20 January: Boreham on John Ruskin

Truth and Beauty
Versatility has to pay the penalty of its own catholicity. The reflection is suggested by the circumstance that it was on this date in the year 1900, that John Ruskin passed from us. There are dangers attached to being many-sided. If a man confines their attention to one subject, or even to one set of subjects, he will have his admirers and he will have his detractors but he will not have admirers who detract or detractors who admire. But when a man takes his stand as Ruskin did, as both a teacher of art and a teacher of social ethics, he may expect that many who gratefully accept his guidance in the one realm will fiercely repudiate his conclusions when they pass to the other. Mr. Chesterton said that when Ruskin wrote of the architecture of cathedrals, he was sublime; but when he penned a moral treatise he was ridiculous. Others, on the contrary, declare that Ruskin's art critiques are merely the preliminary scrapings of the fiddlestrings. It was only when he turned his attention to social life and its implications that the rich, full music of his minstrelsy began.

Yet, think what we may of Ruskin's views on ethics or aesthetics, we are always compelled to recognise in him a force to be reckoned with. "His teachings about art," as Selwyn Image says, "may have been right or wrong. His teaching about political economy may have been right or wrong. But, right or wrong, these teachings have told upon the world, have changed men's outlook on things, and have launched new ideas and new practices." In these respects, the position of Ruskin is quite unique; we have nothing in our records with which to compare it. It is without precedent and without parallel. This being so, it is interesting now that nearly half a century has passed,[1] to attempt an estimate of his ultimate place in literature. Is his fame to rest on his faultless English, on his art theories or on his philosophy of social life? Does he stand alone, without predecessors or successors? Or is he the natural representative of a recognised school?

The Twin Artistries Of Insight And Eloquence
Perhaps they have come nearest to a solution of this problem who have placed Ruskin among the prophets. There is certainly something prophetic about his temper as well as about his teaching. Classed as a prophet, it must be admitted that he looks the part. After the manner of the prophets, he felt himself to be charged with a message to the men of his time; and he delivered that message with a courage, an independence and a passion which were worthy of the loftiest traditions of the prophetic office. Sir George Adam Smith defines a prophet as a man of vision and of voice. He must see as nobody else sees and, in saying what he have seen, must speak as nobody else speaks. In this definition, the two sides of Ruskin's baffling personality are epitomised. He is a seer; that explains his authority in the realm of art. He is a statesman; that explains his authority in the realm of economics.

Viewed from this stereoscopic standpoint, the dual entities become harmoniously focused. His views on art fall into line with all his other teachings. For, expressed in a word, all his contentions amount to this: He maintains that the artist must, above everything else, be the exponent and interpreter of real life. In season and out of season, he insists that the artist is essentially a man living among men; he must therefore be palpitatingly human and any affectation of any kind must be condemned as a hideous degradation of his noble calling. Here, as in so many other respects, Ruskin is the successor of Carlyle. In point of detail, the two are poles apart. Carlyle is billowy as a mountain torrent; Ruskin flows as tranquilly as a sylvan stream. But at heart, and fundamentally, they are as one. They agree in their sturdy independence, in their isolation, in their frank criticism of all political parties and of all philosophical schools, and in their passionate demand for social reconstruction. And, more particularly, they agree in their fierce denunciation of all hollowness and unreality.

The Pure Poetry Of Downright Honesty
Their lofty enthusiasm for truth and beauty made both Carlyle and Ruskin sublimely contemptuous of all voluble shams and simpering pretenders. Ruskin unmercifully lashed first Whistler and then the Impressionists because he honestly believed that they were engineering a divorce between Art and Reality. He scouted the whole thing as a figment of artificiality, a melodramatic pose; his soul rebelled against it. His influence was tremendous. He could damn a painting with a syllable. When he passed, his spirit was perpetuated by a group of men who gave concrete expression to the ideals that he had so ardently cherished and so fearlessly promulgated.

It was the sorrow of his last days that his Autobiography could never be completed. By means of it he had hoped to continue his ministry of criticism and instruction whilst lying in his lonely grave among the English lakes. But the Autobiography was not to be. On the last day of his life he wrote a few sheets of it, but had to give in. Looking at the index finger of his right hand, he sighed sadly: "Poor finger, it will never hold a pen again! Well, it has got me into much trouble! Perhaps it is better so!" And, a little later, he passed quietly away.

Yet he still lives. He stands as the founder of the pre-Raphaelite school. Swinburne and the Rossettis, William Norris and J. A. Symonds, and still more markedly, Walter Pater, all fell under his spell, and, later interpreted faithfully his ideals. We may have had no one worthy of being regarded as the successor of Ruskin in the sense in which Ruskin himself was the successor of Carlyle, but in every department of life—in science, in art, in music, in commerce, in politics and in education—there are today men who see more clearly, teach more purely, and act more nobly because of the influence upon them of the work of Ruskin. They may be unconscious of that influence, but it is indisputably there. And a man who, long after his death, vitally affects for good one generation after another richly deserves all the laurels that we can weave about their name.

F W Boreham

Image: John Ruskin

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on January 20, 1945.