Section 1, Chapter 7, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version.Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses; the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order to be able to give birth to all his inner wealth. --Karl Marx, 1844
hen fame came to Ruskin in the 1850s, he made himself the center of a web of activities of which his books form only a part. First, he was a teacher: he held classes at F. D. Maurice's Working Men's College, tutored and lectured the rich, and wrote textbooks for an even larger audience, becoming in effect the drawing master of the nation. Second, he was a preserver: by undertaking to catalog the immense Turner bequest, containing over 19,000 sketches and paintings, he converted the works of England's greatest painter into an item of national wealth. Third, as a critic, patron, and friend, he encouraged the best young artists of his time with commissions and praise. In short he seized a peculiarly modern occasion -- the hunger of a dominant middle class for the culture previously reserved for the rich -- and forged a synthesis of roles even the Renaissance never knew. He was at once Vasari, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and one of the master craftsmen who trained Raphael or Giotto as well as a visionary and propagandist for art. But perhaps we might best call him a political economist of art, the fountainhead of a micro system that propagated beauty by means of money, ideas, and guidance. In many ways his activities acted out the proposals of his books and lectures, one great aim of which was to reconcile art and society in ways that would transform both. The social means of that transformation would rest on the imaginative extension of his economic micro system to the entire nation.
At its best, we might call Ruskin's patronage system a form of exalted Confucianism,
based on the idea of paternity. We see this aspect most clearly in the case
of his favorite proteges,
Edward and Georgiana [161/162] Burne-Jones,
whom he called his children, but always in some degree Ruskin's relations with
young artists seem to have imitated his own relations with his father: the artists
acted out his ambitions vicariously in return for encouragement and the right
to give advice. They often saw him, in turn, as a combination of schoolmaster
and fairy godfather, and to a young person of noble aspiration, the first meeting
with Ruskin could be the revelation to him of the Promised Land of his powers.
James Smetham, the painter, wrote, "Ruskin is a revelation of a new world
. . ., one of the very noblest creatures that ever breathed God's vital air
and the Chevalier sans peur and sans reproche who has cropped up like the flower
which blooms once in a hundred years." The young Burne-Jones wrote to a
friend, "Isn't that like a dream? Think of knowing Ruskin like an equal
and being called his dear boys. Oh! he is so good and kind -- better than his
books, which are the best books in the world." "Jones," Ruskin
exclaimed on first seeing the young man's sketches, "you're gigantic!"(Smetham's
letter is quoted in Derrick Leon, 277)
No charismatic style could be farther removed from that of Carlyle, and indeed it is tempting to see the two friends as opposite poles, answering opposite needs in the mid-Victorian generation seeking a principle of authority. One, gruffly and even harshly masculine, preached the gospel of heroism and sent his young men, so to speak, off to war. The other, who struck some as frail and feminine, preached the gospel of goodness and beauty, yet made people want just as strongly to sacrifice themselves to a noble ideal. In his influence on others, Ruskin called up enthusiasm rather than earnestness, as Walter Houghton has defined these terms, while Carlyle was the prophet of earnestness in an extreme form (264). And if Carlyle dramatized in his personality some of the fire of a Scottish Covenanter, Ruskin could seem (to the eye of the beholder) surrounded with the glow of knighthood -- or at least with that of gentility. Houghton remarks that earnestness is essentially Evangelical, while enthusiasm is essentially aristocratic. Unlike Carlyle, Ruskin usually pictures social perfection in aristocratic imagery, just as, in his own life, he fulfilled the dream not only of his parents but also of an entire class.
The class basis of Ruskin's appeal is indicated by the house that for a few years formed the nexus of his personal "economy." He returned to Denmark Hill at the end of his marriage, where he found life narrow and irksome, although it must have affected many visitors much as the country houses of his father's clients affected Ruskin as a boy. Callers [162/163] approached the mansion by means of a gravel drive past a lawn with an immense cedar of Lebanon; inside were agreeable footmen and servants and the lord and lady of the house -- she no Scottish captain's daughter but rather a "ruddy, dignified, richly dressed old gentlewoman . . . who knows Chamouni better than Camberwell." It was the young lord who showed the guest the family treasures, hanging and unhanging them from the wall and talking all the while. The tour was apt to end in John's study overlooking the garden -- a room thick, almost cluttered, with papers and sketches, precious manuscripts and specimens of shells and ferns, a museum within a museum that must have seemed, like his books, a collection of his best and happiest moments. James Smetham recalls speaking "about things I should be sorry to open my heart concerning to scarcely any; only of course he guided the conversation." This particular visitor left in a carriage (ordered by the elder Ruskin so that no damage would befall his sketches), feeling "in a sort of soft dream all the way home." The father bought the house and pictures, but the son filled the place with romance and forged its links with Lady Canning, the Marchioness of Waterford, or Broadlands, the home of Palmerston, but if the scene I have described represents the apex in the arc of the father's fortune, the same "fortune" in the son's hands flowed downward into unforeseeable regions. To Octavia Hill, an idealistic young woman trying to finance slum improvements, he said: "I have been given means, take some of them, live, set your mind at ease. But don't think I am doing you a personal favour, or a favour at all. I am but carrying on the work I was sent to do. I work for other generations." (Leon, 232-233, 235.)
The complex psychological dynamics of the system by which Ruskin, fresh upon the dissolution of his own marriage, tried to create for himself an extended household and an extended progeny, are best seen in his relations with Rossetti -- at once the oddest and most inevitable of his friendships. The relationship was inevitable, because Rossetti was a great English painter; it was odd because Rossetti's dissolute and self-destructive genius was as far from the piety of Ruskin's parents as the notorious household at Cheyne Walk was from Denmark Hill. Undoubtedly Rossetti appealed to Ruskin's susceptibility to sensuality -- or at least to the combination of spirituality and squalor that Ruskin associated with Italy -- and therefore to Ruskin's need to nourish and control. Rossetti was, according to Ruskin, "really not an Englishman, but a great Italian tormented in the Inferno of London; doing the best he could; but the 'could' shortened by the strength of his animal passions, without any trained control, or guiding faith" (XXXV, 486). Ruskin's [163/164] letters characteristically combined extravagant praise with persistent criticisms of details -- what Rossetti called his "pinpricks" -- which came close to causing their rupture. For Ruskin's beneficence always involved a trade-off. His general view that social relations should be cooperative instead of competitive found its correlative in a territorial pattern of friendships, according to which everyone receives claim to a distinct "superiority." It seems that Ruskin, emerging from the disaster of his marriage, needed all the more to establish control over others and immunity for himself -- a need that led him to failures in intimate friendship, to success in purely philanthropical relations, and to the belief in a paternal hierarchy as the only possible form of the Peaceable Kingdom. But another side of his authoritarianism was the real fear that the artistic passions were poor shepherds of themselves, a fear connected with his growing preoccupation in the 1850s with the evanescence of beauty. Indeed, it is hard not to see behind the images that close Modern Painters V -- the Hesperid standing in the twilight or the fading stain on Giorgione's wall -- the shape of the doomed Lizzie Siddal or the frescoes on the Oxford Dining Hall, executed on whitewashed brick. The Rossettis must have confirmed Ruskin's sense of an inherent fatality in the art gift as well as the sense, both anguished and hopeful, that he himself had the means to preserve life.
Both Ruskin's life and his books center in these years on the same issues-the interconnectedness of wealth and love and art and life. No document reveals more clearly the personal energies informing his work in the late 1850s than a letter he wrote to Rossetti by way of introduction, asking, among other things, for understanding in the face of his recent scandal:
You constantly hear a great many people saying I am very bad, and perhaps you yourself have been disposed lately to think me very good. I am neither the one nor the other. I am very self-indulgent, very proud, very obstinate, and very resentful; on the other side, I am very upright . . ., exceedingly fond of making people happy, and devotedly reverent to all true mental or moral power.... I believe I once had affections as warm as most people; but partly from evil chance, and partly from foolish misplacing of them, they have got tumbled down and broken to pieces....
Now you know the best and worst of me, and you may rely upon it it is the truth. If you hear people say I am utterly hard and cold, depend upon it it is untrue. Though I have no friendships and no loves, I cannot read the epitaph of the Spartans at Thermopylae with a steady voice to the end, and there is an old glove in one of my drawers that has lain there eighteen years, which is worth something to me yet. (Leon, 214-215.) [164/165]
Ruskin's candor shows through the elaborate self-presentation and the attention to effect. The letter proceeds in the manner of a contract, laying out the conditions of friendship along with a frank valuation of the goods offered; that valuation he then describes in terms of a mission: "I have a theory of life . . ., namely, that we are all sent into the world to be of such use to each other as we can, and also that my particular use is likely to be in the things I know something about -- that is to say, in matters connected with painting." With regard to Rossetti, he believes he can make him "more happy" by "enabling you to paint properly and keep your room in order." The poignance of the letter comes from the need to know what he was sent into the world to do and also, obviously, from the implicit trade-offs it defines: the power to do useful good replaces the missing "friendships and loves," the self-indulgence makes bearable the isolation at the core of his life, and the strength of feeling for persons is replaced by the strength of feeling for things redolent of persons (an inscription, a glove) -- persons, of course, from the past. The charge of coldness he answers with the assertion of his ability to give -- not as a lover or even explicitly as a friend, but as a benefactor, acting out in material terms the greatest of Christian virtues. Above all the letter proposes a kind of cultivation of feelings, but it does so at a different angle, so to speak, from that taken by Mill in the fifth chapter of his Autobiography. Mill, engaged in social questions, found himself pathetically ignorant of "the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed"; Ruskin was to make social action perform the aim of Mill's study of poetry, knowing that in a corrupt society even art fails as a perennial source.
I will argue in the next chapters that Ruskin's social thought has much to do with the proper management of affection -- as do also his practical activities as a political economist of art. His activities and his books are joined by three general aims. First, through his patronage, he creates a concurrent flow of money, affections, and works of art that publicly establish the metaphor of emotional expression as gift giving, the earning and bestowal of treasure. Second, the system is built on a paternal relationship that, like the Confucian system, contains the pattern of all social relationships -- teacher to pupil, ruler to subject, patron to workman, even husband to wife -- which of course is ultimately the system of Gothic building. In each act of help Ruskin becomes the perfect father he longed for: he tried to give to others the palms he could not earn himself, to control in others what he could not control himself, and to preserve in others what was continually dwindling in himself. Third, the private economy exists through time. Each pound spent is also a seed planted; by spending for the future, Ruskin can redeem the past. [165/166]
Leon, Derrick. Ruskin, the Great Victorian. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949.
Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
Landow, George P. "Ruskin as Victorian Sage: The Example of 'Traffic'" [full text ], in New Approaches to Ruskin. Ed. Robert Hewison. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Berger. John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. 1780-1950 New York: Columbia University Press. 1958.
Helsinger, Elizabeth. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l982.
Last modified December 2000