Seven lamps of Ruskinism
As we prepare to celebrate the bicentenary of John Ruskin (1819–1900), Matthew Sturgis finds that his teachings on art, literature, politics and social reform remain strikingly relevant today
Born 200 years ago, polymath John Ruskin has much to teach us, believes Matthew Sturgis
John Ruskin was one of the truly great figures of the Victorian age, prodigious in his energy, his interests and his achievements. Although he established his reputation as an art critic, championing the work of Turner and, later, the PreRaphaelites, he ranged over numerous other fields, making important contributions to topics as diverse as Gothic architecture, Venetian history, travel writing, drawing practice, watercolour painting, geology, ecology, economics, building conservation, penal reform, universal education, welfare provision, handicraft, religion and Classical mythology. (Great British Tastemakers Country Life, December 11, 2013)
‘Tolstoy saluted him for being among “those rare men who think with their hearts”’
he wrote interesting fairy stories, moderate poetry and a highly unconventional autobiography, Praeterita. The intoxicating eloquence of his prose was admired by both henry James and oscar Wilde. he might profess himself a ‘Violent Tory of the old school’, with a firm belief in established hierarchies, but his ideas were both radical and subversive. Tolstoy considered him one of the most remarkable figures of all time, saluting him for being among ‘those rare men who think with their hearts’.
We are now on the brink of his bicentenary. Ruskin was born on February 8, 1819, the only child of rich and indulgent parents, and he lived a remarkably full and productive life, troubled only at the very end by bouts of depression and madness.
The years since his death, in 1900, may have diminished his fame, but they have not obliterated it. indeed, ever since the early20th-century reaction against Victorianism plunged him into an ill-deserved obscurity, he has been slowly re-emerging into the light.
To begin with, his prodigious output rather counted against him. his numerous books, pamphlets, lectures and letters were gathered up into a daunting posthumous edition of 39 green-bound volumes. it was perhaps hard to know where to begin—and, as a result, many people never did.
For an age delighting in anecdotal biography and prurient gossip, Ruskin’s disastrous, and unconsummated, marriage to Effie Gray—together with his sentimental enthusiasm for young girls—made him seem a distant figure, either creepy or absurd.
however, his genius was never entirely forgotten. his short tract Unto this Last (1862) famously inspired Gandhi to change his life—and the world along with it. it was Ruskin’s ideas that directly inspired the creators of the British welfare state. he has always appealed to a few discerning souls. Proust revered his writings. kenneth Clark admired his paintings—ruskin was an accomplished draughtsman and painter of watercolours, producing more than 2,000 over the course of his life.
in more recent years, he has been blessed with a number of able and dedicated literary advocates, Robert hewison, kevin Jackson and Tim hilton the most prominent among them. it is to be hoped that his bicentenary
will draw him back into an even sharper focus; certainly, the year looks promising, with numerous publications and events already accessible or planned (see ‘Town and Country’ for a summary of Ruskin celebrations taking place in 2019).
Ruskin’s ideas are certainly needed today. Many of the topics that engaged him remain strikingly relevant: the threat to the environment posed by industrialisation, the limits of laissez-faire capitalism, the aesthetic element in modern life and the need for universal care and universal education.
And, in investigating such subjects, Ruskin is a constantly engaging intellectual companion, by turns furious and funny. He wrote with the eloquence of genius. He was not, of course, always consistent or coherent in his views. Indeed, he once declared: ‘For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times.’ Nevertheless, his ideas are always wonderfully stimulating and, quite often, wonderfully right.
Here, to guide you into the bicentennial year, are Seven Ruskinian ‘Lamps’ to light the way.
Among his constant social themes was the importance of human relations in a capitalist system that seemed fixed solely on heedless financial gain; he ended his polemic Unto This Last with the ringing lines: ‘I desire, in closing… to leave this one great fact clearly stated. THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy and of admiration. That country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.’
Ruskin placed huge emphasis on beauty as a central element in life. He believed it could be found in Nature—and art that truthfully recorded Nature—and that, in both instances, it was a reflection of the Divine. This ‘ethical’ dimension was never restrictive or didactic.
Ruskin’s short tract Unto this Last famously inspired Gandhi to change his life–and the world’
‘You were made for enjoyment,’ Ruskin told the readers of Stones of Venice (1851– 53), ‘and the world was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to be pleased with them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to other account than mere delight. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.’
To appreciate beauty, however, required the development of one’s faculties; in Modern
Painters (1843), he suggested: ‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.’
Ruskin’s engagement with the natural world was both intense and remarkably original. He delighted, for instance, in the ‘common house fly’ as the perfect type of free creature: ‘There is no courtesy in him; he does not care whether it is king or clown whom he teases; and in every step of his swift mechanical march, and in every pause of his resolute observation, there is one and the same expression of perfect egotism, perfect independence and selfconfidence, and conviction of the world’s having been made for flies.’
Ruskin also believed that every sort of weather had its attraction. This has led to him being credited with an entirely apocryphal quote, popular on the internet, extolling the various ‘different kinds of good weather’: ‘sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating’ and so on.
What Ruskin actually said, in a lecture on the work of the English watercolourist A. V. Copley Fielding, delivered in 1883 and published the year after, was that, ‘for Copley Fielding and for me, there was no such thing as bad weather, but only different kinds of pleasant weather—some indeed inferring the exercise of a little courage and patience’.
Although Ruskin understood that ‘punishment’ was ‘the last and least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime’, he was also a supporter of capital punishment and remained unimpressed by the argument that innocent men and women might occasionally be executed in error under such a system. ‘It is only rogues who have a violent objection to being hanged, and only abettors of rogues who would desire anything else for them,’ he wrote in Fors Clavigera, letters addressed to working men in the 1870s. Honest men don’t in the least mind being hanged occasionally by mistake, so only that the general principle of the gallows be justly maintained; and they have the pleasure of knowing that the world they leave is positively minded to cleanse itself of the human vermin with which they have been classed by mistake. The contrary movement —so vigorously progressive in modern days —has its real root in a gradually increasing conviction on the part of the English nation that they are all vermin.’
Ruskin knew not to over-plan his holidays. In Elements of Drawing (1857), his recipe for a perfect walking tour of the Lake District was ‘take knapsack and stick, walk towards the hills by short day’s journeys— ten or twelve miles a day—taking a week from
‘There is no courtesy in [the common fly]; he does not care whether it is king or clown whom he teases’
some starting-place sixty or seventy miles away: sleep at the pretty little wayside inns, or the rough village ones; then take the hills as they tempt you, following glen or shore as your eye glances or your heart guides’.
Ruskin had profound views on how to abate the fury and frustration that one can feel at contemporary political events. As he explained to Charles Eliot Norton, in November 1860: ‘When I begin to think at all I get into states of disgust and fury at the way the mob is going on (meaning by mob, chiefly Dukes, crown princes, and such like persons) that I choke; and have to go to the British Museum and look at Penguins till I get cool. I find Penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a Penguin.’
The national need for Penguins—and for Ruskin—has, surely, never been greater.
At the close of one year, Ruskin wrote to a friend wishing her ‘a sweet Year—not too New’—on the grounds that the old years had been very good to him and he ‘shouldn’t like this one to be very different and altogether New’. For 2019, however, he might have been prepared to make an exception: the travails of the past 12 months would surely persuade him to wish his all friends a very New Year.