruskin’s fireflies’, in John Dixon Hunt and Faith M. Holland, eds., The Ruskin Polygon: Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 198–235 (213), emphasis in the original.
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Ruskin was so polymathic a writer and the range of his other activities so various that his work is almost impossible to categorise. He is probably best described as a critic in the capacious sense employed by his contemporary Matthew Arnold: that is to say, a critic not only of art and architecture but of culture and society at large. But Ruskin did not at first aspire to the critical role. His first intellectual enthusiasm was geology and he maintained an interest in natural science throughout his life. His chief adolescent aspirations, however, were artistic. He began writing poetry as a small boy. He worked at it with some seriousness from the age of about eleven, but abandoned the ambition in his late twenties, soon after the publication of Modern Painters I in 1843. He was surely right to do so. Ruskin’s verse is more notable for the effort that went into it than anything that could be called inspiration, and the explosion of his genius for prose must have convinced him of the fact. His other ambition was to be an artist, and in this case his talent was remarkable. He was producing meticulously detailed drawings of architecture at fourteen or fifteen, and by the age of seventeen, when he went up to Oxford, he had acquired the ability to communicate atmosphere. But though he persisted with his drawing till old age, maturing and refining his skill and often extending his range in radical ways, he rarely if ever thought of his work as art. He drew things in order to study them, and thereby to see them and understand them better. He did not exhibit his pictures or offer them for sale; indeed, he rarely bothered to finish them. He did use them to illustrate his works or as examples for teaching, but thought of their value, it would seem, as functional not aesthetic. Ruskin does not seem to have been disappointed by the failure of his early ambitions; on the contrary, he embraced the discovery of his adult powers with positive satisfaction. As a wealthy man, he felt no need to earn a living from his art or compete in the gallery world, and the continual practice of drawing was to prove crucial to his critical understanding of visual art. As for 230
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poetry, his study of rhythm, imagery, and the resonances of words left its trace in the quite exceptional beauty of his prose. Poetry Ruskin’s poetry is not devoid of interest. In 1830, at the age of eleven, he composed the Iteriad, a 2,314-line poem about his summer holidays in the Lake District, which trips along in anapaestic couplets. The precocity alone is impressive and Ruskin’s famous powers of observation are already in place, but we get few hints of the depth or intensity to come. Like much of the early work, the Iteriad is undermined by its relentless jocularity in misguided emulation of Byron’s humorous mode. The poems very often touch on the family’s tours; a few are rather dutifully worked up out of passages in Herodotus and other classical authors; and a handful of lyrics express conventional passions for Adèle Domecq, the girl he fell in love with at seventeen. As an Oxford undergraduate, Ruskin set himself to win the annual Newdigate Prize Poem, at which he succeeded in 1839. The subject that year was ‘Salsette and Elephanta’ – the title refers to two islands off the western coast of India associated with religious worship. The caves at Elephanta, in particular, are celebrated for their Hindu sculpture – not the kind of art that would have appealed to Ruskin, even if he had had serious knowledge of it, but it nevertheless provided him with a subject that uncannily tapped his future preoccupations. His poem is concerned with religious sculpture, the relation of art to nature, the association of religion with mountain landscape, and the way other religions can be understood as groping for the truths of Christianity. Newdigate Prize poems in Ruskin’s day were written in the Augustan manner, as if there had never been a Romantic movement. But Ruskin admired such poets as Pope and Goldsmith, and his handling of the heroic couplet is confident, even if in the long run its enforced symmetries inhibit his natural flair. His account of the three supreme gods of the Hindu pantheon is typical, both in its metrical qualities and in its conscious echo of the Christian Trinity: Behold, the giant group, the united three, Faint symbol of an unknown Deity! Here, frozen into everlasting trance, Stern Siva’s quivering lip and hooded glance; There, in eternal majesty serene, Proud Brahma’s painless brow, and constant mien; There glows the light of Veeshnu’s guardian smile, But on the crags that shade yon inmost aisle 231
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clive w ilmer Shine not, ye stars! Annihilation’s lord There waves, with many an arm, the unsated sword; Relentless holds the cup of mortal pain, And shakes the spectral links that wreathe his ghastly chain. (ii.95–6)
The ‘unknown Deity’ presumably alludes to St Paul’s ‘unknown God’ (Acts 17:23), while the presence of ‘Annihilation’s lord’ –‘the evil principle of India . . . engaged in human sacrifice’, according to the editors of the Library Edition (ii.96 n) – would seem to point to what, for Ruskin, were the flaws in Hindu doctrine. Ruskin’s best poem, written at the age of twenty-five, not long before he gave up writing verse, is probably ‘La Madonna dell’Acqua’, which anticipates aspects of The Stones of Venice (1851–3). It is the only poem he wrote that has been much anthologised. The subject is a small shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which stands alone in the Venetian lagoon. Here is the opening: Around her shrine no earthly blossoms blow, No footsteps fret the pathway to and fro; No sign nor record of departed prayer, Print of the stone, nor echo of the air; Worn by the lip, nor wearied by the knee, – Only a deeper silence of the sea: For there, in passing, pause the breezes bleak, And the foam fades, and all the waves are weak. The pulse-like oars in softer fall succeed, The black prow falters through the wild seaweed – Where, twilight-borne, the minute thunders reach Of deep-mouthed surf, that bays by Lido’s beach, With intermittent motion traversed far, And shattered glancing of the western star, Till the faint storm-bird on the heaving flow Drops in white circles, silently like snow.
(ii.227)
Though the passage begins in couplets, the versification is more relaxed than in the prize poem, and the tone is closer to that of Ruskin’s prose. There is still the ghost of Augustan convention in the movement, but it is Augustan convention as understood by Byron. There is also a hint of Shelley, a poet Ruskin admired at this stage of his life. But there is little of the tension – the internal drama – of Romantic versification and, after this splendid opening, the poem drifts. The couplet form breaks down for no particular reason just before the midpoint of the poem, and the images are rolled out in no particular order. It is not until near the ending that something like coherence is restored. There is perhaps some explanation here of Ruskin’s failure as a 232
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poet. His genius in its fullness is inhibited by compression and formal discipline. In prose he is able to expand and improvise, to change direction unexpectedly from time to time, to create unprecedented forms and genres. Drawings and watercolours It seems unlikely that Ruskin’s poems will ever be read for their own sake. But his drawings and watercolours – he never seriously painted in oil (see i.xxxii) – are more highly regarded today than they have ever been and his reputation as an artist still seems to be rising. He was from an early age astonishingly accomplished. At the age of thirteen he properly discovered the work of J. M. W. Turner and remained devoted to it for the rest of his life. He learnt infinite things from Turner’s art, but although as a young man he tried on occasion to imitate him, the results were rarely convincing. There are fine bravura watercolours by Ruskin, but they are Turnerian only in his early years and not very characteristic. The key influences are the minor topographical artists of Turner’s day, especially J. D. Harding and A. V. Copley Fielding, both of whom taught Ruskin, and Samuel Prout, who became a family friend. It was from Prout’s example that he learnt to draw buildings, to suggest the elaboration of their ornament, to render their picturesque decay, to use the whiteness of paper to capture light by contrasting it with neat washes of shade. Ruskin’s achievements in this mode are considerable and they start as early as 1837, when he was eighteen. But Ruskin soon grew away from the Proutian method, which by 1842 he had come to think of as much too formulaic. His autobiography Praeterita (1885–9) records an experience of that year which irrevocably changed his direction. He was twenty-three and just recovering from a bout of flu. Too weary to continue a short walk, he lay down wearily on a roadside bank, only to be drawn out of his reverie by ‘a small aspen tree against the blue sky’: Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced, – without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they ‘composed’ themselves, by finer laws than any known of men. At last, the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere. (xxxv.314)
He seems to be saying that the purpose of art is to teach us to see the world we live in, and thereby come to know it. If a work of art is beautiful, it is so because the artist has learnt about beauty in the school of nature, which is the work of God. The ‘composition’ of natural forms is infinitely more subtle and complex than anything invented by the human imagination. Artists learn to 233
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compose pictures by observing and seeking to follow the shapes they find in the world around them, not by imposing human conventions on things that shape themselves ‘by finer laws than any known of men’. The lesson Ruskin had learnt – even if the story is a retrospective retelling and refashioning – quickly becomes apparent in the wayward compositions of his drawings and their rendering of detail. An engraving from The Stones of Venice II, ‘The Vine: Free, and in Service’, illustrates this well (see Figure 12). The plate is divided into two panels. The top panel depicts a growing vine as it ‘composes itself’. The bottom one shows the left spandrel of one of the portals of St Mark’s Basilica: a figure is represented on a decorative field of vine, the form of the spandrel shaping the vine to something like the natural pattern of growth. The simplified form of the ornamental vine depends on observation of the ‘real’ one. Ruskin comes to see particulars not as deviations from an ideal form but as infinitely various expressions of a common nature. It is what Gerard Manley Hopkins – one of the many Victorians who were to feel his influence – refers to as the ‘this-ness’ of things. In Trees in a Lane, perhaps at Ambleside (1847),1 for instance, we seem to be conscious of each individual leaf, yet also of the trees’ organic wholeness and their subsistence in community. These distinctions in Ruskin’s view of nature are replicated in his social thought. For instance, they recall the pivotal chapter of The Stones of Venice, ‘On the Nature of Gothic’, where the stone-masons working on a Gothic cathedral, each with his individual vision, contribute to an ‘unaccusable whole’ (x.190). Such analogies are crucial to his thinking – to his rejection of the Darwinian ‘struggle for survival’ in favour of what he calls, in Modern Painters V (1860), ‘the Law of Help’ (vii.203–16) and to his sense that the ethical laws which govern human society are repeated in – perhaps derive from – the common laws of nature. His drawings often reflect such analogies: Trees in a Lane incorporates an architectural pattern, as does the stupendous Aiguilles de Chamonix (c.1850),2 where the soaring peak of Mont Blanc and the heap of stone beneath it remind us of another phrase from ‘The Nature of Gothic’: ‘this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp’ (x.188). These are landscape drawings, but Ruskin is not a landscape artist in the way that Turner and Constable are. His scenes are not populated and, though Aiguilles de Chamonix communicates a sense of distance, one is not much aware of context or of complex aerial perspective. It is not in that sense a view. It is more what might be called a ‘nature study’, and nature studies in a stricter sense were to become Ruskin’s forte, especially in the 1870s. It is not that he was indifferent to context, as his readings of Turner show, and there is also a range of his own pictures in which the human or 234
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Figure 12. John Ruskin, The Vine: Free, and in Service, 1853, from The Stones of Venice II.
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social context is all important. In particular, there is a series of drawings of old Swiss towns painted between 1856 and 1866 when Ruskin was, as Christopher Newall has put it, increasingly absorbed by Alpine life – observing on the one hand the poverty and hardship that the mountain peasants endured, but also admiring those people for their self-reliance and independence. He was interested in their economic circumstances and concluded that this could be regarded as a model society of mutual cooperation and pooled resources. The link with the land and the variety of work that farming involved – quite different to the mindless repetition and unhealthy working environment that industry seemed inevitably to inflict upon its labour force – was seen to be good for people.3
The context here is Newall’s description of Farm Buildings in Switzerland (c.1856–9), which also appears to incorporate the remains of a ruined tower, suggesting a historical community.4 Ruskin was, by all accounts, a great teacher – drawing master and lecturer – and many of his nature studies are connected with his teaching. The Dryad’s Waywardness: Oak Spray in Winter, Seen in Front (1858–60), which was engraved for Modern Painters V, seems to have originated in a drawing class at the Working Men’s College: an example of foreshortening.5 Study of a Kingfisher, with Dominant Reference to Colour (probably 1871) was painted for a Slade lecture (see cover image). It is a fine example of Ruskin laying bodycolour over watercolour to register the brilliance of natural pigments. The extraordinary Study of a Peacock’s Breast Feather (1873), which evokes the subtlest range of colours and textures in a single minute object, was given to the educational collection which Ruskin founded in Sheffield.6 Some of these drawings have a mystical quality. The Cockle Shell (1876), in watercolour with tempera, is among the most minimal of his drawings, its extreme specificity suggestive of universal harmony and spiritual wholeness.7 The most surprising of these detailed studies are those which appear to be charged with erotic implication. In one particular group there are suggestions of the female genital region: the graphite drawing Moss and Wild Strawberry (1873?),8 and two watercolours enriched with bodycolour, Wild Strawberry Plant (1873)9 and A Study of Foreground Material (c. 1873).10 As far as we know, Ruskin had never experienced physical love, and the few critics who have touched on drawings of this kind think of the sexual suggestions as unconscious – expressive, that is, of Ruskin’s repressed libido. It is possible to agree with this and yet wonder whether this sort of psychology, with its sharp distinction between conscious and unconscious intention, does not offer too crude a model. We know that Ruskin was familiar with images of female genitalia and had seen the erotic studies by Turner, which he had discovered 236
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in the year 1857–58 while sorting the drawings in the Turner bequest. Is it not possible that, dismayed as he undoubtedly was, he felt there was something to be learnt from them? The vignette Wild Strawberry Plant has a caption written by Ruskin on the paper just beneath it: ‘The Rose of Demeter, Springing in a Cleft of her Rocks’ – wording which may remind us of his talent for poetry. The wild strawberry flower belongs to the family rosaceae and was associated for Ruskin with the young Rose La Touche, with whom he was in love. Demeter is, in effect, the earth goddess in Greek mythology, and the mother of Persephone/Proserpina, who restores life to nature in spring when she returns from the underworld. The cleft in the rocks, like those in Moss and Wild Strawberry and A Study of Foreground Material, is the opening in the earth mother’s anatomy, like the vulva images scrawled in the margins of Turner’s drawings. There is in this, no doubt, a good deal beneath the level of consciousness, but it also exemplifies the organising and symbol-making power of an artist’s imagination – in this case, simultaneously, a painter and a poet. The King of the Golden River The painter and the poet also come together in the earliest literary work to be stamped with Ruskin’s genius. This is his fairy story The King of the Golden River, written in 1841 but not published till 1850. It is among the first stories by a named author to imitate the folktales recently collected by the Brothers Grimm and others. The beguiling prose and crisply specific natural descriptions give it all the power of Ruskin’s mature writings. It is a wonderful story, but it is also, as one would expect, something more than that. The King of the Golden River is, indeed, heavily moralised – as fairy stories often are – but it is not so much a warning against the dangers of adult life as an advocacy of disinterested goodness. Its good is the Christian good which does not distinguish between love for the Creator and love for his creatures. Like most of Ruskin’s early writings, the tale is also touched with the spirit of Romanticism: a spirit which seeks to connect a passion for sublimity with care for ‘all sorts and conditions of men’.11 Northrop Frye once wrote that Ruskin’s approach to wealth in Unto This Last and his other writings on economics was ‘in essence a commentary on this fairy tale’12 and it does undoubtedly suggest what Ruskin directly declares in Unto This Last (1860): that wealth is determined by a moral quotient. The ‘Black Brothers’, Hans and Schwartz, like the Ugly Sisters of Cinderella, are heartless and selfish, but to no productive end. Their actions impoverish everyone, not least themselves. As Ruskin says in Unto This Last: ‘Some treasures are heavy with human tears, as an ill-stored harvest with 237
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untimely rain’ (xvii.52). Such treasures he calls ‘illth’; they are the contrary of wealth, which is instinctively understood by the third brother, Gluck, a boy oppressed by his brothers’ selfishness. All three brothers go in quest of the Golden River, high in the mountains. They are told to take three drops of holy water with them, but Gluck gives his away to creatures he meets on the journey who appear to be dying of thirst. In doing so, he unexpectedly learns the story’s moral: that ‘the water which has been refused to the cry of the weary and the dying’ – as it has been by Gluck’s brothers – ‘is unholy’ (i.346). When Gluck has completed his journey, he is rewarded by the King of the Golden River, who then ‘evaporate[s]’ (i.331) – dissolves into the landscape, the gold being in reality the sun reflected in water, which is to say, the sources of life itself. The evaporation of the king is a metaphor for the relation of divine or moral power to the material circumstances of life. In his biography of Ruskin, W. G. Collingwood describes this fairy tale as ‘a pretty medley of Grimm’s grotesque and Dickens’s kindliness and the true Ruskinian ecstasy of the Alp.’13 The ‘Ruskinian ecstasy’ is also perhaps Turnerian. Examining Ruskin’s diaries for his convalescent tour of 1840–1, the period in which he wrote both his first essay on Turner and The King of the Golden River, Ruskin’s editor, E. T. Cook, observes him developing his powers of natural description, as if in preparation for Modern Painters. ‘His entries’, Cook remarks, ‘are like those brilliant impressions by Turner, which may be seen in the water-colour rooms of the National Gallery’ (i.xxxix). ‘The diaries of 1840–41,’ he continues, ‘and still more perhaps those of years a little later, show the sincerity of Ruskin’s studies from nature, and the spontaneous colour and felicity of his so-called “word-painting”’ (i.xli). ‘Word-painting’ is a common Victorian expression, not always altogether complimentary, but as the earlier reference to Turner suggests, Ruskin was trying to do more than write descriptively. He was trying to find a verbal equivalent for Turner’s painting and drawing, partly in order to describe Turner’s pictures, but also – more importantly – to create natural descriptions that might provide verbal evidence of Turner’s truth. Before he achieves this in Modern Painters, Ruskin does so in his fairy tale. Here is how one of the wicked brothers is, in effect, brought to judgement and becomes what in essence he had always been, a black stone: The roar of the Golden River rose on Hans’ ear. He stood at the brink of the chasm through which it ran. Its waves were filled with the red glory of the sunset: they shook their crests like tongues of fire, and flashes of bloody light gleamed along their foam. Their sound came mightier and mightier on his senses; his brain grew giddy with the prolonged thunder. Shuddering, he drew the flask from his girdle and hurled it into the centre of the torrent. As he did so, an icy chill shot through his limbs: he staggered, shrieked, and fell. 238
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For Ruskin, nature is underpinned by ethical laws, by the mind of God. In repudiating the Law of Help (see chapter 1 of Modern Painters V), the black brothers lay themselves open to the judgement not of angels but of nature itself. It was, in Ruskin’s understanding, a truth that had been revealed to him by Turner. The artist in prose In 1844, to celebrate the completion of Modern Painters I, Ruskin’s father bought him one of Turner’s greatest oils. The painting in question was Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhon coming on (1840), always referred to by Ruskin as The Slave Ship.14 Painted ‘at a time when momentum was gathering for universal abolition of the [slave] trade’, it represents a notorious incident when a slaver caught in a dangerous storm threw ‘its human cargo . . . overboard in order to claim insurance money’.15 Ruskin had described the picture in Modern Painters I: ‘It is a sunset on the Atlantic, after prolonged storm’, he tells us. The sea ‘is divided into two ridges of enormous swell’, between which ‘the fire of the sunset falls along the [trough] of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold and bathes like blood’. He then evokes the strange, apocalyptic sea-creatures that occupy the trough: Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms . . . They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups . . . leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the undistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labours amidst the lightening of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. (iii.571–2)
It is impossible to miss the moral emphasis. As in the passage from The King of the Golden River, nature is represented as the agent of God’s judgement. 239
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The masts are ‘written upon the sky in lines of blood’, as if to suggest the passing of sentence – ‘written’ and ‘lines’ are crucial here – with a suggestion of the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast: ‘God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it . . . Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting’ (Daniel 5:26–7). The last four words, moreover, are an unmistakable allusion to Macbeth’s burning recognition of his own indelible guilt: Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.16
The imagery and the use Ruskin makes of it recall the passage quoted above from the fairy story. ‘[T]he red glory of the sunset’, the ‘crests like tongues of fire’, the ‘flashes of bloody light [that] gleamed along [the] foam’: none of these phrases from the tale would be out of place in this passage of art criticism. In both cases, colour is of the essence – as it tends to be in Ruskin. There is an obvious reason for this in the case of Modern Painters. The first volume was not illustrated, so Ruskin was obliged to inform his prose with the painter’s colours, forms, and images. To achieve this, he also reads the picture, which is to say, interprets it. His language is steeped in reds and golds, and the colours are symbolic: there is red for blood, gold for riches and, we infer, the familiar trope ‘red gold’, standing for trafficked humans. Ruskin is true to what seems to be Turner’s intention, but his images also chime with his writing on other matters, especially on economic questions. For instance, the statement in Unto This Last that ‘the true veins of wealth are purple – and not in Rock, but in Flesh’ (xvii.55–6) is central to Ruskin’s work and congruent with what he takes to be Turner’s vision. This is to say, in effect, that the lyrical passages from Ruskin’s early books – from Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and The Stones of Venice – have something in common with poetry and derive much of their imaginative power from Ruskin’s study of pictorial effects. It is not to say that they are poetry, but that they are hard to read with any depth of understanding without reading their words as we read the words of major poetry. Unto This Last, for instance, is the most sober of Ruskin’s books – a book in which he makes an effort to avoid the seductions of fine writing. Yet it, too, has poetic moments. They are not always lyrical; they are poetic in a sense that William Empson would have understood when – perhaps alluding to Ruskin’s 1849 title – he wrote his critical classic, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). In the 1860s, influenced in part by the philologist Max Müller, Ruskin became interested in the meaning of complex words: in particular, in the way the investigation of etymologies 240
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may re-connect conceptions that history and cultural change have driven apart. Take this passage, for instance: The real science of political economy . . . is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life: and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction. And if, in a state of infancy . . . they imagine precious and beneficent things, such as air, light, and cleanliness, to be valueless, – or if, finally, they imagine the conditions of their own existence, by which alone they can truly possess or use anything, such, for instance, as peace, trust, and love, to be prudently exchangeable, when the markets offer, for gold, iron, or excrescences of shells – the great and only science of Political Economy teaches them, in all these cases, what is vanity, and what substance; and how the service of Death, the Lord of Waste, and of eternal emptiness, differs from the service of Wisdom, the Lady of Saving, and of eternal fulness; she who has said, ‘I will cause those that love me to inherit SUBSTANCE; and I will FILL their treasures.’17 The ‘Lady of Saving’, in a profounder sense than that of the savings bank, though that is a good one: Madonna della Salute, – Lady of Health, – which, though commonly spoken of as if separate from wealth, is indeed a part of wealth. (xvii.85–6)
One of Ruskin’s targets as a social critic is the false spirituality which has contempt for the world and material things – for the delights of nature and the needs of the body – and yet tacitly endorses an economy which is based, as he sees it, on greed for material gain. Unto This Last belongs to the period of Ruskin’s ‘unconversion’, in which he subjected earlier religious assumptions to sceptical scrutiny. During this phase he acquired the habit of re-translating sacred language into material terms. So ‘blessed’ becomes ‘happy’, ‘holy’ becomes ‘helpful’, ‘righteous’ becomes ‘just’, ‘angel’ in some cases becomes ‘messenger’. The unexpected allusion in the passage quoted to the Church of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, built in thanksgiving for the city’s delivery from the plague, reconnects a host of significant words. The Italian salute means both health and salvation, the wellbeing of body and soul understood as one and the same. It can also mean ‘greeting’, like the English ‘salute’, and ‘security’, ‘safety’, and ‘saving’ – or indeed ‘savings’, the prudent reservation of money to guard against insecurity. By these means, economic security and material welfare – safety and savings – come to be seen in a continuum which culminates in salvation. Wealth and health, in that context, are two sides of the same coin. In the last sentence quoted, Ruskin looks forward to the climax of his book: the aphorism, ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE’ (xvii.105). Unto This Last is a critique of political economy, but it is also to be read as a work of imaginative literature. It draws together conceptions not ordinarily 241
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seen in relation to one another. This is a fundamental aspect of Ruskin’s genius. ‘The Nature of Gothic’ is extraordinary in a number of ways, but its most extraordinary aspect is the apparent digression at the heart of it which turns an account of medieval architecture into a meditation on human labour and a denunciation of the industrial system. It does not thereby suffer as a study of Gothic style. On the contrary, it shows that our understanding of that style is inseparable from an understanding of the means of architectural production and that such an understanding must derive from reflections on work, employment, community, and the justice or injustice that informs the social organisation of any given time. It shows, that is, that art is an expression of society. It was rarely Ruskin’s practice to follow received conventions. He invented genres or adapted them, in part to foreground his digressive method. His most notable innovation was the open letter, as represented by Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871–8, 1880–4). These wonderful verbal artefacts combine the necessarily loose construction of ordinary letters with underlying principles of connection and association. It is a form deliberately designed to place in the foreground Ruskin’s habits of digression and association. One of many interpretations of the title is Fortune the Nail-bearer: month by month, Ruskin took up what came to him by fate or chance and nailed it down beside his other concerns. The American critic Guy Davenport was reminded by Fors of the Modernist poet Ezra Pound: ‘Fors,’ he wrote, ‘is a kind of Victorian prose Cantos . . . allowing themes to recur in patterns, generating significance, as Pound did, by juxtaposition and the intuition of likenesses among dissimilar and unexpected things.’18 Ruskin’s last book, his autobiography Praeterita, which in many ways grew out of Fors, is the only one of his books that is purely a work of creative literature. Unlike most of his work, it does not aim to teach. When he wrote it, autobiography was a new genre and it appears to owe little to earlier narratives. A possible exception would be Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850), with its celebrated ‘spots of time’. Praeterita is similarly organised around epiphanies, though there is little evidence that Ruskin took much notice of The Prelude.19 It has little in the way of narrative thrust and breaks off long before the old age in which he was writing it. By 1889, on the verge of his last breakdown, Ruskin was too ill to finish the book, but he managed a final chapter. The last two paragraphs draw together the different themes and images that have concerned him throughout. Praeterita begins with ‘The Springs of Wandel’, which refers to the Thames tributary not far from which Ruskin had spent his childhood. He returns to 242
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those springs in his conclusion: a rush of water images – streams, rivers, fountains, and a reservoir – symbolises both the passing of time and the movement of language and memory back over it. In this way, things begin to ‘bind and blend themselves together’, and the sequence of time is disrupted and re-ordered in accordance with memorial significance. In the first of the two paragraphs he remembers creating a reservoir and a crystalline stream as entertainment for two young girls – his cousin Joan Severn and Rose La Touche – in his back garden. The atmosphere is partly playful, but the whole scene is drenched in Paradisal imagery: ‘“Eden-land”[,] Rosie calls it sometimes in her letters’ (xxxv.561). The last paragraph is as follows: How things bind and blend themselves together! The last time I saw the Fountain of Trevi, it was from Arthur’s father’s room – Joseph Severn’s, where we both took Joanie to see him in 1872, and the old man made a sweet drawing of his pretty daughter-in-law, now in her schoolroom; he himself then eager in finishing his last picture of the Marriage in Cana, which he had caused to take place under a vine trellis, and delighted himself by painting the crystal and ruby glittering of the changing rivulet of water out of the Greek vase, glowing into wine. Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like finebroken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, ‘Cor magis tibi Sena pandit,’ [‘More than her gates, Siena opens her heart to you’] and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars. (xxxv.561–62)
As with ‘The Rose of Demeter’, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the truth of fact and the significance facts have come to possess for the writer. Concluding the story of his life and conscious of his frailty, Ruskin uses images to confront the certainty of impending death: the sunset, the approaching storm, the intensity of the very mortal fireflies by contrast with the cold eternal stars. In the previous paragraph he has told us of ‘the little glittering stream which [he] had paved with crystal’ for the two girls (xxxv.560). It is part of an atmosphere of purity, whiteness, and transparency, which is to say the innocence of childhood. This second paragraph is contrasted in tone. Now the colours are warm – red, purple, gold – and among the many allusions is one to Christ’s first miracle at Cana: ‘the crystal and ruby glittering of the changing rivulet of water out of the 243
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Greek vase, glowing into wine’. One has to breathe deeply to sustain the curve of that clause and capture its lovely cadence. With ‘crystal’ and ‘glittering’ it echoes the earlier clause, but the crucial addition is the miraculous transformation represented by ‘ruby’: Jesus turning the water into wine, as he will later, in effect, turn wine into blood. Wine is associated with joy and festivity, but it is also, as the product of fermented grapes, a further image of death. It is moreover an image of memory, for it is a means of storing past fruition. Innocence, Ruskin seems to be saying, is not enough. It is maturity that provides the richness and intensity of life, though maturity entails mortality. In ‘The Nature of Gothic’, great art is seen as the product of our struggle with imperfection. There and here, Ruskin is thinking of what theologians call the felix culpa, or Fortunate Fall – fortunate since it makes salvation possible. His entry into Siena with the storm clouds behind him may remind us of the most famous instance of the Fortunate Fall in English: Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost turning away from the gate of Eden to perceive how, now they have fallen, ‘[t]he world [is] all before them’.20 The poet Ruskin thinks of as Milton’s Italian rival, Dante, is also present, brought to mind by a reference to Fonte Branda in the Inferno. Each of the three cantiche that make up The Divine Comedy ends with the word stelle – ‘stars’. In each case, the mortal pilgrim’s quest for salvation is placed in a context of eternal truth. I could go on: the passage is exceptional in its richness. It perhaps shows why Ruskin so easily accepted the failure of his early aspirations. He was, as we can now see, a great artist – for reasons that cannot have occurred to him. He thought great artists had to invent, but today we are happy with painters who simply see what is there. The Victorians, Ruskin as much as any of them, considered that good paintings needed finish. But by comparison with many of his contemporaries, Ruskin’s unperfected pictures are wonderfully free of heaviness and leave much of their meaning to the viewer’s intuition. As for poetry, he remained a poet in some sense, and a finer poet than he could have been in verse. He communicates his meaning through rhythm and cadence, imagery and the choice of resonant words. ‘Who cares whether Mr Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not?’ wrote Oscar Wilde. ‘What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his . . . is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets’. And he went on to praise Ruskin for intellect, emotion, passion, ‘imaginative insight’, and ‘poetic aim’.21 We do not need to go quite as far as that, and Ruskin would justly have objected that his work was not worth reading if its message were to be ignored. But Wilde was surely right to claim that in Ruskin’s case – if in no one else’s – the critic was an artist. 244
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Creativity N O T ES 1. Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University), RF 1559: see www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/ruskinlib/Flora/1996P1559.html. 2. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Accession Number 1453). 3. John Ruskin: Artist and Observer (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2014), 170. 4. See Paul H. Walton, Master Drawings by John Ruskin: Selections from the David Thomson Collection (London: Pilkington, 2000), 94. 5. The Ashmolean Museum; Plate 59 of Modern Painters V (vii.94). 6. St George’s Museum, now the Ruskin Collection, Millennium Gallery, Sheffield. 7. Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University). See http://cat.lib .lancs.ac.uk/ruskin_images/1996P1510.jpg. 8. See http://ruskin.ashmolean.org/collection/8979/per_page/50/offset/325 /sort_by/cabinets/object/14351. 9. See http://ruskin.ashmolean.org/collection/8979/object/13817. 10. See http://ruskin.ashmolean.org/collection/9006/9037/9364/all/per_page/25/off set/0/sort_by/seqn./object/14020. 11. Book of Common Prayer (1662). Ruskin quotes this phrase in Praeterita (xxx.1150). 12. See Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 198. 13. W. G. Collingwood, The Life of John Ruskin, 7th edn. (London: Methuen, 1911), 69. 14. In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. See Figure 4. 15. Robert Hewison, Ian Warrell and Stephen Wildman, Ruskin, Turner and the PreRaphaelites (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), 71. 16. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edn., ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): Macbeth 2.2.58–61. 17. Proverbs viii.12 (Ruskin’s capitalisation). 18. Guy Davenport, ‘The House that Jack Built’, The Geography of the Imagination (London: Picador, 1984), 45. The Cantos of Ezra Pound appeared between 1924 and 1969. 19. Ruskin owned a first and a second edition of the poem. The second edition (1851) includes ‘Some underlining and scoring by JR’ (Library, 367). 20. Paradise Lost, XII.646 in John Milton, The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 1998), 406. 21. ‘The Critic as Artist’ in The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001), 238.
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part iv
Legacies
Published online by Cambridge University Press
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17 STUAR T EAGL ES
Political legacies
In 1925, a former schoolmaster at Eton and the retiring Master of Ruskin’s Guild of St George, H. E. Luxmoore (1851–1926), wrote to the public servant Sir George Duckworth (1868–1934): ‘why Ruskin’s name is not in every mouth I can’t understand’.1 Luxmoore exposes a stark truth. Ruskin’s reputation was strongest from about 1870 to 1920. The Manchester Guardian neatly summed up the situation in 1898: It must be some consolation to the aged reformer whose latter days are being passed in peace and quiet at Brantwood to know that, though he can no longer put the trumpet to his lips, his words of challenge and recall to nobler life are being heard.2
This was a time when Ruskin’s publisher, George Allen (1832–1907), sold cheaper editions of his books. Pamphlets and newspaper articles summarising Ruskin’s ideas appeared with increasing frequency. And libraries made his work more widely available. Some influential and sympathetic studies of Ruskin appeared around the turn of the century, by Robert de la Sizeranne, J. A. Hobson, and May Alden Ward.3 These were translated into many different languages and helped, to some extent by creating a legend of Ruskin, considerably to enhance his reception, at home and abroad. This was an era of improving literacy and self-education. The growing anger about urban squalor, rural spoliation, and pauperisation was matched by a rising desire to conduct research into these problems, to expose them and ultimately to tackle them with philanthropic schemes and civic interventions, for which municipal authorities and eventually national governments took responsibility. Economic uncertainty and a sense of perceived crisis in established creedal religions and liberal politics dented confidence in hitherto largely unquestioned standards. But that uncertainty also encouraged political dialogue, social reform, and unorthodox forms of faith (whether in religious nonconformism, psychic phenomena, emerging political ideas, or instances of hero-worship) that seemed to promise the hope of a better future. 249
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‘Influence’ is a slippery term. ‘Legacies’ and genealogies of ideas are difficult to trace. The past few years have seen many studies of aspects of Ruskin’s influence: Sara Atwood’s Ruskin’s Educational Ideals (2011), Keith Hanley and John K. Walton’s Constructing Cultural Tourism: John Ruskin and the Tourist Gaze (2011), my After Ruskin (2011), Keith Hanley and Brian Maidment’s essay collection, Persistent Ruskin (2013), and Mark Frost’s The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George (2014). As for them, the argument of this essay is not that Ruskin is ‘relevant’ or significant because he was influential, but rather that understanding the depth, variety, and complexity of his political legacies is to appreciate more richly the important ideas and activities pursued by succeeding generations. It is not difficult to find men and women who explicitly acknowledged their debt to Ruskin and who expressed gratitude that he had enhanced and even transformed their lives. Self-evidently, this does not in itself validate their understanding of Ruskin. What Ruskin intended and what he inspired in others cannot always be usefully reconciled. Merely to observe affinities, continuities, or disseminations, as interesting as these can be, is even less reliable, however, and risks finding Ruskin lurking in every shadow. Instead, the focus here is on individuals who understood themselves to be motivated by Ruskin; those who (to adopt their words) followed his signposts, walked on his roads, entered by his gates, saw through his eyes, or fell under his spell. Ruskin had been frustrated, baffled, and extremely disappointed by what he perceived as a lack of influence in his lifetime. Of his teaching at Oxford he apparently declared, according to The Pall Mall Gazette, that ‘not a single pupil has learned the things I primarily endeavoured to teach’ (xxxiii.532). In 1883, thinking of what he had written about the housing conditions of the poor, he claimed that only then was he being heeded – ‘recognition of the things which I have been these twenty years trying to get recognized, and reiterating descriptions and lamentation of – even to the actual printing of my pages in blood-red – to try if I could catch the eye at least, when I could not the ear or the heart’ (xxix.469). (Part of Sesame and Lilies, for instance, xviii.91–3, had been published in red.) It is difficult to disentangle Ruskin’s particular influence from that of individuals with whom he was often combined, compared, or contrasted – Carlyle, Morris, and Tolstoy; Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson – or from movements with which he was associated, including Pre-Raphaelitism and the Arts and Crafts. Ruskin’s protean nature, the multiplicity and complexity of his writing, made him vulnerable to diverse claims. He was appropriated, assimilated, harmonised, sometimes distorted, and rarely taken whole. Ruskin’s political ideas diverged sharply at several points from the largely 250
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progressive concepts he helped to inspire. His disapproval of parliament, of democracy, and of political parties was largely ignored, as was his belief in social hierarchy and his dedication to the ideal of the crown. Simultaneously, his moral objections to capitalism, free-market economics, and mechanised industry were received enthusiastically, his sympathy for state intervention was approved, his condemnation of injustice was shared, and his call to practical action was answered both by an important group of social reformers and of those celebrating manual labour and traditional crafts in alternative communities. His unique blend of aesthetics and social economics, and his insistence that different aspects of life cannot be separated without fragmenting and degrading humanity itself found favour. Yet the Christian faith that underpinned all these principles was rarely, if ever, embraced as fully as Ruskin wished. This is particularly important because he wrote that ‘no true disciple of mine will ever be a “Ruskinian”! – he will follow, not me, but the instincts of his own soul, and the guidance of its Creator’ (xxiv.371). Ruskin is imploring his readers to share his religious faith and to operate within his worldview rather than to mistake agreement for hero-worship or even a new religion. But what united the most significant of Ruskin’s political heirs is that they were persuaded as ethical anti-capitalists – they took Ruskin’s desire to modify capitalism as a fundamental challenge to capitalism – that they must take personal responsibility for society’s problems. These heirs did so in accordance with their understanding of Ruskin’s broadly Christian sense of virtue, justice, and honourable service, whether they were themselves Christians or not. One of the crucial tools Ruskin gave them, by the power and elegance of his memorable, often uncompromising prose, was the vital language with which to articulate protest. What Ruskin wrote was important, but whether he liked it or not, the way he wrote it was no less crucial. His political economics relied heavily on the Bible; Classical authors including Plato, Xenophon, and Horace; the English and Scottish Romantic poets; and even a contemporary novelist: Dickens. It was informed by his keen aesthetic sensibility, by his extraordinarily perceptive observation of and sensitivity to the natural world, and by his critical study of the art that – at best, should – represent it. Ruskin was read not as a political theorist or economic thinker on the whole, but as a Romantic articulating a moral revulsion to industrial capitalism that invited people to share his reverence for nature and justice. His descriptions of polluted and brutalised cities, and of disfigured landscapes, resonated with many who knew them at first hand. His metaphors were those of family and the household, frequently connecting political economy with a largely female private sphere – as he was often perceived 251
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to have coded it – as well as a public and (a perceived) male one. He bade the middle classes look around their rooms and reject the mass-produced trinkets on their shelves as the cheapened products of degrading, souldestroying labour. Crucially, he also provided the example and inspiration of practical schemes that showed to varying degrees of success what could be achieved by direct, targeted intervention to tackle problems of immediate and pressing concern. Ruskin initiated street sweeping in St Giles (in what is now the London Borough of Camden), oversaw the cleansing of a spring and pool on the Wandel at Carshalton (Margaret’s Well), and started a teashop in Paddington that we might now describe as an exercise in ethical retail that doubled as a means of employment for two retired family servants.4 Before that, he had already taught at the Working Men’s College at Red Lion Square, London, and financed and encouraged Octavia Hill’s first modelhousing project in Marylebone, where he established the first of the May Day festivities that he would later extend to Winnington Hall, Cheshire, and Whitelands College, Chelsea. The most personal and sustained of Ruskin’s practical exemplars as far as his heirs were concerned was his utopian society, the Guild of St George (as it eventually became known). At his most ambitious, Ruskin envisaged ‘a company designed to extend its operations over the continent of Europe’ (xxx.32), but elsewhere he intended more explicitly but not less significantly ‘to take some small piece of English ground’ on which he would have, he said, ‘no liberty, but instant obedience to known law, and appointed persons’, yet also a kind of utopia: ‘plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in our fields, – and few bricks’ (xxvii.96). Parcels of land and property were donated, notably by businessman and alderman George Baker (1825–1910) in the Wyre Forest near Bewdley, and by Fanny Talbot (1824–1917) in Barmouth, Wales. A communal farm that became a market garden in Totley (Sheffield), and land at Cloughton Moor (Scarborough), were purchased. Later donations, subsequent to Ruskin’s death, came from Mary Hope Greg (1850–1949), including Arts and Crafts houses in Westmill, Hertfordshire, and from Margaret Knight (1870–1949) came a wildflower meadow in Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire. Women always provided a strong presence in the Guild from the start, as Companions, donors, and – in the form of Edith Hope Scott (1862–1936) – its first historian. Mark Frost has recently shown the extent to which Ruskin mismanaged and in some cases mistreated the keen working-class disciples who worked the land for the Guild.5 The contrast with Ruskin’s more equal and respectful relationship with better-off donors is notable. The Guild’s only conspicuous early success by any objective measure was St George’s 252
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Museum at Walkley (Sheffield), ably curated by the Swans, which did much to enhance the lives of local metalworkers by making available to them exemplary items of rare beauty. As a challenge to apparently prevailing norms, Ruskin’s Guild was an important inspiration for others, and crucially it provided an institutional focus for some expressions of personal loyalty to Ruskin by his disciples. Ruskin societies, which established a different focus, were formed from 1878 – in Ruskin’s name but at best with his reluctant acquiescence – and they spread from Manchester and Glasgow to London, Liverpool, Birmingham, and beyond. Committed to reading and discussing Ruskin, the societies were part of a fashion for literary appreciation societies. Yet they went further than celebration, sharing characteristics with ethical societies, political parties, and Labour Churches, although they were neither party political nor could they be said to constitute a distinct movement in themselves. Rather, the societies helped fuel, and were an expression of, the broadly progressive engagement in civic life that marked this period. Vitally, their small but dedicated middle-class memberships committed themselves ‘to aid [Ruskin’s] practical efforts for social improvement’,6 and their local interventions were significant. When the Glasgow Ruskin Society agitated for housing reform in 1889, it joined forces with the Presbytery Commission. The Society noted that ‘not until our religion and our political economy unite on indisputable principles of goodness, both in men and things, will any lasting remedy be affected’.7 Such an admission did not deter them. In Liverpool, hand-spinning and weaving, as well as simple embroidery, were embraced as traditional means by which to maintain the home, and lessons were extended to local blind girls. A market garden was established at Mulberry Cottage, Wavertree, where the society met. Members set up an ethical scheme (St Anthony’s Bank) to lend money to the needy, modelling itself on Mounts of Pity – the medieval pawn broking system that offered what now would be thought charitable relief – and charged no interest. In the late 1880s they campaigned against ‘sweated’ labour, condemning the ‘rage for cheapness’ by befriending exploited workers and boycotting bad employers. Ruskin societies explicitly sought ‘to rouse the conscience of the nation to a sense of the social ills that afflict it’.8 Through the Birmingham Society’s journal, Saint George (1898–1911), that commitment, guided by a progressive spirit, was given real meaning, as I shall discuss. The greatest influence of any of Ruskin’s interventions was his muchderided scheme to persuade his Oxford undergraduates to dig up a muddy, disease-ridden track at Hinksey and make it into a serviceable, healthy, and beautiful village road. Notoriously failing in these aspirations, the diggings 253
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nevertheless taught something of the usefulness and dignity of manual labour, the virtue of self-control, the necessity of personal honour and integrity, and the importance of dealing directly with problems observed. For a group of serious-minded young men, Ruskin’s lesson was given added weight by Balliol’s Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893) and the liberal theorist and pioneer of the civic gospel T. H. Green (1836–1882), whose enjoinders also urged people to act. The numerous preachers and pamphleteers exposing the extent of the squalor and vice of the East End of London focused that action by attracting university men to settle among the poor, where both classes would, it was hoped, learn from one another. Toynbee Hall, named in honour of the foreman of the Hinksey diggings, Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883), was opened by Canon Samuel Barnett (1844–1913) and his wife Henrietta (1851–1936) in 1884. Its Founder’s Day was 8 February, coincidentally but symbolically both Barnett’s and Ruskin’s birthdays. Many of Arnold Toynbee’s friends who had heard Ruskin’s lectures and attended breakfasts and dinners at Ruskin’s rooms in Corpus Christi College, where he was a Fellow during his tenure of the Slade Professorship, and some of whom had also dug at Hinksey, became involved in the early work of the settlement. Diggers who went to Toynbee included Alfred Milner (1854–1925), H. D. Rawnsley (1851–1920), A. H. Hoare (1854–1925), and Herbert Warren (1853–1930). Both Rawnsley, and Ruskin’s later editors, E. T. Cook (1857–1919) (who edited an early Toynbee journal) and Alexander Wedderburn (who dug at Hinksey) later acknowledged explicitly the link between Hinksey and Toynbee. The Ruskin credentials of many of those involved in Toynbee’s work are formidable. From the Guild of St George, a future Master, Hugh Charles Fairfax-Cholmeley (1849–1919), was a resident; another future Master and MP, T. Edmund Harvey (1875–1955), was Warden; and a Guild Trustee, MP, and Ruskin Society leader, John Howard Whitehouse (1873–1955), served as Secretary. A future Guild Companion, Hubert Llewellyn Smith (1864–1945), a leading civil servant and social investigator, worked at Toynbee on Charles Booth’s survey of the Life and Labour of the People in London (1903) and provided guidance for a fellow Toynbee resident, William Beveridge (1879–1963), whose place in the subsequent history of the British welfare state is beyond dispute. Beveridge served on the editorial board of Saint George, the Ruskin Society journal Whitehouse edited, as did another future civil servant resident at Toynbee, the extension lecturer John Ainsworth Dale (1887–1938) and Edward Johns Urwick (1867–1945) of the Charity Organization Society, who became Deputy Warden at Toynbee. Among them are many of the pioneers of social research whose investigations, in particular into housing, pauperism, unemployment, and boys’ 254
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clubs, proved to be influential in the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, C. R. Ashbee (1863–1942) ran a Ruskin Society at Toynbee Hall in the 1880s and 1890s out of which his Guild of Handicraft emerged. The link between Ruskin and settlements did not end at Toynbee. It has even been suggested that the United States movement – among whose pioneers Jane Addams (1860–1935) and Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940) explicitly acknowledge Ruskin – influenced the Roosevelts and the development of the New Deal. In Manchester, the settlement was wedded to an earlier philanthropic institution, the Ancoats Art Museum, founded with the inherited cotton fortune of the philanthropist Thomas Coglan Horsfall (1841–1922). He was a keen enthusiast of Ruskin and Morris, whose project was directly inspired by Ruskin’s Guild museum. There were particular connections with the Manchester Ruskin Society, in the figures of gallery curator J. E. Phythian (1858–1935), academic J. W. Graham (1859–1932), and leading librarian W. E. A. Axon (1846–1913), Ruskin’s first biographer. Whitehouse served at Manchester, as at Toynbee, as Secretary. Later a Liberal MP and a Ruskinian educationist who headed his own Ruskininspired school at Bembridge, Isle of Wight, Whitehouse assembled one of the most impressive collections of Ruskin and Ruskin-related material in the world, and also purchased Brantwood and opened it to the public as a Ruskin memorial. Whitehouse’s successor as secretary at Toynbee Hall was the subsequent British Prime Minister Clement Attlee (1883–1967), and it is more than suggestive that he, Beveridge, Llewellyn Smith, and others crucial to the creation of the welfare state shared a common experience in the East End. The Labour politician Tom Driberg (1905–76) was right to talk of ‘Toynbee Hall socialism’, a short-hand for the progressivism that embraced liberals as well as socialists.9 Attlee was introduced to the work of Ruskin and Morris by his brother Tom, an architect and university extension lecturer: ‘I too admired these great men and began to understand their social gospel’, Attlee wrote.10 Looking around his library in 1954 at the ‘sundry volumes of Ruskin’ he owned, he wrote that, ‘it was through this gate’ – specifically Unto This Last (1860) – ‘that I entered the Socialist fold’.11 It is fitting that it was Morris’s edition of Ruskin’s chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’ that the political theorist and economist Harold Laski (1893–1950) sent as a gift to Attlee at Downing Street in 1949: ‘I have always been fond of Ruskin’s Nature of Gothic. I remember so well discussing it with an architect brother in the early years of the century.’12 Morris, who wrote that the chapter had ‘point[ed] out a new road on which the world should travel’, and whom Attlee also admired, had followed the example of the Working Men’s College, which had re-published the chapter as a sort of manifesto in the 255
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1850s.13 A more powerfully symbolic set of links between Ruskin, work, workers, craftsmen, and a Labour Prime Minister could hardly be imagined, whatever the High Tory origins of Ruskin’s actual politics. Yet Ruskin did not care for political representation in ‘blockhead Parliaments’ (xxix.403). He was not enthusiastic either about trade unions (xxix.398–423, ‘To the Trades Unions of England’). Nevertheless, in 1906, W. T. Stead’s survey of Labour MPs for the Review of Reviews found that more respondents named Ruskin as an influence on them than any other author – seventeen out of forty-five, eight of whom cited Unto This Last particularly.14 Together with many other Labour representatives who acknowledged a keen debt to Ruskin – most prominent among them, Keir Hardie (1856–1915), F. W. Jowett (1864–1944), J. R. Clynes (1869–1949), Tom Mann (1856–1941), and Arthur Henderson (1863–1935), as well as the Liberal Thomas Burt (1837–1922)– these were nearly all self-educated men experienced in the harsh realities of the industrial city whose political awareness matured in the period of Ruskin’s greatest influence. As ethical socialists, broadly speaking, they embraced his perceived condemnation of the dominant political and economic theory as ‘a bastard science’ (xvii.85). The majority of them were from the Independent Labour Party. They were neither intellectual, doctrinaire Marxists, nor bureaucratic Fabians, but Bible-reading workmen morally affronted by the injustices of industrial capitalism. Hardie – the first Independent Labour MP – addressed the Glasgow Ruskin Society in 1894 on the subject of Ruskin and Carlyle’s influence on the ILP.15 A year earlier he had called them ‘the teachers and prophets of the nineteenth century’, and now in his talk ‘The Pioneers of the Labour Party’ he claimed that both men taught that money is a curse without ‘moral development’. Moved by Ruskin’s emphasis on the dignity of labour, he recommended that the ILP should adopt the suggestion in the preface of Unto This Last and open municipal and state workshops to provide ‘honest work for honest workmen’.16 The state could ensure that cloth was manufactured properly and not shoddily, and that pure bread was offered instead rather than adulterated. For Hardie, Carlyle and Ruskin provided ‘the soul’ of the Labour Party: their ideas were at the centre of its moral vision. The emphasis on traditional handicrafts among guild socialists owes its origins to Ruskin, too, though his perceived argument – particularly for G. D. H. Cole (1889–1959) – was largely mediated by William Morris. The architect A. J. Penty (1875–1937), who frequently acknowledged his debt to Ruskin, was rather more optimistic than Luxmoore, writing in 1922, after engaging in political discussions with working men and their industrial employers: ‘I never realized before how far the influence of Ruskin had 256
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penetrated.’17 There is more to explore, indeed, not only about the guild socialists but also about Ruskin’s influence on new agers, town planners, the pioneers of the garden cities, and the founders of the National Trust. That influence – predicated on more extreme personal interpretations – had penetrated deep enough to inspire anarchists seeking refuge from industrial capitalism by going ‘back to the land’ to form utopian communities or artistic colonies. At Purleigh in Essex, John Coleman Kenworthy (1861–1948) combined what he thought Ruskin’s influence with Tolstoy’s (he had met and written about both of them) in a commitment to a community of co-operation and a life of higher individuality. Kenworthy’s Ruskin credentials are impeccable. In his hometown of Liverpool he was a committee member of the Ruskin Society, he contributed articles to Saint George, and he was a Companion of the Guild of St George. He wrote of Purleigh that it was ‘one community at least, whose life is visibly ordered by the principles Ruskin has taught’.18 Revealingly, Kenworthy had worked in co-operative ventures in Canning Town, east London, associated with Mansfield House University Settlement there. The leading member of the Brotherhood Church in Croydon, he helped establish the Brotherhood Trust, an early example of ethical retail, with co-operative stores that refused to deal with employers who did not pay a living wage. The Brotherhood Press published some of Tolstoy’s works in English for the first time. For all that Purleigh and the many other colonies that sprang up at this time proved to be short-lived, they gave tangible expression to the antipathy for elements of modern life expressed by Ruskin practically in the Guild of St George as well as in his writing on political economy that looked back to allegedly more stable, pre-industrial social models. Cook and Wedderburn, the editors of the Library Edition, rightly declared Ruskin a ‘world-author’ (xxxviii.xxii). Kenworthy’s other hero, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), wrote in the foreword to a Russian selection of Ruskin’s work published in 1898: Ruskin is recognized in England as a writer and art-critic, but he is not spoken of as a philosopher, political economist, and Christian moralist . . . Ruskin’s power of thought and expression is, however, such that – in spite of the unanimous opposition he met with, especially among the orthodox economists (even the most radical of them) who cannot but attack him since he destroys their teaching at its very roots – his fame grows and his thoughts penetrate among the public.19
It was Ruskin’s writings on political economy and Christian morality that Tolstoy successfully caused to be translated into Russian. In the collections of ‘wise thoughts’ that Tolstoy compiled in his final years, he included many 257
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‘Epigraphs of striking force taken from [Ruskin’s] works’.20 Posrednik (The Intermediary), the publishing venture Tolstoy established to make the world’s best literature cheaply available to a mass public, issued, among other translations, both Unto This Last and Ruskin’s fairy-tale of just distribution, The King of the Golden River. Tolstoy also played a crucial part in mediating, reinforcing, and augmenting Ruskin’s teaching for a giant on the world’s political stage, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948). Gandhi’s reaction to reading Ruskin could hardly be more personally significant. Given a copy of Unto This Last by his friend Henry Polak (1882–1950), he read it on the twenty-four-hour train journey from Johannesburg to Durban (South Africa). It ‘gripped’ him and ‘the book was impossible to lay aside’; ‘I decided to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book.’ ‘I discovered,’ he wrote, ‘some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin.’ In 1908, first as a serial in Indian Opinion and then as a pamphlet, Gandhi produced a short, paraphrased version in Gujurati of the essays whose ‘magic spell’ had brought about ‘an instantaneous and practical transformation’ in the way he led his life.21 He called it Sarvodaya (the welfare of all), a term he later used to describe his entire economic philosophy. Ruskin’s critique of British commodity capitalism was adapted by Gandhi and used as part of his campaign of civil disobedience in response to the Asiatic Registration Act that required Asians in South Africa to register with the authorities and to produce on demand an identification document personalised with a thumb-print. From this, Gandhi developed his principle of satyagraha (the non-violent search for truth). Moreover, reading Ruskin convinced him that manual labour was essential to any life worth leading, a notion that challenged the traditional Hindu belief that placed manual workers at the bottom of the caste system. He established a prototype ashram, the Phoenix Settlement, committed to traditional crafts and to working the land by hand, a community where everyone drew the same wage. Gandhi’s second communal experiment was named Tolstoy Farm. Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894) overwhelmed him and he translated Tolstoy’s ‘Letter to a Hindu’ into Gujarati in Indian Opinion in 1909. Gandhi admitted that Unto This Last ‘was the first book of Ruskin I had ever read’ but this and A Joy For Ever were cited as authorities in Hind Swaraj (Indian Home-Rule) written in Gujarati in the columns of Indian Opinion in 1909 and translated into English in 1910. After reading Edith Hope Scott’s history of the Guild of St George in Poona Prison, he wrote to her to request a copy of Fors Clavigera, and the editor of The Spectator and fellow Guild Companion, Sir Evelyn Wrench (1882–1966), ultimately obliged him. 258
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Gandhi had first read about Fors in an essay by Tolstoy published in 1897 about the Russian peasant sectarian writer Timofey Bondarev (1820–98). Writing about Tolstoy’s belief in the necessitous virtue of manual labour, Gandhi admitted that originally the idea ‘was thought of by a great Russian writer by name Bondaref. Tolstoy endorsed it and proclaimed it to the world.’22 In 1947, Gandhi insisted that ‘No man . . . ought to be free from that obligation [of physical labour]. It will serve to improve even the quality of his intellectual output.’23 Praising Bondarev for seizing the central ‘moraleconomic truth’, Tolstoy understood that other writers had and were saying much the same thing: Thus, for instance, Ruskin[,] one of the greatest English writers, and one of the greatest authors of our age (almost as little esteemed as our own Bondarev by the cultured crowd of to-day) . . . in Letter 67 of his Fors Clavigera, says: – ‘It is physically impossible that the true religious knowledge or pure morality, should exist among any classes of a nation who do not work with their hands for their bread.’ Many go round this truth and express it (as Ruskin does) with various reservations, but no one else does what Bondarev does in acknowledging bread labour to be the fundamental religious law of life.24
(The quotation from Fors was reproduced accurately enough in English and was later translated into Russian by Tolstoy for his anthologies of wise thoughts.) It was in Letter 67 that Ruskin explicitly told readers, specifically companions of the Guild of St George, to ‘work with their hands for their bread’ and to ban steam-powered machinery (see xxviii.651–6). Writing in Young India in 1919, Gandhi commented of machines: I may ask, in the words of Ruskin, whether these machines will be such as would blow off a million men in a minute or they will be such as would turn waste land into arable and fertile land. And if legislation were in my hands, I would penalise the manufacture [of labour-saving] machines and protect the industry which manufactures nice ploughs which can be handled by every man.25
This view can fruitfully be contrasted with that of Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), who wrote about Ruskin and machines in an essay almost completely unknown in the West. Writing in 1901 under his real name, Lev Bronshtein (1879–1940), a Menshevik member of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party exiled to Siberia, he asked if ‘England remained deaf to Ruskin’s romantic appeals? Should I regret this? I do not think so!’ Leaving aside ‘Ruskin’s reactionary romantic delusions’, Trotsky objected particularly to the fact that Ruskin did not distinguish between the technical and social value of the machine. He believed Ruskin was arguing, ‘When we learn that the tree’s leaves are adapted to the 259
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absorption of carbon dioxide and release oxygen, we become indifferent to them as to any gasometer.’ Thus Ruskin’s view could be dismissed as mere ‘mysticism’ in contrast to Trotsky’s ‘realist’ (Party) view that machines ‘achieve results’ and that they represent ‘the tireless struggle of human genius to achieve freedom from nature’. Moreover, he saw no poetry in peasants dragging heavy trees by hand when a locomotive could effortlessly transport ten thousand pounds of cargo.26 As inadequately as Trotsky grasped Ruskin’s central argument here, he effectively underlines why those inclined to Marxism almost universally rejected Ruskin. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), filled with optimism about recent events in Russia, wrote that ‘when we look for a party which could logically claim Ruskin to-day as one of its prophets, we find it in the Bolshevist party’.27 Though there is merit in the recognition that Ruskin cared more for social justice than for liberty, the subsequent history of Bolshevism more than justified the audience’s laughter. However, Shaw, an admirer of Ruskin who was influenced by him, later declared that ‘Ruskin in particular leav [es] all the professed Socialists, even Karl Marx, miles behind in force of invective. Lenin’s criticisms of modern society seem like the platitudes of a rural Dean in comparison.’28 Certain of the singular moral truth of his conception of society, Ruskin is unlikely to have recognised as his own such a diverse and contradictory set of political legacies. Herbert Warren gave an instance of the selectiveness of Ruskin’s disciples when he admitted that though he and some fellow Oxford undergraduates answered Ruskin’s plea to engage in useful muscular work by digging at Hinksey, most of them also continued to play the useless competitive sports that Ruskin had bade them forsake. Similarly, Ruskin was not enthusiastic about university settlements, considering the work of Horsfall in Manchester and his Oxford disciples in the East End to be an admirable waste of time. He was both flattered by, but wary of, Ruskin societies, guarding ‘against an “ism”’ in his first letter to them (xxxiv.539). Since the 1950s Ruskin has more often been the subject of scholarly study than an inspiration for political activism. His political legacies reached their nadir in the 1920s in a world shattered by international war. His work had grown even more remote from its original source. A report in the Westminster Gazette describing a soldier fatally injured in battle in 1915 invites the reader to consider the extent to which Ruskin’s books were literally buried in the trenches: He was quietly reading a little edition of Ruskin’s Crown of Wild Olive, and seemed to be enjoying it immensely. As I chatted with him for a few minutes he told me that this little book had been his companion all through and that when 260
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But if Ruskin’s voice was difficult to hear after the gunfire, the clatter of modern typewriters, and the amplified volume of the gramophone and wireless, he had nevertheless already been absorbed in the period before 1920 – and with lasting effect – by figures as diverse as Tolstoy, Gandhi, and many of the key civil servants and politicians responsible in the 1940s for the re-construction of Great Britain, especially those who, experienced in the work of Toynbee Hall, created the British welfare state. N O T ES 1. The Letters of H. E. Luxmoore, ed. A. B. Ramsay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 349. 2. Manchester Guardian, 9 December 1898, 5 3. Robert de la Sizeranne, John Ruskin et la religion de la beauté (Paris: Hachette, 1897), J. A. Hobson, John Ruskin: Social Reformer (London: Nisbet, 1898), and May Alden Ward, Prophets of the Nineteenth Century (London: Gay and Bird, 1900). 4. See Mark Frost, The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George: A Revisionary History (London: Anthem, 2014), 72–82. 5. Ibid. 6. Aims of the Ruskin Society (Manchester, 1880), 2. 7. Ruskin Reading Guild Journal, vol. 1 no. 2 (February 1889), 54. 8. Ibid., vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1889), 2. 9. See Tom Driberg, Swaff: The Life and Times of Hannen Swaffer (London: MacDonald, 1974), 222. 10. Clement Attlee, As It Happened (London: Heinemann, 1954), 21. 11. Quoted in Frank Field, ed., Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character (London: Continuum, 2009), 15–21. 12. Quoted in Stuart Eagles, After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 167. 13. Ibid., 231. For Morris’s comment see John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic (Kelmscott: Kelmscott Press, 1892), vii. 14. W. T. Stead, ‘The Labour Party and the Books that Helped to Make It’, in Review of Reviews, v33 (June 1906), 568–82. Sixteen mentioned the Bible whose influence was probably taken for granted, while thirteen cited Dickens and Carlyle. 15. See Eagles, After Ruskin, 217–19. 16. All references to Hardie’s lecture are from Glasgow University Special Collections, MS Gen 1093/2: Minutes and newspaper cuttings of the Ruskin Society of Glasgow, 1891–9 (not paginated). 17. A. J. Penty, Post Industrialism (London: Macmillan, 1922), 92. 18. John Kenworthy, ‘The Purleigh Colony’, Saint George,1.4 (October 1898), 202–7 (202). 19. Dzhon Rëskin, Vospitanie. Kniga. Zhenshchina (Education. Book. Woman) (Moscow: Balandin, 1898) trans. L. P. Nikiforov, 3 (preface by Tolstoy). See 261
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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.
27. 28. 29.
L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoesobraniesochinenii [PSS] (Complete Collected Works), ed. Vladimir Chertkov et al., 90 vols (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1928–1958), xxxi.96. Ibid. Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Writings, ed. Judith M. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29–30. See RaghavanIyer, The Political and Moral Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), iii.488. Ibid. 495. See Tolstoy, PSS, xxxi.69–71. The quotation from Ruskin is at xxviii.654. Iyer, Gandhi, 352. Lev Bronshtein, ‘Poéziya, Mashinai, Poéziya Mashiny’ [‘Poetry, the Machine, and the Poetry of Machines’], Vostochnoeobozrenie [Eastern Review] 197 (8 September 1901). My translation. George Bernard Shaw, Ruskin’s Politics (London: Ruskin Centenary Council, 1921), 29–30. George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (London: Constable, 1928), 469. Quoted in Sir Edward Cook, Literary Recreations (London: Macmillan, 1918), 34–54, specifically (46n.).
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18 MA R C U S WA I T H E
Cultural legacies
Ruskin’s reputation was at a low ebb in the 1950s and 1960s. His public profile had receded, and his published works were largely absent from courses in the increasingly specialised world of higher education. It was in departments of literature that he clung on, where, as Stefan Collini observes, he retained a residual significance according to the ‘older’ notion of a ‘domain of “letters”’.1 This limited role could engender a narrow and compartmentalised view of preoccupations that were really continuous. Raymond Williams implied as much on observing that ‘Ruskin was an art critic before he was a social critic, but his work must now been seen as a whole’.2 Today, the difficulty in addressing Ruskin’s cultural legacy reflects less the suppression or downgrading of the social in relation to the aesthetic, and more the strength and breadth of his revived reputation. The rise of interdisciplinary research in the humanities, from the 1980s onwards, made the promiscuous range of his works palatable again. More recently, Ruskin’s contributions to political economy, and in particular his thinking about the ‘honest merchant’, have garnered attention in response to the global financial collapse of 2008.3 The re-appearance of Ruskin the economist nevertheless presents a challenge. It obliges us to knit together different aspects of the man, to see the connections, but also to recognise the strains involved in the bridging operation. Ruskin was not proposing that we simply collapse the cultural into the economic. It was, for him, a two-way exchange, a model of interdependency that assumed discrete natures, and an ability to hold something back. Among the most visible, and enduring, of Ruskin’s cultural legacies has been the use of his name: in the century following his death, it was given to, and adopted by, a range of civic and educational institutions, among them universities, colleges, parks, and charitable foundations. This visible inheritance reflects Ruskin’s personal influence as a founder or progenitor, but also his contribution to the very idea of holding things in trust for the public benefit, a legacy exemplified by the National Trust, whose founders 263
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were followers of Ruskin. His critique of Victorian ‘restoration’ practices (viii.242; also see Chapter 7) was also based on a notion of trusteeship, as applied to architecture, and continues to inform modern conceptions of buildings conservation. His approaches to museum curation and accessibility are less well known, but they offer helpfully non-instrumental alternatives to current modes of public engagement. These legacies warrant serious consideration, but I am concerned in this essay less with individual cultural achievements than with the broad reach and legacy of two Ruskinian methods. I will begin by discussing Ruskin’s commitment to craft and craftsmanship, this being the area where his interest in art converged with his belief in the personal and social value of labour. I will then address Ruskin’s promotion of more disciplined ways of seeing. As an approach to visual experience, it represents the meeting point between his goal of personal enlightenment and his role as a teacher. Together, the pursuit of craft and clear sight elucidate Ruskin’s continuing claim on the future, in particular the ramifying effect of his preference for the human process over its end product. Cultures of craft It is often supposed that Ruskin, and his most famous follower, William Morris (1834–96), were entranced by a nostalgic vision of handicraft, and that their opposition to industrial capitalism was in some manner an escape to the past, or an evasion of modernity. While there is no doubting Ruskin’s medievalism in art, and his neo-feudalism in politics, the basis of his preference for handicraft and its relation to the medieval bears re-examination. The problem in attributing a blind prejudice against machine production is that it does not explain why Ruskin preferred manual productions. In his famous chapter on ‘The Nature of Gothic’, he grouped modern machine production with the works of ancient cultures that employed slave labour (x.189). Their common feature was perfection of finish achieved by sacrificing the worker’s welfare and imaginative freedom. The perceived result, whether the labour was mechanised or enslaved, was bad art. Thus Ruskin’s Assyrian and Egyptian examples confound the notion that he was objecting primarily to modernity. His target, rather, was an approach to art that either eliminated the human imprint, or registered it only as private misery. Today’s machines have different qualities, and are associated with different working conditions. It is hard to grasp how Ruskin would have received CNC (Computer Numerical Control) manufacturing, or 3D printing, but one assumes he would at least have valued an enhanced ability to capture singularity, just as he valued photographic technology that achieved a similar effect, albeit with reservation (xxxv.373). This recognition informs the 264
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work of Lars Spuybroek, who develops a theory of digital design (a ‘digital nature of Gothic’) based on the conviction that ‘contemporary tools of design and production should be understood in a framework not of modern times but of pre-modern ones’.4 Ruskin may have been prone to nostalgia in surveying his own past, and indeed a more radical ‘homesickness’, but his conception of Gothic was in certain senses de-historicised. Instead of representing an historical essence located in a foregoing period, it consisted of abstract characteristics, among them ‘savageness’, ‘changefulness’, ‘naturalism’, ‘grotesqueness’, ‘rigidity’, and ‘redundance’ (x.184). In combination, they formed an amalgam of ‘Gothicness’, whose component parts could appear in differing concentrations. Although the Gothic flourished amid the social conditions of the Middle Ages, that fact was not seen to rule out its recurrence in the future. This perception lay at the heart of Ruskin’s utopianism, and specifically the land-holding endeavours of his Guild of St George, which sought to recreate the conditions in which art might flourish. Ruskin banned machines on Guild land (xxvii.95–6), but his guiding impulse was less one of opposition to mechanisation than a conviction that the fine and the applied arts should be reunited. According to this integrative aim, the distinction between the artist and the artisan collapses, and the artist returns to type as a maker, or what Williams called ‘the general sense of a skilled person’.5 Thus Ruskin peered beyond the symptomatic circumstances of industrial production in search of a labour process that could tolerate imperfection and preserve the human imprint. It is a legacy that begins to look more adaptable in view of these aims and conditions, and especially once later developments are taken into account, notably William Morris’s reinterpretation of Ruskinian thought as the basis for a democratic art. Three sources of practical apprenticeship demonstrate the means by which Ruskin’s philosophy of ‘making’ entered the first half of the twentieth century. As vestiges of the Arts and Crafts movement, they reflect the cultural horizons of the early twentieth century. Their human legacy nevertheless ensures a continuing influence on today’s cultural practices. My first example is C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft. It was founded in Whitechapel, in 1888, as a kind of East End settlement, but moved premises to the Cotswold village of Chipping Campden in 1902. Ashbee’s early reading of Ruskin, and in particular his insistence on the connection between art and social conditions, informed the rehabilitative aims of the artisanal community he established. The Guild’s workers, most of them recruited from the London slums, now pursued their new vocation in the pleasant surroundings of a disused silk mill. They were encouraged to spend leisure time on amateur dramatics, and to swim in the Guild’s bathing lake. This reforming mission 265
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subsided after Ashbee’s departure, but a number of craftsmen continued operating in the area as designer-makers. The Harts family of silversmiths continue to operate to this day in a workshop housed in the same building as that occupied by the Guild. Commissions from universities, trade associations, and public bodies indicate their ongoing contribution to Great Britain’s institutional life. Ashbee’s legacy branched two ways after the Second World War. In the 1950s and 1960s, a culture of industrial design revolutionised British approaches to silverware. Led by Robert Welch at Chipping Campden, and David Mellor at Sheffield (later, Hathersage in Derbyshire), the new practice of design combined innovative forms with frank attention to function. Importantly, it did so by employing modern technologies of production. These aims were broadly Ruskininan, but owing more directly to the example of the Bauhaus, whose founder, Walter Gropius, consciously adapted Ruskinian principles for the machine age. The hollowing out of Great Britain’s industrial base, and the expansion of practice-based art education, coincided with a second flourishing of handicraft among the current generation of silversmiths. The United Kingdom is now an international centre for artisanal metal work, exemplified by the reputation of designer-makers, including Miriam Hanid, and the success of the annual Goldsmiths’ Fair in London. Ruskin’s own effort to revive the metal trades led him in part to found St George’s Museum. Established in Sheffield in 1875, it promoted the ‘liberal education of the artizan’ (xxx.30). Ruskin never intended to turn artisans into gentlemen, but it is to his credit that one visitor, the knife grinder Benjamin Creswick, was moved to become a sculptor after a chance visit to the museum. Today, the museum’s declared aims are often delivered in reverse: in an age of extended higher education, it is the liberally educated who are taking up artisanal trades, and prompting a renaissance in the practice and ethics of craft. But there are also signs of a wider revival, as the current Master of the Guild of St George, Clive Wilmer, observes on discussing Sheffield’s recovering community of ‘little mesters’ (that is, independent masters), whose knife-making practices bear out Ruskin’s principle of humane imperfection as applied to manufactured finish.6 My second example, the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, was a collective of craftsmen and printers founded in 1921 by the letter cutter and typographer Eric Gill (1882–1940). Initially a jobbing memorial mason, Gill is best known for his Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral, for his Piggots fine printing press, and for the Gill Sans Serif typeface. Though he criticised the Arts and Crafts movement for its attempt to pursue art in isolation from commercial pressures, Gill’s indebtedness to Ruskin and Morris is apparent both in his teachings and his artistic 266
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trajectory. He attended the Central School of Arts and Crafts, which, along with the Municipal School of Art of Birmingham, was among the first schools that taught crafts in workshop surroundings, according to Ruskinian precepts. At the Central School, Gill was instructed in ‘LetterCraft’ by Edward Johnston. The Central School’s founder, W. R. Lethaby, was explicit in tracing the lineage of these methods: in a preface to a book by Johnston, he insisted that ‘men of good education should be brought back into the productive crafts’.7 To support this view, he referred to the truism that ‘Ruskin and Morris’ demonstrated how ‘it was impossible to detach design from craft’.8 If Gill’s design legacy is apparent in the dissemination of digitised ‘fonts’, his legacy as a craftsman was perpetuated by his apprentices. Perhaps his most successful was David Kindersley (1915–1995), who arrived in his workshop to begin an apprenticeship in 1934. Kindersley’s son, Richard, and his wife, Lida Lopes Cardozo, now run lettering workshops in London and Cambridge, respectively. The Cardozo Kindersley Workshop in Cambridge shares Ruskin’s concern to educate the wider public through a list of publications, and it trains apprentices, many of whom have founded workshops of their own. The declared principle of their work is that they ‘They cut with hammer and chisel and avoid using machines.’9 Avoidance of machines in this case is not dogmatic, but rational; a recognition that the pleasing irregularity, character, and meditative value of the human cut cannot be achieved by other means. A Ruskinian concern to infuse work with intelligence is evoked by a slate inscription on the workshop wall, which reads, ‘manufacture, man-u-fakt’yar. v. t. to make. originally by hand. now usu. by machinery: to produce unintelligently in quantity’. The definition alludes to processes lacking the animating variation of life. An evocative material expression of this late flowering of Ruskinian craft principles is apparent in the embellished and gilded slate that was commissioned by the Guild of St George in the 1980s. Cut together by David and Lida, it stands at the threshold of the Ruskin Collection in Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, a material witness to the personal and intellectual links between a Victorian museum for artisans, its modern incarnation as a civic gallery space, and a late-twentieth-century instance of ‘Letter-Craft’ (Figure 13). The contemporary vitality of studio pottery can also be traced to Ruskin, albeit less directly. Its most prominent practitioner is Edmund de Waal, an artist whose porcelain cylinders belie an earlier training in the Arts and Crafts tradition. A former pupil of Geoffrey Whiting, De Waal’s attraction to the mystical discipline of Japanese ceramics reflects the influence of Whiting’s own master, Bernard Leach. Leach took his models not from the Ruskinian Middle Ages, or from Morris’s friend, William De Morgan, but from the 267
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Figure 13. David and Lida Cardozo Kindersley, The Ruskin Gallery, green slate, painted and gilded.
seventeenth-century slipware of Thomas Toft and the ceramics of the Sung dynasty. Sharing the upper-middle-class background of earlier Arts and Crafts practitioners, Leach did not train in the institutions that they went on to found; he instead studied fine art at the Slade, only taking up pottery 268
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when, as a young man living in Japan, he was asked to decorate a plate. At that point, Leach’s artistic sympathies were with the impressionists and post-impressionists, as against Ruskin’s allegedly ‘blind opposition’ to Whistler’s innovations.10 An indebtedness to Ruskinian aesthetics nevertheless emerged in his writings. In A Potter’s Book (1940), he explained the restrictions of the Staffordshire factory tradition, and also of the Modernist turn towards ‘functionalism’.11 In both cases, the emphasis on replicable form ‘limits the enjoyment of work to the designer’.12 Morris is represented as the originator of the idea of the ‘individual, or artist, craftsman’, and as such an early rebel against this tendency. Leach even recruits Morris’s theory of a not-yet-emergent democratic art or ‘communal standard’, whose task it is for artist-craftsman to presage through his individual practice.13 Equally, he relies on Ruskin for his account of the value derived from the accidents of manufacture. Rebelling against the Victorian concern with ‘perfect finish’, and the ‘more recent dictum’ that ‘where irregularities occur the potter “has no realized his intentions”’, Leach contended that: ‘It is the uniformity of perfection that kills’. Unevenness, so long as it did not compromise the structure, was accepted as a mark of the ‘irregular and irrational element in all fine activity’.14 This reads like a conversion of Ruskinian aesthetics into the language of Freud, but the declared inspiration was the Japanese tradition of Raku. There were in fact genuine affinities between Japanese culture and Arts and Crafts precepts, which Leach must have sensed, even if he did not always articulate them. For instance, Morris’s concern with the union of the ‘useful’ and the ‘beautiful’ was reflected in the ‘aesthetics of actual living’ praised by Leach.15 It was a philosophy he found epitomised in the Japanese culture of ‘ceremonial tea’, itself closely linked to the tradition of Raku. Ruskin was by no means an unknown figure in pre-War Japan, and it is possible that what Leach took as ‘Japanese’ precepts among his new friends were in some sense already owing to him. One of his earliest associates, Tomimoto Kenkichi, had spent time in England studying the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, alongside the writings of Ruskin and Morris; another, Takamura Kotaro, had made a bust of Ruskin. Ruskin’s writings also appeared on Japanese school curricular, and his work would gain further prominence through the collecting efforts of Mikimoto Ryuzo, the founder of Tokyo’s Ruskin Library. Leach felt the need for a conscious strategy of defence against the coming industrial age: ‘We in the West are just beginning to emerge from our slavery to the machine,’ he explained, ‘but Japanese workmen are in the early stages of this process’.16 A response to these fears came in the form of the Mingei (Folk Crafts) movement (1926–1945), an initiative led by 269
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Yanagi Sōetsu, author of The Way of Crafts (1927–8). Leach joined him, with the example of Ruskin and Morris consciously in mind.17 In common with his Arts and Crafts compatriots, Leach saw the machine as ‘essentially a duplicator’, whose ‘precise repetition eliminates choice, variety and pleasure’.18 The task was to liberate handicraft, so that it was more than ‘a frill round the hem of industry’, and make it possible for the public to realise the ‘comparative value of the hand-made, the home-made and the joy-made’.19 If the example of Japan testifies to Ruskin’s international influence, it also throws up a challenge, in suggesting that his argument was not in fact so singular. It is possible, after all, that British influences only made headway in Japan because they tallied with local models. On his return to England, Leach entered the English Arts and Crafts mainstream. This fact is confirmed by the publication of A Potter’s Outlook (1928), a pamphlet published for the New Handworker’s Gallery by Gill’s associate, Hilary Pepler. In it, Leach thought consciously about his predicament as ‘the artist turned craftsman’.20 On recollecting this period in 1974, he confirmed his role in ‘the counter-revolution started by Morris and Ruskin’.21 Not all recent attention to craft and human production depends on a lineage of apprenticeship or ideas. The world financial crisis of 2008 led to a renewal of interest in the ethics of making. Belated governmental efforts at ‘re-balancing’ the economy have been accompanied by more concerted responses that see ‘off-shored’ manufacturing as part of a de-skilling process that alienates populations from the world of made things. Matthew Crawford’s The Case for Working with Your Hands (2009) epitomises a renewal of interest in the ‘experience’ of fixing things, though he disclaims interest in either craftsmanship or the romance of the manual.22 In a recent book, The Craftsman (2008), Richard Sennett represents Ruskin as a ‘Romantic’, whose esteem for pre-industrial craft was stymied by an unwillingness to work with machines. This casual assessment is supplemented by the more useful notion of ‘staged reflection’, whereby the virtue of pride in work is combined with self-critical thoughtfulness.23 As such, the overall project of the book resonates with Ruskin’s concern to infuse labour with ‘intellect’. Increasingly the old narrative that presented ‘craft’ as an endangered species artificially kept alive by the Arts and Crafts movement is being challenged. The editor of The Craft Reader (2010), a work that collects Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’ alongside more recent contributions, argues that ‘craft’ ‘is not a way of thinking outside of modernity, but a modern way of thinking otherwise’.24 The rise of hand-finished machines in the metal trade exemplifies his point that industrialisation often displaced, rather than replaced, craft skills. 270
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An especially sensitive engagement with Ruskinian work ethics, and their manner of connecting ‘craft’ to governance, is apparent in the recent poetry and criticism of Geoffrey Hill. Though Hill is not an uncritical admirer – on occasion, he finds Ruskin’s ‘rhetorical currency’ to be ‘debased with vituperation’ – he nevertheless admires and re-animates Ruskin’s distinctive mode of religio-economic prophecy.25 Indeed, Hill’s energies of disdain are aimed, primarily, at the same enemy: adapting the Morrisian phrase ‘anarchical plutocracy’, he describes as ‘plutocratic anarchy’ the matrix of economic interests whose agenda in government is the renunciation of government, or social responsibility.26 Such words echo Ruskin’s Carlylean horror of disorder and laissez-faire. Hill is less sure of the appropriate cultural response, but confesses an attraction to Ruskin’s supposed belief in ‘intrinsic value’. He interprets this notion as a way of thinking about the value of poetry, and of cultural endeavour more generally, in an economic system whose tendency is to disclaim enduring sources of value. But Hill stops short of crediting literary productions with a transcendent power. Instead, he develops a visionary conception of the poet’s attraction to ‘intrinsic value’; it is ‘an aura, rather than a realization’, a ‘wraith’, but one ‘which points in the right direction, towards semantic realizations that have some substance’.27 At the opening of Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, Hill invites further comparison with Ruskin, now exploring the idea of fellowship in labour, and implicitly casting the poet as an artisan of sorts. These associations are established by means of an epigraph from Psalm 90 that asks the Lord to ‘establish’ the ‘work of our hands upon us’.28 It, in turn, prepares us for Hill’s poetic self-identification as ‘a worker in iron’, in ‘Improvisation on “Warum ist uns das Licht gegeben?”’29 Recalling Hill’s own metal-working Midlands ancestry, the phrase invokes Ruskin’s concern with workers in iron (xxx.51), while eliciting a larger concern with words as a resistant raw material requiring imaginative heat to bring to malleability, and deft handling to shape (see also Chapter 12 in relation to Ruskin’s conception of the plough). The result is a work ‘hammered to fable’ whose value dwells less in the teleological form of a literary opus, than in labour processes that Ruskin identified as the roots of wealth.30 Seeing clearly Hill’s poetry employs a method of detailed description that finds a radiating significance in natural phenomena. He discovers by that means an exquisite time effect of ‘nowness’.31 This eye for particulars reflects an ethics of attentiveness that recalls Ruskin’s thinking about vision, notably his dictum 271
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that ‘To see clearly, is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one’ (v.333). ‘Seeing’ in this account is an ‘overdetermined’ function, a point of absolute integration between powers of language, of foretelling, and divinity. It may be difficult to appreciate how such mixed, transcendental constituents could continue to affect modern artistic practice. But the influence reaches far beyond Hill’s allusive poetry, and indeed beyond the parameters of the art world. I mean to demonstrate this reach, while acknowledging the ways in which its effects remain uneven and contested. The difficulty in examining Ruskin’s influence on modern art practices begins with the Whistler v. Ruskin trial of 1878. The previous year, Ruskin squandered his reputation as a champion of new art – in effect, a friend to ‘modern painters’ – by accusing Whistler of asking ‘two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ (xxix.160). Even if losing the libel case cost Ruskin little, the effect of losing the argument in the eyes of posterity was serious. Despite his earlier defence of Turner’s own impressionism, he could not, at least on this occasion, see the value in painting that was more compositional than observational. He missed the harmony in Whistler’s ‘Nocturnes’, attributing instead a self-conscious artifice. Ruskin’s reputation as a cultivator of modern vision was also damaged by changes in the structure of art education. The artisans and students who visited St George’s Museum spent time drawing mineralogical samples, or thinking about the connection between drawing or painting and the plastic forms of sculpture, whether humanly made, or formed by natural processes (see http://ruskinatwalkley. org). The successor institution, the Ruskin Museum, ran from a spacious site in Sheffield’s Meersbrook Park until the 1950s. Its closure, and the movement into storage of its holdings, marked two changes that severely disrupted the transmission of Ruskin’s legacy. The first sprang from a positive cause: the rise of state provision in higher and further education, which made initiatives like the Working Men’s College and the Ruskin Museum seem less necessary. It had been in these institutions that Ruskin’s methods flourished, not simply because he favoured them as a teacher or founder, but because his pedagogical insistence on cultivating individual vision worked well with students who knew little of art history. These were the methods that Ruskin promoted in his successful primer, The Elements of Drawing (1857), itself derived from the programme of instruction he followed at the Working Men’s College. In the more traditional centres of art education, this effect coincided with an abandonment of skills-based instruction in draughtsmanship. The automatism that preoccupied surrealism in the 1920s, and the new conceptualism that grew in popularity from the 1960s, were construed as rebellions against the discerning eye and the English empiricism it was seen to perpetuate. The destruction 272
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of institutional cast collections produced a similar effect. Ruskin’s concern with casts was more to do with the preservation of endangered detail than with a classicism that promoted the value of imitation. But he remained attached to the educational use of ‘models’. It was this approach that was literally ‘thrown out’ as part of a pedagogical de-cluttering operation. The course of late-twentieth-century art education was not entirely hostile to Ruskin’s legacy. His position was itself founded on a kind of art Protestantism that privileged the individual eye over the baggage of visual tradition. As such, his status as a ‘traditionalist’ is decidedly moot. His willingness to sponsor the Pre-Raphaelites’ defiance of the Royal Academy reflects this positioning, but there are also aspects of his visual theory that resist attempts to consign him to a past of imitation and dogged technique. Though he praised Bacon for his study of ‘material nature’ (v.353), Ruskin was always, in his commitment to prophecy, more than a materialist. The Elements of Drawing distilled Ruskin’s rejection of the so-called South Kensington system, whose methods stressed rigid and laborious imitation, and mathematical standards of accuracy. That system was the target of his insistence that ‘it is always dangerous to assert anything as a rule in matters of art’ (xv.57). Although he promoted a discipline of looking, or rendering accurately what is seen, he did not regard this as an approach to the irrefutable record. Instead, he wanted his students to see ‘under what a universal law of obscurity we live’ (iv.79). This emphasis on obscurity lends credence to the apocryphal account of Monet declaring that ‘ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing’.32 A combination of diligence and mystery is apparent too in Ruskin’s own drawings. His habitual refusal of finish suggests a radical contingency, where sweeps of colour and mood are punctuated by fine details in pen and ink, and principles of truth to nature are somehow applied to mythical creatures such as the gryphon. This was the unintelligibility of reverence, not of nihilism or fragmentation. As such, it is out of sympathy with approaches that disclaim deeper truths, whether typological, mythic, or divine. But Ruskin also insisted that ‘merely scientific draughtsmen caricature a third part of Nature, and miss two thirds’ (xv.54). This widened the category of observable phenomena without necessary recourse to the supernatural. In this way, his thinking accommodates forms of uncertainty more amenable to modern aesthetic precepts. Beyond the defensibility of the theory is the enduring quality of the practice. Ruskin’s view of drawing as a method of cultivating attentiveness never entirely went away. In the inter-war period, his vision was championed by the Arts and Crafts veteran W. A. S. Benson (1854–1924). Benson reaffirmed Ruskin’s hostility to the idea that drawing was a mere exercise 273
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in dexterity, or ‘a gymnastic exercise’.33 He also made a case for drawing’s fundamental significance and primitive origin: he conceived ‘the line’ as ‘a thread; linen, or spun flat having given the idea and the name to European languages’.34 In Benson’s hands, as in Ruskin’s, the medium was recuperated as one of value in itself. This recalls Ruskin’s similar liking for the portable device of travellers’ watercolours: a form whose popular accessibility was no slight on its seriousness, but a recommendation. Philip Rawson’s Drawing (1969) initiated a revival of interest in the culture of the line. Notwithstanding the relativism of his assertion that ‘a drawing’s basic ingredients’ have no ‘overall similarity with anything real’,35 and his insistence that ‘drawing is not seeing’, there are affinities here with Ruskin. These are apparent in the concern to treat drawing as a genre in its own right, not just a medium preparatory to painting or sculpture. Moreover, Rawson approves ‘attentiveness’, and regards artistic practice as a mode of productive alienation that one must learn to ‘read’.36 This is not ‘prophecy’, but it is not a great distance from Ruskin’s literary methods, or his sense of ‘seeing clearly’, in itself a visual disturbance of settled habit. More recently, Tim Ingold has explored the fundamental forms of drawing, noting in particular Ruskin’s concurrent naturalisation of the ‘line’ and commitment of it to change and flux.37 This helpfully focuses attention on one of the more searching and radical pieces of advice in The Elements of Drawing: Ruskin’s attribution of dynamic energy to the lineaments of a drawn subject, to its ‘awful lines’, ‘the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity’ (xv.91). Some sense of this awful power is suggested by ‘The Dryad’s Waywardness’, an illustration to the fifth volume of Modern Painters that shows a leafless oak spray on blue wove paper, its form clearly defined, yet rendered alive by Ruskin’s customary white highlights, and by the darker shades of blue that achieve a misty, looming, effect in-between branches. It does not follow that Ruskin’s influence is strong in the world of academic art practice. In many art schools, the conviction that Walter Gropius inherited from Ruskin that ‘proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist’ has fallen into desuetude.38 The emphasis is on the theoretic orthodoxies of ‘fine art’, including conceptualism, abstraction, and latterly, postmodernist pastiche. Ruskin’s methods remain, in this sense, ‘antiAcademic’. By contrast, his concern with drawing flourished for nearly a century at the elementary level. In primary schools, Ruskin’s approach to art and science education lingered as ‘observational drawing’, and its subjects were often found on the classroom ‘nature table’.39 A ‘peaceful and still’ classroom scene in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) shows this Ruskinian method in operation: the lesson is in ‘elementary botany’, and 274
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‘The desks were littered with catkins, hazel and willow, which the children had been sketching’.40 Observational drawing was still taught at teacher training college in the 1950s and 1960s, and it remained a staple of art education in British schools throughout the 1970s and 1980s. If not consciously pursuing the ‘obscurity’ that Ruskin envisaged, it nevertheless taught the habits of attentiveness that prompted forms of reflection. It laid an emphasis on the ‘whole person’, and through its combination of ‘botany’ and ‘art’, was amenable to the cross-curricular aims of primary education. This holistic and potentially recuperative emphasis may explain why methods of close inspection are now popular among advocates of ‘mindfulness’. As an approach to psychological therapy that combines Buddhist meditation with New England Transcendentalism, ‘mindfulness’ recalls the forms of conscious simplicity cultivated by Edwardian advocates of the ‘New Life’, themselves the philosophical children of Ruskin, Whitman, and Thoreau. We might be tempted to imagine that observational drawing was an inevitable pedagogic strategy. The reaction of Ruskin’s peers suggests otherwise. Recalling his first impression of a visit to Ruskin’s class at the Working Men’s College, William Bell Scott remarked on the ‘sheer unorthodoxy’ of the method.41 Instead of rendering ‘ornamental objects’ or the ‘human figure’, he found that everyone in the room was ‘trying to put on small pieces of paper imitations by pen and ink of pieces of rough stick crusted with dry lichens’. Lawrence’s ‘catkins’ echo these lichen-encrusted sticks, but the tone has changed: the sense of the ludicrous has gone, and the gesture of bringing the wild wood (and pieces of wood) into an institutional space becomes routine, one component of an internal picturesque. The advent of the National Curriculum in British schools placed pressures on classroom time, prompting concerns about ‘the demise of the nature table’.42 A more generalised effort has since been made to revive these methods in the wider community. Chief among such initiatives is the Campaign for Drawing, launched by the Guild of St George in 2000. It is now a successful independent charity devoted to the promotion of drawing as a developmental human process. Ruskinian techniques are returning in this way, but largely from their embattled point of origin, in voluntary and campaigning organisations, rather than from the state institutions that absorbed them in the Edwardian period. The cultural legacies I have discussed are distinguished by their adaptability. Ruskin’s conception of craft as tied to humane, but also human (and therefore variable), working processes began as a response to the shortcomings of Victorian industrial production. It did not depend on the endurance of those shortcomings to survive; indeed, it would inspire design-orientated production in the Modernist period, and tailored 275
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production in the twenty-first century. Where Ruskin has influenced modern designer makers, the emphasis equally is on the value of the human imprint, bearing in mind the availability of machines for other purposes. This is distinct from a commitment to handicraft that endures despite the availability of machine solutions. The reason for this adaptability lies in Ruskin’s emphasis on the process rather than product. For him, drawing is a means of ‘seeing clearly’. It proceeds not for the sake of ‘sight’ alone, but because it leads to ‘insight’ and an enlargement of the mind’s eye. Drawing, in this view, stakes its claim as an art on what it does to the participant, less for the artistic archive it generates: ‘I have not been trying to teach you to draw’, he wrote, ‘only to see’ (xxxv.31). The effect is to loosen Ruskin’s recommendations from the contingencies of artistic fashion, but also to isolate his methods from positions more rooted in his times, among them his dogged preference for handicraft, his agrarianism, his suspicions of social mobility, and the ‘reverence’ he owed to natural theology (see Chapter 10 ). Removed from these sources, his agenda can seem hollowed out, or resolved into a larger story for which he is not responsible. But this is a process of adaptation, too, and it ensures that his commitment to craftsmanship and to better habits of vision, have an afterlife, either as a spectral tokens of value, as attributed by Hill, or as practical artistic tools. NO TES 1. Stefan Collini, ‘“From Non-Fiction Prose” to “Cultural Criticism”: Genre and Disciplinarity in Victorian Studies’, in Juliet John and Alice Jenkins, eds., Rethinking Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 13–28 (15). 2. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 141. 3. See, for instance, Andrew Hill, ‘Lombard: Ruskin offers a moral code on just rewards’, Financial Times, 21 August 2009. 4. Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design (V2 Publishing, 2011), 9. 5. Williams, Culture and Society, 60. 6. Clive Wilmer, ‘“A new road on which the world should travel”: John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic” and William Morris’ (York: Guild of St George, 2014), 1–3. 7. W. R. Lethaby, ‘Editor’s Preface’, in Edward Johnston, Writing & Illuminating & Lettering (London: Hogg, 1906), i-xxii (ix). 8. Ibid., vii-viii. 9. Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, www.kindersleyworkshop.co.uk [accessed 15 September 2014] (para. 3 of 3) 10. Bernard Leach, Beyond East and West: Memoirs, Portraits and Essays (London: Faber, 2012), 120. 276
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Cultural legacies 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26.
27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
39.
Bernard Leach, A Potter’s Book (London: Faber, 2008), 14–15. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 8. Leach, Beyond East and West, 126. See Yuko Kikuchi, ‘The Mingei Movement’, in Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry, International Arts and Crafts (London: V&A, 2005), 298. Leach, Beyond East and West, 127. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 226. Matthew Crawford, The Case for Working with Your Hands (London: Viking 2009), 6; published in the USA as Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009). Ibid., 296. Glenn Anderson, ed., The Craft Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 5. Geoffrey Hill, ‘Rhetorics of Value and Intrinsic Value’, in Kenneth Haynes, ed., Collected Critical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 465–477 (466). Geoffrey Hill, ‘Civil Polity and the Confessing State’, The Warwick Review, 2 (2008), 7–20; William Morris, ‘How I Became a Socialist’, in May Morris, ed., The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1910–15), xxiii.277–81 (279). Hill, ‘Translating Value’, in Collected Critical Writings, 383–393 (390). First epigraph, in Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Hill, ‘Improvisation on “Warum ist uns das Licht gegeben?”’, Without Title, in Broken Hierarchies, 519. Hill, Broken Hierarchies, 519. See, for instance, the mineralogical eye in ‘The red sandstone forest, fernshouldering streams; / the Severn also, cliff-cutting, wide-wading’, Scenes from Comus, 2.16, 419–480 (438). Cited in Wynford Dewhurst, ‘What is Impressionism’, Contemporary Review, 99 (May 1911), 295–6. W. A. S. Benson, Drawing: Its History and Uses (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 11. Ibid., 31. Philip Rawson, Drawing (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 1. Ibid., 19. For the disputed origin of the ‘line’, see Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), 42. Walter Gropius, ‘Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses’ (April 1919), in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 435. John Hobden, ‘View of the “Right Kind of Teacher for Science”’, in Rachel Sparks Linfield and Paul Warwick, eds., Science 3–13: The Past, The Present and Possible Futures (London: Routledge, 2002), 81–92 (82).
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marcus w aithe 40. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 35. 41. William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. W. Minto, 2 vols (London, 1892), ii.9–10. Quoted in Susan Owens, The Art of Drawing: British Masters and Methods Since 1600 (London: V&A Publishing, 2013), 125. 42. Evidence given by Andy Simpson, Head of Education, RSPB, to House of Commons Education and Skills Committee (London: Stationery Office, 2005), 18 October 2014, Ev.19.
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GUIDE TO F URTHER READING
This section lists some of the principal critical and bio-/bibliographical writing about John Ruskin.
Works The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: Allen, 1903–12) Unto This Last and Other Writing by John Ruskin, ed. Clive Wilmer (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1985) ‘Resumé’ of Italian Art and Architecture (1845), ed. Paul Tucker (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2003) John Ruskin: Selected Writings, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2004) Praeterita, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2012) Ruskin’s Venice: The Stones Revisited, by Sarah Quill, 2nd edn. (London: Lund Humphries, 2015) Modern Painters I, electronic edition at www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/ruskin/empi /index.htm
Letters and diaries (see the List of abbreviations for the principal collections, 00–00) Venetian Notebooks at www.lancaster.ac.uk/depts/ruskinlib/eSoV/index.html
Biography Batchelor, John, John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000) Bradley, John Lewis, ed., The Letters of John Ruskin to Lord and Lady MountTemple (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1964) A Ruskin Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) Collingwood, W. G., The Life and Work of John Ruskin, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1893) 279
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g u i d e t o fu r th e r re a d i n g Cook, E. T., The Life of John Ruskin, 2 vols (London: Allen, 1911) Dearden, James S., Facets of Ruskin: Some Sesquicentennial Studies (London: Skilton, 1970) John Ruskin’s Camberwell (St Albans: Brentham, 1990) and Burd, Van Akin, eds., A Tour of the Lakes in Cumbria: John Ruskin’s Diary for 1830 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1990) John Ruskin: A Life in Pictures (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999) John Ruskin: An Illustrated Life of John Ruskin, 1819–1900, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Shire, 2004) Further Facets of Ruskin: Some Bibliographical Studies (London: Dearden, 2009) Dickinson, Rachel, ed., John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense Letters (Oxford: Legenda, 2009) Evans, Joan, John Ruskin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954) Harrison, Frederic, John Ruskin, English Men of Letters series (London: Macmillan, 1905) Hewison, Robert, John Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Hilton, Tim, John Ruskin, The Early 1819–1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) John Ruskin: The Later Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) Hunt, John Dixon, The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin (London: Dent, 1982) Leon, Derrick, Ruskin: The Great Victorian (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949) Lutyens, Mary, ed., Effie in Venice: Unpublished letters of Mrs John Ruskin Written from Venice between 1849–1852 (London: Pallas Athene, 1999) O’Gorman, Francis, John Ruskin (Stroud: Sutton, 1999) Severn, Arthur, The Professor: Arthur Severn’s Memoir of John Ruskin, ed. James S. Dearden (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967)
Bibliography Wildman, Stephen, et al.: www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/ruskinlib/Pages/bibliog.html (which also incorporates material from the Ruskin Newsletter 1969–1989; Kirk H. Beetz’s, John Ruskin: A Bibliography, 1900–1974 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1976), and George Allan Cate’s John Ruskin: A Reference Guide (Boston, MA: Hall, 1988))
Journals (current) The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today (online) Ruskin Review and Bulletin (from the Ruskin Library and Research Centre, Lancaster University) The Companion, the journal of the Guild of St George
Journal special editions Nineteenth-Century Prose: Special Issue on John Ruskin, 35 (2008, ed. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman) and 38 (2011, ed. Sara Atwood) 280
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Criticism/context Atwood, Sara, Ruskin’s Educational Ideals (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) Auerbach, Nina, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) Austin, Linda M., The Practical Ruskin: Economics and Audience in the Late Work (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) Barringer, Tim, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998) and Giebelhausen, Michaela, eds., Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext (London: Ashgate, 2009) Bauer, Helen Pike, ‘Ruskin and the Education of Women’, Studies in the Humanities, 12 (1988): 74–89 Bertrand, Gilles, Le Grand Tour Revisité: Pour une archéologie du tourisme: le voyage des français en Italie, milieu XVIIIe siècle–début XIXe siècle (Rome: Ecolefrançaise de Rome, 2008) Birch, Dinah, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) ed., Ruskin on Turner (London: Cassell, 1990) ‘Fathers and Sons: Ruskin, John James Ruskin, and Turner’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 18 (1994), 147–62 ed., Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999) and Francis O’Gorman, ed., Ruskin and Gender (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) ‘Ruskin’s Revised Eighteenth Century’ in Francis O’Gorman and Katherine Turner, eds., The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 163–81 ‘“Who wants authority?”: Ruskin as a Dissenter’, Yearbook of English Studies, 36 (2006), 65–77 ‘Fallen Nature: Ruskin’s Political Apocalypse’ in H. Gustav Klaus and John Rignall, eds., Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 113–25 Brechin, Gray, ‘Necessitous Men are Not Free Men’: Bridging Ruskin’s Thought and the New Deal (York: Guild of St George, 2014) Burd, Van Akin, ‘Another Light in the Writing of Modern Painters’, PMLA, 68 (1953), 755–63 ‘Ruskin and His “Good Master”, William Buckland’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36 (2008), 299–315 Buzard, James, The Beaten Track. European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) Clegg, Jeanne, and Tucker, Paul, Ruskin e la Toscana: Ruskin Gallery, Collection of the Guild of St George, Sheffield (Sheffield: Ruskin Gallery, Collection of the Guild of St George in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1993) Clegg, Jeanne, and Tucker, Paul, eds., The Dominion of Daedalus: Papers from the Ruskin Workshop held in Pisa and Lucca, 13–14 May 1993 (St Albans: Brentham, 1994) Clegg, Jeanne, Ruskin and Venice (London: Junction, 1981) Colley, Ann C., Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) 281
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g u i d e t o fu r th e r re a d i n g Cook, E. T., Studies in Ruskin: Some Aspects of the Work and Teaching of John Ruskin (Orpington: Allen, 1890) Daniels, Rebecca, and Brandwood, Geoff, eds., Ruskin and Architecture (Reading: Spire, 2003) Davis, Alan, ‘Ruskin’s Last Turner Engravings’, Turner Society News, 87 (2001), 4–8 ‘“This is the Best of Me”: Ruskin’s “Collected Works”, 1871–80’, The Reader, 10 (Liverpool University School of English, 2002), 27–32 ‘Ruskin’s use of the Liber Studiorum in his Early Oxford lectures’, Turner Society News, 90 (2002), 9–13 ‘“What I intended the plates to be”: Ruskin’s Etchings for The Seven Lamps of Architecture’, The Ruskin Review and Bulletin, 1.1 (Lent term, 2005), 3–11 Ruskin’s Organic Vision: Nature, Life and Art (Lancaster University: Ruskin Library, 8 October–22 December 2005) ‘Ruskin’s Organic Vision’, The Reader, 21 (Liverpool University School of English: Spring 2006), 7–16 Dearden, James S., Ruskin, Bembridge and Brantwood: The Growth of the Whitehouse Collection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994) Dentith, Simon, Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now: Reading with Hindsight (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) Dowling, Linda, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996) Eagles, Stuart, Ruskin and Tolstoy (Newport: Guild of St George, 2010) After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet: 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Ferrazza, Marco, Cattedrali della terra: John Ruskin sulle Alpi (Torino: Vivaldiana, 2008) Finley, Stephen, Nature’s Covenant. Figures of Landscape in Ruskin (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) Gamble, Cynthia, Proust as Interpreter of Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Translation (Birmingham, Alabama: Summa, 2002) ‘John Ruskin, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and the Alps’, The Alpine Journal (1999), 185–96 and Matthieu Pinette, L’Oeil de Ruskin: l’exemple de la Bourgogne (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011) ‘Finding a Voice: from Ruskin to the Pastiches’, in Adam Watt, ed., Marcel Proust in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 27–33 Garrigan, Kristine, Ruskin on Architecture: His Thought and Influence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, and London, 1973) Hagstotz, Hilda Boettcher, The Educational Theories of John Ruskin (Lincoln, Neb: University of Nebraska Press, 1942) Hanley Keith, and Dickinson, Rachel, eds., Ruskin and the Struggle for Coherence (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007) Hanley, Keith and Sdegno, Emma, eds., Ruskin, Venice and Nineteenth-Century Cultural Travel (Venezia: Cafoscarina, 2010) Hanley, Keith, and Walton, John K., Constructing Cultural Tourism: John Ruskin and the Tourist Gaze (Bristol: Channel View, 2010) Hanley, Keith, and Maidment, Brian, eds., Persistent Ruskin: Studies in Influence, Assimilation and Effect (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013) 282
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g u i d e t o f u r t h e r re a d i ng Hartley, Lucy, ‘Putting the Drama into Everyday Life: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and a Very Ordinary Aesthetic’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 72 (2002), 173–95 Heinrich, Anselm, Newey, Katherine, and Richards, Jeffrey, eds., Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) Hélard, André, John Ruskin et les Cathédrales de la Terre (Chamonix: Guérin, 2005) Helsinger, Elizabeth K., Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) Hewison, Robert, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976) ed., New Approaches to Ruskin: Thirteen Essays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) Ruskin and Oxford: The Art of Education (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) ed., Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy: Papers from the Ruskin Programme, Lancaster University (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) Warrell, Ian, and Wildman, Stephen, Ruskin, Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: The Tate Gallery, 2010) Ruskin on Venice: ‘The Paradise of Cities’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) Hunt, John Dixon and Holland, Faith M., eds., The Ruskin Polygon: Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982) Jacobson, Ken, and Jacobson, Jenny, Carrying Off the Palaces: John Ruskin’s Lost Daguerreotypes (London: Quaritch, 2015) Landow, George P., ‘Ruskin’s Refutation of “False Opinions held concerning Beauty”’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 60–72 The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) ‘“Your Good Influence on Me”: The Correspondence of John Ruskin and William Holman Hunt’, The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester, 59 (1976–77), 95–126; 367–96 Leonard, Diane, ‘Ruskin and the cathedral of lost souls’, in Richard Bales, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Proust (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 42–57 Links, J. G., The Ruskins in Normandy: A Tour in 1848 with Murray’s Hand-Book (London: John Murray, 1968) Macfarlane, Robert, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (London: Granta, 2003) Marsh, Jan, ‘“Resolve to be a great paintress”: Women Artists in Relation to John Ruskin as Critic and Patron’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 18 (1994), 177–85 McCoubrey, John, ‘Turner’s Slave Ship: Abolition, Ruskin, and Reception’, Word and Image, 144 (1998), 319–53 Merrill, Linda, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in ‘Whistler v Ruskin’ (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) Munich, Adrienne Auslander, Queen Victoria’s Secrets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) Newall, Christopher, ed., John Ruskin: Artist and Observer (London: Holberton, 2014) Newey, Katherine, and Richards, Jeffrey, John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 283
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g u i d e t o fu r th e r re a d i n g O’Gorman, Francis, Late Ruskin: New Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) ‘“To see the finger of God in the dimensions of the pyramid”: A New Context for Ruskin’s The Ethics of the Dust (1866)’, Modern Language Review, 98.3 (2003): 563–73 ‘Ruskin’s Aesthetic of Failure in The Stones of Venice’, Review of English Studies, 55 (2004), 374–91 ‘Ruskin, Venice, and the Endurance of Authorship’, Nineteenth Century Studies, 19 (2005), 83–97 ‘Ruskin, Science, and the Miracles of Life’, Review of English Studies, 61 (2010), 276–88 ‘“Influence” in the Contemporary Study of the Humanities: The Problem of Ruskin’, Carlyle Studies Annual, 28 (2013), 5–29 Penny, Nicholas, ‘John Ruskin and Tintoretto’, Apollo, 99 (1974), 268–273 Pointon, Marcia, ed., Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) Prettejohn, Elizabeth, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate, 2007) Reichler, Claude, and Ruffieux, Roland, Le voyage en Suisse: Anthologie des voyageurs francais et européens, de la Renaissance au XXème siècle (Paris: Laffont, 1998) Reichler, Claude, La découverte des Alpes et la question du paysage (Genève: Georg, 2002) Les Alpes et leurs imagiers: Voyage historique et histoire du regard (Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2013) Ring, Jim, How the English Made the Alps (London: Murray, 2000) Robson, Catherine, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) Rosenberg, John D., The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961) Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995) Schuman, Cathy, Pedagogical Economies: The Examination and the Victorian Literary Man (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) Sdegno, Emma, ‘Ruskin’s Optical Thought: Tools for Mountain Representation’ in Loretta Innocenti, Franco Marucci, EnricaVillari, eds., Pictures of Modernity: The Visual and the Literary in England, 1850–1939 (Venezia: Cafoscarina, 2008), 29–50 Shrimpton, Nicholas, Ruskin and ‘War’ (York: Guild of St George, 2014) Spear, Jeffrey, Dreams of an English Eden: Ruskin and His Tradition in Social Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 174–77 Sprinker, Michael, ‘Ruskin on the Imagination’, Studies in Romanticism, 18 (1979), 115–39 Stein, Richard, The Ritual of Interpretation: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) Stoddart, Judith, ‘The Morality of Poems and Ballads: Swinburne and Ruskin’ in Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton, eds., The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne (Aldershot: Scolar, 1993), 92–106 Ruskin’s Culture Wars: ‘Fors Clavigera’ and the Crisis of Victorian Liberalism (Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1998) 284
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g u i d e t o f u r t h e r re a d i ng Sussman, Herbert L., Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) Swenarton, Mark, Artisans and Architects: The Ruskinian Tradition in Architectural Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) Waithe, Marcus, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006) ‘Hill, Ruskin and Intrinsic Value’, in Piers Pennington and Matthew Sperling, eds., Geoffrey Hill and His Contexts (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 133–149 ‘Dense Settling: Geoffrey Hill’s Broken Hierarchies’, P. N. Review, 219, 41.1 (September–October, 2014), 14–18 Ruskin at Walkley: An Illustrated Guide to the Online Museum, 2nd edn. (York: Guild of St George, 2014) Weiner, Martin, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (1981) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky, Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999) Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2007) Wheeler, Michael, and Whiteley, Nigel, eds., The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) Wheeler, Michael, ed., Time and Tide: Ruskin Studies – Ruskin and Science (London: Pilkington, 1996) Whistler, James Abott MacNeill, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, new edn. (London: Heinemann, 1892) Wildman, Stephen, and Gamble, Cynthia, ‘A Perpetual Paradise’: Ruskin’s Northern France (Lancaster University: Ruskin Library, 2002) Wilmer, Clive, ‘“A new road on which the world should travel: John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic” and William Morris’ (York: Guild of St George, 2014) Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
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INDEX
Note that in order to keep the index within reasonable limits, no modern critics of Ruskin or of his milieu are listed. Acland, Henry, 22–4, 108–9, 116 Allen, George, 70, 249 Alps, 32–48, 174–5 Andrews, the Revd Edward, 19 Angelico, Fra, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 63, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93–4 Arnold, Matthew, 50, 189, 190, 196–7, 198, 199, 211, 230 Arts and Crafts Movement, 59, 112–14, 117, 122, 124, 128, 199, 250, 252, 265, 266–70, 273 Ashbee, C. R., 255, 265–6 Atlee, Clement, 255 Balzac, Honoré de, Illusions perdues, 76–7 Bellini, Giovanni, 58, 59, 92 Bradford, 1, 111, 213 Brantwood (Ruskin’s Coniston home), 26–30 Bridgewater Treatises, 40–1 Brown, the Revd Walter, 22 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 49–50 Buckland, William, 22, 41 Burne-Jones, Edward, 23, 61, 97, 98 Butterfield, William, 107–8, 109, 110 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 5, 34, 52, 57, 190, 207, 226, 231, 232 Campo Santo (Pisa), 54–5, 56, 57 Cardoso Kindersley Workshop, 267–8 Carlyle, Thomas, 9, 18, 24, 62, 117, 121, 122, 125, 128, 154, 189–200, 206, 213, 221, 250, 256, 271 Cimabue, 10, 53, 62 Claude [Gellée /le Lorrain], 51, 84–5, 89 Clayton, Edward, 22 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 49
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Collingwood, W.G., 25, 27, 29, 30, 34, 78, 238 Coniston, 26–30, 101, 220 Dale, the Revd Thomas, 19 Dante, 46, 88, 228, 243–4 Darwin, Charles, 22, 42, 153, 214, 234 Deane and Woodward (architects), 23, 108–9 Dickens, Charles, 157, 219, 238, 251 Dulwich Picture Gallery, 19, 70 Eastlake, Charles, 53, 112 Edinburgh, 17–18, 110–11, 208–9 Eliot, George, 78, 202–3 Fielding, Anthony Van Dyke Copley, 20, 233 Forbes, James D., 44, 46 Fox-Strangways, William, 53 Furnivall, F.J., 50 Gandhi, Mohandas, 128, 258–9, 261 ‘Ghent Altarpiece’, 70–1 Gill, Eric, 266–7, 270 Giorgione, 12, 56, 61, 63 Giotto, 10, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 74, 86, 92, 93 Gordon, the Revd Osborne, 22 Governor Eyre Controversy, 198–200 Guild of St George, 6, 29, 117, 127–8, 131, 135–8, 141–2, 153, 164–5, 184, 204, 213, 225, 252–3, 255, 265–7, 275 Hardie, Keir, 256 Harding, J. D., 20, 233 Hill, Geoffrey, 271–2 Hinksey (Ruskin’s road-building scheme), 25, 124, 253–4, 260
ind ex Holbein, Hans, 184–5 Hugo, Victor, Notre-Dame de Paris, 76 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 75, 139 Jowett, Benjamin, 220, 254 La Touche, Rose, 25, 29, 63, 151–2, 158–61, 216, 218–19, 222–3, 237, 243 Lawrence, D. H., 274–5 Liddell, H.G., 21, 23 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 27 Linton, W. J., 27, 28 Mandeville, Bernard, 126–7 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 50 Melvill, the Revd Henry, 19 Mill, J. S., 144–5, 162, 195 Millais, John Everett, 23, 89–90, 91, 96, 97, 98, 157, 159, 161 Millett, Kate, 161–2, 163 Modernism, 13, 242, 269, 274–6 Molière, 76, 78 Monet, Claude, 101–2, 273 Morris, William, 23, 110, 113, 124, 199–200, 250, 256, 264–5, 268–9 News from Nowhere, 124 Nasmyth, Alexander, 17 National Trust, 25, 257, 263–4 Nazarenes, 52, 92–3 Old Water Colour Society, 19, 20 Oxford University, 6, 21–6, 131–5, 212–14, 221 Palladio, Andrea, 10, 107, 111 Palmer, Samuel, 52 Paris Commune, 73, 136 Pater, Walter, 98 Patmore, Coventry, 163–4 Poussin, Gaspar, 51, 84 Pre-Raphaelites, 6, 10, 18, 23, 28, 56, 59, 83, 88–92, 96, 97–8, 109, 122, 180, 209, 250, 273 Proust, Marcel, 72, 77, 101–2 Prout, Samuel, 68, 84, 101, 233 Pugin, A. W. N., 102, 107, 123 Quercia, Jacopo della, 54, 63 Raphael, 23, 52, 53, 56, 86, 93 Rawnsley, Hardwicke, 25, 29, 254 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 28, 87, 91–2
Rhodes, Cecil, 25 Richmond, George, 53, 219 Rio, Alexis-François, 53, 102 Robbia, Luca della, 28 Rogers, Samuel, 35, 37, 52, 68 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 23, 49, 91, 97, 98 Rowbotham, John, 19, 66 Royal Institute of British Architects, 4–5, 111 Runciman, Charles, 20 Ruskin, Effie (née Gray), 50, 57, 155, 157–61 Ruskin, John James (Ruskin’s father), 5–6, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 20, 119, 123, 206, 207, 208, 210, 216–17, 220–1, 225, 227, 239 Ruskin, Margaret (Ruskin’s mother), 9, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 30, 77, 126, 145, 204, 206, 225, 226, 227, 252 Ruskin Societies, 253–4 Ruskin, John WORKS ‘Aesthetic and Mathematic Schools of Art in Florence, The’, 62 Aratra Pentellici, 24, 176 Ariadne Florentina, 62, 181 Art of England, The 130–1 Bible of Amiens, The, 71, 72, 112, 153–4, 156 Bibliotheca Pastorum, 131 Chronicles of Saint Bernard, 34 Crown of Wild Olive, The, 73, 111, 117, 123, 196–7, 213, 260–1 Deucalion, 32, 33, 36, 42, 45–7 Drawings and watercolours, 233–7 Eagle’s Nest, The, 24, 113, 166, 213 Elements of Drawing, 181, 272–3 ‘Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine’, 5, 22 Ethics of the Dust, The, 6, 150, 162, 166–8, 202, 205 Fiction, Fair and Foul, 20, 78 ‘Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme, The’, 71, 112 Fors Clavigera, 3, 5, 6, 25, 45, 58, 60, 74, 97–8, 112–3, 117, 135–8, 141–2, 154–5, 171–3, 199, 205, 210, 213, 219, 224, 225, 242 Giotto and his Works in Padua, 56, 59 Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice, A, 63 ‘Inaugural Address to the Cambridge School of Art’, 7 Iteriad, 26, 231 King of the Golden River, The, 116, 237–9, 258
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index Ruskin, John (cont.) Laws of Fésole, The, 10 Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 18, 209, 211 Lectures on Art, 25, 213 Letters to a College Friend, 22 Love’s Meinie, 24, 166 Modern Painters I, 18, 22, 37, 38, 39–40, 51, 52, 53, 55, 71, 83–6, 87, 90–1, 122, 145, 230, 239, 240 Modern Painters II, 54, 55, 56, 62, 86, 91, 96 Modern Painters III, 3, 38, 150–1, 202, 203 Modern Painters IV, 27, 32, 36, 38, 39–40, 42–3, 45, 147 Modern Painters V, 3, 12, 20, 61, 71, 95–8, 125, 145, 149, 178–9, 202, 210, 236, 239, 274 Munera Pulveris, 117, 127, 195–6 Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, 119 Notes on Samuel Prout and William Hunt, 28 Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures (‘Academy Notes’), 21 ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, 8, 150, 213 ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, 3, 157, 161–6, 168 Oxford Museum, The, 23 Pleasures of England, The, 130–1, 132–3, 139 Poetry of Architecture, The, 27, 28, 100–2, 206–7 Poetry, 34–5, 231–3 Political Economy of Art, The, 58, 124, 126, 210 Praeterita, 6, 19, 22, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 46, 60, 64, 66, 117–19, 148, 155–6, 174, 175, 202–3, 204–5, 206–7, 211, 216, 217–18, 220, 223, 224–8, 233–4, 242–3 Pre-Raphaelitism, 59, 89–90, 96 Proserpina, 153, 166, 216 Queen of the Air, The, 6, 150–1, 162, 167–8, 213 St Mark’s Rest, 3–4, 50, 63, 112, 152 Salsette and Elephanta, 22, 231–2 Sesame and Lilies, 6, 43–4, 117, 157, 197, 213, 250 Seven Lamps of Architecture, The, 4, 57, 71–2, 77, 102–3, 109–10, 112, 122, 124, 145–7, 176–7, 204 Stones of Venice, The, 4, 5, 11, 32, 50, 57–8, 61, 72, 88–9, 92, 103–7, 112,
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113, 116–17, 118, 122–5, 146, 147, 176, 191, 218, 232, 234, 240 ‘The Nature of Gothic’,21, 59, 105–6, 113, 124, 234, 242, 244, 255, 264–5, 270 Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, The, 30, 79, 167, 219–20 ‘Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism, The,’ 98 Time and Tide, 117, 127–8, 199, 210 ‘Traffic’, 1, 123, 213 Two Paths, The, 111, 125 Unto this Last, 5, 6, 112, 117, 121, 123, 125–7, 162, 194–5, 216, 237–8, 240–2, 255–6, 258 Val d’Arno, 24, 62, 63, 98 Valle Crucis, 139–41 ‘Verona, and its Rivers’, 61 ‘Work of Iron, The’, 211–12 Said, Edward, 131 St George’s Museum, Walkley, Sheffield, 45, 253, 266, 272 San Miniato, Florence, 4 Sand, George, 76–8 Sandys, Frederick, 182–3 Santa Maria della Spina, Piza, 4 Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de, 36, 46 Schlegel, Friedrich, 52 Scott, George Gilbert, 109, 110, 111 Scott, Sir Walter, 17–18, 29, 37, 116, 207, 224, 226 Severn, Joan (née Agnew), 27, 152, 221–2, 223, 243 Shakespeare, William, 88, 166, 219, 226, 240 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 34, 52, 232 Smith, Adam, 116–17, 121, 126–7 Spiritualism, 152 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 43, 44 Street, George Edmund, 109 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 50, 144 Tintoretto, 10–11, 32, 56, 61, 62, 83, 86, 88, 91, 93–5, 117–18 Titian, 12, 26, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 71, 88, 89 Tolstoy, Leo, 250, 257–8, 261 Toynbee, Arnold, 25, 254–5, 261 Turner, J. M. W., 3, 5, 11, 12, 20, 25–6, 37, 52, 66, 67, 83–98, 147–8, 156, 160, 177, 220–1, 233, 235, 236 Turner Bequest, 148–9, 160, 236–7 Works:
ind ex By the Brookside, 178–9 Gates of the Hills, The, 39 Geneva, 28 Goddess of Discord in the Garden of Hesperides, The, 97 Liber Studiorum, 177 Morning Amongst the Coniston Fells, Cumberland, 26 Pass Faido, 38 Slave Ship, The—Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying—Typhoon coming on, 85–6, 239–40 Tyndall, John, 44–7 Venice, 12, 56–9, 61, 91, 101, 103–7, 122–3, 174, 225, 232, 241 Ruskin’s ‘Christmas Story’, 151–2 Basilica di San Marco, 104, 123, 146 Palazzo Ducale, 10, 50, 59, 104–5 Santa Maria della Salute, 241
Scuola San Giogio degli Schiavoni, 151–2 Scuola di San Rocco, 10, 11, 32, 56, 62, 88 Veronese, Paolo, 23, 56, 71, 92, 61 The Wedding Feast at Cana, 58 (attrib.) Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 60, 95–6 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 46, 72 Walkley Museum, Sheffield:, see St George’s Museum Waterhouse, Alfred, 109 Waterloo, Battle of, 68, 70, 74 Webb, Philip, 110 Whistler v. Ruskin, 25, 83, 97–8, 272 Whiteland’s College, 21, 165, 252 Wilde, Oscar, 3, 98, 244 Willis, Robert, 53–4, 102 Wordsworth, William, 11, 22, 26, 33, 34, 52, 100, 140–1, 202, 204, 207, 211, 242 Working Men’s College, 21, 71, 78, 91, 209–10, 236, 252, 255, 272–3, 275
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