A century after the death of John Ruskin — on Jan. 20, 1900 — it is abundantly clear that there never has been another art critic like him.
In the span of 81 years, he published more than 40 books plus several hundred lectures and articles that had acknowledged influence on men as different as Ezra Pound and Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Proust and William Morris, George Bernard Shaw and Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy and Clement Atlee.
Moreover, Ruskin began the campaign for the preservation of Venice; established a drawing school at Oxford University; founded an art museum; offered a plan to control flooding of three European rivers; purified a polluted spring; conducted a course in road-mending; swept streets in a London slum; opened a tea shop; and established St. George’s Guild, an agrarian community intended to combat British industrialism.
Even so, in the early 1960s, another prominent art critic, Kenneth Clark, found that practically nothing was left of Ruskin’s reputation beyond “a malicious interest in the story of his private life,” which included gossip about impotence, a morbid (but innocent) passion for young girls and several crippling attacks of madness.
Just five years ago Clark’s assessment was underlined by “Modern Painters,” an opera by David Lang that contrasted the private and public Ruskin, dwelling more on personal tragedy than universal achievement. And even today, with a vast commemorative exhibition set to open in March at the Tate Gallery in London, books about him still are easier to find than his own extraordinary writings.
So why should anyone read him?
First, because he is the only critic of art in English whose work achieves the status of the finest literature. He wrote in a letter to his father, “There is the strong instinct in me — which I cannot analyse — to draw and describe the things I love . . . a sort of instinct like that for eating or drinking.” The writing in his first book, the five-volume “Modern Painters,” is often ecstatic description of the sort that makes it heir to William Wordsworth’s nature poetry.
Yes, it digresses, ranging over all sorts of topics apart from its primary one, the paintings of J.M.W. Turner. But Ruskin invents little. Even his wildest exultation is rooted in the painstakingly close observation he developed as a child. Ruskin retained what he called “innocence of the eye,” a condition comparable to a “blind man suddenly gifted with sight.” And he united this capacity to take in visual data purely, unimpeded by meaning, to the sharpest faculty for reason and the most powerful command of style.
A drawback for most readers in the 20th Century has been that, like Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, Ruskin was also a moralist. The aesthete and philistine he loathed with equal fervor, for each grasped only half of an ideal he saw in its life-enhancing wholeness. “So far from Art’s being immoral,” he wrote, “in the ultimate power of it, nothing but Art is moral; Life without Industry is sin, and Industry without Art, brutality.”
Later volumes of “Modern Painters” show Ruskin moving from the power of nature to the frailty of man, from art to society. A falling away from the Evangelicism that his fanatical mother had forced on him had much to do with it. He found “what message I have given is all wrong: has to be all re-said another way, and is, so said, almost too terrible to be serviceable.” The 18 years required to write “Modern Painters” had allowed the development of a social conscience.
In “The Stones of Venice,” the most eloquent monument to a city in the English language, Ruskin states that architecture is an accurate index of a nation’s temper and such temper determines its fate. Here he champions Gothic architecture as an expression of the noblest impulses in man. When Ruskin elaborates the theme in “On the Nature of Gothic,” Frank Lloyd Wright will take from it ideas of “organic form” and William Morris will be moved to create a society at once anti-industrial, agrarian and communal.
In “Stones” Ruskin asked, “Was the carver happy while he was about it?” And in subsequent works, that question led to a direct assault on the social and economic structure of England. Ruskin wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning that he had come to see “the great fact that great Art is of no real use to anybody but the next great Artist; that it is wholly invisible to people in general — for the present — and to get anybody to see it, one must begin at the other end, with moral education of the people, and physical, and so I’ve to turn myself quite upside down.”
The result of such turning was “Unto This Last,” a collection of essays in which he attempted to humanize capitalism and its concept of value. There, in a style that thundered with the righteousness of an Old Testament prophet, Ruskin proposed state education, vocational training, Social Security benefits, public housing and minimum wage laws. For his trouble, he was denounced as “a mad governess” and his editor William Thackeray was forced to discontinue serial publication of the essays.
Yet Shaw wrote: “(Ruskin) knocked the first great hole in classic economics by showing that its value basis was an inhuman and unreal basis, and could not without ruin to civilization be accepted as a basis for society at all.” Gandhi, who made a translation of “Unto This Last” into Gujarati, said “that book marked the turning point in my life.” And the modern Labor Party in England was born when 29 independent politicians vowed that Ruskin’s book of essays was the text that had most profoundly influenced their thought.
It was also the last completely sane book Ruskin would write. His paternal grandfather had gone mad and committed suicide in 1817. Ruskin was probably himself a lifelong manic-depressive, so he suffered no abrupt collapse or even a steady decline. But when the young Henry James visited Ruskin nearly a decade after “Unto This Last,” he found its author “scared back by the grim face of reality into the world of unreason and illusion, and that he wanders there without a compass and a guide — or any light save the fitful flashes of his beautiful genius.”
Still he attempted, through lectures of tremendous energy and invective, to Christianize and socialize England. Such attempts were a preface to “Fors Clavigera,” a series of monthly letters addressed to workmen and laborers. “I live in chronic fury,” Ruskin confessed to a friend, “only to be at all relieved in its bad fits by studied expression.” The expression of “Fors Clavigera” varies from what Carlyle called “lightning bolts” to eerie, otherworldly calm. The fiercest writing came in “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” an apocalyptic denunciation unmatched in English literature.
Such was Ruskin’s gift of observation, however, that even this poetic conceit was based in fact. A later survey of weather conditions in England indicated his visions of sunlessness, smoke and cold were actual, not imagined. And though they served as a means to discharge his remaining wrath, allowing the eventual creation of a lyrical, sweet-tempered autobiography, “Praeterita,” they were, too, a final virtuoso display of his powers of seeing.
“I went mad because nothing came of my work,” Ruskin once wrote. But his intellectual biographer, John D. Rosenberg, writing in the 1960s, declared “it would require a revolution to undo the revolution which (`Unto This Last’) brought about.” And in his own time, prime minister William Gladstone, whom Ruskin regularly ridiculed, wanted to make him Poet Laureate and was dissuaded only by the the fact that the incapacitated Ruskin could scarcely sign his name.
Why should anyone read him?
Because he was a giant, who for all his prejudices, oversights, contrariness and affliction, wrote the truth in prose we have yet to live up to.
