An introduction to the writings of John Ruskin

Front matter

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WRITINGS

OF

Table Of Contents

PAGB

RUSKIN THE REYEALER OF NATURE: —

The Consecratiox 31

I. John Ruskin In His Century

No man is a wider exponent of the life and thought of the nineteenth century than John Ruskin. Other men are greater, stronger in thought, more balanced in character, mightier in creative power; but no one has turned upon the complex modern world a nature more keen in appreciative insight, more many-sided, sensitive, and pure. Two writers, Browning and Carlyle, will be recognized by the twentieth century as prophets of the age that is passing away. Their message has rung like a trumpet-call through the years. Two others, Tennyson and Ruskin, will be recognized as interpreters. All shifting phases of thought, passion, problem, and faith have been reflected and preserved by spiritual alchemy in the polished mirrors of their souls.

In 1819, the same year which saw the birth of Ruskin, a girl-baby in Warwickshire began to absorb that perception of rural English beaiity which was to be shared with all the world through the pages of " Adam Bede " and " The Mill on the Floss." George Eliot and Ruskin are exact contemporaries. The England into which they were born was the old-fashioned England of stagecoaches and gentle leisure. Railroads and telegraphs were unknown, and the change from the old order to an industrial and mechanical civilization was not yet completed. Politically it was a time of outward pause ; the excitement of the French Revolution had passed away, yet the great outburst of song which had heralded and accompanied the Revolution still echoed in men's ears. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelle}^, Byron, Keats, were still living, but a few short years were all the younger men were to see on earth, while in Wordsworth and Coleridge the poet, though not the man, had died. Scott was the hero of the hour. " Waverley " had been published in 1816, and the English public was carried away, through Ruskin's childhood, by the enthusiasm of the great romantic movement which Ruskin himself was to do so much to enlarge and to direct. Tennyson and Browning were little boys of ten and seven. Far north, in Scotland, a Scottish youth, rough, uncouth, unhappy, was garnering, in the tumult of dark spiritual experience and of external hardship, the bitter yet tender wisdom which was to fling itself in fruitful words on the pages of " Sartor Resartus."

Of struggles, inward or outward, the little Ruskin knew but few. Only son of a rich wine-merchant, the sheltered simplicity of his life had little in common with such rough training as strengthened the sturdy fibres of the Scottish peasant. Yet in one teaching the cottage at Ecclefechan and the villa at Heme Hill were agreed. Chapter by chapter, verse by verse, the little boy, like Carlyle before him, read the Bible over and over before his strict and devoted mother. Always reverent and docile in temperament, he seems to have followed with entire obedience, if sometimes with weariness, her minutely rigid method. Many long passages were learned by rote if not by heart, till his whole nature became steeped in the language and spirit of that mighty book which has for centuries nurtured the noblest English souls. "And truly," he says, "though I have picked up the elements of a little further knowledge in mathematics, meteorology, and the like, in after life, and owe not a little to the teaching of other people, this maternal installation of my mind in that property of chapters I count very confidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the one essential part of all my education."

Apart from the Bible, Buskin's chief early reading was in Homer, Scott, and Byron, all of whom he still loves with fidelity unshaken. Yet that gradual awakening of the spirit within, which we call education, came to him less through the mind than through the eye. From the time he was four years old the family lived out of town, and in a large, old-fashioned, sweet garden the child spent most of his time, contented and solitary, learning to observe and to receive. In the summers the family took the most delightful of vacations, driving in leisurely fashion through England, Scotland, and later Switzerland. These journeys opened to the lad a fairyland of wonders. From babyhood he had been raptur-

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ously alive to beauty, like Wordsworth's child in the famous ode. When he was only three years old, and was asked by a portrait painter what background he would like in the picture of his little self, he had decidedly and swiftly answered, "blue hills." Such a nature, passionately contemplative, was enriched to the utmost by the absorption in early youth of much of the noblest and loveliest, both in art and nature, that Europe could furnish. When he was twelve years old a friend gave him Kogers's Italy with illustrations by Turner. Immediately there sprang up within him that profound and ardent discipleship which was to form the constraining loyalty of twenty years of his life. Thus his quiet childhood slipped into youth, the love of art — architecture and painting — and the passion for poetry being supplemented in a way perhaps somewhat unusual by a strong bent towards scientific study. Euskin himself sums up his early life for us : " For best and truest beginning of all blessings, I had been taught the perfect meaning of peace, in thought, act, and word. . . . Next to this quite priceless gift of peace, I had received the perfect understanding of the natures of obedience and faith : . . . these three for chief good ; next to these, the habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind — on which I will not further enlarge at this moment, this being the main practical faculty of my life."

In 1836 he went to Oxford, and was entered at Christ Church, the richest and most aristocratic of the colleges, as a gentleman commoner. The stern old city with its austere grace laid its spell upon him, and he entered with some earnestness into the life, social and literary, of the best English youth. But his great enthusiasm was still for art, and for Turner's pictures. In time this enthusiasm assumed the form of indignant championship. Turner was unquestionably the greatest landscape painter that the world had seen, but his works were hard to understand from their very novelty of method ; and, though not without recognition, he was at this time attacked and ridiculed in some of the leading reviews. Ruskin, with impetuous chivalry, hastened to defend him in a letter to a magazine. As he wrote, ideas pressed upon him : the letter grew to a pamphlet. Still he found himself " compelled " to " amplify," and when at last he paused, it was to find completed an entire book, inquiring into the true principles of painting, and defending modern art. This was the first volume of " Modern Painters," given to the world in 1843.

Euskin was at this time twenty-four years old. His nature was ardently attuned to all high things. He had entered into the richest heritage that life could offer, with one great exception — he had never known struggle, and he had never known serious pain. Full of high possibilities he thus had still the immaturity of the eager boy. But henceforth his growth was to be before the public, and this fact may account for much seeming weakness and inconsistency. Carlyle was thirty-nine before he reached any general recognition. George Eliot at thirty-six had given nothing to the world. But Ruskin shared with the British public the freshness and the crudity of his first impressions, and from this time his growth and change may be traced unfailingly through the long sequence of his famous books.

"Modern Painters," this first volume, was received with derision by the art critics, with amazed applause by the public. Thus, almost by chance, the direction of Euskin's energies was determined. He professes himself to regret that he has not been a geologist. With the large views of youth he had planned the work on a scale which required many volumes for its completion. The second volume followed in 1846. Then Turner passed to where beyond these voices there is peace. Neither abuse nor honour could touch him longer, and with a more sober devotion his young champion studied slowly for many years before he gave to the world the fruits of his riper thought. It was not till 1860 that Volume V. closed the long series, which, beginning with a defence of an individual artist, had extended to a broad historical and comparative study of art, ancient and modern, and had contained at least the suggestions _ of the theory of aesthetics which has proved most genuinely and practically attractive through the century. The first part of the work is marked by the enthusiasm of youth, by an intense, unquestioning, narrow evangelicalism ; by a devout adoration of beauty. The latter volumes, increasingly sad in tone, show swift growth in breadth, moderation, and in philosophical and analytic power.

During these twenty years Euskin was loved and honoured throughout England as the chief interpreter of beauty in nature and in art. His works w^ere reverently studied as a great educational power. The attitude towards art of the specialist was changed by his teaching, and the apathetic public was aroused to a new and intelligent aesthetic life. Ruskin's energies as an art critic were not confined to " Modern Painters." Two other great works, the " Stones of Venice " and the " Seven Lamps of Architecture,'' gave a vividly sympathetic exposition of Gothic architecture in its principles and history ; while many minor works, devoted to the one end of the interpretation of art in its purity and its truthfulness, bore witness to an unceasing devotion of work. But a change was coming. Even while he was absorbed in the contemplation of Italian masters or the glories of the Alps, another force, mighty and insistent, was drawing the soul of Ruskin away from the service of nature and art. It was the voice of the modern world. It summoned him from the study of beauty to the need of humanity. He obeyed the call. The interpreter of art became the social reformer. Since 1860 the chief interest of Mr. Euskin's life has been the effort to understand and solve the problems of human sorrow and human need.

No stranger transition is recorded in history than this which has turned the philosophical student of art into the vehement teacher of political economy. Mr. Euskin was brought up, as we have seen, in the most conservative of homes and the most conservative of universities. His temperament was receptive rather than aggressive, attuned to the love of beauty and the pursuit of abstractions, rather than to the apprehension of practical facts. No personal grievance drove liim into rebellion : he was wealthy, and every refinement of fair living was within his reach. It is easy to see why a man like Carlyle should have become a social prophet : race sympathy and severe personal experience reacted from without on an inner nature militant and practical to the core. But that a Kuskin, with his ignorance of struggle, and his happy, instinctive contentment in leaves and pictures and cathedrals, shonld deliberately have entered the rough, hot, wearisome sphere of economic struggle is a phenomenon perplexing indeed.

Reasons for the change are clear to the thoughtful mind. Ruskin and Carlyle start from opposite poles ; but both arrive at the same centre. And this because of that essential unity of life which forces artist and philosopher, fighter and dreamer, to remain alike restless, and seeking, each dissatisfied with his own sphere of energy, so long as disease in any part of the vast human organism affects and vitiates the whole.

The year 1860 was the great watershed in Euskin's life. Already, in the fifth volume of " Modern Painters," the change which had passed over him was obvious to the attentive mind. But two courses of lectures, published as books in this year, or somewhat earlier, "The Two Paths," and " The Political Economy of Art," mark clearly and decisively the nature and cause of the transition.

Carlyle preached social reform as the direct and necessary condition of pure living. Ruskin was driven to it in seeking for the necessary condition of pure art.

There are two central themes in these books : —

First, The growth of a purely mechanical civilization tends to shut out the possibility of original, creative achievement in art, diverting men from the free study of organic form, vulgarizing their tastes, and deadening their powers.

Second, Art can flourish only in a national life instinct with honour, beauty, justice, and peace. The wide spread of social misery renders such a national life impossible : therefore, in our modern world, true art, or, a.t least, great and permanent art, cannot exist. Would we have pure art once more, we must purify our social order.

Once these conclusions grasped, Kuskin turned obediently and firmly from the study of art to the study of sociology. It might be expected that he would not approach this burning subject after the conventional fashion. His next book, " Unto This Last," a treatise on the elements of political economy, was received by a chorus of angry scorn and amused pity. The editors of the "Cornhill Magazine," in which it first came out, were obliged to decline further instalments when the first four chapters had appeared ; but Mr. Euskin pursued his way undaunted. As he continued to think, and to formulate his thoughts in print, the whole attitude of the English public towards him changed. He had been loved with a peculiar tenderness of reverence : he became not so much hated as despised. Rumors against his sanity crept about, disciples and friends left him in isolation : those who still clung to him lamented his mistaken folly. Goaded to exasperation by this treatment, he never, indeed, faltered j but he began to express himself in extreme and fantastic forms, which lent color to the accusations of his critics. A lambent humour, fantastic yet fiery, began to play through his utterances ; and serious-minded Englishmen often found it impossible to say whether he were in jest or earnest. To one who has heard Mr. Euskin lecture, the effect of his amazing and scathing invectives against modern civilization is modified by the memory of a twinkle in a keen, deep-gray eye, and an especially gentle lisp.

Undoubtedly, many of his views and his way of stating them became crabbed and queer. It was through no personal desire that he entered the arena of social struggle; reluctantly, rather, and with many a wistful backward glance towards the world of calm he had left. " That it should be left to me," so he writes, " to begin such a work, with only one man in England — Thomas Carlyle — to whom I can look for steady guidance, is alike wonderful and sorrowful to me ; but, as the thing is so, I can only do what seems to me necessary, none else coming forward to do it." Suggestions of Mr. Euskin's leading principles and theories in social science will be found later in the book. Here, we can only say that his ideal for the state is a form of socialism founded not on equality but on justice and obedience. He did not entirely abandon his art-work, but it became more and more subordinate. He excited the derision of the public by various practical experiments, on a small scale : he started a tea-shop, for the sale of pure tea, which ignominiously failed, "because," as he whimsically says, "of my procrastination in painting my sign ; " he attempted to clean tlie Augean stables, and, for a time, hired a crossing in the dirtiest part of London kept absolutely clean; he inveigled certain young Oxford exquisites to engage with him in the wholesome manual labor of road-making, — a labor, it may be added, which they are said to have performed extremely ill. Comparison with the great Kussian reformer, Tolstoi, suggests itself as we read of this phase of Mr. Ruskin's life ; yet Euskin is, on the whole, less extreme, less literal, than Tolstoi. His passion for the highest and fairest products of civilization has done much to keep him balanced and broad in his ideals. Finally, in 1871, he began his most ambitious and prolonged effort to realize his theories in practical form : an effort which, seemingly diffused and Utopian, has yet succeeded in clinging to some reality, despite the fragmentary method by which it has been carried out. He started a monthly letter, which he called b}^ the fanciful name of Fors Clavigera, to the workmen of Great Britain. Few workmen were, it is to be feared, sufficiently exemplary or enlightened to spend their time and their money over Mr. Ruskin's obscure, if beautiful, mosaic of Scripture exposition, literary allusions, poetry, argument, and hard fact. Those who were soon found that he meant more than mere talk. The sight of the misery of the laboring classes and the evils due, as he believed, to an unrighteous competition, roused him to indignant speech and act. " For my part," he wrote, " I will put up with this state of things passively not an hour longer. I am not an unselfish person nor an evangelical one : I have

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no particular pleasure in doing good, neither do I dislike doing it, so much as to expect to be rewarded for it in another world. But I simply cannot paint nor read nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky, when there is any, — which is seldom nowadays, near London, — has become hateful to me because of the misery I know of, and see signs of where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly. Therefore, as I have said, I will endure it no longer quietly ; but henceforward, with any few or many who will help, do my poor best to abate this misery."

The direct, obvious result of Ruskin's action was the formation of that Guild of St. George which will be found described later. He has himself been consistent, in deed as in word. Of the large fortune he inherited from his father he has given away eleven-twelfths ; and his best energy and genius during the last twenty years have been devoted to furthering, directly or indirectly, the social cause which he has at heart. But his versatile and sympathetic nature has not confined itself to any one line of effort. In 1870, and again in 1884, he was lecturer on art in his own university ; and the establishment of a School of Art in Oxford has been one of his best-loved schemes. In his charming books for girls and boys power of a different order has been manifested. Meanwhile, his swift and broad sympathies have embraced still another field. Even in his youth he showed the patient observation, the reverence for fact, which mark the scientific temperament. He has of late years reverted to purely scientific studies, and in '^ Ethics of the Dust," '' Deucalion," and " Proserpina," has written of mineralog}^, geology, and botany in a charming way, which, though often too independent to be recognized by conventional science, yet gives incentive and suggestion to all his readers.

Truly, as was said at the beginning, the career of Euskin is typical. His life has covered many phases, rising, falling, in swift succession. Born while Scott and Byron were supreme, he has outlived the work of Browning and of George Eliot. Born while Adam Smith was the one authority in economics, he has lived to see the school of Mill called antiquated, and swept away by a new and vivid tendency. His maturity has witnessed the rise, in some cases the full expression, of the five great movements around which have been centred the activities of the modern world. The critical movement, the scientific movement, the religious movement, the artistic movement, the social movement, — each of these has passed over him ; to each his eager and delicate nature has stirred responsive. Of two of these . movements he has been at the very heart. The artistic movement was largely moulded, if not originated, by his powerful genius. Concerning his place and value in the social movement it is not yet time to speak. To his work in this direction he has sacrificed his popularity, his health, and, more bitter far, his influence. .Where he was revered, he is ridiculed ; where he was obeyed, he is neglected. Still the battle is hot and the issue doubtful. But our judgment of the value of Mr. Ruskin's economic ideas should not affect our profound sense of the significance of his conversion. We may condemn his theories as Utopian extravaganzas : all the more imperious must have been the stress of the impulse which drove him from the sphere in which he was master, to that in which he is unfit even to labour. It is strange indeed to find the same man prominent as an interpreter of the beautiful and a student of the dismal science of political economy : it is sad more than strange if the interpreter of beauty forfeits his own fair power to gain mere self-delusion in exchange. Kuskin's is not, as we have said, the assertive or progressive temperament. He is, by choice, no leader of his time. He has never doubted, except where doubt was forced upon him. Reverence and obedience are the instinctive watchwords of his nature. That such a man, intensely conservative in every nerve, should be relentlessly driven to a position considered by most of his contemporaries as dangerously radical, is a paradox touched with grim humour but with deeper pathos. That he should be forced by modern conditions to turn from joyous and adoring contemplation, and, Hamlet-like, to assume the burden of the times, is a fact on which we may well pause. The significance is clear : the noble sensitiveness of the man has simply felt, a little before his fellows, the new "common wave of thought" which was to " lift mankind." The change in Euskin is the change of the century. From " Modern Painters " to " Fors Clavigera," — this is the great transition of the age. We began the Victorian era with art : with high theoretic

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enthusiasm, with romantic devotion to the past, with reverence for beauty, yet often with complacent content in our elaborate society. We end with social science : with a strenuous, practical earnestness, with consecration to human needs, with deepening humility. Beauty is not forgotten nor despised. It is ours, a precious possession forever. But it has led us to something beyond itself, — to the conception of that perfect state where alone it can be perfectly realized. It is because John Ruskin, more than any other one man in England, has felt these two influences of Art and Humanity, that we are eager to study him : it is because he has reflected them both in a nature clear, reverent, and true, and through words beautiful since sincere, that we trust our study of even a few selections from his writings to leave us richer than it found us, in thous^ht and life.

II. Chronological List Of The More Important Writ- Ings Of John Ruskin

The Poetry of Architecture. Papers contributed to the Architectural Magazine, 1837-1839. Signed Kata Phusin.

Modern Painters. Vol. I. By a Graduate of Oxford. 1843.

Modern Painters. Vol. 11. 1846.

The Seven Lamps of Architecture. By John Ruskin. 1849. (Henceforth Ruskin published under his own name.)

Poems. Collected 1859.

The Stones of Venice. 1851-1853.

Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds. (Concerning theories of the Church.) 1851.

Lectures on Architecture. 1853.

Modern Painters. Vol. III. 1856.

Modern Painters. Vol. IV. 1856.

1 The Political Economy of Art. 1857.

The Elements of Drawing. 1857.

The Two Paths. Lectures on Art and its Application to Decoration and Manufacture. 1860.

Modern Painters. Vol. V. 1860.

Unto This Last. 1860.

Munera Pulveris. 1863.

1 Lectures afterwards published under the title " A Joy For Ever."

Sesame and Lilies. 1865.

Ethics of the Dust. 1865.

The Crown of Wild Olive. 1866.

Time and Tide. Twenty-five Letters to a Working-Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work. 1867.

The Queen of the Air. A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm. 1869.

Lectures on Art, delivered before the University of Oxford. 1870.

FORS Clavigera. Monthly Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. 1871-1878.

Aratra Pentelici. On the Elements of Sculpture.

The Eagle's Nest. The Relation of Natural Science to Art. 1872.

Proserpina. Studies of Wayside Flowers. 1876.

Deucalion. Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves and Life of Stones. 1878.

Mornings in Florence. 1877.

St. Mark's Rest. 1877.

The Laws of Fesole. 1878.

The Art of England. Oxford Lectures. 1884.

The Pleasures of England. Oxford Lectures. 1885.

Our Fathers have told Us. Sketches of the History of Christendom for Boys and Girls who have been held at its Fonts. Part I. The Bible of Amiens. 1885.

Preterita. Scenes of my Past Life. 1887.