A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

JOHN RUSKIN (1819–1900)

1. His Life. Ruskin was born in London, of Scottish parentage, and was educated privately before he went to Oxford. During his boyhood he often traveled with his father, whose business activities involved journeys both in England and abroad. After leaving the university Ruskin, who did not need to earn a living, settled down to a literary career. He was not long in developing advanced notions on art, politics, economics, and other subjects. In art he was in particular devoted to the cause of the landscape-painter Turner, and in social and economic theories he was an advocate of an advanced form of socialism. To the present generation his ideas appear innocuous, or even inevitable, but by the public of his own day they were received with shocked dismay. At first the only notice he received was in the jeers of his adversaries; but gradually his fame spread as he freely expounded his opinions in lectures and pamphlets, as well as in his longer books. In 1869 he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford. Illness, however, which was aggravated by hard work and mental worries, led him to resign (1879) after a few years; and though shortly afterward (1883) he resumed the post, it had at last to be abandoned. He retired to Brantwood, on Coniston Water, in the Lake District, where he lived till his death, his later years being clouded by disease and despair.

2. His Works. Ruskin’s works are of immense volume and complexity. They were often issued in a haphazard fashion, and this makes it all the more difficult to follow the order of their publication. For a start he plunged into what turned out to be the longest of his books, Modern Painters, the first volume of which was issued in 1843 and the fifth and last in 1860. This work, beginning as a thesis in defense of the painting of Turner, develops Ruskin’s opinions on many other subjects. The first volume was not long in attracting notice, chiefly owing to its sumptuous style, which was of a kind unknown in English for centuries. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) is a shorter and more popular work, which once again expounds his views on artistic matters. The Stones of Venice (1851–53), in four volumes, is considered to be his masterpiece both in thought and style. It is less diffuse than Modern Painters; there is a little more plan in the immense array of discursive matter; and the luxuriance of the style is somewhat curtailed. His other writings are of a miscellaneous kind, and comprise The Two Paths (1859), a course of lectures; Unto this Last (1860), a series of articles on political economy which began to appear in The Cornhill Magazine, but were stopped owing to their hostile reception; Munera Pulveris (1862), also an unfinished series of articles on political economy, published in Fraser’s Magazine, and also withdrawn owing to their advanced views; The Crown of Wild Olive (1864), a series of addresses; Sesame and Lilies (1865), a course of three lectures, which is now the most popular of his shorter works; and Præterita, which first began to appear in 1855, and which is a kind of autobiography.

3. His Style. Ruskin himself often deplored the fact that people read him more for his style than for his creed. His views, which he argued with power and sincerity, must in time give way to others; many of them are now self-evident, so rapid sometimes is the progress of the human intellect; but his prose style, an art as delicate and beautiful as any of those he spent his life in supporting, will long remain a delectable study. For its like we must return to the prose of Milton and Clarendon, and refine and sweeten the manner of these early masters to reproduce the effect that Ruskin achieves. In its less ornate passages Ruskin’s diction is marked by a sweet and unforced simplicity; but his pages abound in purple passages, which are marked by sentences of immense length, carefully punctuated, by a gorgeous march of image and epithet, and by a sumptuous rhythm that sometimes grows into actual blank verse capable of scansion. In his later books Ruskin to a certain extent eschewed his grandiose manner, and wrote the language of the Bible, modernized and made supple; but to the very end he was always able to rise to the lyrical mood and fill a page with a strong and sonorous sentence.

The paragraph given below, it will be noticed, is one sentence. Observe the minute care given to the punctuation, the aptness of epithet, and the rhythm, which in several places is so regular that the matter can be scanned like poetry.

Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see the orient colours change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen through clefts in gray swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils of the mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fall from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight.

The Stones of Venice