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Selections From the Works of John Ruskin by John Ruskin

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Riverside College Classics


SELECTIONS

FROM THE WORKS OF

JOHN RUSKIN



EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY

CHAUNCEY B. TINKER, Ph.D.
_Professor of English in Yale College_

BOSTON--NEW YORK--CHICAGO--SAN FRANCISCO
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge



1908

BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE--MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




PREFACE


In making the following selections, I have tried to avoid the
appearance of such a volume as used to be entitled _Elegant Extracts_.
Wherever practicable, entire chapters or lectures are given, or at
least passages of sufficient length to insure a correct notion of the
general complexion of Ruskin's work. The text is in all cases that of
the first editions, unless these were later revised by Ruskin himself.
The original spelling and punctuation are preserved, but a few minor
changes have been made for the sake of uniformity among the various
extracts. For similar reasons, Ruskin's numbering of paragraphs is
dispensed with.

I have aimed not to multiply notes. Practically all Ruskin's own
annotation is given, with the exception of one or two very long and
somewhat irrelevant notes from _Stones of Venice_. It has not been
deemed necessary to give the dates of every painter or to explain
every geographical reference. On the other hand, the sources of most
of the quotations are indicated. In the preparation of these notes,
the magnificent library edition of Messrs. Cook and Wedderburn has
inevitably been of considerable assistance; but all their references
have been verified, many errors have been corrected, and much has of
course been added.

In closing I wish to express my obligation to my former colleague, Dr.
Lucius H. Holt, without whose assistance this volume would never have
appeared. He wrote a number of the notes, including the short prefaces
to the various selections, and prepared the manuscript for the
printer.

C.B.T.

_September, 1908_.




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION
The Life of Ruskin
The Unity of Ruskin's Writings
Ruskin's Style

SELECTIONS FROM MODERN PAINTERS
The Earth-Veil
The Mountain Glory
Sunrise on the Alps
The Grand Style
Of Realization
Of the Novelty of Landscape
Of the Pathetic Fallacy
Of Classical Landscape
Of Modern Landscape
The Two Boyhoods

SELECTIONS FROM THE STONES OF VENICE
The Throne
St. Mark's
Characteristics of Gothic Architecture

SELECTIONS FROM THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE
The Lamp of Memory
The Lamp of Obedience

SELECTIONS FROM LECTURES ON ART
Inaugural
The Relation of Art to Morals
The Relation of Art to Use

ART AND HISTORY

TRAFFIC

LIFE AND ITS ARTS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE




ILLUSTRATIONS


JOHN RUSKIN IN 1857
TURNER'S FIGHTING TEMERAIRE
CHURCH OF ST. MARK, VENICE
ST. MARK'S: CENTRAL ARCH OF FACADE




INTRODUCTION


[Sidenote: Two conflicting tendencies in Ruskin.]

It is distinctive of the nineteenth century that in its passion for
criticising everything in heaven and earth it by no means spared to
criticise itself. Alike in Carlyle's fulminations against its
insincerity, in Arnold's nice ridicule of Philistinism, and in
Ruskin's repudiation of everything modern, we detect that fine
dissatisfaction with the age which is perhaps only proof of its
idealistic trend. For the various ills of society, each of these men
had his panacea. What Carlyle had found in hero-worship and Arnold in
Hellenic culture, Ruskin sought in the study of art; and it is of the
last importance to remember that throughout his work he regarded
himself not merely as a writer on painting or buildings or myths or
landscape, but as the appointed critic of the age. For there existed
in him, side by side with his consuming love of the beautiful, a
rigorous Puritanism which was constantly correcting any tendency
toward a mere cult of the aesthetic. It is with the interaction of
these two forces that any study of the life and writings of Ruskin
should be primarily concerned.




I

THE LIFE OF RUSKIN


[Sidenote: Ancestry.]

It is easy to trace in the life of Ruskin these two forces tending
respectively toward the love of beauty and toward the contempt of mere
beauty. They are, indeed, present from the beginning. He inherited
from his Scotch parents that upright fearlessness which has always
characterized the race. His stern mother "devoted him to God before he
was born,"[1] and she guarded her gift with unremitting but perhaps
misguided caution. The child was early taught to find most of his
entertainment within himself, and when he did not, he was whipped. He
had no playmates and few toys. His chief story-book was the Bible,
which he read many times from cover to cover at his mother's knee.
His father, the "perfectly honest wine-merchant," seems to have been
the one to foster the boy's aesthetic sense; he was in the habit of
reading aloud to his little family, and his son's apparently genuine
appreciation of Scott, Pope, and Homer dates from the incredibly early
age of five. It was his father, also, to whom he owed his early
acquaintance with the finest landscape, for the boy was his companion
in yearly business trips about Britain, and later visited, in his
parents' company, Belgium, western Germany, and the Alps.

[Sidenote: Early education.]

All this of course developed the child's precocity. He was early
suffered and even encouraged to compose verses;[2] by ten he had
written a play, which has unfortunately been preserved. The hot-house
rearing which his parents believed in, and his facility in teaching
himself, tended to make a regular course of schooling a mere
annoyance; such schooling as he had did not begin till he was fifteen,
and lasted less than two years, and was broken by illness. But the
chief effect of the sheltered life and advanced education to which he
was subjected was to endow him with depth at the expense of breadth,
and to deprive him of a possibly vulgar, but certainly healthy,
contact with his kind, which, one must believe, would have checked a
certain disposition in him to egotism, sentimentality, and dogmatic
vehemence. "The bridle and blinkers were never taken off me," he
writes.[3]

[Sidenote: Student at Oxford.]

[Sidenote: Traveling in Europe.]

At Oxford--whither his cautious mother pursued him--Ruskin seems to
have been impressed in no very essential manner by curriculum or
college mates. With learning _per se_ he was always dissatisfied and
never had much to do; his course was distinguished not so much by
erudition as by culture. He easily won the Newdigate prize in poetry;
his rooms in Christ Church were hung with excellent examples of
Turner's landscapes,--the gift of his art-loving father,--of which he
had been an intimate student ever since the age of thirteen. But his
course was interrupted by an illness, apparently of a tuberculous
nature, which necessitated total relaxation and various trips in Italy
and Switzerland, where he seems to have been healed by walking among
his beloved Alps. For many years thereafter he passed months of his
time in these two countries, accompanied sometimes by his parents and
sometimes rather luxuriously, it seems, by valet and guide.

[Sidenote: Career as an author begins.]

Meanwhile he had commenced his career as author with the first volume
of _Modern Painters_, begun, the world knows, as a short defense of
Turner, originally intended for nothing more than a magazine article.
But the role of art-critic and law-giver pleased the youth,--he was
only twenty-four when the volume appeared,--and having no desire to
realize the ambition of his parents and become a bishop, and even less
to duplicate his father's career as vintner, he gladly seized the
opportunity thus offered him to develop his aesthetic vein and to
redeem the public mind from its vulgar apathy thereby. He continued
his work on _Modern Painters_, with some intermissions, for eighteen
years, and supplemented it with the equally famous _Seven Lamps of
Architecture_ in 1849, and _The Stones of Venice_ in 1853.

[Sidenote: Domestic troubles.]

This life of zealous work and brilliant recognition was interrupted in
1848 by Ruskin's amazing marriage to Miss Euphemia Gray, a union into
which he entered at the desire of his parents with a docility as
stupid as it was stupendous. Five years later the couple were quietly
divorced, that Mrs. Ruskin might marry Millais. All the author's
biographers maintain an indiscreet reserve in discussing the affair,
but there can be no concealment of the fact that its effect upon
Ruskin was profound in its depression. Experiences like this and his
later sad passion for Miss La Touche at once presage and indicate his
mental disorder, and no doubt had their share--a large one--in
causing Ruskin's dissatisfaction with everything, and above all with
his own life and work. Be this as it may, it is at this time in the
life of Ruskin that we must begin to reckon with the decline of his
aesthetic and the rise of his ethical impulse; his interest passes
from art to conduct. It is also the period in which he began his
career as lecturer, his chief interest being the social life of his
age.

[Sidenote: Ruskin's increasing interest in social questions.]

By 1860, he was publishing the papers on political economy, later
called _Unto this Last_, which roused so great a storm of protest
when they appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ that their publication
had to be suspended. The attitude of the public toward such works
as these,--its alternate excitement and apathy,--the death of his
parents, combined with the distressing events mentioned above,
darkened Ruskin's life and spoiled his interest in everything that
did not tend to make the national life more thoughtfully solemn.

"It seems to me that now ... the thoughts of the true nature of
our life, and of its powers and responsibilities should present
themselves with absolute sadness and sternness."[4]

His lectures as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, a post which he
held at various times from 1870 to 1883, failed to re-establish his
undistracted interest in things beautiful.

[Sidenote: Triumph of the reformer over the art-critic.]

The complete triumph of the reformer over the art-critic is marked by
_Fors Clavigera_, a series of letters to workingmen, begun New Year's
Day, 1871, in which it was proposed to establish a model colony of
peasants, whose lives should be made simple, honest, happy, and even
cultured, by a return to more primitive methods of tilling the soil
and of making useful and beautiful objects. The Guild of St. George,
established to "slay the dragon of industrialism," to dispose of
machinery, slums, and discontent, consumed a large part of Ruskin's
time and money. He had inherited a fortune of approximately a million
dollars, and he now began to dispose of it in various charitable
schemes,--establishing tea-shops, supporting young painters, planning
model tenements, but, above all, in elaborating his ideas for the
Guild. The result of it all--whatever particular reforms were effected
or manual industries established--was, to Ruskin's view, failure, and
his mind, weakening under the strain of its profound disappointments,
at last crashed in ruin.

[Sidenote: Death in 1900.]

It is needless to follow the broken author through the desolation
of his closing years to his death in 1900. Save for his charming
reminiscences, _Praeterita_, his work was done; the long struggle was
over, the struggle of one man to reduce the complexities of a national
life to an apostolic simplicity, to make it beautiful and good,

Till the high God behold it from beyond,
And enter it.


[1] _Praeterita_. He was born February 8, 1819.

[2] Ruskin himself quotes a not very brilliant specimen in _Modern
Painters_, III, in "Moral of Landscape."

[3] _Praeterita_, Sec. 53.

[4] _The Mystery of Life._




II

THE UNITY OF RUSKIN'S WRITINGS


[Sidenote: Diversity of his writings.]

Ruskin is often described as an author of bewildering variety, whose
mind drifted waywardly from topic to topic--from painting to political
economy, from architecture to agriculture--with a license as
illogical as it was indiscriminating. To this impression, Ruskin
himself sometimes gave currency. He was, for illustration, once
announced to lecture on crystallography, but, as we are informed by
one present,[5] he opened by asserting that he was really about to
lecture on Cistercian architecture; nor did it greatly matter what the
title was; "for," said he, "if I had begun to speak about Cistercian
abbeys, I should have been sure to get on crystals presently; and if
I had begun upon crystals, I should soon have drifted into
architecture." Those who conceive of Ruskin as being thus a kind of
literary Proteus like to point to the year 1860, that of the
publication of his tracts on economics, as witnessing the greatest
and suddenest of his changes, that from reforming art to reforming
society; and it is true that this year affords a simple dividing-line
between Ruskin's earlier work, which is sufficiently described by the
three titles, _Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, and
_The Stones of Venice_, and his later work, chiefly on social subjects
such as are discussed in _Unto This Last, The Crown of Wild Olive_,
and _Fors Clavigera_. And yet we cannot insist too often on the
essential unity of this work, for, viewed in the large, it betrays one
continuous development. The seeds of _Fors_ are in _The Stones of
Venice_.

[Sidenote: Underlying idea in all his works.]

The governing idea of Ruskin's first published work, _Modern Painters,
Volume I_, was a moral idea. The book was dedicated to the principle
that that art is greatest which deals with the greatest number of
greatest ideas,--those, we learn presently, which reveal divine
truth; the office of the painter, we are told,[6] is the same as that
of the preacher, for "the duty of both is to take for each discourse
one essential truth." As if recalling this argument that the painter
is a preacher, Carlyle described _The Stones of Venice_ as a "sermon
in stones." In the idea that all art, when we have taken due account
of technique and training, springs from a moral character, we find the
unifying principle of Ruskin's strangely diversified work. The very
title _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, with its chapters headed
"Sacrifice," "Obedience," etc., is a sufficient illustration of
Ruskin's identification of moral principles with aesthetic principles.
A glance at the following pages of this book will show how Ruskin is
for ever halting himself to demand the moral significance of some fair
landscape, gorgeous painting, heaven-aspiring cathedral. In "Mountain
Glory," for example, he refers to the mountains as "kindly in simple
lessons to the workman," and inquires later at what times mankind has
offered worship in these mountain churches; of the English cathedral
he says, "Weigh the influence of those dark towers on all who have
passed through the lonely square at their feet for centuries";[7] of
St. Mark's, "And what effect has this splendour on those who pass
beneath it?"--and it will be noticed on referring to "The Two
Boyhoods," that, in seeking to define the difference between Giorgione
and Turner, the author instinctively has recourse to distinguishing
the _religious_ influences exerted on the two in youth.

[Sidenote: Underlying idea a moral one.]

Now it is clear that a student of the relation of art to life, of work
to the character of the workman and of his nation, may, and in fact
inevitably must, be led in time to attend to the producer rather than
to the product, to the cause rather than to the effect; and if we
grant, with Ruskin, that the sources of art, namely, the national
life, are denied, it will obviously be the part, not only of humanity
but of common sense, for such a student to set about purifying the
social life of the nation. Whether the reformation proposed by Ruskin
be the proper method of attack is not the question we are here
concerned with; our only object at present being to call attention to
the fact that such a lecture as that on "Traffic" in _The Crown of
Wild Olive_ is the logical outgrowth of such a chapter as "Ideas of
Beauty" in the first volume of _Modern Painters_. Between the author
who wrote in 1842, of the necessity of revealing new truths in
painting, "This, if it be an honest work of art, it must have done,
for no man ever yet worked honestly without giving some such help to
his race. God appoints to every one of his creatures a separate
mission, and if they discharge it honourably ... there will assuredly
come of it such burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall
shine before men, and be of service constant and holy,"[8] and the
author who wrote, "That country is the richest which nourishes the
greatest number of noble and happy human beings,"[9] or, "The
beginning of art is in getting our country clean, and our people
beautiful,"[10]--between these two, I say, there is no essential
difference. They are not contradictory but consistent.

[Sidenote: Art dependent upon personal and national greatness.]

Amidst the maze of subjects, then, which Ruskin, with kaleidoscopic
suddenness and variety, brings before the astonished gaze of his
readers, let them confidently hold this guiding clue. They will find
that Ruskin's "facts" are often not facts at all; they will discover
that many of Ruskin's choicest theories have been dismissed to the
limbo of exploded hypotheses; but they will seek long before they find
a more eloquent and convincing plea for the proposition that all great
art reposes upon a foundation of personal and national greatness.
Critics of Ruskin will show you that he began _Modern Painters_ while
he was yet ignorant of the classic Italians; that he wrote _The Stones
of Venice_ without realizing the full indebtedness of the Venetian to
the Byzantine architecture; that he proposed to unify the various
religious sects although he had no knowledge of theology; that he
attempted a reconstruction of society though he had had no scientific
training in political economy; but in all this neglect of mere fact
the sympathetic reader will discover that contempt for the letter
of the law which was characteristic of the nineteenth-century
prophet,--of Carlyle, of Arnold, and of Emerson,--and which, if it
be blindness, is that produced by an excess of light.


[5] See Harrison's _Life_, p. 111. Cf. the opening of _The Mystery
of Life_.

[6] Part 2, sec. 1, chap. 4.

[7] See p. 159.

[8] _Modern Painters_, vol. 1, part 2, sec. 1, chap. 7.

[9] _Unto This Last_.

[10] See p. 262.




III

RUSKIN'S STYLE


[Sidenote: Sensuousness of his style.]

Many people regard the style of Ruskin as his chief claim to
greatness. If the time ever come when men no longer study him for
sermons in stones, they will nevertheless turn to his pages to enjoy
one of the most gorgeous prose styles of the nineteenth century. For a
parallel to the sensuous beauties of Ruskin's essays on art, one turns
instinctively to poetry; and of all the poets Ruskin is perhaps likest
Keats. His sentences, like the poet's, are thick-set with jeweled
phrases; they are full of subtle harmonies that respond, like a
Stradivarius, to the player's every mood. In its ornateness Ruskin's
style is like his favorite cathedral of Amiens, in the large stately,
in detail exquisite, profuse, and not without a touch of the
grotesque. It is the style of an artist.

[Sidenote: Ruskin's method of construction in description.]

A critical fancy may even discover in the construction of his finest
descriptions a method not unlike that of a painter at work upon his
canvas. He blocks them out in large masses, then sketches and colors
rapidly for general effects, treating detail at first more or less
vaguely and collectively, but passing in the end to the elaboration of
detail in the concrete, touching the whole with an imaginative gleam
that lends a momentary semblance of life to the thing described, after
the manner of the "pathetic fallacy." Thus it is in the famous
description of St. Mark's:[11] we are given first the largest general
impression, the "long, low pyramid of coloured light," which the
artist proceeds to "hollow beneath into five great vaulted porches,"
whence he leads the eye slowly upwards amidst a mass of bewildering
detail--"a confusion of delight"--from which there slowly emerge those
concrete details with which the author particularly wishes to impress
us, "the breasts of the Greek horses blazing in their breadth of
golden strength and St. Mark's lion lifted on a blue field covered
with stars." In lesser compass we are shown the environs of Venice,[12]
the general impression of the "long, low, sad-coloured line," being
presently broken by the enumeration of unanalyzed detail, "tufted
irregularly with brushwood and willows," and passing to concrete
detail in the hills of Arqua, "a dark cluster of purple pyramids." In
the still more miniature description of the original site of Venice[13]
we have the same method:

"The black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath
the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor
and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the
tideless pools and the sea-birds flit from their margins with a
questioning cry."

[Sidenote: His love of color.]

Equally characteristic of the painter is the ever-present use of
color. It is interesting merely to count the number and variety of
colors used in the descriptions. It will serve at least to call the
reader's attention to the felicitous choice of words used in
describing the opalescence of St. Mark's or the skillful combination
of the colors characteristic of the great Venetians in such a sentence
as, "the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armor shot angrily under
their blood-red mantle-folds"[14]--a glimpse of a Giorgione.

[Sidenote: His love of prose rhythm.]

He is even more attentive to the ear than to the eye. He loves the
sentence of stately rhythms and long-drawn harmonies, and he omits no
poetic device that can heighten the charm of sound,--alliteration, as
in the famous description of the streets of Venice,

"Far as the eye could reach, still the soft moving of stainless
waters proudly pure; as not the flower, so neither the thorn nor
the thistle could grow in those glancing fields";[15]

the balanced close for some long period,

"to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges and
to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in the
world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from
the burning heart of her Fortitude and splendour";[16]

and the tendency, almost a mannerism, to add to the music of his own
rhythm, the deep organ-notes of Biblical text and paraphrase. But if
we wish to see how aptly Ruskin's style responds to the tone of his
subject, we need but remark the rich liquid sentence descriptive of
Giorgione's home,

"brightness out of the north and balm from the south, and the stars
of evening and morning clear in the limitless light of arched
heaven and circling sea,"[17]

which he has set over against the harsh explosiveness of

"Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, a square brick pit
or wall is formed by a close-set block of house to the back
windows of which it admits a few rays of light--"

the birthplace of Turner.

[Sidenote: His beauty of style often distracts from the thought.]

But none knew better than Ruskin that a style so stiff with ornament
was likely to produce all manner of faults. In overloading his
sentences with jewelry he frequently obscures the sense; his beauties
often degenerate into mere prettiness; his sweetness cloys. His free
indulgence of the emotions, often at the expense of the intellect,
leads to a riotous extravagance of superlative. But, above all, his
richness distracts attention from matter to manner. In the case of an
author so profoundly in earnest, this could not but be unfortunate;
nothing enraged him more than to have people look upon the beauties of
his style rather than ponder the substance of his book. In a passage
of complacent self-scourging he says:

"For I have had what, in many respects, I boldly call the
misfortune, to set my words sometimes prettily together; not
without a foolish vanity in the poor knack that I had of doing
so, until I was heavily punished for this pride by finding that
many people thought of the words only, and cared nothing for their
meaning. Happily, therefore, the power of using such language--if
indeed it ever were mine--is passing away from me; and whatever I
am now able to say at all I find myself forced to say with great
plainness."[18]

[Sidenote: His picturesque extravagance of style.]

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