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John Ruskin

Ian Warren studies the 19th century Christian, artist and pioneer socialist

Of the familiar tribe of whiskery Victorian intellectuals, John Ruskin is probably now one of the least remembered. The centenary of his death therefore seems a reasonable opportunity to consider his life and thought a little, and see if this neglect is justified. Since Ruskin's published output was, in a typical Victorian way, prolific, and since I would like to minimize the inevitable cramming effect, I will concentrate on Ruskin's thought in the areas of religion, aesthetics and social reform. Although he was very keen to express opinions on much else besides, these three denote the contours of his creative mind best, providing at the same time the most enduring aspects of his work.

Religion is a good place to begin, since it is only possible to understand Ruskin in the context of his religious hinterland. Brought up the only child of middle-class Evangelical parents, his childhood and adolescence seem to have been occupied mainly with very close study of the Bible, reading of tracts, and digestion of sermons. While the literary effects of this can be seen clearly in the style of Ruskin's mature prose, he was also influenced profoundly at the psychological and emotional levels by the consequences of his Evangelical upbringing. A childhood story, quite possibly apocryphal, that he hectored an adult audience with the imperative “people, be good”, illustrates quite well the fundamental moral rigour of the typical Ruskinian approach. Ruskin was also stamped with a very real awareness of evil, which resurfaced in later life with the experience of terrifying hallucinations, while the inevitable puritanism completed the moulding of his personality. However, as his developing intellectual powers brought him into contact with wider influences he began to experience the classic Victorian crisis of faith, experienced also among others by Carlyle, Eliot, Swinburne, and Tennyson. After a decade of increasing doubt, he experienced what he called his “de-conversion” after attending a service in Turin in 1858. Now Ruskin turned on the Evangelicals with all the eloquence and scorn of one of the most accomplished stylists of his age, condemning what he considered the arrogance of a religion “which consists in an assured belief in the Divine forgiveness of all your sins, and the Divine correctness of all your opinions”. In spite of his agnosticism, however, Ruskin continued occasionally to pray and attend church, until in 1873 he finally returned to a less dogmatic kind of Christianity, which allowed for a wider and more generous faith. Through his last years periods of spiritual calm alternated with periods of illness in which he experienced the demonic visions already mentioned. Even though he had repudiated Evangelicalism intellectually, its psychological influence could not be escaped.

Ruskin's success as a writer was due initially to his works on artistic criticism. His first major work came in the 1840s with the publication of Modern Painters, a defence of the artist J.M.W. Turner in several volumes, in which the author's ignorance of aesthetic thought was compensated by a characteristic gusto and self-assurance. Modern Painters was later followed by The Seven Lamps of Architecture, where Ruskin elaborates further his artistic views. He had a sensitive appreciation of nature, a gift for seeing the world, which expressed itself mainly in spiritual terms. There was of course the puritanical dislike of sensuality, and also a concern that art must depict accurately the `facts' of nature, which Ruskin seems to have conceived in an idealistic rather than in a materialistic or physical sense. He considered a landscape to be possessed of the attributes of good and evil, provided by God for man's enjoyment or alternatively to encourage his correction. Ruskin was later to become a champion of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, whose cause he identified as his own, although his encouragement of these younger artists was mixed with a good deal of unwelcome interference. The intense moralism of Ruskin's aesthetic thought, based on an understanding which was more instinctive than intellectual, was perhaps what drew Ruskin to such radical conclusions when he came into contact with the social realities from which he had been screened during his early life. The art of Renaissance Italy, particularly that of Venice, made a deep impression on him when he experienced it during a continental tour in 1845. He became convinced of a fundamental relationship between great works of art and the society in which they are created, views reflected in the volumes entitled The Stones of Venice which appeared in the early 1850s.

Ruskin's mind could rarely be brought to concentrate on one field for very long, however, and in the late 1850s artistic criticism was supplanted as his primary concern, although, as I have suggested, the moral sensibility that had initially attracted him to this area continued to shape his outlook. During a period as a lecturer in a working men's college, Ruskin became more fully aware of the social inequalities produced by Britain's laissez-faire economic system. Experience of the poverty in which many Britons existed outraged him, and in a series of essays published in the Cornhill Magazine, he mounted a venomous attack on the follies of unfettered competition. Anyone familiar with the intellectual predilections of the Victorian age will appreciate that this was never likely to be a popular move, and so a storm of complaints forced Thackeray, the magazine's editor, to put a stop to Ruskin's contributions. They were later published in a volume entitled Unto This Last, which the author considered his best book.

It displays Ruskin's stinging but controlled contempt for the notion of “economic man” advocated by the tradition of classical economic theory, and expressed most recently by John Stuart Mill. Ruskin's argument, again essentially moral and poetic rather than deductive is summed up in his famous maxim “there is no wealth but life”. His political and social ideas were developed further in Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workers and Labourers of Great Britain , in which a modified form of the authoritarian political thought of Ruskin's mentor, Carlyle, is present alongside some more progressive proposals, many of them looking forward to the twentieth century and the creation of the welfare state. Although initially considered highly eccentric by most of Ruskin's contemporaries, Unto This Last was later highly influential among the early British Labour Party, also proving a great inspiration to an ambitious young Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi.

The great success finally achieved by Ruskin's writings, lectures and essays brought some ease to a largely unhappy personal life. Partly constrained by the effects of his upbringing, he was unable to develop a stable relationship with a mature woman. His affections tended to oscillate between arrogant aloofness and the very worst kind of infantile romanticism, and his marriage was a failure, annulled on grounds of non-consummation after six years. Ruskin was pathetically only able to maintain affection for pre- adolescent girls, such as Rose de la Touche, with whom Ruskin pursued a long, tortuous and ultimately disastrous relationship, ended by the death of the by now insane Rose at 26. Ruskin himself suffered intellectual decline during the 1870s, and experienced his first mental collapse in 1878, when he murdered his cat, imagining the poor creature to be Satan. Forced to resign his Slade Professorship at Oxford, he retired to Brantwood, his house near Coniston in Cumbria, where in 1889 he suffered his final decline and the beginning of a final eleven year period of dementia. Ruskin was by this time a national institution, visited by admirers keen to photograph the now silenced prophet, though he, no longer aware of his fame, found his only solace in his fossil collection. At his death in 1900 he was one of the most celebrated writers of the age, lauded by Tolstoy and Proust, hailed by a whole generation of figures on the British Left. The legend had become detached from the man.

Since Ruskin's death he has suffered something of an eclipse. His moralising, his stylistic brilliance and his polymathic interests tend to arouse suspicion nowadays, perhaps not without reason, while in the current intellectual climate of almost absolute scepticism the prospects of a revival do not seem good. With the attack on the values of welfarism over the past generation Ruskin's legacy can look even more of a curious anachronism, although in the canting hubris of a new age of improvement we could do well to ask, as he did, why our own prosperity seems to require the impoverishment of so many others. Yet perhaps Ruskin's greatest value to us is his ability to articulate so well those intense, immediate feelings of delight in beauty, pity and rage at suffering, and the assertion of essential humanity against narrowly economistic or scientific explanations of our existence.

Ian Warren is a first year History student.

Last modified: 25th November 2005