John Ruskin
The most Romantic prose of the Victorian sages is found in John Ruskin(1819–
1900). His eloquent reaction to social problems had a spellbinding effect on the
thought and lives of the young: on William Morris and Oscar Wilde, on Gandhi,
who read him on trains in South Africa, and on Marcel Proust, who translated him
(with some help) into French. Ruskin, untrained in aesthetics, was to be England’s
great art critic. He next turned from art and architecture to society, denouncing the
ugly greed of England, and eventually, in apocalyptic tones, the pollution of the
natural world by ‘the Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’.
Ruskin’s greatness is as striking as his singularity, an instance of the effect of
Evangelicalism and Romanticism on an only child. Of his first sight (at 14) of the
Swiss Alps at sunset, he wrote (at 70) that ‘the seen walls of lost Eden could not have
been more beautiful’. Like the Alps at sunset, Ruskin’s works are vast, awe-inspiring
and easy to get lost in. He is like Coleridge in his range, but less metaphysical and
more moral in his discursiveness. He has passages of rhythmical harmony almost as
beautiful as Tennyson’s verse: of rapt perception and analytic description, of social
insight and prophetic force. Of his passages of description, Virginia Woolf wrote that
it is as if ‘all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the
sunlight’. He was an enchanting public lecturer, but could run self-persuaded into
oddity or obsession. Ruskin, like Carlyle and Dickens, confronted by the brutality
and waste of industrial society and by the amoral neutrality of political economists,
fe lt outr age.He proposed radical and collective human solutions both in the arts
and in politics.He lost the narrowness of his upbringing, but regained Christian
belief. He called himself a Tory of the school of Homer and Sir Walter Scott anda
‘communist,re ddest of the red’.
Ruskin’s first major work,Modern Painters (5 volumes,1843–60),was interrupted
by The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice (3 volumes, 1851–3). He
turned aside from his defence of the English Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner to
pr eserve in prose the medieval architecture of Europe then being destroyed. He drew
and measured the major Gothic buildings in Venice like a geologist, studying the
co mponents of their architecture and ornament. Volume 1 analyses the results of
this original research, classifying good and bad. Volume 2 cleanses Venice of its post-
medieval reputation, and famously defines, after an imagined overview of Europe
from the air, ‘the Nature of Gothic’. He derived the health of Gothic architecture
from the condition of its producers in craft guilds, in contrast with the uniform dead
finish of British factory ware, and the condition ofits producers. (The Gothic revival
architect, A. W. Pugin, had anticipated these views in his Contrasts of 1836. Ruskin
did not acknowledge this, perhaps because Pugin wanted to undo the Reformation
as well as the Renaissance.)
Ruskin’s perception that the workman was being turned into a machine led him
to denounce competition and commercialism. After 1860 he plunged into furious
propaganda on art and craft, on social, political and economic theory. He poured
out money, lectures, tracts, and public letters, and set up schools, organizing the
Guild of St George, and teaching at the Working Men’s College. He was the first
Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, resigning twice. Increasingly isolated, he had
periods of delirium. After 1889 he withdrew to Brantwood, his house on Coniston
Water, spoke little and wrote nothing. His career was to be curiously paralleled by
that of the 20th-century American poet Ezra Pound.
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