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Beginning with an exploration of the rich tradition of European art that stimulated his imagination, and to which he responded in his own skilful drawings, Ruskin and his Contemporaries follows the uniquely visual dimension of his thinking from the æsthetic, religious and political foundations laid by his parents to his difficult personal and critical relationship with Turner, and his encounters with the art and architecture of Venice. Victor Hugo makes a surprising appearance as Ruskin develops his ideas on the relationship between art and society. Ruskin’s role as a contemporary art critic is explored in two chapters on Holman Hunt, one focussing on the Pre-Raphaelite’s The Awakening Conscience, one examining his later Triumph of the Innocents. The development of Ruskin’s role as a social critic is traced through his teaching at the London Workingmen’s College and his foundation of the Guild of St George, a reforming society that continues to this day. Oscar Wilde came under his personal influence, as did Octavia Hill, a founder of the National Trust. The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin are shown to have been deeply unsettling to Ruskin’s worldview. The book concludes with a demonstration of the profound influence of the Paradise Myth on all of Ruskin’s writings, followed by an exploration of the concept of cultural value that shows why Ruskin’s ruling principle: ‘There is no wealth but Life’ is as relevant to the twenty-first century as it was to the nineteenth. The print edition of the whole book is available now at £29.99 ISBN 978 1 84368 168 7 For more information visit www.pallasathene.co.uk
INTRODUCTION
1 Half way through his literary career, Ruskin stopped writing books. His rate of literary production actually increased, but after 1860 his published writings would take the form of collections of articles, lectures, pamphlets, letters to newspapers and other public interventions. From 1871 onwards his monthly newsletter, Fors Clavigera, became a stream of consciousness that anticipates Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Once he had started to publish on his own behalf with the help of his former pupil, George Allen, part-publication became increasingly the norm: his late guidebooks to Florence and Venice, for instance, and his botanical and geological studies. These parts eventually would be bound between hard covers, but reading them in that form – and still more in the majestic binding of Cook and Wedderburn’s Library Edition – distances you from the humble informality of the original simple cardboard covers. Now that I am more than half way through my own literary career, I have decided to follow Ruskin’s example. Ruskin and his Contemporaries is a compilation. It is constructed from disparate sources, some published, some unpublished, and some entirely new. Some are articles in collections that I or colleagues have edited, and I am grateful to my fellow editors for their commissions. Many chapters began life as papers given to the Ruskin Seminar at Lancaster University, a wonderful place to try out ideas. These are joined by lectures commissioned and delivered xiv
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elsewhere, including from my time in 2000 as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford.
I can see why Ruskin came to prefer the short form, especially the lecture. As his message became more urgent he sought an immediacy of communication, a direct dialogue with his audience. By all reports, he became a charismatic lecturer, improvising as he spoke, and enhancing his delivery with visual aids such as the huge lecture-diagrams he prepared; by painting over the glass of a Turner watercolour to demonstrate the effects of industrial pollution; or placing a hand-plough on the demonstration table in order to talk about engraving. The lecture became his mode of address. As he wrote in the introduction to one of his part-publications, Love’s Meinie, in 1881: ‘I still write habitually in a manner suited for oral delivery, and imagine myself speaking to my pupils, if ever I am happily thinking in myself ’ (25.14). There is a great deal to be said for the lecture as literary form. The ‘academic hour’ – which is supposed to last fifty minutes – imposes the concentration of length, the need to construct the arc of an argument, and the demand for clarity from an audience that has no text in front of them, and so cannot turn back to see what might have been meant. It is also necessary to keep your audience awake, with provocations to retain their attention and jokes that open their faces – and therefore their minds – to new ideas. Modern technology supplies increasingly sophisticated visual aids, but it is still the words that count. The lecture encourages a sprightlier form of discourse than in a journal article, or a solemn chapter in a book. xv
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Nonetheless, Ruskin and his Contemporaries is a book, constructed like a book. All the material has been revised, to smooth out otherwise unavoidable repetitions, to refer forwards and backwards, and to incorporate entirely new material. The organisation is chronological, beginning with an overview that was originally written as the introduction to my first book, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (1976), but not used. That book’s title suggested the essence of my approach to Ruskin as someone with a unique ability to link word and image, so that each carries the other. The chapter is also biographical, and the chronological approach that follows allows us to observe the formation of Ruskin’s mind under the influence of his mother’s Evangelicalism and his father’s æsthetic tastes and Ultra-Tory politics. His father’s wealth created the circumstances in which he was able to develop two relationships that influenced his whole life: with the art and personality of J. M. W. Turner, and the place that is Venice. Not counting his parents, nine of the seventeen chapters are shaped by Ruskin’s relationship with an individual. Holman Hunt is visited twice, though at very different points in his and Ruskin’s lives. Three relationships are adversarial – with Victor Hugo, Henry Cole, and Charles Darwin. The chapter on Darwin was especially written, because it is impossible to write about Ruskin and science without coming to terms with Darwin. The fact that Ruskin was unable to do so, I believe, is one of the reasons for his despair, and ultimate insanity. His relationships with Holman Hunt, Octavia Hill and Oscar Wilde were shaped by Ruskin’s critical patronage. In the case of Octavia Hill, as of Kate Greenaway, who is not discussed here, there was also an element of unrequited love on their parts. Ruskin’s own frustrated passion for Rose La Touche runs as a xvi
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thread throughout the book. I hope that Oscar Wilde’s complete exclusion from the Library Edition has been compensated for here. Ruskin, in his own impossibly idiosyncratic way, also had relationships with contemporary institutions. Indeed, he founded some. This calls for a discussion of ideas as well as personalities: his belief in the value of drawing, which links the London Working Men’s College to the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, and his utter abhorrence of utilitarianism and economic liberalism, in opposition to which he set up the Guild of St George. It is a tribute to the tenacity of Ruskin’s ideas that both the Guild of St George and the Ruskin School of Art survive into the 21st century, and are flourishing. Discussion of Ruskin’s ideas calls for what might be called a more ‘theoretical’ approach, and in the last two chapters I discuss, first of all, the Paradise myth that became the ruling idea of Ruskin and Venice: ‘The Paradise of Cities’ (2010). In my conclusion, I bring Ruskin into the 21st century, by showing the influence of his ideas on work that I have done and arguments that I have made in opposition to the ruling economic and institutional orthodoxies of our own age. Ruskin is still our contemporary.
Fifty years of writing about Ruskin means that I have accumulated many personal debts. I hope that I will be forgiven for not listing them all here, and refer you to the acknowledgments in Ruskin on Venice: ‘The Paradise of Cities’ (2010), which describes the progress of my Ruskin studies. I would, however, like to thank Alan Davis for his scrupulous reading of and stimulating xvii
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response to drafts of this book, the designer of the jacket, Geoffrey Winston, and my publisher Alexander Fyjis-Walker for adding me to his roll of Ruskin writers. Lastly, I thank my wife, Erica, for seeing the point of it all. College House Cottage, 2018
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