The Age of Tennyson

by Hugh Walker

John Ruskin is an author whose multifarious activity makes it somewhat difficult to classify him. He has written on art, literature, morals, economics, society, in short, on nearly everything. He has written verse as well as prose, and the unwise enthusiasm of disciples has lately gathered together the rhymes of his youth. If however we regard Ruskin’s work as a whole, we see that its principal motive is critical, and that his criticism is mainly directed to art. This is the case with what still remains his greatest work, Modern Painters. The first volume of this book, magnificently illustrated, excellently printed, and written with an elaborate splendour of style almost unexampled in English, was published in 1843 with the simple inscription, ‘by a Graduate of Oxford.’ The fifth and last volume did not appear until 1860. The Modern Painters is easily first among all the English works that treat of painting. Its full merit can hardly be appreciated until we realise how daringly original it was; and to realise this is difficult, because of the very success of Ruskinism. The young graduate of Oxford preached a new gospel, and set himself in opposition at once to the established canons of art-criticism, and to the established philosophy of his time. In the former convention reigned supreme. ‘The man who in the pre-Ruskinian era was the high priest among connoisseurs was Sir George Beaumont; and Sir George, admirable man as he was in other respects, when he looked at a landscape, asked, not whether it was true to the facts of nature, but whether it accorded with the fictions of convention. “But where is your brown tree?” he asked of Constable when that painter gave in his adherence to the then revolutionary course of proclaiming that trees were green.’ Ruskin too proclaimed that trees were green, and no one has done more than he to vindicate nature’s right to be what she is. It was their championship of truth and their earnestness that drew him towards the Pre-Raphaelites, and made him their formidable and efficient champion in Pre-Raphaelitism (1851), as well as in many detached passages of his writings.

While Ruskin was elaborating and completing his Modern Painters, he was likewise engaged upon works bearing on the kindred art of architecture. His chief writings upon it are The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853). His appointment in 1869 as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford greatly stimulated his activity. His reputation had then reached nearly its highest point. He interpreted his duties seriously, and threw himself with ardour into the work. Quite a number of his smaller publications—among them Aratra Pentelici, The Eagle’s Nest, Ariadne Florentina and Love’s Meinie—are the outcome of his tenure of the professorship. His second tenure of office, beginning in 1883, produced The Art of England and The Pleasures of England. He moreover made himself an art-guide to travellers in Italy; and hence his Mornings in Florence and St. Mark’s Rest.

This great body of art-criticism is all bound together by a few fundamental principles; and it is perhaps his fidelity to principle, hardly less than the magnificence of his style, that has won for Ruskin a popularity denied to other critics of art. It will be useful to regard his critical work from two points of view: its rise in negation and opposition, and its issue in positive doctrine.

Ruskin, like every man who has had much to teach, begins by being a protestant. He finds that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and his effort is first to uproot what is bad, and secondly to encourage and foster what is good. The objects of his dislike have been so often denounced by him that all know what they are. Materialism, utilitarianism, a sordid industry merely concerned with the accumulation of wealth, and caring little either for its use or for the quality of the thing produced—these have been the objects of Ruskin’s life-long hatred. The merits of his method of dealing with them must be touched on later; here it is enough to notice that the motive for his work on art is the pressing need to find some foundation, other than these, for the beautiful and good. Though Ruskin was not of the Oxford movement, he was stimulated by much the same sympathies and dislikes that produced it; and it is interesting to note how Pre-Raphaelitism in art, Ruskin’s art-criticism, and the poetic and religious movements of the middle of the century, all show various forms of the same revolt against the deification of matter.

Starting with this opposition to mere material utility, Ruskin is careful always to define art so as to bring out its spiritual significance. ‘All great Art,’ he says, ‘is Praise.’ To him, art and religion, or art and morality, are not so much different things as different phases of the same thing. Beauty is measured, not by economic utility, or capacity to satisfy a material want, but rather by transcendental utility, or capacity to satisfy a spiritual want. In proportion as it embodies the conceptions of a great spirit, art is great. The artist ought to be faithful to nature, but mere imitation is not enough. Greatness consists in the something which the artist does not exactly add to nature, but rather educes from nature, the something which the gifted eye only can see, but which the gifted hand can make visible to others less splendidly endowed.

In his application of these principles Ruskin is sometimes capricious, sometimes, perhaps, presumptuous, and very often dogmatic. His caprice is visible in his changes of opinion. We find judgments pronounced in one edition of his works with the confidence of omniscience, and retracted in another with frank self-contempt, but with unabated confidence. The reasons for the one opinion seem, as a rule, just as convincing as the reasons for the other; and while all men may legitimately change their views, frequency of change ought to beget a certain amount of diffidence. That Ruskin’s criticism is sometimes presumptuous follows from its extreme confidence. He discovers the meaning of every stone in a building, and of every line and colour in a painting, in a manner hardly granted to mere man; for, after all, the most sympathetic of critics cannot enter into another man’s mind, nor can the most learned completely realise a past age. This dogmatism, though irritating, is generally harmless enough; but it is not so when it results in underrating an artist like Michael Angelo, because he will not fit into the preconceived theory, and in undue exaltation of the comparatively little, because they sometimes furnish just the illustrations needed.

From the same root springs the cognate fault of the intensely subjective character of Ruskin’s criticism. In a celebrated passage on the Jura in the Seven Lamps, after an eloquent description of the scene, the writer imagines it transported to some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. In an instant it loses all its impressiveness—to him. The reason is that the element of human association is lost; and he instantly jumps to the conclusion that this element is an essential part of the charm of nature to all. Few will dispute that such association is to many an important factor in the delight in nature. But this has not been a universal feeling. Some travellers, like Darwin on the Cordilleras or in the Brazilian forests, have felt, in the midst of untrodden solitude and unbroken desolation, a sense of the sublime nowhere else to be experienced.

That which, in spite of faults, gives Ruskin’s art-criticism its superiority over all rivals is, in the first place, the fulness of knowledge whence it springs, and, in the second place, the magnificence of the style in which it finds expression. Ruskin’s continental travels in early manhood gave him an acquaintance with the best models, such as could not otherwise be acquired. He was moreover himself an artist, capable of good and accurate, if not of great work, and aware of what is possible and what is not possible in art; and his steady confidence in the existence of an inner meaning and a serious purpose in all art worthy of the name saved him from the thinness of substance and the dilettante trifling too apt to be seen in writings of that class.

But it is, first of all, beauty of style that the name of Ruskin suggests. His prose has been lauded as the finest in the English language. The English language contains so much that the absolutely finest is not easy to discover; nor will men ever agree as to the relative merits of simple and of ornate styles. There is not a little to be said for Oliver Goldsmith, even as against John Ruskin. The latter writes what is known as ‘poetic prose;’ and in doing so, though he is no mere imitator, he follows in the footsteps of men like De Quincey, who sought to obtain by prose effects commonly associated with poetry. This was in part a reversion, but a reversion with a difference. The eighteenth century had evolved a clear, direct, simple structure of sentence, well adapted to appeal to the understanding. It was not unfitted too, as many passages in Addison and Steele and other acknowledged masters prove, for an appeal to the emotions. Nevertheless, this was its weak side; and just as the lucid, bright, highly intellectual verse of the eighteenth century gave place to poetry more emotional and more varied, so the prose of the eighteenth century had to receive its complement in a prose more ambitious in design, more complex in structure and richer in tone. It was romanticism overflowing, as it were, the bounds of verse. The change was not so much the introduction of something wholly new as the grafting of old tendencies on a new stock. The complex structure and involved harmonies and wealth of imagination which the new writers hungered for were to be found in the prose of Milton and of Jeremy Taylor. On the other hand, the type of sentence established by the eighteenth century writers was too sound to be set aside. It remained the basis, while the older magnificence and daring were brought back and wedded to it.

Of this type of poetic prose Ruskin is the acknowledged master. Others, like De Quincey, have rivalled, and perhaps equalled his best passages. But excellent passages in De Quincey are much rarer than in Ruskin. The latter has built upon a broader foundation. All the field of nature and great part of the field of knowledge have been his. Ornate prose tends to be descriptive; and in his descriptions Ruskin has, over the mere literary man, the great advantage which the study of art gives. He had been educated to observe, and he naturally saw more than others who, even if they possessed equal sensibility, had less of this special culture.