John Ruskin was born
in 1819, son of a Scottish wine merchant settled in London.
He was educated privately. Before entering Oxford University
in 1836 he traveled widely in France, Switzerland and Italy, and
showed an active interest in art. His able draughtsmanship
was revealed mainly in architectural drawings and floral
studies. In 1839 he won the Newdigate poetry prize of the
University of Oxford.
Faced with the
reality of life in the rapidly expanding industrial cities which
were usually places of low wages, inferior diets, inadequate
housing and illiteracy, Ruskin became actively interested in social
reform. He was an early supporter of the Working Men's College
founded by Maurice Kingsley and others in 1854. In 1860, Unto
This Last appeared in the Cornhill Magazine. It was the first of an
important series of writings, supplemented by lectures, in which
Ruskin attacked the materialist philosophy and the "dismal science"
of the particular brand of political economy that seemed to
overshadow his age. His views gave powerful support to
the philosopher, Carlyle, to whom he dedicated Munera Pulveris in
1862. Time and Tide (1867) upholds the importance of honesty
of work and honesty of reward, and paints a new social Utopia,
albeit based on the the maintenance of class and rank by government
decree, with strict laws governing suitability of young people for
marriage.
Sesame and Lilies
(1871) consists of lectures delivered in 1864 and 1868, and deals
with reading and education, in which he deplores the crushing
influence of industrial civilization upon art and morality. It sums
up much of Ruskin's most characteristic thought about the dark
areas of industrialism. The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) is
full of fierce denunciation of contemporary
society.
In contrast The
Queen of the Air (1869) is a study of Greek myth and
art.
Its publication
marked the election of Ruskin as Slade professor of art at
Oxford. He held the post until 1879 and again during
1883-4. Many of his lectures there appeared in book form as
The Eagles Nest (1872) Ariadne Florentine (1872) Val d'Arno (1873)
and the Art of England (1883).
Fors Clavigera
(1871-84) consists of nearly a hundred open letters addressed to
the labourers and workmen of Great Britain, dealing with varied
topics in ethics, art, politics, trade, books, and legends.
Intensely personal and illuminated often by his most vivid
phraseology it is one of Ruskin's most remarkable achievements. He
followed it in 1885- 9 with the autobiographical
Praeterita.
In later years he
lived in comparative retirement on his estate at Brantwood,
Coniston, in the Lake district, among the mountain landscapes which
had strongly influenced his appreciation of natural forms as a
child. There he frequently turned to projects involving
manual work and rural crafts. His old home is now maintained as a
Ruskin museum. It was during his later life that his mind suffered
severe disturbances and he was periodically dominated by
melancholia and depression, some of which spilled over into his
writing. He died in 1900.
In a letter to a
friend he appears as a something of a kindly millionaire,
struggling with the problems of a sick society in terms of "the
three things to which man is born- labour, sorrow and joy". "So, in
every way, I like a quiet life; and I don't like seeing people cry,
or die; and should rejoice, more than I can tell you, in giving up
the full half of my fortune for the poor, provided I knew the
public would make Lord Overstone also give up the half of his, and
other people who were independent give the half of theirs; and then
set men who were really fit for such office to administer the fund,
and answer to us for nobody's perishing innocently; and so leave us
all to do what we chose with the rest, and with our days in
peace".
Ruskin's popularity
is rising as more people perceive that his analysis of the ills of
industrialisation are relevant to the present day. From this
point of view he is symbolic of the need to inject social negative
feedback into runaway industrialism, which now has the dominance to
destroy the very atmosphere that urged him to champion Turner's
skills in capturing the fleeting character of light and air.
Also, through the environmental bias he placed upon his
interpretation of political economy, he offers a bridge between the
economic and environmentalists camps on the modern road to a
reconciliation of prosperity with ecological stability. He
was the first to open serious discussion on "ecological economics",
where things valued on spiritual scales should be given monetary
weights by a society keen to preserve them in the face of economic
development.
Increasingly, modern
environmentalism is searching for a spiritual basis. Ruskin
justified many of his opinions and convictions in the context of
Victorian Christianity, and in this he offers some intellectual
routes to the formulation of a much needed 'ecological conscience"
linked to a spiritual evaluation of nature.
Most of Ruskin's
writings may be taken as a fundamental criticism of the competitive
society, founded on free enterprise and machine production which
had developed uniquely in Britain out of the older agricultural and
mercantile society between the 1780s and the 1860s. In this
sense he was groping towards rules for defining the use of natural
resources. His writings stand parallel to those of Thomas
Henry Huxley, who, starting from Darwinism was attempting to define
Man's place in nature.
Ruskin's summarised
his own capabilities in a letter to an artisan friend.
"I am essentially a painter and a leaf
dissector; and my powers of thought are all purely mathematical,
seizing ultimate principles only, never accidents; a line is always
to me, length without breadth; it is not a cable or a crowbar; and
though I can almost infallibly reason out the final law of
anything, if within reach of my industry, I neither care for, nor
can trace, the minor exigencies of its daily appliance."
Evidence of the
applications of these mental skills appears on almost every page he
wrote. His descriptions of a lichen covered tree stump convey
an impression of its unsurpassable beauty which the reader will
ever remember. With regard to his ability to marshal a
succinct line of enquiry, here is an example of the clarity and
economy of effort with which he set out 'the population
problem'.
"An island of a certain size has standing room
only for so many people; feeding ground for a great many fewer than
could stand on it. Reach the limits of the feeding ground,
and you must cease to multiply, must emigrate or starve. The
essential land question then is to be treated quite separately from
that of the methods of restriction of population. The land
question is- At what point will you resolve to stop? It is a
separate matter of discussion how you are to stop at
it.
And this essential land question- At what point
will you stop?- is itself two-fold. You have to consider
first, by what methods of land distribution you can maintain the
greatest number of healthy persons; secondly, whether, if, by any
other mode of distribution and relative ethical laws, you can raise
their character, whilst you diminish their numbers, such sacrifices
should be made, and to what extent?"
The synthesis which
Ruskin attempted still escapes a global society which endlessly
debates the same four basic social questions- the size of the
population, the state of the poor, the provision of education, and
the health of the environment. And a hundred years on, having
tried socialism and communism, the world is still being carried
along by unchecked capitalism We consume ever-increasing
quantities of natural resources, with an ever growing illiterate
population, set alongside an inequitable distribution of
wealth. The contrasts between rich and poor and the attendant
social problems are now far greater in terms of the numbers of
people affected than Ruskin could ever
imagine.
