Ruskin and Modernism

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Also by Giovanni Cianci LA SCUOLA DI CAMBRIDGE LA FORTUNA DI JOYCE IN ITALIA

Also by Peter Nicholls * EZRA POUND: Politics, Economics and Writing * MODERNISMS: A Literary Guide

* From the same publishers

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Ruskin and Modernism Edited by

Giovanni Cianci and

Peter Nicholls

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Selection and editorial matter © Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls 2001 Text © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–91560–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruskin and modernism / edited by Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–91560–7 (cloth) 1. Ruskin, John, 1819–1900—Criticism and interpretation. 2. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Ruskin, John, 1819–1900—Influence. 4. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. I. Nicholls, Peter, 1950– II. Cianci, Giovanni. PR5264 .R67 2000 828'.809—dc21 00–048352 10 10

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents List of Contributors

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls 1

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Unstable Foundations: Ruskin and the Costs of Modernity Richard L. Stein Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal: John Ruskin and Wilhelm Worringer Andrea Pinotti

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Ruskin, Myth and Modernism Dinah Birch

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Degrees of Darkness: Ruskin, Pater and Modernism Laurel Brake

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‘Reactionary Desire’: Ruskin and the Work of Fiction Ian Duncan

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The Early James and Ruskin: Intergenerational Frictions Luisa Villa

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‘Things Passed Over’: Ruskin, Modernism and Autobiography Max Saunders

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Ruskin and the Fascination of Words Toni Cerutti

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Tradition, Architecture and Rappel à l’Ordre: Ruskin and Eliot (1917–21) Giovanni Cianci

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Eliot and Ruskin: Second Thoughts Ronald Bush v

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133 155

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Ruskin’s Grotesque and the Modernism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis Peter Nicholls

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Laying the Ghost: D. H. Lawrence’s Fight with Ruskin Stefania Michelucci

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Architecture as Commentary: Ruskin’s Pre-modern Architectural Thought and its Influence on Modern Architecture Giovanni Leoni

Index

165 181

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List of Contributors

D INAH BIRCH is Tutor in English at Trinity College, Oxford. Her publications include Ruskin’s Myths (1988) and Ruskin on Turner (1990). She has recently edited Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (1999), and her selected edition of Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera will be published in 2000. L AUREL B RAKE is Senior Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, London. She is author of Subjugated Knowledges (1994) and Walter Pater (1994). Her edited volumes include (with Ian Small) Walter Pater in the Nineties and (with Bill Bell and David Finkelstein) NineteenthCentury Media and the Construction of Identity (2000). She is currently completing a biography of Walter Pater. R ONALD BUSH is Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. His books include The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ (1976) and T. S. Eliot: a Study of Character and Style (1984). In addition to his many essays on Modernist writers, he has also edited T. S. Eliot: the Modernist in History (1991) and Prehistories of the Future: the Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (1995). TONI CERUTTI is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli. Her books include Antonio Gallenga: an Italian Writer in Victorian England (1974) and Le vite dei vittoriani: Breve storia dell’autobiografia vittoriana (1981). She is the author of essays on Ruskin, Carlyle and Spenser, and has edited Da Blake al modernismo (1993) and Ruskin and the Twentieth Century (2000), companion to the present volume. G IOVANNI C IANCI is Professor of English at the University of Milan. He is author of La Scuola di Cambridge (1970) and La fortuna di Joyce in Italia (1974). He is the editor of numerous collections of essays, including Futurism/Vorticism (1979), Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura/ Pittura (1982), La Città (1991), and Il Cézanne degli Scrittori, dei Poeti e dei Filosofi (2000)

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List of Contributors

I AN DUNCAN is Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: the Gothic, Scott, Dickens (1992) and of essays on Victorian and Modernist writers. He has edited works by Conan Doyle, Scott, Buchan and Hudson. G IOVANNI L EONI is Professor of the History of Architecture at the University of Bari. He is author of many works on Ruskin in Italian, and has translated and edited Ruskin, Opere (1987). In 1998, he edited the first complete Italian translation of Ruskin’s Modern Painters. STEFANIA MICHELUCCI is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Milan. She is author of L’orizzonte mobile: Spazio e luoghi nella narrativa di D. H. Lawrence (1998) and of numerous essays on the travel writings and shorter fiction of Lawrence. Her edition of Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy and Other Essays was published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics in 1997. She is currently completing a book on the poetry of Thom Gunn. P ETER NICHOLLS is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Sussex. He is author of Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (1984), Modernisms: a Literary Guide (1995), and of numerous essays on twentieth-century literature and theory. A NDREA PINOTTI is Lecturer in Aesthetics at the University of Milan. He is author of Il corpo dello stile: Storia dell’arte come storia dell’estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wöfflin (1998), Piccola storia della lontananza: Walter Benjamin storico della percezione (1999), and of essays on contemporary German art theory. M AX SAUNDERS is Reader in English at King’s College, London. He has published widely on early Modernist writers and is author of Ford Madox Ford: a Dual Life (1996) and editor of Ford Madox Ford: War Poems (1999) R ICHARD STEIN is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. His published work includes The Ritual of Interpretation: the Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti and Pater (1975) and Victoria’s Year: English Literature and Culture, 1837–1838 (1987). He is currently working on Victorian visuality.

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L UISA VILLA is Lecturer in English at the University of Genoa. She is author of books on Henry James (Esperienza e memoria, 1989), George Eliot (Riscrivendo il conflitto, 1994), and resentment in English fiction at the turn of the century (Figure del risentimento, 1997).

Acknowledgements The essays collected in this volume were first presented as papers at the conference on John Ruskin and Modernism held at the University of Milan in September 1997. The editors would like to thank the Rettore dell’Università and the Preside della Facoltà di Lettere for making the conference possible. Our thanks for additional financial support go also to the Istituto di Anglistica of the University of Milan, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, the British Council of Rome and Milan, Penguin Italia, Milan, the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici of the University of Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, and the Fondazione della Cassa di Risparmio di Vercelli. We are grateful to the staff of the Istituto di Anglistica for their generous help with the organization of the conference, to Stefania Michelucci for her assistance with almost all aspects of the event, and to Toni Cerutti for providing superb hospitality at Vercelli. We are also grateful to Nerys Williams for her editorial contribution and to Tania Golds for assisting in the production of the final manuscript. A companion volume to the present work containing further essays drawn from the conference has been edited by Toni Cerutti and published as Ruskin and the Twentieth Century by Edizioni Mercurio, Vercelli.

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Introduction Ruskin’s name has all but disappeared from the histories of literary Modernism. In the visual arts of the twentieth century, however, Ruskin has remained a point de repère, not only for architects but also for historians of architecture and art. Take, for example, Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936), a work which had a major impact not only in Britain but throughout Europe and elsewhere. As is well known, Pevsner’s thesis was that the genuine and legitimate style of our century was achieved by 1914. Morris had started the movement by reviving handicraft as an art worthy of the best men’s efforts, the pioneers about 1900 had gone further by discovering the immense, untried possibilities of machine art. The synthesis, in creation as well as in theory, is the work of Walter Gropius (born in 1883).1 As critics have observed, Ruskin’s work does not receive direct attention here, but he is implicitly present in Pevsner’s account of disciple William Morris.2 Additionally, Pevsner notes the large number of modernist architects who have acknowledged a significant debt to Ruskin: Henry van de Velde, Herman Muthesius, Walter Gropius, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The last two were both impassioned readers of Ruskin in their youth, as was another celebrated architect, Le Corbusier.3 Other art historians have recognized the extent of Ruskin’s influence on the development of modern painting. Ernst Gombrich, for example, claimed not only that Ruskin’s doctrine of the ‘“innocent eye” prepared the ground for Impressionism’, but that the ‘whole attitude that Ruskin betrays can in fact be found to have particularly appealed to the Expressionists.’ 4 Indeed, according to Gombrich, Wilhelm Worringer, author of Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908) and a considerable influence (via T. E. Hulme) on English Modernism, was ‘logically anticipated by Ruskin’.5 Ruskin’s traces are everywhere: Gombrich also suggests that ‘it may well be that there is more of Ruskin in Adolph Loos himself than at first meets the eye.’ 6 As far as literary Modernism is concerned, however, the decline in Ruskin’s reputation there has often been seen as a natural reaction xi

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to his virtual dictatorship of more than thirty years. To rebel against Ruskin’s monolithic reputation was tantamount to rebelling against Victorianism tout court.7 It was this sense of Ruskin’s patriarchal supremacy as much as his notorious attack on Whistler which alienated a younger generation.8 Here, perhaps, Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ is most clearly at work in the almost oedipal revulsion commonly felt for the Victorian legacy. Ezra Pound, quoting Apollinaire, would declare in 1914: ‘On ne peut pas porter partout avec soi le cadavre de son père’,9 and Ford, in more autobiographical vein, would explain to younger readers: You see there were in those days a number of those terrible and forbidding things – the Victorian great figures. To me life was simply not worth living because of the existence of Carlyle, of Mr Ruskin, of Mr Holman Hunt, of Mr Browning or of the gentlemen who built the Crystal Palace. These people were perpetually held up to me as standing upon unattainable heights, and at the same time I was perpetually being told that if I could not attain these heights I might just as well not cumber the earth. What then was left for me? Nothing. Simply nothing. 10 It was not only against Ruskin the man that the modernists felt themselves having to react, but to a more pervasive and even less tolerable phenomenon: Ruskinism, Ruskin canonized, Ruskin transformed ‘from a radical author into a public monument’.11 Ruskin’s teachings had lost their intuitive and problematic aspect; his thinking had ceased to be apprehended as, in his own words, ‘three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal’,12 and were now presented as either established dogma or in a reductively simple form. Ruskin’s enduring concern with ethical questions now seemed damagingly didactic and moralistic. As D. H. Lawrence put it, ‘The deep damnation of self-righteousness . . . lies thick all over the Ruskinite, like painted feathers on a skinny peacock.’13 These reactions to Ruskin help to account for the absence of his name from most accounts of literary modernism, though as many of the essays in the present volume show, emphatic dismissals of Ruskin did not necessarily prevent his thought from permeating the new aesthetic. Our attempts to trace this often occluded influence are complicated by a tendency within literary criticism to give primacy to the linguistic over plastic and image-based values. In part this is the legacy of the Cambridge critics of the twenties and thirties who,

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in their reaction against impressionistic and positivistic methods, rigorously excluded study of anything connected with biographical, historical, sociological or cultural investigation. Instead, attention was directed toward the text alone, toward a close, analytic reading of ‘the words on the page’. Not surprisingly, Ruskin only makes sporadic appearances in the inaugural work of the Cambridge critics, I. A. Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). So too in Richards’ other seminal volume, Practical Criticism (1929), Ruskin’s name is invoked only once, so that he can be reprimanded for his ‘external standard’ of criticism and for his ‘calamitous though noble mistake’ in the theory of the ‘pathetic fallacy’.14 In an essay two years before, in fact, Richards had written that ‘Ruskin is almost forgotten’; there Richards remembered him not at all for his literary theory or aesthetics but merely for his criticism of fanatical mountaineers.15 Lacking any consideration for non-linguistic media, Richards, Empson, Leavis and their followers conceived of the ‘modern sensibility’ or ‘the modern movement’ in terms which took no account of the stimulus and challenge provided by the visual and plastic arts in this period, both in Britain and on the Continent. These critics’ responsiveness to texts as self-referential linguistic objects certainly illuminated modernism’s preoccupation with languageas-medium, but at the same time it failed to register a fundamental shift from music to painting as a model for a new avant-garde language. 16 Since the Cambridge critics were the first to legitimate, establish and promote Modernism, it is hardly surprising that for many decades the connection between Modernism and the arts was neglected and that, as Christopher Butler has remarked, most studies of Modernism displayed ‘an excessively literary bias’.17 That exclusive emphasis on the literary made it difficult to appreciate the modernist fascination with the interfaces between the different arts and with the potential for one medium to influence and interact with another. As some of the essays in the present volume show, Ruskin’s influence would exert itself, often silently, in this interstitial realm between writing and the visual arts. Denied importance, or vehemently denounced, Ruskin’s thought none the less insinuated itself into the modernist aesthetic. Indeed, even Richards could not altogether evade the long reach of the Victorian sage. As his biographer remarks, ‘There are moments of moral compassion, urgency of tone, and prophecy in Richards’s social and educational criticism that resemble the pages of [Ruskin’s] Unto This Last. The fact that Richards

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invents his own system and language to convey certain mid-Victorian values should not conceal his deep indebtedness.’18 It now seems obvious that the art of painting represented the paradigm of the new for the early modernists. When they sought (in Pound’s phrase) to ‘make it new’ they drew their inspiration in large measure from the works of Cézanne, Picasso, Boccioni or Kandinsky, to name only a few of the exemplary figures. Not for nothing did Pound in his account of his famous imagist poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913) write that it was not words that first came to him but ‘an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour . . . it was . . . the beginning, for me, of a language in colour’.19 Painterly perception gave access to ‘the new world about us’, and in the first draft of Canto I Pound quite explicitly defined his objective: Barred lights, great flares, new forms, Picasso or Lewis If for a year a man write to paint not music20 T. E. Hulme similarly stressed the transformation of word to image: Each word must be an image seen, not a counter. That dreadful feeling of cheapness when we contemplate the profusion of words in modern prose. The true ideal – the little statue in Paris. 21 Hulme’s concept of visuality was not directly indebted to Ruskin, though his emphasis on original sin owes a great deal to Ruskin’s philosophy of the imperfect, and both critics shared an aversion to Renaissance art and its Weltanschauung. Ruskin’s influence went deep, then, provoking in a younger generation a curious mixture of denial and repetition. In the essays which follow, attention has been given primarily to modernist writers for whom the relation to Ruskin was an awkward and sometimes conflicted one. On occasion the difficulty emerges openly, but for the most part it tends to be veiled, not necessarily repressed but effaced in what might almost be called a shared cultural amnesia. Ruskin may be remembered by the modernists only as a distant, symbolic presence, but in practice his ideas colour much of their thinking about aesthetics – so much so that we may often find those ideas ‘reinvented’ with no conscious sense of an intellectual debt to Ruskin. Indeed, Ruskin’s voluminous writings might be said to shelter an incipient modernism whose antipathy to a degraded

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modernity undoubtedly predicts a major current within the work of the new century. From our own vantage point at the end of that century – a vantage point coincident, of course, with the centenary of Ruskin’s death – these prefigurings of an avant-garde aesthetic may seem as striking to us as they were hard to discern for the modernist writers. Above all, there is Ruskin’s relentless probing of the relation between aesthetics and ethics which, while it may initially have alienated a younger readership, retained an irritating authoritativeness for those who, like Pound and Eliot, were equally concerned with art’s social and political responsibilities (‘We need another Ruskin’, wrote Eliot in 1931, finding that the current social and economic crisis compelled him to modify his earlier satirical presentation of Ruskin 22). So too, Ruskin’s fascination with myth resonates with that of the Modernists, as does his attraction to forms of disjunction and discontinuity (notable in the theory of the grotesque, but evident also in the evolving modes of his own writing). Equally important is Ruskin’s historical sense which, with its drama of rise and fall (especially in The Stones of Venice), offered a powerful model for modernist readings of the past; and add to this Ruskin’s joint preoccupation with cultural heritage and personal memory which is so frequently echoed in the aesthetic of the new century. While Ruskin seemed a distant and antique figure to the Futurists and Vorticists – Marinetti famously denounced ‘the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin’23 – he was not as uncomplicatedly passéiste as they assumed. In ridiculing Ruskin’s ‘morbid dream of primitive rustic life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-winders’, Marinetti ignored Ruskin’s radical concern with architecture and urban spaces – a concern which was closer to Futurism’s own utopian preoccupation with the new city (Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova, for example) than to the art-for-art’s-sake philosophy of the fin-desiècle aesthetes. While the Vorticists could not subscribe wholeheartedly to the Futurist attack on tradition, they too often turned to architecture as a sensitive register of modernity. Pound, for example, recalled spending his ‘odd time for several months observing the decadence of wood-carving, fan-lights over London doors’, 24 and this close scrutiny was, for once, self-consciously Ruskinian, with its claim to read the large-scale degradation of modernity in ‘the horror of the machine-cut stone trimmings’. 25 Wyndham Lewis, too, perhaps the only British modernist unaffected by ‘pastoral regression’ (Pound’s words about Ruskin 26 ), meted out harsh criticism of

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London’s buildings and conjured with a Vorticist architecture which might rid the capital of its ‘Bouvards and Pécuchets in brick and stone’.27 Lewis was close to Ruskin in his desire to ‘get Painting, Sculpture and Design out of the studio into life somehow or other’.28 The essays which follow attest to the multiple resonances of Ruskin’s thought in the literature of Modernism. In tracing the orbit of his influence we may discover often unexpected and unacknowledged continuities between early twentieth-century writers and their Victorian precursors. For while Modernism defines itself in terms of a definitive break with the nineteenth-century past, it habitually reworks and reinvents the legacy from which it recoils. Nowhere is that double movement more tellingly at work than in the simultaneous appropriation and dismissal of Ruskin’s thought.

Notes 1 Retitled Pioneers of Modern Design – from William Morris to Walter Gropius, rev. ed 1960; rev. ed. 1975 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 38. 2 See, among others, Nigel Whiteley, ‘“Falsehood in a Ciceronian Dialect”: the Ruskinian Tradition, Modernism, and the Rise of the Classical Tradition in Contemporary Architecture’, in The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture, eds Michael Wheeler and Nigel Whiteley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). 3 See Pevsner, Pioneers, ch. 1. 4 Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 5th ed. (London: Phaidon, 1977), p. 250; Gombrich, The Sense of Order: a Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979; London: Phaidon, 1994), p. 46. 5 Gombrich, The Sense of Order, p. 263. 6 Ibid., pp. 59–60. 7 See, for example, the Introduction to J. L. Bradley, ed., Ruskin: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1984). 8 On the Ruskin–Whistler case, see especially Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler versus Ruskin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1992). 9 ‘Vorticism’ (1914), in Harriet Zinnes, ed., Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (New York: New Directions, 1980), p. 199. 10 Ford, fr om Ancient Lights (1911), in his Memories and Impressions (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 28. 11 Brian Maidment, ‘Interpreting Ruskin, 1870–1914’, in The Ruskin Polygon, eds John Dixon Hunt and F. M. Holland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 160. 12 Ruskin, ‘Cambridge Inaugural Address’, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 16: 187.

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13 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton, vol. 1, 1901–13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 81. 14 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: a Study of Literary Judgment (1929; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 204. 15 Richards, ‘The Lure of High Mountaineering’ (1927), in Complentarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 235. 16 Cf. Roman Jakobson, ‘Marginal Notes on the Prose of the Poet Pasternak’, in Language and Literature, eds Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987), pp. 302–3: ‘The Romantics’ slogan of art gravitating toward music was adopted to a significant degree by Symbolism. The foundations of Symbolism first begin to be undermined in painting, and in the early days of Futurist art it is painting that holds the dominant positions.’ 17 Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. xv. 18 John Paul Russo, I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 22. Ruskin’s impact on Leavis is even clearer, though it has not yet received the attention it deserves. 19 Pound, ‘Vorticism’, p. 203. 20 Pound, ‘Three Cantos’ (1917), rpt. in Personae: the Shorter Poems, rev. ed., eds Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), p. 234. 21 T. E. Hulme, ‘Notes on Language and Style’, in Michael Roberts, T. E. Hulme (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1938), p. 274. 22 Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion, vol. 10, no. 39 (Jan. 1931), pp. 309–10. 23 Marinetti, ‘Futurist Speech to the English’ (1910), in Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), p. 64. 24 Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; London: Peter Owen, 1966), p. 245. 25 Pound, ‘Art Notes – Buildings, I’, New Age (August 29, 1918), in Zinnes, p. 74. 26 Pound, ‘The City’, in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 194–5. 27 Ibid., p. 28. 28 Lewis, The Caliph’s Design ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1986). p. 12.

1 Unstable Foundations: Ruskin and the Costs of Modernity Richard L. Stein

I. Milan, money and modernity Milan is not a major subject of Ruskin’s architectural and historical criticism, but one late reference provides a useful introduction to his writing on the relation of artistic form and social change. The remarks appear in a monograph written for the Arundel Society in 1872, a minor essay on what he regards as minor works of art, ‘The Cavalli Monuments in the Church of St Anastasia, Verona.’ The church, he warns, ‘contains nothing which deserves extraordinary praise.’ Still, in an uncharacteristic anticipation of Andy Warhol, Ruskin suggests we give it fifteen minutes’ attention. He promises the time will prove ‘interesting and instructive’ (24: 127). First he contrasts two monuments, visible as we enter the church. One is cloaked in shadows, the other bathed in light; the first is the best, the second ‘essentially the worst, piece of sculptured art in the building’: a series of academy studies in marble, well executed, but without either taste or invention, and necessarily without meaning, the monument having been erected to a person whose only claim to one was his having stolen money enough to pay for it before he died. It is, Ruskin adds, ‘one of the first pieces extant of entirely mechanical art workmanship, done for money’ (24: 130). A monument, we might say, to the new world order described in The Stones of Venice, only now he gives equal weight to Renaissance ‘pride of science’ and the capital that finances it. The point is re-emphasized 1

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in the Cavalli chapel itself, a ‘medley’ of contrasting styles, schools, motives and degrees of artistic excellence. This is partly what he calls ‘incrustation’ (a term he borrows from Italian historians: 24: 132), the accumulated work of many hands from many periods. But the deeper confusion is rooted in finance: tombs and frescoes of different dates, partly superseding, none illustrating, each other, and instructive mainly as showing the unfortunate results of freedom and ‘private enterprise’ in matters of art. . . . (24: 130–1) The only possible exception appears in Altichero’s beautiful upper fresco of three knights kneeling before Christ. Then attributed to Giotto, Ruskin insists that it is ‘nothing more than an interesting example of the earnest work of his time,’ with ‘no quality on which I care to enlarge’ (24: 132). Yet he still must attend to its ‘considerable historical interest’ (24: 132). Ruskin dates the fresco to the fourteenth century, when Federico Cavalli became Podestà of Vicenza. But its ‘peculiar significance’ arises from the history of the previous three centuries, when Milan ‘had been the central point at which the collision between the secular and ecclesiastical power took place in Europe’ (24: 135). This was when the Cavalli came from Germany to enter the service of powerful families in Milan, Vicenza and eventually Venice; part of the triumph of ‘the wandering rider, Eques, or Ritter, living by pillage, over the sendentary burgher, living by art, and hale peasant, living by labor’. And the ‘essential nature of this struggle’ is ‘curiously indicated in relation to the monument’ by two facts: ‘first, that the revolt of the burghers in Milan began with ‘a gentleman killing an importunate creditor’; second, that ‘at Venice, the principal circumstance recorded of Jacopo Cavalli . . . is his refusal to assault Feltre, because the senate would not grant him the pillage of the town’ (24: 137). Thus, for all its medieval charm, the fresco foreshadows the growing power of money in the culture that surrounded and succeeded it – that is, in modern culture. Yet none of this is visible in the Giottoesque fresco. Ruskin in effect historicizes it, not just in relation to the middle ages but from the distance of post-Renaissance culture. He invites the reader to do the same, to ‘follow out, according to his disposition, what thoughts the fresco of the three kneeling knights . . . may suggest to him on review of these passages of history’ (24: 137–8). It is a

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departure from what we often think of as Ruskinian art criticism, perhaps a departure from art criticism as such. The visual is subsumed in the historical, description supplanted by narration. The fresco becomes a meditative object. Perhaps it is the very attribution of such art to Giotto that troubles him. Appearances are deceiving. It isn’t enough to see. This may explain the essay’s odd closing comments, where Ruskin says he ‘must guard’ us against one conclusion; ‘that a condottiere’s religion must necessarily have been false or hypocritical’. His own historical narrative seems to support this view. But things aren’t as simple as that: The folly of nations is in nothing more manifest than in their placid reconciliation of noble creeds with base practices. But the reconciliation, in the fourteenth, as in the nineteenth century, was usually foolish only, not insincere. (24: 138) The tour of a medieval monument concludes in the nineteenth century, emphasizing our limited ability to understand the past, let alone see it with any precision. Historical images are contaminated by the conditions in which they must be viewed, especially when we look across the great divide between medieval and modern experience. Ruskin’s final sentences suggest not just the elusiveness of historical and visual evidence but the special difficulties we encounter interpreting the culture from which our own culture is beginning to emerge.

II. Death in Venice Why the ‘stones’ of Venice? Ruskin’s title is usually explained by his own remarks in the first chapter: if I should succeed, as I hope, in making the Stones of Venice touchstones, and detecting, by the mouldering of her marble, poison more subtle than ever was betrayed by the rending of her crystal; and if thus I am enabled to show the baseness of the schools of architecture and nearly every other art, which have for three centuries been predominant in Europe, I believe the result of the inquiry may be serviceable for proof of a more vital truth than any at which I have hitherto hinted. (9: 57–8)

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The sentence uses its central term in two ways. The famous reference to touchstones hints that architecture will serve as a kind of material metaphor, a site of moral analysis. The end of the sentence promises a search for ‘proof’, a word recalling the quasi-scientific emphasis of Modern Painters on natural law, particularly geology. The Stones of Venice continually refers us to the same bedrock of physical evidence: real stones in real buildings. Lest we underrate the plain, material significance of the title, Ruskin echoes its literalism in the titles of the first volume, ‘The Foundations’, and the first chapter, ‘The Quarry’. Back to basics, then, to the hard facts of architectural history. In this most impressionistic of cities, the subject of some of his most poetic prose and Turner’s most expressionistic images, Ruskin will focus on the solid materials of cultural archeology. I will return to Turner’s role in Ruskin’s analysis of Venetian history. First, I want to emphasize the paradoxical quality of its methodology. For in spite of his commitment to the solidity of material history, Ruskin is fixated on something opposite: the insubstantial, uncertain world of illusion and decay – the mysteries comprising this elusive place. The first description of the city echoes poetic images of its misty beauty: ‘a ghost upon the sands of the sea’, a ‘faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon’ (9: 17). Yet the traditional images underscore a more modern response to modern phenomena. In Marx’s famous metaphor, all that is solid melts into air; Venice is a city of uncertainty, dissolution and loss. The book’s first investigations of archaeological data turn up only absent details: the unfinished side of a Renaissance sepulchral monument, the missing hand of God in the Renaissance copy of a medieval capital from the Ducal Palace. There are many other examples. The Stones of Venice can be read as a catalogue of damaged or destroyed artifacts, neglected monuments and tattered paintings. How could it be otherwise? Nineteenth-century Venice is a scrapheap of its past greatness. Ruskin writes his father that this will dissatisfy readers: You know I promised them no Romance – I promised them Stones. Not even bread. I do not feel any Romance in Venice. It is simply a heap of ruins . . .1 He pledges ‘to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost’ (9: 17). But the promise only confirms the futility of the task: what must be traced already is fading. If the Gothic world is to be ‘reconstructed’ (to use one of his favorite metaphors), it must be

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from incomplete evidence; a heap of broken images, as T. S. Eliot would put it. Much as in his writing on Turner, Ruskin’s insistence on the hard data of Venetian history masks a recognition of the impossibility of this pseudo-scientific project, the inevitable insufficiency of any attempt to capture a fragmentary world in words. Venice can be seen only in partial glimpses of shattered half-truths, obscured by what Walter Pater would later refer to as the flux of time. What Ruskin encounters in this city is the unknowability of the past, history as a foreign country. Needless to say, this recognition is primarily visual, and no less indeterminate for that. As we have seen in the essay on the Cavalli Chapel, Ruskin finds visual evidence dangerously prone to misreading. Or perhaps I should put this the other way, since it is in The Stones of Venice that he first identifies the contradictory quality of the visual, its captivating but threatening instability. This is much of what Venice itself comes to stand for: the allure of a beautiful image and its deceptive depths, the multiplicity of what might seem a simple, single thing. The city is necessarily plural – many buildings, constructed over time. That stylistic variety is most conspicuous in the buildings that interest Ruskin most, especially those (like the Ducal Palace and St Mark’s) that span the crucial divide between the middle ages and the Renaissance. One result is the ‘incrustation’ he revisits in the Cavalli Chapel: architecture of many styles and periods, mixing assorted materials handled in different ways.2 But incrustation also records the work of different cultures, different peoples – or, as Ruskin might put it, races – that ‘met and contended’ in Venice (9: 38). The visibility of that multi-ethnic ‘struggle,’ in a sort of aesthetic miscegenation, is another mark of the close relation of the medieval city and the jumble of nineteenthcentury London. All this is most apparent at St Mark’s. I say ‘at’ rather than ‘in’ because Ruskin locates the church in a changing context – a magnificent, ancient building used and misused in a confusing modern society. The rhetoric of the famous description at first tries to persuade us that it will be otherwise: we approach St Mark’s through noisy, dark passageways that seem to ‘fall back’ before the magical structure, ‘as if the rugged and irregular houses that pressed together above us in the dark alley had been struck back into sudden obedience and lovely order’. Ruskin tells us to ignore those competing details, that visual noise, just as he tells us to forget the ‘mingling with the lower Venetian populace of lounging groups of

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English and Austrians’ (10: 82). Yet he cannot forget any of this himself: the same distracting images return again and again, or, more accurately, he returns to them. Perhaps the most remarkable quality of this poetic passage is its compulsive attention to prosaic reality, its insistent descent from St Mark’s visionary iconography to the turbulent world of living beings surrounding it. Tradesmen hawk their wares beneath its pillars; martial music on the piazza competes with organ notes drifting from the church; ‘in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards’ (10: 84). But such details (and there are more) do not so much pollute the sacred imagery as relocate it in the complex surroundings of a living world. A real world, one might say, although it is precisely this linkage of the sacred and the profane, the hieratic images of past art and the confusing motion of living beings, that makes Ruskin’s Venice like Eliot’s London an ‘Unreal city’ – and makes it so clearly modern. No less than Eliot’s it is also a city of the dead. Anticipating Thomas Mann, Ruskin is preoccupied with death in Venice, with evidence of decay and disease.3 Repelled and attracted at once by this infected splendour, he seeks out precisely those details he ought to avoid like the plague, particularly those associated with the fatal modern disease called the Renaissance. At times he characterizes the city as a beautiful woman, at times as her beautiful corpse; this necrophilia may help explain why his marriage was failing as he wrote the book. Venice is a site of his deepest ambivalence and most active repression. It is the capital city of decadence – not merely diseased but the embodiment of disease itself – a beautiful disease, as Pater would have said. Little wonder so many of the journeys narrated in The Stones of Venice lead to tombs, to morbid contemplation of decline and fall. Ruskin’s historical survey ends with the image of a cursed Renaissance city consumed ‘by the inner burning of her own passions . . .[,] her ashes . . . choking the channels of the dead salt sea’ (11: 195). Death dominates the whole final volume, especially in the long account of medieval and Renaissance funerary sculpture he revised for the ‘Travellers’ Edition’ and retitled ‘The Street of the Tombs’. What can this morbidity tell us about Ruskin’s relation to the modern? The first edition of the first volume appeared on 3 March 1851; on 28 December of that year Ruskin received word of Turner’s death (which had occurred on the 19th). He was in the midst of research

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for the last two volumes, and had been ‘working among tombs . . . for this last three weeks’. 4 No wonder the event quickly became entangled with his analysis of Venetian history, the city’s fateful confrontation with the forces of modernity. Ruskin reassures his father (who sent the news) that he was ‘quite prepared’ for the death, yet he admits one source of continuing uneasiness: ‘whether it has yet been ascertained that his portfolio is safe – or whether, of which I lived in continual dread – he has destroyed anything.’ 5 Turner’s death has touched nerves sensitized by Venetian history – a history of notable deaths, damaged or lost works of art, an idealizing culture increasingly subordinated to the power of capital. Might the same fate await the greatest modern painter or his work? In his first letter on the subject, Ruskin discusses the pictures that preserve essential qualities of Turner’s genius. Because it is Sunday, he cannot ‘enter into any particulars’. 6 What he means is that he cannot (although he wants to) write about business. Soon he will write about little else. From this time on, he is preoccupied with the effect of Turner’s death on the price of his paintings and the general state of the art market. That is the recurring focus of his correspondence with his father up to the last letter he writes before leaving Venice in June 1852, when he returns home to act as executor of Turner’s estate. Ruskin doesn’t want to miss out on what he rightly anticipates as a spiralling trade in Turners, and spends many letters trying to persuade his father to buy selected works. There may be bargains; certain paintings must be purchased before their prices rise too much. He works hard to convince John James Ruskin (whose responses are not published) that his own valuations are just, even when they run counter to established prices. Long explanations follow. Some pictures possess inherent artistic worth, others are valuable to him for their subjects or techniques. That first letter urges his father to ‘secure’ all the Swiss sketches since 1841: ‘I can get more of Turner at a cheaper rate thus, than any other way – I understand the meaning of these sketches. . . . Besides – no one else will value them.’7 By January 1852, he is prepared to ‘divide all Turners into four classes’ (a typical Ruskinian formula), beginning with ‘those which I would give any price for it I had it to give’, then ‘those which I would give anything in reason for’, and last ‘those which I would give something for – if they went cheap’. 8 Turner’s death has introduced him to that inherently modern discipline he later would call ‘the political economy of art’. It is by no means a simple subject, especially since this economy

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intersects with others. Ruskin’s 1852 letters from Venice discuss his own considerable expenditures (which his wealthy father underwrites), the probable success of The Stones of Venice with an English public (about which his father is worried), and the future survival of Venetian art (Ruskin is gloomy about this). The fortuitous conjunction of issues helps him recognize a modern crisis of value, a large and growing discrepancy between the cost and worth of precious objects. How can Venetian palaces be destroyed in the name of ‘restoration’? How is it possible that others do not recognize the relative importance of Turner’s greatest work? Ruskin believes he knows the truth in these matters – the unchanging value and essential significance of the art he loves. Yet as he moves among decaying tombs or climbs to inspect neglected Tintorettos, he sees another, less predictable economy at work. No matter that this market in Turners was created largely by Ruskin’s own efforts. Now it has spiralled to unthinkable proportions. After his death, Turner has become a ‘modern painter’ in a new and fearful way, his paintings taken from his control and Ruskin’s. Masterpieces have become commodities, caught up in an impersonal system of objects (to use Baudrillard’s phrase). Ruskin cannot help but be preoccupied with these intimations of mortality. The fate of Turner coincides with the fate of Venice: modernity means commercialization, and this in turn means the death of art.

III. Whistler’s Mother and Ruskin’s Dada Ruskin’s most notorious engagement with modernism occurred in 1877 and 1878, when his harsh assessment of paintings by James McNeill Whistler at the Grosvenor Gallery led to one of the most celebrated libel trials of the century. The offending remarks, published in the letters to ‘the workingmen of England’ Ruskin called Fors Clavigera, complain particularly about the price of what he regards as inferior work. The famous passage is brief and biting: For Mr Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face. (29: 160)9

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The language recalls the attacks from which Modern Painters first defended Turner’s pictorial experiments.10 Four decades later, it is Ruskin who must experience the ‘shock of the new’, confused by Whistler’s impressionistic techniques and dismayed that such unconventional work is exhibited and priced as if it is comparable to ‘classic’ art. The second issue is as important as the first: most of the Fors letter concerns a newspaper article about ‘the conditions under which art is now studied’ (29: 151). The problem of Whistler’s modernism is related to the problem of modern exhibition practices – that is, to the modern art business. These threads do not come together neatly. The free-associational style of Fors Clavigera ranges from art to zoology. By the time of the attack on Whistler (in letter no. 79), Ruskin makes increasing reference to usury, which he (like Pound after him) regards as central to understanding modern history and the condition of the arts; the next letter (no. 80) returns to the issue again. But the Whistler letter already deals with related subjects: the inflation or falsification of artistic value, proper commissions for art sales, and ‘the suddenly luminous idea that Art might possibly be a lucrative occupation’. Ruskin sarcastically complains that the ‘Professorships’ of dealers like Agnew and Co. have ‘covered the walls’ of Manchester with ‘exchangeable property’ (29: 154). A note adds: ‘The existence of the modern picture dealer is impossible in any city or country where art is to prosper.’ He promises to arrange a ‘bottega’ for the Guild of St George, where ‘shopkeepers’ will sell watercolors at reasonable prices ‘on the understanding that the work is, by said shopkeeper, known to be good, and warranted as such; just as simply as a dealer in cheese or meat answers for the quality of those articles’ (29: 154–5n). Then, after related observations, he turns to recent efforts ‘for the promulgation of Art-Knowledge’ (29: 157) at the Grosvenor Gallery. Ruskin actually approves the aims of the gallery, which ‘has been planned and is directed by a gentleman in the true desire to help the artists and better the art of his country: – not as a commercial speculation.’ Yet some traces of commerce still must be expunged. ‘Sir Coutts Lindsay is at present an amateur both in art and shopkeeping. He must take up either one or the other business, if he would prosper in either’ (29: 157). Ruskin instructs Lindsay not to display his own paintings, and to remove china and ‘glittering’ furniture that interfere with the contemplation of art. A gallery should be businesslike, but it shouldn’t look too much like a business.

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More importantly, it should not ‘group the works of each artist together’, a scheme that exaggerates ‘the monotony of their virtues, and the obstinacy of their faults’. ‘It is better,’ Ruskin explains, with a curious echo of Whistler’s terminology, ‘that each painter should, in fitting places, take his occasional part in the pleasantness of the picture-concert, than at once run through all his pieces, and retire’ (29: 158). A gallery, then, should define such ‘fitting places’. A painter like Whistler should be viewed alongside other, and better, artists – to help us compare and judge. But some comparisons are invidious, such as that implied in the Grosvenor’s display of a so-called ‘modern school’ that includes Edward Burne-Jones. ‘His work . . . is simply the only art-work at present produced in England which will be received by the future as “classic” in its kind, – the best that has been, or could be.’ ‘I know,’ Ruskin adds later, ‘that these will be immortal’ (29: 158–9). Galleries must acknowledge such classics, such classes of art and artist. For class is central to Ruskin’s uneasiness, as we see in the references to Sir Coutts Lindsay as gentleman and Whistler as a ‘Cockney’. Galleries should help us put paintings, and people, in their place. Hanging Whistler’s pictures together blurs their differences from other work and blurs them with one another. The public is effectively blinded, as if by a pot of paint. We no longer can discriminate separate virtues or faults. We no longer can distinguish separate subjects, or perhaps any subjects at all. To some extent that is Whistler’s goal. As their musical titles suggest, his paintings subordinate mimesis to expression, to the evocation of feeling. Narrative or moral content is incidental, as he explains in his testimony at the trial and in an essay published six months earlier, later reissued as ‘The Red Rag’. His example is the ‘Harmony in Grey and Gold,’ a snow scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture.11 Whistler makes the same point about the famous portrait of his mother, ‘exhibited at the Royal Academy as an “Arrangement in Grey and Black.” Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?’12

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Ruskin, for one, cared a great deal. The Grosvenor Gallery exhibited eight Whistlers: four Nocturnes, one Harmony, three Arrangements – including the Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle. That painting – of the writer Ruskin addressed as his ‘friend’, ‘best teacher’, ‘dear master’, and finally ‘papa’ – may suggest most fully why he found Whistler’s modernism so troubling. In the dissolution of subject he glimpsed what Ortega Y Gassett would call the dehumanization of art, the last phase of an assault on human content Ruskin first discovered in the missing features of Renaissance funerary sculpture. He also may have glimpsed curious references to his own writing, as if Whistler had conceived his work in direct opposition to Ruskin’s values: the Nocturnes reduce landscape to musical impressions; the Arrangements transform people into spots of color; the very titles discourage us from ‘reading’ visual images. Perhaps it is by extension of this same implicit dialogue that after the trial – which the painter won at great personal cost, receiving only one farthing in damages – Whistler travelled to Venice, where he executed some of his best late work. In 1885, after his return, he delivered the ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture specifically ridiculing Ruskin as ‘the Preacher’: ‘Sage of the Universities – learned in many matters, and of much experience in all, save his subject.’13 By then at least, Ruskin is an inescapable (if negative) point of reference in Whistler’s art. Ruskin’s mental state at the time of the trial was said to prevent him from appearing in court.14 Whistler, on the other hand, held forth with great wit on the stand, reprinting (and revising) his best lines in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. That self-promotion suggests a final source of Ruskin’s anxiety. Whistler’s painting suppresses narrative content to emphasize the role of the artist: the all-tooconspicuous hand behind the brushwork, the virtuoso referred to by the musical titles, someone who ‘plays’ with paint. It is an early version of performance art, an early performance of modernism, flaunting its unconventionality. This is part of what Ruskin means by ‘wilful impudence’, all the more so for invoking the figure of the modern artist Ruskin himself had created in his writing about Turner. When questioned in court if he charged 200 guineas for the ‘labour of two days’, Whistler famously responded (at least according to his version of the transcript) that he asked it for ‘the knowledge of a lifetime’.15 Ruskin had paid tribute to Turner’s ‘gigantic memory’ in ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ and praised the painter’s lifetime accumulation of knowledge in the fourth volume of Modern Painters

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(12: 379).16 But he also acknowledged that this achievement made much of Turner’s work inaccessible, the artist himself obscure, ‘modern’ in a sense that would become more familiar in the next century. ‘Only another Turner could apprehend Turner’ (7: 453). Whistler learned the discourse of modernism from a master. Whistler challenges his audience to think of both the artist and his art in new ways, to search for new ways of seeing. That is the point of one of his wittiest exchanges from the witness box, at least as he transcribes it: ‘Then you mean, Mr Whistler, that the initiated in technical matters might have no difficulty in understanding your work. But do you think now that you could make me see the beauty of that picture?’ The witness then paused, and examining attentively the AttorneyGeneral’s face and looking at the picture alternately, said, after apparently giving the subject much thought, while the Court waited in silence for his answer: ‘No! Do you know I fear it would be as hopeless as for the musician to pour his notes into the ear of a deaf man.’17 Whistler reports that laughter followed the joke. He does not indicate if he based it on a curiously similar passage in The Stones of Venice about appreciating the architectural use of colorful materials: ‘a deaf man might as well pretend to pronounce judgments on the merits of a full orchestra, as an architect trained in the composition of form only, to discern the beauty of St Mark’s’ (10: 97–8). The echo reminds us that Ruskin already had encountered a version of what he finds so disorienting in Whistler’s painting: a strange, fragmentary art; a beauty contained in the dissolution of familiar reality; an art of decadence and masquerade – the haunting world of Venice. In the 1850s his desire for this forbidden ambiance could be indulged and then repressed. In the 1870s the repressed returns in the form of an emerging modernism, priced high enough to revive his concerns about the erosion of value, labeled with phrases that seem to mock his own deepest convictions. It is as if this art of the future comes out of his own past, his own fantasies – the fears for art that seem to anticipate the deliberate transgressions and irrationalities of Dada and other modernist movements. Whistler was Ruskin’s worst nightmare.

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Coda: hammer blows Curiously, the nightmare seems to recur, as if the same repressed material erupts again, after Ruskin’s death. On 10 March 1914, a suffragette named Mary Richardson slashed the Velázquez Venus with a Mirror, the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery. It was ‘the first and most famous in a campaign of deliberate damage to works of art during the last months of suffragette militancy before the outbreak of war.’18 Richardson, a former art student, explicated her actions in language that echoed Unto This Last: I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas.19 There were eight attacks on thirteen more paintings over the next four months, including at least two with special Ruskinian significance. On 22 May five pictures were damaged in the National Gallery’s Venetian Room. At the National Portrait Gallery on 17 July, in the final incident before the outbreak of war ended the campaign, a suffragette slashed Millais’s portrait of Carlyle. Historians of modern art situate the suffragette attacks alongside revolutionary aesthetic movements like Vorticism and Futurism. F. T. Marinetti, who joined suffragette marches in London during the window-smashing campaign of 1912, had pledged in the ‘Founding and Futurist Manifesto’ of 1909 to ‘destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind. . . .’ 20 Marinetti was no admirer of Ruskin. 21 The suffragette actions suggest a more equivocal position towards the arts of the past. They attacked not only such Victorian classics as Herkomer’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington (12 May) but also paintings associated with the emergence of post-Victorian aesthetics such as Sargent’s portrait of Henry James (4 May) and a modernist nude in the Royal Academy summer exhibition (22 May). It was not so much an assault on institutionalized art as an attempt to redefine institutional values, to relocate aesthetics in a larger context. After damaging Millais’s portrait of Carlyle with ‘a chopper’, Margaret Gibbs (alias Ann Hunt) interrupted the proceedings against her to announce that the painting ‘will have an added value and be of great historical interest because it has been honoured with

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the attentions of a militant.’ 22 Lisa Tickner recently has shown that the suffrage campaign concerned representation in the arts as well as politics.23 Clearly, it also concerned the ways in which certain representations could be seen. Staging their protests in an exhibitionary space given authority by Victorian culture, the suffragettes did not so much attack the conception of an art museum as join the battle for its control. No one had done more than Ruskin to popularize that conception or suggest the terms in which it might be contested. The suffragettes’ questions (explicit and implicit) are his: what is the nature of value? Under what circumstances is it (or is it not) possible to cherish the arts? For the suffragettes, even when they attack paintings he loved, Ruskin is not so much a target as a source, an intellectual and moral forebear without whom the denunciation of misplaced values and misvalued paintings would not have been possible. If their campaign enacts a politics of modernism it also reenacts something of his struggle against the growing power of modern market conditions, the reduction of questions of value to matters of cost. Ruskin would have been horrified by their violence to paintings. But he might have recognized his own concerns in their preoccupation with the destruction of precious things. The Stones of Venice identifies that as the central, characteristic act of the Renaissance, the new, modern age inaugurated dramatically on 27 March 1424, by the ‘hammer stroke’ that began demolition of the old wing of the Ducal Palace (10: 352). Ruskin invoked the same motif at the 1857 ‘Art Treasures’ exhibit in Manchester, warning his wealthy audience to take more seriously the very idea of a treasure: for every great work we preserve, something – or someone – is neglected. ‘It is ourselves who abolish – ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame. . . . All these lost treasures of human intellect have been wholly destroyed by human industry of destruction’ (16: 64–5). It was in this vein that Mary Richardson insisted that her actions had ‘financial and symbolic’ significance: ‘I had to draw the parallel between the public’s indifference to Mrs Pankhurst’s slow destruction and the destruction of some financially valuable object.’24 She might have said, more simply, ‘There is no Wealth but Life.’

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Notes References in the text are by volume and page number to The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12). 1 Ruskin’s Letters from Venice, 1851–1852, ed. John Lewis Bradley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 185: 18 February 1852. The passage continues by asserting that it is a ‘heap of ruins, trodden under foot by such men as Ezekiel describes 21, 31: and this is the great fact which I want to teach: To give Turneresque descriptions of the thing would not have needed ten days’ study – or residence.’ 2 Ruskin borrows the term from Italian art historians, but clearly it comes to stand for much more in his socio-historical vocabulary. Incrustation is the visible imprint of aesthetic history, what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a chronotope. In a sense it is the space of time, marking a visible world inflected by material conditions, the visual embedded in history – a token of what I call visuality. 3 John Rosenberg observed Ruskin’s anticipation of Thomas Mann: ‘Might not his violent hostility to Renaissance Venice have been a kind of atonement for the spell which this most arrogantly voluptuous of cities cast upon him?’ The Darkening Glass: a Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 87. 4 Ruskin’s Letters from Venice, p. 112. 5 Ibid., p. 111. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., pp. 112–13. 8 Ibid., p. 145. 9 Letter 79 is dated 18 June 1877. For a thorough recent study of the Whistler–Ruskin battles, see Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler versus Ruskin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). The classic, if biased account, appears in Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (New York: Dover Press, reprint of the Heinemann edition of 1892), titled ‘The Action’. 10 See Rosenberg, p. 207. 11 The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, p. 126. 12 Ibid., p. 128. 13 Ibid., p. 149. 14 Linda Merrill, who questions the ‘traditional story’ of Ruskin’s incapacity, suggests that ‘there is reason to suspect that by November 1878, the month of the trial, Ruskin was not as ill as his lawyers would have had Whistler – and future historians – believe’ (p. 95). She concludes (on the evidence of Arthur Severn’s memoirs), that Ruskin himself made the decision, based on ‘the conviction that a confrontation with Whistler would offend his dignity’ (A Pot of Paint, p. 96). 15 The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, p. 5. 16 In ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ Ruskin goes on to remark that all Turner’s ‘greatness, all his infinite luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything that he sees, – on his grasping all, and losing

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hold of nothing, – on his forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else’ (12: 385). Modern Painters IV declares ‘that he seems never either to have lost, or cared to disturb, the impression made upon him by any scene – even in his earliest youth’ (6: 42). I am grateful to Clive Wilmer for pointing out the relation of Whistler’s remark and Ruskin’s tributes to Turner’s memory. 17 Ibid., pp. 9–10. Merrill refers to this as a ‘dramatic elaboration’ (A Pot of Paint, p. 367 n. 46), although the transcript she reconstructs uses the same image: Holker [the Attorney-General]: You have made the study of art your study of a lifetime. What is the peculiar beauty of that picture? Whistler: I daresay I could make it clear to any sympathetic painter, but I do not think I could to you, any more than a musician could explain the beauty of a harmony to a person who has no ear. (p. 153)

18 19 20 21

22 23 24

Whether this text here recreates the transcript more accurately than Whistler’s is impossible to determine. Merrill, attempting ‘to present a rendition of Whistler v. Ruskin that is clear, correct, objective, and intelligible’ (Merrill, p. 3), bases her version on newspaper accounts, which often abbreviate discourse, even if this means sacrificing style for the sake of clarity. Such sources might tend to underplay Whistler’s own wit, for reasons of journalistic clarity rather than malice. Rowena Fowler, ‘Why Did Suffragettes Attack Works of Art?’, Journal of Women’s History, 2 (1991), p. 109. The Times, 11 March 1914. Cited in Janet Lyon, ‘Militant Discourse, Strange Bedfellows: Suffragettes and Vorticists Before the War’, differences, 4, no. 2 (1992), p. 106. See, for instance, the ‘Futurist Speech to the English’ (1910), in which he attacks ‘the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin, which I would like to cover with so much ridicule that you would never forget it[.]’ F. T. Marinetti, Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Classics, 1991), p. 72. The Times, 22 July 1914. Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Mary Richardson, Laugh a Defiance (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), p. 165.

2 Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal: John Ruskin and Wilhelm Worringer Andrea Pinotti

Oh dear, oh dear, what a day! Was ever anything so provoking! just when we wanted to crystallise ourselves. 1

1. ‘Like a wild north wind’ John Ruskin and Wilhelm Worringer shared an idée fixe: the Gothic. If we read the Formprobleme der Gotik (1911) by the German art historian, comparing it with The Nature of Gothic, the approach of the two books coincides in many points. First of all, they are both discursive texts, not overtly scientific – in the tradition of rigorous artistic historiography – yet capable of exerting a deep influence far beyond the specific discipline, 2 combining the theoretic with the intuitive. Ruskin and Worringer strive towards an intuition of the essence of Gothic. Both extend the concept of Gothic style from an artistic category to a spiritual category (Ruskin’s ‘gothicness’,3 Worringer’s ‘secret Gothic’4): a definition which is irreducible to its mere historical medieval limits, and is polemically opposed to the Classic, and which is able to blow ‘like a wild north wind’,5 even along the more remote paths of art history. Both employ Gothic as a key to reading their own historical time – for Ruskin Victorian England, for Worringer expressionist Munich – and finally as a vehicle for the manifestation of their poetics. Both offer a key to a reading of the Gothic, since for Ruskin and Worringer, style is essentially language – with its grammar, its phraseology, and its history – and works of art are writings. In his work 17

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Ruskin refers to the ‘language of mature Gothic’, the ‘grammar of the flamboyant’, 6 and the ‘grammar of silica’.7 Worringer maintains, treading in Alois Riegl’s wake, that the artistic representation of reality ‘consists in the translation of the objects from the external world which have to be represented in the linguistic elements of the corresponding will of form’. 8 In discussing the origin of Gothic style (or ‘Gothic phraseology’9) from proto-northern ornamentation, he asserts that ‘from the ground of this elementary archaic grammar of lines a particular language of lines develops, which is evidently characterized as a proper German idiom’. 10

2. ‘Naturalism and style’ But the ‘truth’ of the language of art (of Gothic, as of any style) is comprehensible, both in Ruskin and in Worringer, only if reduced to those psychological premises (which Ruskin identifies as ‘mental tendencies’11 ) which constitute a condition of possibility, a sort of spiritual a priori 12 (not individual, but collective 13 ) allowing for cultural expressions, in primis art and religion. In Worringer, this claim extends to the formulation of an anthropological typology (primitive man, oriental man, classic man, gothic man) which has to provide the basis for his psychology of styles. Yet if one considers the mental elements listed by Ruskin in defining gothicness – ‘savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, redundance’14 – a problem is constituted above all by the term ‘naturalism’. Here the similarity between the two thinkers appears to fail. A conflict is created by the opposition of abstraction and empathy (expounded by Worringer in the homonymous text which provides the theoretic frame to Formprobleme der Gotik): abstraction in this instance corresponds to rejection of nature, whereas empathy corresponds to an identification with nature. Thus Gothic is abstract, that is, anti-naturalistic, since Gothic figuration derives from the proto-Northern line, in which ‘any attempt of direct imitation of nature is absent’. 15 But in Ruskin’s opinion Gothic style is profoundly naturalistic, that is, it is moved by ‘the love of natural objects for their own sake’.16 It is necessary, then, in order to understand this radical difference, to clarify the meaning of the term ‘naturalism’, by examining the sense in which it is employed; by Ruskin positively, by Worringer negatively. Conventionally naturalism is presented as a tendency to faithful reproduction of nature in works of art.

Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal 19

It is significant that both authors, in discussing naturalism, consider the concept of style. In The Nature of Gothic, particularly the passages devoted to the moral element of naturalism, Ruskin examines the different imaginative attitude attributed to Western and Eastern peoples, ‘The Western, or Gothic, delighting most in the representation of facts, and the Eastern . . . in the harmony of colours and forms’.17 This conflict becomes an opposition between men of facts and men of design, ‘facts’ in this context meaning what is perceived through the eye and the mind, and ‘design’, the capacity of composing forms and colours. These two extremes are possibilities, which delimit a range of infinite nuances, and of error too. Ruskin associates the concept of style with an abstract composition, one which neither necessarily reproduces facts, nor is necessarily ‘figurative’: We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts. Good colouring does not necessarily convey the image of anything but itself. It consists in certain proportions and arrangements of rays of light, but not in likenesses to anything. A few touches of certain greys and purples laid by a master’s hand on white paper will be good colouring; as more touches are added beside them, we may find out that they were intended to represent a dove’s neck, and we may praise, as the drawing advances, the perfect imitation of the dove’s neck. But the good colouring does not consist in that imitation, but in the abstract qualities and relations of the grey and purple. 18 ‘Naturalism and style’ is the title of the second chapter in Abstraction and Empathy; the concept of ‘style’ is associated with that of ‘abstraction’, and opposed to that of ‘naturalism’, which in turn is coupled with ‘empathy’. Naturalism is an ‘approximation to the organic and the true to life’, 19 a typifying definition of classic art, whereas style is ‘pure geometric abstraction’,20 the artistic expression of primitive and oriental people. In Worringer too, naturalism appears be connected with the figurative (a style in which organic beings, such as animals and plants, can be recognized; the Ruskinian facts). Style appears to be connected with the non-figurative (the abstract line is non-representational). Unlike Ruskin, to whom the Gothic man is the man of facts, Worringer believes that Gothic is ‘the last “style”’,21 and therefore an abstract one.

20

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But Ruskin states that the true mission of men of design is ornament, something which they conveniently forget in envying facts, when they feel the ‘temptation of closely imitating nature’.22 In considering ornamentation – definitely not mere decoration, but held to be the very essence of Art, by Ruskin as well as by Worringer23 – a work of art is only fully ornamental when it is ‘naturalistic’: ‘The less of nature it contains, the more degraded is the ornament’.24 In this way, from design via ornament, we have been brought back to naturalism. Yet naturalism – and this is true for Ruskin as well as for Worringer – must not be confused with imitation of nature. Or rather, we need to agree on the concept of ‘imitation’. Ruskin, in considering the vegetable decoration in gothic architecture, writes: Not that the form of the arch is intended to imitate a leaf, but to be invested with the same characters of beauty which the designer had discovered in the leaf. Observe, there is a wide difference between these two intentions. The idea that a large Gothic structure, in arches and roofs, was intended to imitate vegetation, is, as above noticed, untenable for an instant in the front of facts. But the Gothic builder perceived that, in the leaves which he copied for his minor decorations, there was a peculiar beauty, arising from certain characters of curvature in outline, and certain methods of subdivision and of radiation in structure.25 Structure, and the laws which govern it: this is, according to Ruskin, what the artist must imitate.26 Structure and those laws, in Worringer’s opinion, lie at the basis of the living world, so mimesis does not consist ‘in the wish to copy the things of the outer world or to render their appearance. Its aim was to project the lines and the forms of the organically vital, the euphony of its rhythm and its whole inward being.’27 Worringer insisted that ‘it was not the vegetal organism itself, but its structural law that man carried over into art’. 28

3. Sympathy, ‘down even to the stone’ To which realm of nature do these structures belong? Ruskin wills the concept of nature to coincide with the concept of the organic world; the kingdom of living beings to which Worringer’s empathic attitude would relate. The central concept here is that of ‘vital beauty’, ‘the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in living things’,29

Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal 21

which exerts over us a ‘call for sympathy’ 30 and is specified as a ‘keenness of the sympathy which we feel in the happiness, real or apparent, of all organic beings’. ‘Vital beauty’ considers the functions which the organism fulfils in each of its parts, and not its utility towards the needs of man. A trunk transformed into a bridge becomes a mere object, loses its vital beauty, maintaining only the typical beauty which is ‘dependent on its lines and colours’,31 and therefore dependent on design, or abstract and formal values. The emphasis placed on vitalism, or sympathy towards the organic, and even on the question of participation and identification to which the act of seeing leads, ‘the full sight . . . requiring the highest powers of penetration, sympathy, and imagination’,32 grants Ruskin an important role in the theorizing of empathy. Gombrich goes as far as to claim that the Ruskinian conception of the double source of ornamentation may have prefigured Worringer’s opposition of abstraction and empathy: ‘Ornament . . . has two entirely distinct sources of agreeableness: one, that of the abstract beauty of its forms[33 ] . . . the other, the sense of human labour and care spent upon it’.34 The first position endorses an autonomy of form from the organic world and from life; the second emphasizes empathic humanization of forms. For the theorists of empathy, the animation that the subject exerts over the object is not exclusive to living beings, with whose vital rhythm the human being synchronizes, but even to inert beings; Ruskin states that ‘No inconsiderable part of the essential characters of Beauty depends on the expression of vital energy in organic things, or on the subjection to such energy, of things naturally passive and powerless’. 35 In the fourth volume of Modern Painters, in the chapter dedicated to ‘vital beauty’, Ruskin indicates that ‘the task of the painter, in his pursuit of ideal form, is to attain accurate knowledge, so far as may be in his power, of the peculiar virtues, duties, and characters of every species of being; down even to the stone’.36 Here one can see the possibility of a sophisticated conceptualizing of nature, from mere realm of organic beings, to Nature as an entity which includes the animal, the vegetable, and even the mineral kingdoms; that of stone and of crystal. Ruskin too, like Worringer, had to face the problem of how the straight or geometric line could be perceived as a natural line, and approached in the same way as a curved or (organic) line. Surely all beautiful forms must be curved, since one can hardly find a natural form which is straight: ‘Although, to find right lines in

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nature at all, we may be compelled to do violence to her finished work, break through the sculptured and coloured surfaces of her crags, and examine the processes of their crystallisation’. 37 Moreover, in contemplating an organic and an inorganic spirit, Ruskin emphasizes that in the edifices of Man there should be found reverent worship and following, not only of the spirit which rounds the pillars of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenue – which gives veining to the leaf, and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that agitates animal organisation, – but of that also which reproves the pillars of the earth, and builds up her barren precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky. 38 This is the same crystalline spirit that was venerated by primitive man, according to Worringer, since it offered a shelter against the chaos of organic life. 39 Ruskin’s enthusiasm for crystal forms, an enthusiasm which intensifies in the passage from the Seven Lamps to the Stones of Venice, 40 would become in the space of fifty years, due to the attention Worringer’s work focused upon it, absolutely central in expressionistic poetics.

4. ‘The same great law’ Even Worringer, with his sympathetic discussion of abstraction, recognizes the power of ‘the ultimate affinity between the morphological laws of organic and inorganic nature’.41 The conflict between organic and inorganic laws is overcome by the awareness of an essential original unity in natural lawfulness which proposes that organic regularity is different only in degree from the inorganic: ‘The primary element is not the natural model, but the law one abstracts from it . . . Both ornamental styles, linear and vegetable, represent after all an abstraction.’ 42 The geometrical line, ‘element of an inorganic lawfulness placed before all that exists’, is the basis of the natural structure tout court, which is developed in the process of moving from the inorganic to the organic, but never removed or forgotten: The morphological law of the inorganic nature echoes like a hazy reminiscence in our organism. . . . Every differentiation of the

Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal 23

organized matter, every development of its more primitive form, goes along with a tension, a nostalgia, so to speak, for regress to that primitive form.43 In disagreeing with Lipps, who maintained that every form of nostalgia we feel is always a nostalgia for life, Worringer evokes a nostalgia for death and mineral stillness (or Ruskin’s ‘crystal rest’44 ), which primitive man, threatened by the hostile and mysterious environment, driven by his ‘spiritual agoraphobia’, pursues. The geometric form thus represents the basic morphological law common to both the living and the non-living kingdoms, expressing ‘the most profound inner connection of all living things’.45 It interconnects life with the inert and gestures towards nature in its broadest sense to include the inorganic. Worringer’s position is very close to Riegl’s, whose Historical Grammar, 46 through its insistence upon the crystalline form, confers upon it a superior unity of symmetry and proportionality, dismantling the opposition between organic and inorganic. Riegl ascribes to the crystalline laws a capacity to acknowledge the logos of the organic world as well. To obey geometric harmony does not mean, however, to place oneself out of nature: in Stilfragen Riegl had already realized that it is through the foundational laws of symmetry and rhythm that nature creates man, animal, plant and crystal.47 Ruskin refers to the same unity of laws when he states: ‘What is done by the Venetian architect, with a power as irresistible as that of the waves of his surrounding sea, is done by the masters of the Cis-Alpine Gothic, more timidly, and with a manner somewhat cramped and cold, but not less expressing their assent to the same great law.’48 Organic world and inorganic world speak the same language of proportion; therefore it is possible to set a grammar which identifies its functional laws.

5. ‘Endless natural history’ The subject of the history of language once broached, its diachronic development requires investigation. In both Ruskin and Worringer we find a philosophy of history (exploring the single form, the Gothic style, Art as a whole), particularly in the discussion of transition from the inorganic to the organic and the abstract to the naturalistic. Worringer presents the inorganic as an originary echo that resounds

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in the organic and as a law moulding the formal structure. Ruskin is equally sensitive to the issue of the origination of form in the past. As the Goethian Klee would do in his courses at the Bauhaus, Ruskin suggests a genetic study of the foliage (as well as of the work of art49), since he asserts ‘its modes of growth present simple examples of the importance of leading or governing lines. It is by seizing these leading lines, when we cannot seize all, that likeness and expression are given to a portrait, and grace and a kind of vital truth to the rendering of every natural form.’ But his form of life includes the inert and the rock as well: I call it vital truth, because these chief lines are always expressive of the past history and present action of the thing. They show in a mountain, first, how it was built or heaped up; and secondly, how it is now being worn away, and from what quarter the wildest storms strike it. In a tree, they show what kind of fortune it has had to endure from its childhood . . . Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. 50 Such Ruskinian exhortation recalls Klee’s ‘unendliche Naturgeschichte’: history, or even prehistory, of the visible. The artist, admiring nature already shaped, can move his point of view from present to past; this procedure allows him to approach the only, essential image, that of creation as genesis. This process is ‘natural’ since ‘for the artist, dialogue with nature remains a conditio sine qua non. The artist is a man, himself nature and a part of nature in natural space.’ It is ‘infinite’ since the artist believes that present creation cannot be complete, and armed with this premise he extends the creative act from the past to the future, to achieve a ‘new naturalness, the naturalness of the work’.51 The genetic-evolutionary process does not limit itself to the single form or to the single work, but extends until it embraces art in its universality. The entire history of art moves from the abstract to the naturalistic. Ruskin suggests that ‘In the progress of national as well as of individual mind, the first attempts at imitation are always abstract and incomplete. Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.’ And he adds: ‘All art is abstract in its beginnings; that is to say, it expresses only a small number of the qualities of the thing represented. . . . There is a resemblance between the work of a great nation, in this phase, and

Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal 25

the work of childhood and ignorance, which, in the mind of a careless observer, might attach something like ridicule to it.’52 Worringer follows the same premise, extending the issue of abstract priority to Art as a whole. By examining the evolution of ornament, he observes that it was a process which ‘consists in the subsequent naturalisation of a pure ornament, i.e. an abstract form, and not in the subsequent stylisation of a natural object.’53 This process, according to Ruskin, is exemplified by Gothic style, as well as in Art as a whole; the same evolutionary law from the abstract to the organic is always in force. The supposition that the original concept of Gothic architecture was derived from vegetation is thus ‘strange and vain’, since it is actually a process of interrelation: ‘The Gothic did not arise out of, but develop itself into, a resemblance to vegetation’. 54

6. The Gothic oxymoron This questioning of the inner evolution of Gothic style returns one to the initial problem: what is the significance of attributing to the Gothic the character of naturalistic and organic style? Could the conflict between Ruskin and Worringer (organic Gothic versus abstract Gothic) be resolved in the proposition that even for Ruskin Gothic was in its origins abstract? One needs to explore those passages in The Nature of Gothic and Formprobleme der Gotik where Ruskin and Worringer, overwhelmed by their idée fixe, let themselves be dominated by pathos and poetry, rather than by quantitative description or by philosophy of history. It is bizarre that Worringer moves away from the premise that Gothic is in essence abstract, and discusses the concept as if it were organic.55 Ruskin in binary opposition maintains that Gothic is organic, but discusses the concept as if it were abstract. Ruskin, in fact, writes about a ‘not merely stable, but active rigidity’, about an ‘energy of fixedness’.56 The metaphors which he resorts to are derived not only from the organic world, vegetable and animal (Gothic decoration ‘stands out . . ., here starting up into a monster, there germinating into a blossom’), but also from the crystalline world of ice (‘frosty fortitude’, ‘freezing into pinnacles’). 57 Such decoration is certainly ‘never for an instant languid, always quickset’; yet its vitality is not a serene one, indicative of Southern communities, but corresponds to that ‘crabbed, perverse, and morose animation of plants that have known little kindness from earth or

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heaven, but, season after season, have had their best efforts palsied by frost, their brightest buds buried under snow, and their goodliest limbs lopped by tempest’.58 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer has already ascribed to the Gothic man the necessity of empathizing with abstract forms: ‘The need for empathy of these restless people does not choose the most obvious way, which leads to the organic, because for it the harmonic movement of the organic is not sufficiently expressive; on the contrary, it needs that mysterious pathos typical of the animation of the inorganic.’59 In Formprobleme this need confirms itself as an expression of contrasting impulses, which cannot find a dialectic reconciliation, but remains within an oxymoronic conflict: ‘This is not a case of harmonious interpretation of two opposite tendencies, but of an impure, and to a certain extent uncanny, amalgamation of them, a requisition of our capacity for empathy (which is bound up with organic rhythm) for an abstract world which is alien to it’. It is exactly the constant tension between two polar forces which generates in the Gothic an ‘ecstasy of movement, far outstripping any possibilities of organic movement’.60 This deep disquietude, fever and anxiety will not calm down except in death (or, which is the same, in the ‘foul torrent of Renaissance’61 ): ‘It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly[62] around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied’.63 The Gothic line, as Worringer writes, gives ‘the impression of a living and passionate mobility, of a ceaseless disquietude in searching, which is present in this tangle of lines’.64 The northern line, in short, is not animated by the empathic projection of the subject’s life, ‘but rather seems to have a proper expression, far stronger than our life.’

7. Organicity is abstraction This peculiar oxymoronic character of the Gothic style, as it is represented in both Ruskin and Worringer’s intuitive descriptions, forces one to reconsider in primis the concepts of abstraction and naturalism, and consequently the rigid opposition between the paladin of organic Gothic (Ruskin), and the paladin of inorganic Gothic

Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal 27

(Worringer). This hardly draws one to a consoling end, to an embrassons-nous, since there remains a conflict of supposed antipodal interpretations. Such a conclusion is prevented by the feverish tension of disturbing opposites within the oxymoron itself. On the contrary, the parabola of the Gothic style, of its origin and its destiny – and also the parabola of this comparison between two of its main interpreters – shows that organicity and abstraction are not labels which can be applied once and for all to a style. Instead they are conditions of possibility, we could say a priori, which only permit in the extreme positions set up within them the comprehension of the style itself. Gothic is a style which is always abstract and always organic – how could it be otherwise? Although it does not imitate nature, altering it in a particular way, it also (as in Goethe via Klee) produces nature itself, a plus of nature. In other words, the concept of Gothic certainly imitates nature; but not so much ‘natura naturata’, as ‘natura naturans’; the spirit of leaf, the spirit of crystal.

Notes Abbreviations: SL = John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture; NG = John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic; references are from The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12). AE = Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1907), trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International University Press, 1953); FG = Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic (1911), trans. Herbert Read (London: Putnam, 1927). 1 The Ethics of the Dust: 18: 246. 2 ‘Laymen have overestimated Worringer’s dissertation and his Formprobleme, while scholars of art have underestimated them . . . Worringer touched a deeper layer of the problem of form than many another scholar, and we, too, must seek to delve into this layer without renouncing the task of formulating clear concepts’ (Paul Frankl, The Gothic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 679). 3 NG: 10: 181. ‘Gothic . . . is not an art of form or tradition only, but an art of vital practice and perpetual renewal’ (The Two Paths: 16: 284). 4 FG, p. 38. ‘When the psychologist of style, faced with the matured, historical Gothic, has for once grasped the basic character of the Gothic will to form, he can detect this will to form as being active underground, as it were, even where, obstructed by more powerful external conditions and hindered in its free expansion, it assumes a foreign disguise.’ 5 The Stones of Venice I, appendix 8 (‘The Northern Energy’): 9: 426. 6 SL II: 8: 95. In NG he complains that ‘the idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight

28

7

8 9 10

11

12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26

Ruskin and Modernism out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our mind for a moment’ (NG: 10: 206). The Grammar of Silica 26: 537. Cf. the planned Grammar of Crystallography (30: 3; 37: 404) and the ‘Grammar of Ice and Air’ (The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, 34: 59). FG, p. 62. AE, p. 119. FG, p. 41. In ‘Griechisch-Römisches’ (1924) Worringer opposes the Greek culture of becoming to the Roman culture of being, discussing their different styles in writing. Cf. Fragen und Gegenfragen (München: Piper, 1956), pp. 29–32. ‘Gothic architecture has external forms and internal elements. Its elements are certain mental tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it’ (NG: 10: 183). Ruskin also speaks of ‘moral’ or ‘imaginative’ elements (NG: 10: 184 and 245). In the sphere of scientific study Worringer requires ‘a method which treats all the facts of art merely as arrangements of certain a priori categories of artistic, or rather, of general psychic sensibility’ (FG, pp. 12–13). As far as architecture is concerned, Ruskin would probably agree with the ‘Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen’ practised by Wölfflin, Riegl and Worringer: ‘Architecture . . . is, in some sort, the work of the whole race, while the picture or statue is the work of one only’ (NG: 10: 213–14). NG: 10: 184. FG, p. 40. NG: 10: 215. NG: 10: 215. NG: 10: 215–16. AE, p. 27. AE, p. 35. AE, p. 120. NG: 10: 220. Ruskin: ‘Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture’ (12: 82–4). It is what transforms a mere functional ‘building’ into a real ‘architecture’, which only is ‘a true work of art’ (SL I: 8: 29). Worringer: ‘It is of the essence of ornament that in its products the artistic volition of a people finds its purest and most unobscured expression’ (AE, p. 51). On this point Worringer strictly follows Riegl’s theory of ‘Kunstwollen’. Manufacture and Design: 16: 325. But ‘everything being then ornamental that is imitative’ (SL IV: 8: 154), ‘consider first that the characters of natural objects which the architect can represent are few and abstract’ (8: 155). NG: 10: 257–8. On structure cf. SL IV: ‘All beauty is founded on the laws of natural forms’ (Aphorism 19: 8: 141); ‘Architecture . . . is not to imitate directly the natural arrangement . . ., but she is nevertheless . . . to give some indication of that radical and connected structure which Nature would have given it’ (8: 151). And SL V: ‘Now I call that Living Architecture. There is sensation in every inch of it, and an accommodation to every architectural necessity, with a determined variation in arrangement, which

Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal 29

27 28 29 30

31 32 33

34 35

36 37

is exactly like the related proportions and provisions in the structure of organic form’ (8: 204). AE, p. 28. AE, p. 59. Modern Painters II: 4: 64. Modern Painters II: 4: 147. Ruskin significantly relates sympathy to language: ‘Language . . . is only clear when it is sympathetic. You can, in truth, understand a man’s word only by understanding his temper. . . . It is this which makes the art of language . . . To teach the meaning of a word thoroughly, is to teach the nature of the spirit that coined it, and the secret of language is the secret of Sympathy’ (The Relation of National Ethics to National Arts: 19: 172). In Fors Clavigera (27: 627) sympathy is defined as ‘the imaginative understanding of the natures of others, and the power of putting ourselves in their place’. In Stones III (9: 61) Ruskin uses the expression ‘sympathetic temper’. About Ruskin’s ‘sympathy’, John Unrau (who, in his Ph.D. dissertation A Study of Ruskin’s Architectural Writings, presented at the University of Oxford, 1969, suspected the presence of a ‘latent Ruskin’ in Worringer’s theory of ‘latent Gothic’) writes that it is ‘the operation of the faculty which we nowadays term “empathy”’ (‘Ruskin’s Uses of the Adjective “Moral”’, English Studies, 52, no. 4 (Aug. 1971), p. 346). The role of the concept of sympathy in modern Anglo-Saxon thought (e.g. in David Hume, who can be considered a forerunner of the ‘Einfühlungstheorie’) is central. Modern Painters II: 4: 153. NG: 10, 230. And colours: ‘Abstract colour is not an imitation of nature, but is nature itself . . . We deal with colour as with sound – so far ruling the power of the light, as we rule the power of the air, producing beauty not necessarily imitative, but sufficient in itself, so that, wherever colour is introduced, ornamentation may cease to represent natural objects, and may consist in mere spots, or bands, or flamings, or any other condition of arrangement favourable to the colour’ (12: 94). SL II: 8, 81. Cf. Ernst H. Gombrich, ‘John Ruskin and Expressionism’, in The Sense of Order (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1979), part I, ch. II. SL V: 8: 190. Cf. The Ethics of the Dust: Dora: ‘You know, you always talk as if the crystals were alive; and we never understand how much you are in play, and how much in earnest. . . .’ – Lecturer: ‘The stones puzzle me as much as I puzzle you. They look as if they were alive, and make me speak as if they were; and I do not in the least know how much truth there is in the appearance’ (18: 340–1). Modern Painters IV: 6: 173. SL IV: 8: 145. ‘Beautiful ornament, wherever found, or however invented, is always either an intentional or unintentional copy of some constant natural form; . . . the pleasure we have in these geometrical figures of our own invention, is dependent for all its acuteness on the natural tendency impressed on us by our Creator to love the forms into which the earth He gave us to tread, and out of which He formed our bodies, knit itself as it was separated from the deep’ (‘The Material of Ornament’: 9: 271).

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38 SL III: 8, 102–3. The leaf is South, the crystal is North: ‘The ice spiculae of the North, and its broken sunshine, seem to have image in, and influence on, the work; and the leaves which, under the Italian’s hand, roll, and flow, and bow down over their black shadows, as in the weariness of noon-day heat, are, in the North, crisped and frost-bitten, wrinkled on the edges, and sparkling as if with dew’ (SL III: 8: 122). 39 ‘Here the last trace of connection with, and dependence on life has been effaced, here the highest absolute form, the purest abstraction has been achieved; here is law, here is necessity, while everywhere else the caprice of the organic prevails’ (AE, p. 20). 40 In SL V, crystals are opposed to vegetation, as the false to the true life: the first, ‘instead of growing and blossoming under any whole-some dew, is crystallised over with it, as with hoar-frost, and becomes to the true life what an arborescence is to a tree, a candied agglomeration of thoughts and habits foreign to it, brittle, obstinate, and icy, which can neither bend nor grow, but must be crushed and broken to bits, if it stand in our way’ (SL V: 8: 192). In ‘The Material of Ornament’, the crystal form is admired as ‘the completely systematised natural structure of the earth’ (9: 271). ‘The proper material of ornament will be whatever God has created. . . . And, for material, we shall therefore have, first, the abstract lines which are most frequent in nature; and then, from lower to higher, the whole range of systematised inorganic and organic forms’ (9: 265). On this question see Joseph Masheck, ‘Abstraction and Apathy’, in Neil H. Donahue, ed., Invisible Cathedrals: the Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 50–1. 41 AE, p. 35. 42 AE, p. 60. 43 AE, pp. 35–6. Freud will deal with a similar nostalgia for death in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920). 44 Ethics of the Dust: 18: 340. 45 AE, p. 35. 46 Alois Riegl, Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (1897–9), aus dem Nachlaß hrsg. v. K. M. Swoboda u. O. Pächt (Graz: H. Böhlhaus, 1966). Cf. AE 19–20. 47 Alois Riegl, Stilfragen (Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1893). 48 SL III: 8: 122. 49 For this it is necessary ‘to wait for the calm verdict of interposing years’: ‘as in the ebbing of a mountain lake, he would watch the varying outline of its successive shore, and trace, in the form of its departing waters, the true direction of the forces which had cleft, or the currents which had excavated, the deepest recesses of its primal bed’ (SL III: 8: 100). 50 Elements of Drawing: 15: 91. Marcel Proust remarks: ‘If he attaches so much importance to the aspect of things, it is because this alone reveals their deep nature. . . . The configuration of an object is not merely the image of its nature, it is the expression of its destiny and the outline of its history’ (‘Preface to La Bible d’Amiens’, in On Reading Ruskin, trans. and eds J. Autret, W. Burford and Ph. J. Wolfe, introd. R. Macksey (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 34–5.

Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal 31 51 Paul Klee, ‘Ways of Studying Nature’ (1923), in The Thinking Eye: the Notebooks of Paul Klee, vol. I, ed. Jürg Spiller (New York: G.Witterborn; London: Lund Humphries, 1961), pp. 63–7. 52 SL IV: 8: 170. 53 AE, p. 60. 54 NG: 10: 237. The Gothic artist ‘could not help liking the true leaves better; and cautiously, a little at a time, he put more of nature into his work, until at last it was all true’ (NG: 10: 232). 55 Dora Vallier claims that, ‘quoi qu’il veuille prouver, il continue d’être séduit par la “vitalité organique” . . . Son jugement de valeur inconsciemment penche du côté de l’Einfühlung’ (‘Lire Worringer’, introd. to the French edition, Abstraction et ‘Einfühlung’, trans. E. Martineau (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978), p. 18. Even on the stylistic level of Abstraction and Empathy, as Waite underlines, one could find symptoms of such an empathy towards abstraction: ‘When he discusses abstraction his language becomes . . . most empathetic and performative; when he discusses empathy, it becomes most anxious and, in Worringer’s terms, most abstract’ (Geoffrey C. W. Waite, ‘Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Criticism’, in G. Chapple, H. H. Schulte and A. Lee Alvin, eds, Turn of the Century: German Literature and Art, 1890–1915, (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), p. 220. 56 NG: 10: 239–40. 57 NG: 10: 240. 58 NG: 10: 241. 59 AE, p. 77. 60 FG, p. 42. 61 SL II: 8: 98. 62 Cf. ‘The Northern Energy’: ‘Geometry seems to have acted as a febrifuge, for beautiful geometrical designs are introduced amidst the tumult of the hunt’ (9: 430). In the same appendix Ruskin lists subjects which illustrate ‘the feverish character of the Northern Energy’ (9: 434). 63 NG: 10: 214. 64 FG, p. 41.

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3 Ruskin, Myth and Modernism Dinah Birch

It has long been recognized that myth can be identified among the sources of cultural authority for writers wishing to reject Victorian literary form. In place of the fictional conventions of realism, or the historiography of progress, early modernists could perceive themselves to be constructing a syncretic and fragmentary framework grounded in myth. Writing of James Joyce’s Ulysses in November 1923, T. S. Eliot famously spoke of this ‘mythical method’. His remarks, repeatedly quoted since, seem almost to amount to a manifesto: ‘Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him . . . It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious. . . . Instead of the narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art.’1 But this ‘mythical method’ has a longer and more complex history than the confidently immediate tone of Eliot’s essay suggests. Some of its interwoven lines of inheritance have recently been re-examined, and the developing disciplines of ethnography and anthropology, beginning to come of age as modernist thinking moved towards self-definition, can now be more accurately identified as among its most pervasive sources. 2 It has become clear that their identity was taking shape long before Frazer’s status as literary celebrity was confirmed for a generation. Constructions of modernist myth were not simply to do with readings of Jessie Weston or The Golden Bough. Political and social theory, Anglo-American imperialist ambitions and the limitations of those ambitions, new approaches to the origins of science and literature, all had a part to play. 32

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The mythographic direction of Ruskin’s work of the 1860s and 1870s might seem far removed from modernist interests in anthropology and ethnography, for it was not as a writer on myth that Ruskin figured in the prevailing sense of literary tradition. But here, as elsewhere, the modernist aesthetic was less decisively removed from earlier practice than we might suppose. Many Victorians had contributed to sophisticated and often dissident reinterpretations of mythology, and Ruskin was among them. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the development of his critical thought is closely bound up with readings of myth. The publication of The Queen of the Air (1869) formulated a radical view of Greek mythology. Throughout Fors Clavigera (1871–84), and in the scientific texts which he worked on throughout the 1870s, Ruskin continued to explore the implications of a new mythography. His developing images of myth were closely bound up with concepts of femininity and mortality. In Proserpina (1875–86), his serially published work on botany, he locates these images in a mythic study of plants and flowers. In furthering these Victorian interests, and redefining their terms, modernist writers demonstrate one of the most notable ways in which their literary iconoclasm was grounded in late nineteenthcentury thought. The Victorian revaluation of myth has its roots in the Romantic ambition to return to the energies of the primitive. A new interest in myth was central to the Romantic revolution in thought, and it was closely linked with the revaluation of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, that went with the radicalism of the Romantic revolution in Europe. Late eighteenth-century scholars like the French radical Charles Dupuis, or the English Richard Payne Knight, had been among the first to suggest that mythological traditions could be approached comparatively. Not only did they argue that significant links could be traced between the myths of the Greeks and other pagan cults, but also that the trained and sceptical eye might see connections between these heathen stories and the sacred narratives of the Jewish tradition. In Payne Knight’s view, all these mythic narratives could be seen to share a common basis in religious symbolism, often grounded in fertility worship. Knight suggested a universal reverence of the generative principle that expressed itself in the worship of natural phenomena: the sun, water and the earth. If myth was understood as a religious phenomenon in this way, then the special status of Christianity as a body of divinely revealed truth was, by implication at least, questioned. For

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eighteenth-century sceptics, an analysis of myth could suggest that the beliefs of Christianity might not be wholly separate from those of primitive pagan mythologies – an implication which could be construed as an attack on the foundations of established state religion. As Marilyn Butler has pointed out, ‘In the eighteenth century interest in pagan religions was led by the irreligious.’ 3 Arguments of this kind have their roots in the Enlightenment. But they proved to be very attractive to younger English Romantics like Byron, Shelley, Peacock and Keats, writers who had their own reasons for questioning the spiritual authority of the Christian church, and for affirming the creative and fertile power of the natural world.4 Reverence for the power of natural energy as a spiritual phenomenon is an important impulse in many central Romantic texts – Keats’s Hyperion, Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, or the great speech to the sun in Byron’s Manfred (Act 3, sc. 2) are characteristic examples of this recurrent motif. This interest in comparative mythology continued throughout the Victorian period, taking different forms as intellectual fashions changed. One of the most influential movements within the constantly shifting revaluation of myth within these years is its accommodation to the increasing prestige of science as a means of interpreting the world, and this was to become important to Ruskin’s later revaluations of myth. But Ruskin’s first approach to mythology was formed, like so much else in his work, by the creative conjunction between Romanticism and evangelical Christianity in his early years. From his intensive early reading of the Romantics, particularly English Romantic poetry, Ruskin derived a lifelong veneration for the creative energy of the nature. The first volume of Modern Painters is an extended demonstration of the fact that, for him, as for the early Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Peacock or Byron, religious experience was hardly separable from a reverence for the created world. But Ruskin differed from these Romantic poets, and from the sceptics who had influenced them, in the fervour of his Christian faith. The scepticism of the Enlightenment held no attraction for the young evangelical Ruskin. It was largely for this reason that in the years up to the mid-1850s Ruskin had little time for what he was inclined to see as the benighted heathenism of mythology. The ancients were not Christian; and Protestant Christianity seemed to Ruskin at this stage in his life to be the single and exclusive repository of spiritual truth. The Greeks, particularly, seemed to him to have had only the most superficial religious life.

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He wrote in the second volume of Modern Painters, in 1846, that ‘the Greek could not conceive a spirit; he could do nothing without limbs; his God is a finite God, talking, pursuing, and going journeys’. 5 It was only when his Christian faith began to falter, as Modern Painters drew to its conclusion in the late 1850s, that he began to take a serious and very much more sympathetic interest in myth. When he did so, it was in terms of comparative mythology that he made his approach, and it was a comparative mythology founded in his long-standing Romantic reverence for nature. Perhaps the ancients had not, after all, been sunk in superstitious paganism. It now came to seem possible that the nature-worship which he perceived at the heart of their mythologies could offer a life-line in the face of growing religious uncertainty. Throughout the 1860s, Ruskin was increasingly inclined to look to myth for a way out of his religious perplexities. In 1864, he wrote of his difficulties to his old college friend Henry Acland: ‘But you may suppose, from what we talked of then, that I was not likely to stay quiet in the mess I was in. So I am trying to understand what religions have hitherto been worth understanding, in some impartial manner – however little of each – and as I have strength and time, and endeavouring to make out how far Greeks and Egyptians knew God; or how far anybody ever may hope to know Him.’6 At around the same time, he wrote half-jokingly to the American Charles Eliot Norton: ‘I’ve become a Pagan, too; and am trying hard to get some substantial hope of seeing Diana in the pure glades; or Mercury in the clouds.’7 In pursuit of a broader and deeper knowledge of mythological traditions, Ruskin became an active student of mythographic scholarship. His reading ranged through the older traditions represented by Richard Payne Knight, including his 1818 study of The Symbolical Language of the Ancients, the early innovations of German Hellenists as represented by Carl Otfried Müller, the more up-to-date philological investigations represented by the influential work of Friedrich Max Müller, and the early anthropological scholarship of Edward Burnett Tylor and J. Fergusson. 8 He made it his business to learn how the understanding of myth had been transformed during his lifetime. However, though he embarked on his investigation of myth with what he had emphasized in his letter to Acland as a spirit of impartiality, and was clearly attracted to the cool and analytic tone of the newer and more scientific German traditions of comparative mythology, Ruskin was not just looking for knowledge. He

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was searching for faith. He turned to myth in the hope of constructing a certain and systematic religious belief out of his Romantic reverence for nature. But he did so knowing that myth could not wholly satisfy his need. A letter to Richard St John Tyrwhitt, written in August 1863, emphasizes the point: my personal experience of spiritual treatment has been chiefly from sun, moon, wind, and water – when the sun’s bright – I’m always pious: and always wicked in a windy day. And I’ve the greatest possible desire to ‘believe’ in Apollo and Diana – and in Nereus, and in water-symbols – and I do, very nearly; so that just a little touch or two of strong will will do it – quite: and what is more, it would make me quite comfortable and happy at once, and I don’t see at all how I can possibly get on without it, for I’m very wretched just now: only I’ve a horrible habit of thinking, whenever I want to believe a thing, that it can’t possibly be true, just because I want it to be; and I try it, and pinch it, and poke at it, and plague it, till it all goes to pieces – if there’s the least crack in it anywhere. So just because I wanted so much to believe in Diana, and dedicate a pine to her in my garden, I must needs, like a goose, go and watch which she seemed to like best; and all I could make out was that she shone on them all alike except one which she didn’t shine on because there was a great high chimney and a chalet-roof in the way – and I couldn’t somehow get to believe in a goddess who wouldn’t or couldn’t get round a corner: But if I could only cure myself of that nasty habit of measuring angles and things, I should be all right and comfortable – but it’s too late, I’m afraid.9 Here too a characteristically half-joking tone conceals a serious hunger for idealism. But his analytical and scientific bent – ‘that nasty habit of measuring angles and things’ – will not be wholly denied. Ruskin’s new interpretations of myth are related to his own spiritual need, but they also actively engage with the development of myth as a focus for scholarly debate. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, the most controversial topic for discussion was Max Müller’s influential philological theory of the sources of myth. Müller was an innovative and prolific scholar, who had two leading ideas on myth: that ancient myths derived from the worship of the sun, and that their earliest forms of expression had to do with the degeneration of language – that mythology was little more than a

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dangerous disease of language, in fact. 10 The idea that myth was closely related to the development of language was attractive to Ruskin, though he had no time for Müller’s notion that it was simply an expression of the decay of language. Ruskin was also sympathetic to Müller’s idea that the origin of myth lay in the worship of natural phenomena. Though he could not accept the idea that they were ‘almost always solar’,11 he was certainly interested in the myths of the sun, and briefly planned to write a book on Apollo as god of the sun.12 Instead, influenced by the potent Romantic image of the creative breeze, he found that he had more to say about myths of cloud and wind. His most substantial work on myth, his 1869 book on the Greek goddess Athena, The Queen of the Air, is subtitled ‘a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm’. Ruskin learned much from Max Müller, but for him the point of studying myth was not so much to shed light on the origin of ancient culture and religion, as to lead his readers to a clearer understanding of modern culture and religion. He explains his purpose in the introduction to The Queen of the Air: ‘We cannot justly interpret the religion of any people unless we admit that we ourselves, as well as they, are liable to error in matters of faith; and that the convictions of others, however singular, may in some points have been well founded, while our own, however reasonable, may in some particulars be mistaken. You must forgive me, therefore, for not always distinctively calling the creeds of the past, “superstition”, and the creeds of the present day, “religion”; as well as for assuming that a faith long forgotten may once have been sincere.’ Not only were the Greeks and Egyptians, in Ruskin’s view, sincere, they were also often wise, and the unchanging lessons of their naturemyths could be a valuable source of spiritual instruction to those who studied them. Ruskin’s method is primarily a moral one – influenced and stimulated by the scholarly controversies of the 1860s and 1870s, but still motivated by the religion and the Romanticism of his youth. Ruskin’s revaluation of myth after the completion of Modern Painters in 1860 was paralleled by the development of new forms in his work. His books were increasingly composite in structure, assembled from lectures, essays and pieces of topical writing. The account of myths of Athena in The Queen of the Air is characteristic of his writing of the 1860s – it is a patchwork of material gathered from very different sources, republished from the Art Journal, or his earlier

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polemical pamphlet Notes on the General Principles of Employment for the Destitute and Criminal Classes (1868). Ruskin himself described the book as ‘desultory memoranda on a most noble subject’.13 But it was not his purpose to analyse the myths of breath, breeze and storm associated with Athena in terms of a structured and coherent narrative, but as a body of often obscure spiritual meaning that had expressed itself in intermittent and varying ways in the art and literature of the ancient Greeks. The various myths of Athena constituted one of the traditions of old time in whose admittedly ‘vain and fitful courses’ could be discerned ‘a teaching for which no other can be substituted, and of which the power cannot be measured’.14 For Ruskin, the incompletion and discontinuity of myth was essential to its fertility. It was a source of potential wisdom in an unbelieving age and a reminder of the necessary limitations of that wisdom, and it was also a suggestive model for new kinds of literary form. His approach to myth as a critique of thought and literary form amidst the fragmentation of the modern world provides a suggestive parallel for the innovative literary generation which followed him. In his later years as revered Victorian professor and sage, Ruskin hardly seems to inhabit the same literary landscape as the iconoclastic James Joyce. Yet his insistence on a comparative framework of reference, where the myths of Jewish, Egyptian and Greek traditions could form layers of interlaced meaning, is analogous with Joyce’s placing a Jewish hero in a Catholic city, investing the ancient Greek narratives of Homer with transformed meaning in twentieth-century Dublin. Like Ruskin, James Joyce constructed language from the abundance of allusion, founded in extraordinarily wide-ranging learning, but refusing many of the traditionally systematic premises of scholarship. T. S. Eliot had claimed myth as a source of order in Ulysses. But myth could also question order, even blow it away. Athena’s life-giving breath had its darker counterpart in the destructive winds of the Harpies – ‘the gusts of vexatious, fretful, lawless passion, vain and over-shadowing, discontented and lamenting, meagre and insane, – spirits of wasted energy and wandering disease, and unappeased famine, and unsatisfied hope’.15 Joyce’s windy episode in Ulysses, ‘Aeolus’, has a very much less moral tone. Yet it too asserts the ambivalent power of words as breath – both the creative breeze of the Romantic imagination, and the mockingly destructive winds of futility and death – ‘Gone with the wind’,16 as Joyce recalled in ‘Aeolus’; ‘The tribune’s words howled and scat-

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tered to the four winds’;17 ‘The sack of windy Troy’;18 ‘Terrible tragedy in Rathmines! A child hit by a bellows!’ 19 Like The Queen of the Air, Joyce’s Ulysses creates its own versions of order out of myth. Joyce himself remarked of his novel: ‘My intention is not only to render the myth sub specie temporis nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique.’ 20 Joyce’s insistence on interconnection and interrelation recalls Ruskin’s mythical method. Both reach towards a fullness of meaning, often a dark and disorienting meaning, which, in Ruskin’s words, is ‘developed and manifested more and more by the reverberation of it from minds of the same mirror-temper, in succeeding ages.’21 Joyce’s reading of myth in Ulysses is literary in that its primary reference is to Homer’s Odyssey, whereas T. S. Eliot is more inclined to understand myth as a anthropological body of meaning located outside Western literary texts. Yet, Eliot too is drawn to the potential for unsettling continuities in myth, that reverberation across different minds and different cultures. Like Ulysses, The Waste Land is placed in the urban landscape. But Eliot’s city is as fluid as Joyce’s is specific, fusing broken images of ‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London’. 22 The barren unreal city is a modern phenomenon, but one which contains remembered natural energies within its unclean alleys and canals. Though nothing can be fixed in Eliot’s shifting and allusive lines, myths of decay necessarily imply those of regeneration – that ‘damp gust / Bringing rain’. 23 The ancient narrative of myth recalls a redemptive principle beneath the poetry’s nihilistic flux. This is not to suggest that The Waste Land can be read as an absolute declaration of renewed life. Eliot is closer to Ruskin’s cultural pessimism than Joyce had been, loathing, as Ruskin had loathed, the corruption and defilement of a natural world ‘covered with the dust and refuse of the town’.24 Both saw the city landscape marked with ruin. What Ruskin termed its ‘loose-tumbled stones’25 become the apocalyptic ‘falling towers’26 of The Waste Land. Ruskin had written out of self-mocking despair: ‘I am thinking of putting a patchwork faith together for myself out of any coloured rags I can pick up that look pretty – dropped by the dead nations – stitching them somehow into a pillowcase or bed cover, and going to sleep with such warmth as I can get out of them and my poor little life together – Poor Tom’s a cold – at present – But the glitteringest rags tear so!’27 His strategy finds a familiar echo in the

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closing lines of The Waste Land: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’28 Ruskin and Eliot identified different rags and fragments, and interpreted them differently. It is clear that Eliot’s interest in ritual practice was influenced by his knowledge of the Cambridge classicist school of anthropology, whose significant work postdates Ruskin’s investigations and initiates a changed direction in early twentieth-century interpretations of myth.29 But it is also clear that Ruskin and Eliot share the impulse to look to the mythological legacies of the past, however imperfect and disturbing, as a means of formulating an intensely personal response to the spiritual confusion of a generation. Persistent analogies between Ruskin’s mythographical studies and the interests of early modernists can be identified in shared interests in mythical femininity, and the accompanying preoccupation with myths of vegetation. It is not an accident that Ruskin’s two major works of mythographic interpretation, The Queen of the Air and Proserpina, take goddesses rather than gods as their subjects. The Queen of the Air investigates a divinity who can be seen to unite masculinity and femininity. Athena, prefigured in Ruskin’s view by the still more ancient Egyptian goddess Neith, is a martial figure, intellectual and austere, who springs directly from the head of Zeus and is without either mother or mate.30 As Ruskin interprets her, she unites female creativity with male authority. But Athena’s presence among Ruskin’s gods is balanced and qualified by that of Proserpina, lost daughter of Demeter, an earth-goddess associated with death and renewal. In Ruskin’s mind, Proserpina is the divinity of flowers as emblems of perpetual regeneration, but also of loss. He began to publish Proserpina, his work on the science of flowers, in 1875, the year in which Rose La Touche died. Proserpina had been one of his pet names for her, and the work is in part an extended memorial for Rose. But the link between Proserpina, flowers and death has a long literary history, and Ruskin was fully aware of its resonance. Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale was important to him, and the epigraph to Proserpina is drawn from Perdita’s famous speech: O Proserpina, For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall From Dis’s wagon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take

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The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady Most incident to maids) . . . 31 Though Proserpina is always an image of beauty for Ruskin, she is identified as a dark goddess. She is the ‘bringer of death’,32 and her real home is in the earth. Ruskin wrote of this in his 1861 lecture on ‘Tree Twigs’: ‘She plays for a little while in the Sicilian fields, gathering flowers, then snatched away by Pluto, receives her chief power as she vanishes from our sight, and is crowned in the grave.’33 Proserpina, or Persephone, becomes a multiple, fluid divinity, and is often a troubling presence in Ruskin’s work. The spiritual support that Ruskin derived from such myths was mixed with distress. ‘I could get, and do get, some help out of Greek myths – but they are full of earth, and horror, in spite of their beauty. Persephone is the sum of them . . .’34 Ruskin’s anxious reading of the myths of earth, which he found at once destructive and regenerative, is enmeshed with his equally uneasy understanding of sexuality, and of the mortality which seemed to him identified with the feminine. In The Cestus of Aglaia (1865–6), he described ‘a vision which has never quite left me since I saw it’; ‘the image of an Italian child, lying . . . upon a hill of sand’:35 The sand was mixed with her draggled locks of her black hair, and some of it sprinkled over her face and body, in an ‘ashes to ashes’ kind of way; a few black rags about her loins, but her limbs nearly bare, and her little breasts, scarce dimpled yet, – white, – marble-like – but, as wasted marble, thin with the scorching and the rains of Time. So she lay, motionless; black and white by the shore in the sun; the yellow light flickering back upon her from the passing eddies of the river, and burning down on her from the west. So she lay, like a dead Niobid: it seemed as if the Sun-God, as he sank towards grey Viso (who stood pale in the south-west, and pyramidal as a tomb), had been wroth with Italy for numbering her children too carefully, and slain this little one. Black and white she lay, all breathless, in a sufficiently pictorial manner: the gardens of the Villa Regina gleamed

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beyond, graceful with laurel-grove and labyrinthine terrace; and folds of purple mountain were drawn afar, for curtains round her little dusty bed. 36 Ruskin’s vision is dense with myth – not only in the specific references to the sun-god and the myth of Niobe,37 but to the death-myths of Egypt, to Apollo’s association with the sun and with laurel, to the link between queens and gardens. Underlying all these allusions is the identification between the sleeping girl and the earth, here the dry ground of sand and dust. Like T. S. Eliot after him, Ruskin found it hard to trust to the renewed vitality that the earth seemed to promise. ‘I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap, which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises, tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending stream of phantom sand.’38 Eliot’s sandy waste land, with its ‘murmur of maternal lamentation’, 39 is in part a memory of the arid landscape of the myth of Demeter and Proserpina. Other myths of loss within the relentless cycles of natural growth and decay recur. The myth of the hyacinth is among the most pervasive. The fleeting presence of the ‘hyacinth girl’ offers a fragile moment of release in The Waste Land, but it is constructed from failure and denial: Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing Looking into the heart of light, the silence.40 Here, as often in Eliot’s engagement with myth, the boundaries of gender are blurred, for the reference to the hyacinth implies the death of male beauty. Apollo, god of creation and of destruction, accidentally kills the lovely youth Hyacinth. He transforms him into a flower of mourning, whose return each spring can only record an endless renewal of grief. The petals of the hyacinth were said to be marked αιαι (‘alas, alas!’), making it, literally, both flower and text within this ‘nightmare world’41 of repetition. The ritual is in part a literary one. Like Ruskin, Eliot remembers Lycidas, Milton’s elegy for lost youth. ‘I never read anything in spring-time (except the Ai, Ai, on the “sanguine flower inscribed with woe”)’, Ruskin remarked in 1867, quoting Lycidas.42 Poems, like flowers, return;

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but neither Ruskin nor Eliot could easily envisage their own release into fertility. Inevitably, women writing within the modernist movement understood things differently. Yet they too were often preoccupied with images of the flowers and plants that figure in mythical narratives of death and regeneration. H. D. made myth a central tenet of her modernist aesthetic, and her poems repeatedly evoke Greek flower myths. Their enigmatic ambivalence is obsessively pondered in Sea Garden (1916): The light of her face falls from its flower, as a hyacinth, hidden in a far valley, perishes upon burnt grass.43 ‘Demeter’, published in Hymen (1921), affirms a more creative significance in the doubled mother-and-daughter goddesses of the earth. As H. D. reshapes their story, its meaning contains mortality and darkness, but is nevertheless not comfortless: Enough of the lightning, enough of the tales that speak of the death of the mother: .... enough of tale, myth, mystery, precedent – a child lay on the earth asleep. Proserpina remains ‘mistress of Death’, yet H. D.’s Demeter declares the primacy of the maternal energy that so often fails in modernist writing. The kiss of Hades is ‘less passionate’ than that of the mother.44 H. D.’s own post-war crisis of breakdown and despair had been partly resolved by the birth of a daughter in the spring of 1919. She called her Perdita. For H. D., the sleeping child on the earth does not recall Niobe’s lost children, but Shakespeare’s baby Perdita: it should here be laid, Either for life or death, upon the earth Of its right father. Blossom, speed thee well. 45 The dark ‘mystery’ that H. D.’s maternal goddess impatiently discards suggests the mythical tradition of the Eleusinian ‘mysteries’,

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in which the stories of Demeter and Persephone were ritually invested with a spiritual significance available only to the initiated. Ruskin broods on the idea of sealed mysteries, inaccessible to the mass of humanity, throughout the 1860s and 1870s. In Munera Pulveris (1862–3), he laments these ‘gifts of the dust’, sacred mysteries buried in the obscurity of great literature: ‘Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, have hidden all that is chiefly serviceable in their work, and in all the various literature they absorbed and re-embodied, under types which have rendered it quite useless to the multitude.’46 Such enigmas seemed to him still more a matter of futility in ‘The Mystery of Life and Its Arts’ (1868). Ruskin’s faith in the cycles of nature itself was undermined as he contemplated life’s mystery; ‘that the glory of it was perishable, as well as invisible, and the gift and grace of it might be to us as snow in summer and as rain in harvest.’ Virginia Woolf, who was not inclined to trust to the fertility of motherhood, remains close to this Victorian sense of a disordered world. ‘Oh! dear me, the mystery of life! the inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! . . . the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard . . .’, she muses in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917).47 Like Ruskin, when she thinks of human mortality amidst this incomprehensible flux she turns to thoughts of flowers and trees: But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women,[48 ] or whether there are such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so . . . They were discussing botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap.49 Woolf’s ‘dust heap’ calls to mind Eliot’s burial of the dead, with its ‘heap of broken images’, ‘fear in a handful of dust’.50 Eliot’s wise woman, the Cumaean Sibyl, has been absorbed into dust, and can utter only the wish to die. For Woolf, there remains the possibility of new flowering – not in the form of children, but through an individual return to a richer world of natural growth. Though

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modernist writers do not interpret cycles of destruction and renewal in the same way, their patterns of reference do provide persistent parallels with Ruskin’s fragmented mythical method. Woolf’s refigurations of myth, like those of Joyce, Eliot and H. D., suggest that Ruskin’s mythography can provide a context in which the newness of modernism can be more precisely located within reiterated continuities.

Notes 1 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, The Dial, 75 (1923), p. 483. 2 Robert Crawford’s The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) was among the first major studies to make the extent of T. S. Eliot’s debt to contemporary anthropology clear. Prehistories of the Future: the Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, eds Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), has added much to our understanding of the complexity of the issues. 3 Marilyn Butler, ‘Romantic Manichaeism: Shelley’s “On the Devil, and Devils” and Byron’s Mythological Dramas’, in The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century’, ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 13. 4 See Butler, pp. 13–37. 5 The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, eds ET Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 4: 329. 6 Works, 38: 34. 7 Works, 36: 426. 8 C. O. Müller’s influential work on The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, trans. H. Tufnell and G. C. Lewis, 2 vols (London, 1830) was important to Ruskin, who described it as a book that ‘all ought to know’ (Works, 18: 472). Friedrich Max Müller was a leading figure in Oxford throughout the 1860s and 1870s, and his Lectures on the Science of Language, 1st and 2nd series (London, 1861, 1864), were an influence to which Ruskin often refers. He may have been introduced to the nascent study of anthropology through his friendship with Alfred Tylor, the brother of E. B. Tylor, who was a geologist. Ruskin describes E. B. Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (London, 1865) as a book of ‘rare value and research’ (Works, 18: 614). Other early anthropological studies to earn Ruskin’s admiration included J. Fergusson’s pioneering Tree and Serpent Worship (London, 1866), which Ruskin described as ‘a work of very great value’ (Works, 19: 364–5). 9 Jay Wood Claiborne, ‘Two Secretaries: the Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Augustus Howell and Rev. Richard St. John Tyrwhitt’, unpubl. Ph.D. thesis (University of Texas, 1969), 207–8. Quoted in Dinah Birch, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 73.

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10 ‘As an affectation or disorder of language, mythology may infect every part of the intellectual life of man.’ Müller, Lectures (2nd ser.), p. 413. Müller’s thinking on language is brilliantly explored in Steven Connor’s essay ‘Conclusion: Myth and Metamyth in Max Müller and Walter Pater’, in Bullen, pp. 199–222. 11 Müller, ‘Comparative Mythology’, in Oxford Essays: Contributed by Members of the University (London, 1856), p. 87. 12 He wrote of his study of Athena, The Queen of the Air (1869), that ‘I should have had another such out by this time on the Apolline myths, and, perhaps, one of the Earth-gods, but for my Oxford work’ (Works, 34: 504). 13 Works, 29: 291. 14 Works, 19: 235. 15 Works, 19: 314. 16 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 137. See Ernest Dowson’s ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’ – ‘I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind.’ 17 Ibid., p. 138. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 140. 20 Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 271. 21 Works, 19: 310. 22 The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 73. 23 Ibid., p. 74. 24 Works, 19: 294. 25 Ibid. 26 Complete Poems, p. 73. 27 Ruskin’s Myths, p. 74. 28 Complete Poems, p. 75. 29 Jane Harrison, Francis Cornford and Gilbert Murray saw the origins of Greek drama in primitive ritual. Eliot found their arguments impressive, and drew on them in formulating his own theories of poetic drama. See Barkan and Bush, eds, p. 34; Crawford, pp. 86–7. For a lucid view of the work of Harrison, Cornford and Murray, see Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 122–34. 30 For an account of Athena in relation with Neith, see Dinah Birch, ‘The Ethics of the Dust: Ruskin’s Authorities’, Prose Studies, 12 (1989), pp. 147–58, and Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, ‘Gender and the Architectonics of Metaphor: Ruskin’s Pathetic Fallacy in The Ethics of the Dust’, Prose Studies, 16 (1993), pp. 41–61. 31 The Winter’s Tale, IV.iv. 116–25. 32 Works, 7: 478. 33 Ibid. 34 Works, 36: 501. 35 Writing of ‘Patience’ in The Cestus of Aglaia (1865–6), Ruskin begins with a reference to Chaucer’s image in The Parliament of Fowls ‘Dame

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36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

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Pacience sitting there I fonde, / With face pale, upon a hill of sonde’ (I. 242–3; Works, 19: 82). Works, 19: 82–3. Niobe boasted that she was at least the equal of Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis, as she had twelve children and Leto only two. Apollo and Artemis then killed all the children of Niobe, who wept until the gods turned her to stone. Homer, Iliad 24.604; Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.182–3. A child of Niobe is termed a ‘Niobid’. Works, 19: 83. Complete Poems, p. 73. Ibid., p. 62. Crawford, p. 149. Works, 17: 405; see Lycidas, 106; The Poems of John Milton, eds John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1968), p. 247. ‘Acon’, H.D.: Collected Poems 1912–1944, ed. Luis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), p. 32. Collected Poems, p. 113. The Winter’s Tale, III.iii.44–6. Works, 17: 208. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 84. ‘And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.’ Mark 8:24. Complete Shorter Fiction, pp. 84–5. Complete Poems, p. 61.

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4 Degrees of Darkness: Ruskin, Pater and Modernism Laurel Brake

‘all our thoughts are but degrees of darkness. And in these days you have to guard against the fatallest darkness of the two opposite Prides; – the Pride of Faith . . . and the Pride of Science.’ (Ruskin, Lecture II, ‘The Relation of Art to Religion’, Lectures on Art, delivered 1870; Works, 20: 51)

By 1870, and the inaugural lectures delivered to the University as the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Ruskin was at the height of his career, aged 51. If Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice were behind him, the scale of their achievement was indicated by the creation of such a Professorship, and by the opportunity it afforded Ruskin to embed the study of visual art in the curriculum and education of gentlemen. And while the lectures are nothing if not didactic, their very certitudes register Ruskin’s consciousness of the cacophony of counter-arguments in a ‘darkness’ which was both a general condition of human knowledge and personal: the turmoil of his dissolved marriage (1853), break with evangelical faith (1858), and attachment to Rose La Touche were matched by his public arguments with England, first about art and then, from 1860, political economy. Mental instability, which haunted Ruskin’s earlier years, continued to be an important factor. I will argue that while Ruskin proved increasingly irascible towards ‘progress’ or modernity during his Oxford years, he nevertheless strengthened his legacy to modernism, reinforcing his orientation to form, in lectures to young gentlemen whom he taught to look carefully and to see. Walter Pater, already familiar with Ruskin’s work and then at Oxford 48

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as a young Fellow, was publishing his early essays at the time. Born twenty years after Ruskin, Pater (1839–94) was chronologically, geographically and culturally placed to experience Ruskin and his work as a towering intellectual presence, if not influence, and undoubtedly this was the case. The contemporaneity of these critics’ lives and work meant that both their differences of person and their articulation of difference in their respective writings were often positioned in relation to each other, and although they addressed each other’s positions frequently, it was not usually by name.1 Together with Matthew Arnold, and the upcoming Mr Wilde (born 1854, entered Oxford 1874), Ruskin and Pater are key participants in a debate about culture which constitutes part of the history of early modernism. In the political tussle among these critics inscribed in their writing, the Artist and the Critic are prised loose by Wilde and Pater from the strictures of Society, the burden of individual and cultural Salvation, and even the yokes of class and imperialism, only to enter the fraught isolation of modernist subjectivity. The politics of gender has its part to play in this struggle. It is likely that Pater read Ruskin before going up to Oxford in 1858.2 By December 1859, halfway through his undergraduate course, however, we are told of Pater’s repudiation of the arguments of Stones; he was now, he claimed, ‘an enemy to all Gothic darkness’3 and in possession of ‘a better taste’. But from the evidence of Pater’s subsequent writing, both its fine arts subjects and its critical format and contents, his reading of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice had been formative; moreover, it was in the midst of the period between 1867 and 1872 when Pater was publishing his first essays, that Ruskin, elected in 1869, came to Oxford in 1870 to commence lecturing. I shall be looking at this first series of Ruskin’s Lectures on Art, and his earlier pamphlet (1851) on Pre-Raphaelitism in conjunction with those essays Pater published which were to reappear in Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873. Indeed, it is altogether appropriate to regard Pater’s choice of subject for his first book as one which functioned in dialogue with Ruskin’s recommendation on the one hand of Gothic and Pre-Raphaelite art and his castigation on the other of ‘the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools; a feeling compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride’ (‘Pre-Raphaelitism’, Works, 12: 357n). Many of Pater’s Renaissance texts, both in the periodicals and the book, address questions which Ruskin raised into prominence in the Oxford lectures and earlier, and throughout Pater’s subsequent

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career Ruskin was to remain a shaping referent for the younger man’s life and writing. After Ruskin retired from public life in 1885, Pater attempted unsuccessfully to succeed him as Slade Professor, and in the same year Pater served as Curator of the University Galleries, perhaps in anticipation of his candidacy for the professorship. Likewise when Pater published ‘Style’ and ‘Raphael’ in 1888 and 1892, salient elements of the address of these essays are to positions by then regarded as quintessentially Ruskinian. In a complex dialogism, Pater’s early review of William Morris’s work and the late essay on Raphael address Ruskins’s writing on Pre-Raphaelitism of 1851 and 1854, while Ruskin’s Oxford Lectures on Art of 1870 respond to the spirit of aestheticism in the Morris review published only 18 months previously in 1868, and are themselves the object of Pater’s riposte in the first, 1873 edition of The Renaissance, especially in the Preface. Michael Levey characterized the cultural meaning of the work of Ruskin and Pater as follows: Ruskin had assumed a Jehovah-like authority, and laid out a strict, ethical garden of art with defined flowerbeds and a large amount of forbidden, poisonous fruit. Pater turned it into a jungle rich and rank, where anyone was free to wander as he liked and where the very fruits condemned by Ruskin might prove not only the most alluring to eat but entirely harmless. 4 This is a statement to which both protagonists might have assented, had it ended before the last clause, to which I suggest neither would subscribe: Ruskin’s prose of denial imbricates acknowledgement of the allure of the fruits, and Pater’s celebration of ‘experience’ invokes its danger rather than its harmlessness. From their distinct gender positions within heterosexuality and homosexuality, Ruskin and Pater both saw the ‘fruits’ as Satan’s, but in these years Pater advised his readers to eat, while Ruskin ostensibly urged energetic abstention: ‘There is no black horse in the chariot of the soul’ he tells his students, ‘they are all good’ (Ruskin, Lecture III, Works, 20: 88). This shrill contestation of the contrary case – the energized displacement of the negative which Derrida has detected in all presence – is pervasive in the rhetorical style of this first series of Slade lectures, which Kenneth Clark alleges ‘were like revival meetings’.5 In a period when evaluation was a primary function of criticism, Clark feels compelled to allege that while Ruskin’s Slade lectures are ‘not his best work’ and ‘lack . . . coherency’, they do merit at-

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tention. 6 Claiming that at this period of his life Ruskin’s mind was too full (of political economy) to turn willingly to art, Clark implies that Ruskin’s ‘major’ (and earlier) work was less idiosyncratic and more single minded. I do not wish to endorse either claim, but to treat these lectures as cultural documents which were circulating at a time and place which coincided with Pater’s workplace, with its structures of pedagogy and its community of male youth, and with the period of Pater’s early published work. Pater’s first magazine articles and the book which resulted from them are predicated, at basic levels, on a number of topics raised by Ruskin into prominence in mid-Victorian English letters: first, the fields of fine art and architecture, the former of which Ruskin immediately proposed should be introduced into the University syllabus. While Pater’s book seems to fall into our interdisciplinary category of area studies, containing essays on poetry, philosophy and classical scholarship as well as fine art, the core of the book comprised essays on Renaissance figures whose fame derived from their prowess as visual artists – Botticelli, Luca della Robbia, Leonardo and Michelangelo. As in Modern Painters, named individual ‘stars’ figured prominently in The Renaissance, their personalities and social settings, as well as their art. An important difference – which may be connected with Pater’s habitual practice of periodical publication – is that he adopted the biographical structure of Vasari, a series of lives, rather than the model of philosophical discourse found in Modern Painters. 7 Nevertheless, the volume form of Pater’s writing entered into a market niche for art criticism which Ruskin had helped establish over 25 years, though Pater’s unillustrated work also derived from volumes of literary criticism such as Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1865) and Swinburne’s William Blake (1868). Samuel Wright notes that many of the reviews of the first edition of Studies ‘were placed in the Art columns of the periodicals in which they appeared, and Pater himself spoke of it as a work of art’. 8 The link between art and pedagogy is another basic element of Ruskin’s programme that Pater replicates, and again contemporaneity rather than influence may be the more reliable model for the relationship. We know that from 1867, the year Pater began to offer lectures at Oxford, his first series on the History of Philosophy was singled out, admiringly, for ‘rarely mentioning any philosopher’s name’.9 A later commentator, Lewis R. Farnell, who attended lectures from 1879, claims that Pater ‘was the first to give . . . practical

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expression to the idea that Greek art was a fitting lecture-subject for a classical teacher’. 10 Pater’s practice of the introduction of art into classics chimes with Ruskin’s attempt to introduce art into the Oxford syllabus as a subject in its own right. Dinah Birch is interesting on this point because she not only argues that by 1870 Ruskin’s priority was instruction,11 but that Ruskin’s discussion of ancient Greek art in the lectures represents a new receptivity on his part to a non-Christian culture previously denounced. Other characteristics of Pater’s Studies which have a dialogical relation to Ruskin include Pater’s address to perennial aesthetic questions – such as what constitutes style, the meaning of form, and the moral and social responsibilities of art – which, invigorated pre-eminently by Ruskin, were soon circulating outside the visual arts; within literature, writers such as Arnold, Swinburne, George Eliot and Morris addressed questions which Ruskin had been foregrounding. Together, the bulk and momentum of their work helped make aesthetics a dominant discourse of the late nineteenth century, sufficiently to be parodied as aestheticism, for example, in 1875–6 in The New Republic by W. H. Mallock.12 Spilling over into popular culture, the aesthetic was reinforced by the reiteration of the serial commentary of the press such as George du Maurier’s verbal satires and visual cartoons in Punch from 1865,13 and from 1881 by Patience, and the associated circulation of Wildean discourse in its many forms – lectures, dress, photographs, private conversation and interviews, poetry, drama, prose essays and fiction. Ruskin’s own consciousness of the ‘turn’ from aesthetics to aestheticism is registered in his attacks on aestheticism in its various guises in the Slade lectures.14 Although Ruskin’s earlier published work related to contemporary, ‘modern’ painters, the history of art soon became crucial to his developing argument, which in his configuration prominently involved issues of periodization. If other participants in this debate such as Pugin, the Pre-Raphaelites, Robert Browning, Michelet, Burckhardt and J. A. Symonds impinged on Studies, they seem safely secondary to the structures, vocabulary and example of Ruskin, whom Pater read early, and whose looming presence materialized for Pater in the Slade Professorship. More particularly, it was during the course of Ruskin’s Oxford lectures that Pater decided to make his bid, and to present an alternative view of cultural history to that of Ruskin by making the history of a redefined Renaissance period the focus first of his periodical articles and then of his book.15

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But perhaps the most pervasive and basic influence of Ruskin on the generation of Pater and Swinburne was the painstaking primers of how to see which were embedded in both the editorial and art copy of Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, all of which it is probable Pater read. I have to deduce that for Pater, Ruskin’s grounding in the visual arts was formative, even essential. Without Ruskin, it seems unlikely that art history by Rio and Crowe and Cavalcassele, and Swinburne’s art criticism in the Fortnightly, would have kindled Pater’s interest to the extent that they did. Moreover, Ruskin’s legacy to Pater – the moving of questions of aesthetics, Fine Art, the self-conscious artist, and the processes and techniques of making artefacts from the art periodicals, the studio and the halls of the Royal Academy to centre-stage – is one means by which these issues emerged in the foreground of modernist consciousness. In the 1890s and after, for example, writers such as Joyce and Woolf read Pater on art, form and style. Having delineated some of the links between Pater and Ruskin, I want to specify some differences which help us to map the distinctive work and paths of these near contemporaries. First is the Ruskins’ secure wealth in suburban London; a rooted and close, even oppressive family of an only child; and the high culture which characterized the upper middle-class household in which Ruskin was reared. This is in marked contrast with Pater, whose father was a surgeon (not the more prestigious physician) who died when Pater was two. The family, consisting of two generations of adult women and four siblings, moved twice, first to Enfield in rural Middlesex, probably in 1844, and then to Canterbury in 1853, where his mother died a year later and where he went to school adjacent to the great Anglican cathedral. Pater’s background, riddled by loss and to some extent financial insecurity, was High Anglican, a religion he abandoned before he left for Oxford in 1858, whereas Ruskin’s, emotionally and financially secure, imbued him with a fierce, evangelical Protestantism, to which he adhered until that same year, when he abandoned it for a more generic Christianity; in that year in which both Pater and Ruskin shook off the restrictions of faith, Ruskin was 39 and Pater 19. Just as the culture of Anglicanism affected the intellectual structures of Pater’s writing, with its emphases on metonymies, echoes and links, so Ruskin’s evangelical Protestantism fuelled his paradigms of binaries, the violation of whose boundaries are resisted with Puritan zeal.16 Family wealth also meant

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that Ruskin had from childhood ample opportunities to travel abroad, first on the ‘grand tour’, and then explicitly to ‘work’, often travelling with congenial groups of protégés and servants. It is not surprising that some of Ruskin’s writing – for guide books and (Royal) ‘Academy Notes’ – was dedicated to consumption by the tourism and leisure industries. Moreover, books such as The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture, which were read then as now by tourists as well as art historians and critics, do draw on the conventions of travel writing, a well-established genre in the nineteenthcentury book trade. Comparatively, the breadth of Ruskin’s readership was far wider than that of Pater, a difference indicative of Ruskin’s evangelical commitment to education and a politics of change. Ruskin’s wealth also enabled him to live as what we now call an ‘independent scholar’, and to eschew forms of production, notably publication but also lecturing, determined by a commercial market; he did not, for example, frequently contribute to periodicals for payment, as Pater did and perhaps had to. Where Pater on the whole successfully negotiated space for his controversial material in a range of periodicals, Ruskin had notable difficulties placing his equally awkward material, with certain of his contributions to Cornhill and Fraser’s abruptly called to a halt. But Ruskin was able to explore forms of publication – often involving his own expense – which were innovative and self-styled.17 Many of the first series of Oxford lectures up to 1876, for example, were issued by Ruskin and George Allen in an edition of collected works in which Ruskin, through the pricing of his volumes, put into practice his quarrel with the system of irregular discount of the book trade. 18 The result in this case was well-printed but not cheap books, and despite his interest in the working man, there were tensions between the politics and serial forms of many of his publications which seemed to court a popular audience and their high price and high culture which did not. The result are idiosyncratic, well-designed forms of publication which appear to anticipate elite and experimental serials which by the early twentieth century are termed ‘little magazines’ and emerge as a genre characteristic of modernism. Another ramification of Ruskin’s status as an ‘independent scholar’ who was not forced by either the marketplace or any institution or workplace to conform, was a relative freedom of expression which apparently caused Henry Wentworth Acland, a principal instigator of the Slade professorship, to weep with relief at Ruskin’s caution after the inaugural lecture.19 The degree to which Ruskin violated

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the decorum of the institution on that occasion is articulated by Benjamin Jowett of Balliol, who thought it ‘in very poor taste’, and indeed Ruskin had castigated his middle-class audience for ‘their vanity in living always up to their incomes’ and ‘their folly in imagining that they can subsist in idleness upon usury.’ The ‘sons and daughters of English families’ will be compelled ‘to acquaint themselves with the principles of providential economy; and to learn that food can only be got out of the ground, and competence only secured by frugality’ (‘Inaugural’, Works, 20: 40). This passage, in the wake of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, published in the previous year, is sandwiched between a reference to the ‘unemployed’ who ‘are daily becoming more violently criminal’ and a rhetorical passage on engagement in ‘the highest arts’ which gives some idea of the range of these lectures on ‘art’, the potential of which Acland’s tears of relief acknowledged. Pater, by contrast, had little money behind him; his several attempts to be elected to an Oxford fellowship were fuelled by necessity to earn a living, the possibility of ordination and life as a clergyman having been stymied. 20 His writing, initially under cover of anonymity, was adopted to mainstream formats, published, saleable work in periodical and book form, a success sustained partly by virtue of a style which may be viewed as defensive. This style, coded, oblique, complicated, is there in embryo in the early anonymous essays, all of which treat controversial subjects; it is honed under the pressure of the denunciation of Studies in the History of the Renaissance from pulpits in Oxford, and it serves to disperse and articulate meaning for sophisticated readers alone. The institutional constraints under which Pater worked also resulted in various acts of self-censorship, which included the removal and reinstatement of texts from successive editions of his work, withholding essays entirely from book publication after periodical circulation, withdrawing plans for a book and the manuscript from his publisher, and the dedication over four years21 to a two-volume work put forward as an explanation of the implications of the ‘Conclusion’ to Studies, which had caused such controversy in Oxford twelve years before. Marius the Epicurean was Pater’s most lengthy and sustained work, the only book of which no part was serialized. To write it involved an adjustment in his institutional constraints, and he resigned his tutorship in order to gain both the time to travel to Rome to research the setting and period of the novel and the time to write. Such

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constraints as the university timetable which left staff free for long periods during the hottest months and the expense and time of long-distance travel may explain why Pater never travelled to Greece. Although he lectured in Classics and wrote repeatedly about ancient Greek art and artefacts, his first-hand knowledge was confined to what he was able to view, decontextualized, in the museums of Britain and the Continent, and to read in Homer and other classical texts. None the less, for different reasons, Pater and Ruskin both wrote from ‘outside’, Ruskin because he was largely ‘independent’ of institutions, geographically restless and mobile, and intellectually innovative and irascible, and Pater because, although he was writing from ‘inside’ a culturally dominant institution, he wrote from the endangered position of a homosexual in such an institution, writing primarily for other men open to such homosocial readings. In this sense both Ruskin and Pater in their persons anticipate the type of the modernist artist/critic – self-conscious and isolated, although clearly this does not conform to Ruskin’s theoretical view of the artist’s implication in the social fabric. I suggested earlier that Ruskin’s trips abroad moved from the status of tourism and the grand tour to ‘work’, and I want to look at this transformation of a leisure activity to work, and at the high value accorded to labour in Ruskin’s aesthetic and moral structures. Like other privileged terms in Ruskin’s prose, such as ‘purity’, ‘noble’ and ‘ethical’, the subject of labour or work articulates the anxiety underlying it for Ruskin through the use of over-emphasis, repetition and declamatory rhetoric. Moreover, Ruskin’s social position, of middle-class wealth and independence derived from his father’s business, helps us to gloss this anxiety, through attention to the binary term which the presence of work displaces; leisure or the more pejorative term ‘idleness’, which appears in remarks about the profession of the painter in 1851: The painter has no profession, no purpose. He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies. But he was never meant to be like this. (‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ (1851), Works, 12: 348) The suggestion that the painter has been robbed of purpose and focus by the loss of religion as the purpose of art, and left to be ‘an idler on the earth’ reveals the full terror that leisure – as the

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absence of work, purposefulness and usefulness – holds for Ruskin. As a man of leisure and potential idleness, Ruskin positions the labour of perception as central to art and its viewers, but also to the political economy which circles seamlessly, in an unbroken circuit, from the viewer to the object to the nation to the race and back to the viewer. Similar to the implied reader or spectator of modernist art, Ruskin’s readership and viewers comprise a cultivated elite, as he reiterates in his inaugural lecture: a true peasant cannot see the beauty of cattle; but only qualities expressive of their serviceableness. . . . Landscape can only be enjoyed by cultivated persons; and it is only by music, literature, and painting, that cultivation can be given. Also, the faculties which are thus received are hereditary; so that the child of an educated race has an innate instinct for beauty, derived from arts practised hundreds of years before its birth . . . (‘Inaugural’ (1870), Works, 20: 36; my italics) The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues. . . . The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstances. (‘Inaugural’ (1870), Works, 20: 39) Ruskin’s faith here, in ‘cultivation’, is a pale expression of far more vivid imperialist passages in the Lectures on Art,22 but his association of ‘cultivation’ with ‘music, literature and painting’ echoes Arnold’s recent identification of high culture as the barricade against anarchy. For Ruskin, as for Arnold, Culture, and for Ruskin specifically visual art, is bound up with national as well as personal salvation. In such a restrictive politics, even a discussion of a line is burdened with questions of ethics, nation, and race: the pencil leaving one point and arriving at another, not only with unerring precision at the extremity of the line, but with an unerring and yet varied course – sometimes over spaces a foot or more in extent. . . . Try, first, to realize to yourselves the muscular precision of that action, and the intellectual strain of it. . . . And then consider . . . what sort of an ethical state of body and mind that means. . . . what fineness of race there must be to get it. (‘The Relation of Art to Morals’ (1870), Works, 20: 78–9)

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It is from such a restrictive politics that Pater and Wilde are to release theories of art to formulations which seed modernism’s emphases on form, experimentation and disjunction. Inscriptions of Pater in works by Joyce, Woolf and Wilde are well documented. However, as in Ruskin, such liberating formulations of art in Pater and Wilde co-exist with others which, invoked under pressure, identify art with morality. It is striking that Pater’s in ‘Style’ (1888) closely echo Ruskin in Modern Painters III (1856),23 and that Wilde’s are responses to criticism of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891 and 1895, after book publication and during the trials. That is, all three writers subvert their dominant positions. Certain aspects of Studies highlight the dialogical relation between Ruskin’s Oxford texts and Pater’s ‘studies’, and articulate their diverse cultural politics: these include definitions of the form and purposes of art, constructions of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the periodization (and character) of the Renaissance, and the battle for youthful minds which Ruskin signals in the very first lecture. I noted earlier Ruskin’s commitment to pedagogy in preparing for the opportunity the Slade Professorship offered him to extol and demonstrate the claims of fine art in higher education, but the lectures also have a moral agenda, the purveying of a cultural politics which is associated with the romance quest of manly heroes and the realpolitic language of imperialism. It is announced immediately in Lecture I: All that I ask of you is to have a fixed purpose of some kind for your country and yourselves. . . . I know what stout hearts are in you, to answer acknowledged need: but it is the fatallest form of error in English youth to hide their hardihood till it fades for lack of sunshine, and to act in disdain of purpose, till all purpose is vain. (Works, 20: 43) your trial is not so sharp. It is between drifting in confused wreck among the castaways of Fortune, who condemns to assured ruin those who know not either how to resist her, or obey; . . . and the taking of your appointed part in the heroism of Rest; the resolving to share in the victory which is to the weak rather than the strong. (Works, 20: 44; my italics) Ruskin’s valorizing of ‘Rest’ in the oxymoron of heroism is to alert his students to the dangers of ‘drifting’ without ‘purpose’, the

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posture of the flaneur, and to warn them against embracing an openness above all to the deceptively neutral ‘experience’ which Pater had recommended in his remarks about the flux 18 months before: those impressions of the individual to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight . . . each of them is limited by time, and . . . as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also, all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. 24 It is with the movement, the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off, that continual vanishing away, that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves. 25 Although Pater had published this essay anonymously in the Westminster, his next publication, on Leonardo, was on Ruskin territory, and signed in the Fortnightly. Appearing in November 1869 and containing the elaborate passage on the Mona Lisa, ‘Notes on Leonardo da Vinci’ was likely to have come to Ruskin’s notice by the summer term of 1870, when the first lectures were delivered. To the many Fellows in his audience, Pater’s cultural politics which endorsed the flux, process and fruit of experience, appreciated the male body and its beauty, and venerated the art of ancient Greece may well have been surmized from the similarities of phrase and preoccupation in this signed piece of Pater’s with the anonymous essays on Morris and Winckelmann preceding it. Whether or not Ruskin knew of Pater’s authorship of the Morris review, the structure of the first series of Oxford lectures, with its second and third lectures dedicated to the ‘use’ of art, and its ‘morals’, seems determined by recognition in the Oxford of the day of the primacy of the aesthetic and validation of the classical found in Pater’s earliest work. Ruskin’s address to these Ruskinian issues which Pater had now critiqued and made his own, all of which reappear in the Leonardo essay, continues in Ruskin’s third lecture, on ‘The Relation of Art to Morals’, where he attacks the ancient Greek mind on two fundamental counts for its failure to value heterosexual love. His Oxford audience, products of the ideology of ‘classical’

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education, would understand his allusion to Greek love, and the import of the attack on it for Oxford education and for its homosocial defendants such as Pater: Unhappily, the subordinate position of their most revered women, and the partial corruption of feeling towards them by the presence of certain other singular states of inferior passion which it is as difficult as grievous to analyse, arrested the ethical as well as the formative progress of the Greek mind. (Lecture III, Works, 20: 91) In the construction of Greek love as ‘singular’, ‘inferior’, ‘passion[ate]’ and un-’ethical’, Ruskin articulates the gender differences in the positions of the two men. The normative discourses of medicine, ethics and Christianity invoked by Ruskin to express his psychic resistance to the Greek ‘mind’ are ideologically heterosexual. Debates around manliness and the manly from mid-century26 continued to render gender signifiers unstable and contested, as Ruskin’s anxiety and Pater’s vehemence show. Ruskin’s adherence to ‘ethics’, ‘use’, ‘morals’ in 1870 echoes and addresses Pater’s rejection of all ideology which impinges on the free pursuit of heightened experience in 1868: The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract morality we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.27 The degree to which the ideology of gender informs the debate between the two critics in the early 1870s, ostensibly a debate of theology, ethics and aesthetics, is highlighted by the Oxford context; the primacy of classics in the syllabus, the discourse of pedagogy, and an audience largely of male academics, many of whom were undergraduates. It may be argued that Pater continues the debate in the Preface to Studies, in reply to Ruskin’s lectures. Billie Inman has already suggested that the dismissal of ideology in the first paragraph of the Preface is addressed to Ruskin:28 Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract. . . . Such discussions help us very

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little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry. . . . Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness.29 And the second paragraph which begins with the famous appropriation and rewriting of Arnold’s ‘To see the object as in itself it really is’ presses home the point in a culminating summary which contests Ruskin’s as well as Arnold’s critical practice – their compulsion to move from the specific to the abstract: And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the analysis and discrimination of them, need not trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or its exact relation to truth or experience, – metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him. 30 (Studies viii) To Arnold’s and Ruskin’s emphases on the ‘truth’ of the object, Pater responds by redefining both the ‘object’ and the ‘seeing’ ‘subject’ at once in what he terms ‘aesthetic criticism’. From Arnold’s and Ruskin’s assumption of a rational observer subject, discriminating objective reality outside of the self, Pater moves to a position of avowed subjectivity, and the discrimination of the impression within, with the act of criticism consisting of analysis of how the impression of beauty or pleasure is produced. Pater deftly couples the study of art with ‘the study of light, morals and number’ 31 and strategically goes on to link the analysis by the ‘aesthetic critic’ to the disinterested and empirical analysis by the chemist: the critic’s ‘end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others’. ‘One must realize such primary data for oneself or not at all’ (Studies viii), Pater primly tells us, tongue in cheek, the ‘data’ consisting indifferently of ‘a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book’.32 Pater’s lists are characteristically provocative! Pater’s insistence in the ‘Preface’ on a methodology of empiricism which validates notation and inhibits evaluation, and on a philosophy of relativism which reinforces any and all ‘results’ which the empirical method yields is, historically, a rational argument which comes out of the impassioned peroration of the earlier Morris article,

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in which Pater presents the ends of art as formalist, artistic, not salvationary in any Christian or national framework. The very categories in which Ruskin and Pater discuss the ‘ends’ of art, ‘use’ and ‘uselessness’, and ‘art for art’s sake’, reveal that they are part of the same binary. Ruskin’s ‘use’ is social and ethical, and Pater’s ‘use’ is not; but far from useless, ‘aesthetic’ art conforms to formalist criteria and the ends of pleasure and ‘experience’. In this early work Pater, and the French criticism he is inscribing in English prose, are concerned to decouple art from the hegemonic State, the middle classes, and the task of social salvation. However, Pater’s positive statement of the ‘ends’ and uses of art is provocative, including homosocial and homoerotic aspects which do not bear explicit exposure, to which however he does allude. In contrast Ruskin’s ends for art labour under no such prohibitions, and appropriating the language of manliness, he is free to proclaim them assertively. If Pater turns to form both to empty art of its social constraints and to free it for the homosocial aesthetic, Ruskin is grounded in form and the materiality of art temperamentally as a practitioner, despite his adherence to social, economic and theological theory. So, while the first four lectures in the 1870 series relate to topics such as art and religion, morals, and use, the last three are dedicated to formal matters: line, light and colour. Certainly Ruskin was the great English predecessor for Pater and for modernism on the issue of form, and these lectures show Ruskin’s outstanding capacity to express in prose, as well as in his prodigious illustrations, the significance and importance of the grammar of visual art. Although by 1870 Ruskin is constantly straining to escape the material ‘line’, to escape from the concrete to the abstract, his commitment to the ethical, the moral and the nation-race, his immersion in the dye of practice, his dyer’s hand, is still unmistakable and tenacious. It is this tension between his compulsion to transcend the material and his attachment to it which pervades these lectures, in for example the overwriting of the following passage where the italicized words show the strain: ‘The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble art only from noble persons’ (Lecture I, Works, 20: 39). A passage on colour is immediately overdetermined by images of control: ‘pictures may be painted which shall . . . be . . . filled with the indwelling light of self-possessed imagination; – which shall not be stained or enfeebled any more by evil passion, but glorious with the strength and chastity of noble human love’ (Lecture VII, Works, 20: 178–9).

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These fissures in the prose articulate ‘the degrees of darkness’ referred to in Lecture II, the struggle between ‘faith’ in its most generic, abstract sense, and the materialism of science and making. It is this materialism, in which Ruskin is embroiled through practice, which is typified by Ruskin in a letter to the Times in 1854 by the trope of a microscope which reveals unwelcome details.33 In Lecture II in 1870 Ruskin turns to the dangers of the scientific mind, which are likened here ‘to the woodworms in the panel of a picture by some great painter . . . tasting with discrimination of the wood, and with repugnance of the colour, and declaring that even this unlooked- for and undesirable combination is a normal result of the action of molecular Forces’ (Works, 20: 52). These inchoate forces of physical life appear in Pater’s Morris essay in 1868 and reappear in the ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in 1873, poeticized and ruefully welcomed: ‘This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.’34 The origin of this dialogue between the two critics seems a moot point, whether Ruskin’s lecture was addressing the contentions of the 1868 Morris essay or Pater’s 1873 reprinting those of Ruskin’s lecture. What seems clear is that Ruskin remains divided, unreconciled to science but eloquently materialist in practice, while Pater is to ally science with form in the tradition of Flaubert, in ways which modernism may adopt. Pater’s exhortation to his readers in the ‘Conclusion’ of 1868 and 1873 celebrates the primacy above all of ‘intellectual excitement’. It is offered in a frank context of secular commitment to expand the ‘interval’ between birth and death, ‘getting as many pulsations as possible’, and tasting the ‘fruit of a quickened multiplied consciousness’. Through his embrace of both the material body and form, the early and late Renaissance, and classical and contemporary culture (Raphael and the pre-Raphaelites, Hellenism and aestheticism), Pater ushers in many facets of cultural history and visual culture which Ruskin in ‘darkness’ displayed but juxtaposed. It is Pater’s crucial addition in 1868/73 of sexual pleasure, desire, jouissance and ecstasy essentially freed from all elements of the laborious, which distinguishes his aesthetic from Ruskin’s and Arnold’s of this period, and which made formalist categories available in English in a secular and individualistic mode, ripe for the picking by modernists and modernisms.

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Notes 1 An exception was a public scrap over the claims of both critics to have ‘discovered’ Botticelli for the British public. Although Pater’s Fortnightly Review essay of August 1870 predates Ruskin’s interest in Botticelli, Ruskin insisted on claiming precedence. Ruskin’s interest developed from mention in the Hilary term lectures of 1871 and the Preface to the published (1872) Eagle’s Nest lectures of spring 1872 to a fuller consideration of Botticelli in his Michaelmas term lectures that year on wood and metal engraving (published 1876 as Ariadne Florentina). W. G. Collingwood, The Life of John Ruskin (London: Methuen, 1900), p. 298, notes that Ruskin’s ‘sudden enthusiasm about an unknown painter’ (Botticelli) after his spring trip to Rome in April 1872 ‘amused the Oxford public, and it became a standing joke among the profane to ask who was Ruskin’s last great man’. 2 See Michael Levey, The Case of Walter Pater (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 74. 3 Quoted in Thomas Wright, The Life of Walter Pater, 2 vols (London: Everett, 1907), I: 188 and Levey, The Case, p. 73. 4 Levey, The Case, p. 23. 5 Kenneth Clark, Ruskin at Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947). This is Clark’s inaugural lecture as Slade Professor. See also Collingwood, Life, p. 272, for a vivid account of Ruskin’s lecturing which characteristically moved from reading of written script to extemporary interpolations. 6 Clark, Ruskin at Oxford, p. 5. See also R. Hewison, Ruskin at Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 17–18. 7 It was only very late in Pater’s career in 1894 that, following Ruskin’s example, he published two essays on buildings in The Nineteenth Century, a periodical whose editor James Knowles was an architect. 8 Samuel Wright, Walter H. Pater: a Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1975), p. 7. 9 T. H. Ward, ‘Brasenose, 1864–1872’, Brasenose College Quartercentenary Monographs (Oxford, 1909), pp. 74–5. 10 Lewis Richard Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1934), pp. 76–7. 11 Dinah Birch, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 145 and 141: ‘Instruction, rather than beauty, was his own first concern; this led to his study of Greek art at Oxford’; he wanted ‘to convey a vision of life’ to which end art provided ‘illustrative examples’, rather than serving as ‘the central subject of his discourse’. 12 Collingwood, Life, p. 309, names Mallock as one of Ruskin’s disciples who attended the open breakfasts Ruskin gave at Corpus while he was in residence there as Slade Professor. Although Mallock dined, he did not dig the Hinksey Road. 13 Postlethwaite and Maudle, Du Maurier’s famous aesthetic pair, did not appear in Punch until 1880, but he was parodying Morris and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood from 1865. 14 This view of the lectures has been taken by Ruskin’s contemporaries such as G. W. Kitchin, in ‘Ruskin at Oxford, as an Undergraduate and as Slade Professor’, Ruskin in Oxford and Other Studies (London: John

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15

16 17

18

19 20

21

22 23

Murray, 1904), and by ours. See Ken Daley, ‘From the Theoretic to the Practical: Ruskin, British Aestheticism, and the Relation of Art to Use’, Prose Studies, 20 (Aug. 1997), pp. 90–107, for a well-reasoned argument. Pater’s first signed essay, ‘Lionardo da Vinci’, appeared February [1], 1869 in the Fortnightly Review. It emerged as the first of a series of essays on Renaissance artists in the same magazine, the second of which, on Botticelli, came out in August 1870, and Michelangelo in November 1871. Ruskin was formally appointed in August 1869 and delivered the first lectures in the Hilary term, that is, the spring term, 1870. See, for example, the juxtaposition of art and science in the first series of Slade lectures, Lectures on Art. For more on this point, see two suggestive articles in Robert Hewison, ed., New Approaches to Ruskin (London: Routledge, 1981): Brian Maidment, ‘Fors Clavigera and Ruskinism, 1870–1900’ and Hewison, ‘Afterword: Ruskin and the Institutions’. Collingwood, Life, pp. 195–6 and 201–2, discusses the problems with Cornhill in 1860 and Fraser’s in 1862. The following appears in an ‘Advertisement’ for The Works of John Ruskin bound into the British Library copy of vol. I: ‘Every volume of this series of my collected works will be sold to the trade without any discount or allowance on quantity, at such a fixed price as will allow both author and publisher a modest profit on each volume. It will be sold to the trade only; who can then fix such further profit on it as they deem fitting, for retail.’ See Collingwood, Life, pp. 293–5. Clark, Ruskin at Oxford, p. 4. Pater’s alleged intention upon graduation from Oxford to apply to the Bishop of London was apparently frustrated by his former schoolfriend John Rainier McQueen, who informed the Bishop of Pater’s apostasy in anticipation of Pater’s application. See Levey, The Case, ch. 5, esp. pp. 90–1, 213, and Wright, The Life, I, 207. Marius the Epicurean, a novel which appeared in two volumes in 1885, was written between 1881? and 1884, a period during which Pater published very little. For example, ‘she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able’ (‘Inaugural’, Works, 20: 42). In Modern Painters, vol. III, Ruskin writes: ‘Greatness of style consists, then: first, in the habitual choice of subjects of thought which involve wide interests and profound passions, as opposed to those which involve narrow interests and slight passions. The style is greater or less in exact proportion to the nobleness of the interests and passions involved in the subject’ (Works, 5: 48–9). In ‘Style’, Fortnightly Review, 50 (o.s.) (Dec. 1888), p. 38, Pater writes: ‘the distinction between great art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all events, not on its form, but on the matter. . . . It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends. . . . if it be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Ruskin and Modernism world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great art.’ Walter Pater, ‘Poems by William Morris’, Westminster Review, 90 (o.s.) (Oct. 1868), p. 311. Ibid. See for example work by Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, and commentary in, for example, James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Pater, ‘Poems by William Morris’, p. 312. See Billie Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading (New York: Garland, 1981), p. 274. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), p. vi. Ibid., p. viii. Ibid, my italics. Ibid., p. ix, my italics. Was this trope taken up mischievously by Swinburne in 1872, when he published a collection of essays titled Under the Microscope? Pater, Studies, p. 208.

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5 ‘Reactionary Desire’: Ruskin and the Work of Fiction Ian Duncan

I On 19 June 1870, ten days after the death of Charles Dickens, Ruskin wrote to Charles Eliot Norton: The literary loss is infinite – the political one I care less for than you do. Dickens was a pure modernist – a leader of the steamwhistle party par excellence – and he had no understanding of any power of antiquity except a sort of jackdaw sentiment for cathedral towers. He knew nothing of nobler power of superstition – was essentially a stage manager, and used everything for effect on the pit. His Christmas meant mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from the dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds.1 While Ruskin acknowledges a distinction between literary value (‘the literary loss is infinite’) and a judgement based on politics, it is the ideological meaning of Dickens’ work that exercises him. The novelist’s relish for the properties and appearances of the here and now, ‘mistletoe and pudding’, blinds him to a realm of meaning located somewhere else: a transcendental horizon, accessible through traditions of typology and myth. Ruskin speaks in very different terms of another nineteenth-century novelist, in the famous opening lines of Praeterita: I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school; – Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s. I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own masters. 2 67

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Dickens is ‘a pure modernist,’ while Scott stands at the end of an ‘old school’, of which Homer is the founding father. Scott, in other words, is a classic, connected with those invisible powers of antiquity and superstition from which Dickens is cut off. Ruskin had always been a passionate reader of Dickens’ work; The Stones of Venice is sprinkled with delighted allusions to David Copperfield, which had just completed serialization. 3 The later denunciation of that work is no less passionate for being so programmatic. As for Scott, he was always one of Ruskin’s essential writers, a lifelong touchstone. Ruskin’s attitude to both authors is complex and varying, rather than cut and dried, and it clarifies important features of his own literary relation to modernity. Ruskin is practically unique among the major Victorian cultural critics in the extensiveness and quality of the attention he paid to contemporary fiction. At the same time, he shared much of the official suspicion of the novel, regarding it as a genre fatally compromised by its commitment to the phenomenology and ideology of modern life. Ruskin’s address to the shifting, overlapping categories of fiction in modern culture, novel, romance and myth, with their various relations to the categories of reality and truth, illuminates the critical position he occupies in the Romantic genealogy of a Modernism characterized by the simultaneous repudiation of Romanticism and of modernity. Ruskin is, accordingly, an exemplary figure in the history of the theory of fiction, at least in Great Britain and North America. The novelists themselves were not always ready to acknowledge his salience for what they were doing: E. M. Forster’s A Room With a View (1908) bluntly identifies Ruskinian medievalism with ‘Victorian values’, which it rejects in favour of a modern paganism derived from Pater’s essays on the Renaissance. Nevertheless, Ruskin’s quarrel with the novel predicts a seismic shift in the conceptual ground of fiction, from realism to myth, which would not receive formal recognition in the institutions of criticism until after the First World War.

II The late essay Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880) gives us Ruskin’s most sustained and eloquent meditation on the topic. Comparing the death scenes in Bleak House with those in Scott’s Old Mortality, Ruskin analyses the work of Dickens as a pathological symptom of modernity. Dickens’ novels exemplify ‘the literature of the prison-house’

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– and of the hospital and morgue; their representation is limited to providing ‘photographic evidence’ of their own conditions of production in the overcrowding, pollution, morbidity and fatalism of life in the metropolis.4 By way of contrast, Ruskin identifies Scott’s treatment of mortality (in Lukácsian terms, epic rather than novelistic) with a ‘health’ rooted in pre-modern cultural conditions and a transparent relation to nature. This characterization is informed, as a number of critics have pointed out, by Ruskin’s feelings for his own autobiographical and ancestral past and its local landscapes.5 As Fiona Robertson has shown, the association of Scott with ‘moral and spiritual healthiness’ is one of the commonplaces of Victorian criticism, decisively formulated in Carlyle’s 1838 review of Lockhart’s Life of Scott. ‘Were one to preach a Sermon on Health, as really were worth doing,’ Carlyle had exhorted, ‘Scott ought to be the text.’6 In order to maintain this aesthetic of health, Robertson suggests, Scott’s critics had to keep his work quarantined from ‘Gothic’ elements and influences – a kind of cultural German measles infecting modern taste, especially fiction. The general diagnosis goes back to Wordsworth (as Ruskin’s phrase ‘literature of the prisonhouse’ lets us know), and the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in which Wordsworth made the connection between ‘the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident’, and a contemporary epidemic of ‘frantic novels’ and ‘sickly and stupid German Tragedies’.7 Fiction, Fair and Foul looks very much like the Scott-based sermon on health that Carlyle had prescribed, with Scott’s work giving a more reliable access to ‘nature’ than Wordsworth’s own, and Dickens’ assuming the burden of a modern urban Gothic sickliness; except, of course, that Ruskin has turned ‘Gothic’ into the opposite aesthetic category, a conversion I shall say something about presently. Ruskin divides the novel, the literary form most representative of modernity, between modernist and classical practitioners; but it turns out that Scott himself is symptomatically divided, occupying a precarious, liminal station between ancient and modern. He is a ‘modern classic’ (as we might say) on the threshold of the nineteenth century, with one foot in his ancestral Borders and the other in the Victorian industrial marketplace. The narrative of Scott’s career in Fiction, Fair and Foul amplifies Carlyle’s account of an essentially healthy nature infected by what Ruskin calls ‘modern conditions of commercial excitement’ (34: 274). Ruskin asserts a clear distinction

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in Scott’s career between the production of healthy novels, those committed to a virtuous representation of eighteenth-century Scottish life, and unhealthy productions such as Ivanhoe, the discharge of an avaricious and sickly fantasy. Ruskin goes well beyond Carlyle in equating the debilitating devotion to ‘the indiscriminate market’, which issued in Scott’s ruin and his fatal apoplexy, with an organic pathology – the ‘illth’ of Unto This Last lodged now in the individual body, as it is in a defiled nature. Thus, the stages of Scott’s illness determine the quality of his work; his life turns out to have been circumscribed by cases of the pathology that overcame him in the end; his infection is at once biologically and historically predetermined. Scott typifies a general fall, a fated sickening into modernity. Earlier, in Part IV of Modern Painters (1856), Ruskin had in fact classified Scott as a modern. Along with Turner in painting, he is ‘the great representative of the mind of the age in literature’ (5: 350). Ruskin analyses, and he uses the term, Scott’s modernism. Its components are a thoroughgoing secularism, an authentic (because spontaneous and disinterested) melancholy, and a blindness to the principles of art: He had some confused love of Gothic architecture, because it was dark, picturesque, old, and like nature; but could not tell the worst from the best, and built for himself perhaps the most incongruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly modernism ever designed, making, in the most curious and subtle way, that mingling of reverence with irreverence which is so striking in the age . . . Like all pure moderns, he supposes the Gothic barbarous, notwithstanding his love of it; admires, in an equally ignorant way, totally opposite styles.8 Here, then, it is Scott who is the ‘pure modern’, disconnected from the ‘power of antiquity’ – his Gothic enthusiasm sounding quite a bit like the ‘jackdaw sentiment for cathedral towers’ later to be ascribed to Dickens. Ruskin is not simply being inconsistent. There is a great deal at stake in these views of Scott as variously ancient and modern, both attached to and cut off from an elder aesthetic tradition. For Ruskin recognized the sentimental adherence to pre-modern cultural forms, to natural scenery, to an old-school Toryism, to be symptoms of Scott’s – and his own – predicament of modernity. In other words,

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Scott’s modernism, and by implication Ruskin’s, consists in the finding oneself, somehow, mentally both inside and outside modernity; and this contradictory subject-position, with all its malaise, is what we would call an authentic one. It distinguishes Scott and Ruskin from those who are only ever able to find themselves inside modern life: inmates of the prison-house, like Dickens and his readers. In Fiction, Fair and Foul Ruskin addresses the crux: It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelings would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the dreariness of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral felicity. Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly trained Londoner can enjoy no other excitement than that to which he has been accustomed, but asks for that in continually more ardent or more virulent concentration; and the ultimate power of fiction to entertain him is by varying to the fancy the modes, and defining for his dulness the horrors, of Death. (34: 271) Ruskin himself, we understand, is no such ‘thoroughly trained Londoner’. A Scottish ancestry, kept alive in the teaching of his father, and enshrined in the works of Scott, provides him with one source for the natural food of human feelings. All the same, none of this is present to Ruskin in the way that the city is, or the spoiled landscapes he mourns and so vividly evokes. Ruskin’s own writing has strong affinities with that of the arch-modernist, Dickens, drawing its rhetorical energy from similar sources: his is also a style sumptuously committed to sensation, making poetry in the promiscuity and chaos of urban life, in fragments and ruins, pollution and decay – as a number of his readers have not failed to notice. The opening of Fiction, Fair and Foul, pungently lamenting the suburban defilement of Croxted Lane (a ‘green bye-road’ of the author’s youth), rehearses a set-piece already familiar to the reader of Ruskin, who may remember the outskirts of Bradford in Modern Painters, or the approach to Venice at the end of volume 1 of The Stones of Venice. 9 The ‘Divinity of Decomposition’ is Ruskin’s evil genius too; Fiction, Fair and Foul is a symptom of the sickness it diagnoses. This Ruskin knows. And here we come to a crucial question. What if nobility, health and nature are nothing more substantial than ‘dreams of pastoral felicity’, phantasms of the street, nostalgic

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projections of modern life? What is to distinguish Ruskin’s own sacred memories and utopian imaginings, his own critical enterprise, from the efflorescence of a ‘reactionary desire’? – giving the word ‘reactionary’, as Ruskin gives it, its proper meaning of a sentiment defined negatively by the conditions that have produced it. For an answer let us return to the keyword ‘Gothic’. Scott’s attitude to Gothic architecture, in the passage quoted earlier from Modern Painters, exemplifies what Ruskin means by ‘reactionary desire’. Scott’s love of gothic is a purely sentimental craving for what is antithetical to modern conditions, but not imaginatively constituted in any other terms except through that antithesis – and thus, condemned to reflect back modernity’s mirror image. In a rigorously sardonic passage in Fiction, Fair and Foul Ruskin will instance desire itself as governed by this illusory, antithetical constitution: An era like ours, which has with diligence and ostentation swept its heart clear of all the passions once known as loyalty, patriotism and piety, necessarily magnifies the apparent force of the one remaining sentiment which sighs through the barren chambers, or clings inextricably round the chasms of ruin; nor can it but regard with awe the unconquerable spirit which still tempts or betrays the sagacities of selfishness into error or frenzy which is believed to be love. (34: 286) Hence the modernism of Scott’s taste is expressed in his judgment that the Gothic is ‘barbarous’: merely the shadow of his own benighted horizon. The Gothic according to Ruskin, and I refer now to the famous essay in The Stones of Venice, typifies not ‘barbarism’ but civilization – and, at the same time, nature. Ruskin’s account is remarkable, and historically crucial, for its insistence on the integrity and complexity of Gothic as (instead of a static aggregate of features) a symbolic system: a closed, dynamic field of meaning in which any part signifies the whole, and the character of the work expresses the character of the producer. The totality is an organic combination of ‘external forms’ and ‘internal elements’, or ‘certain mental tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it’;10 the builders’ mental tendencies express, in turn, the political, economic and moral conditions of the society for which they work. A given stylistic detail or aesthetic form may thus represent – in the words of one of Ruskin’s contemporaries – ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other

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capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’: in short, ‘Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense’.11 The strangeness of Gothic is the strangeness of a lost language, and its material traces are texts that can be recovered, translated and read. The correspondence of this linguistic-cultural order with the dynamic order of nature, meanwhile, guarantees its accessibility to the alienated modern interpreter, if he will but apply himself to study it. For Ruskin, then, Scott represents an earlier, transitional stage of ‘Gothic revival’, coinciding with the onset of modernity – one of the conditions of which is Scott’s naiveté or unreflexiveness, his unconsciousness (marked by his refusal to look critically through his own present conditions, which he is thus condemned to reflect). Ruskin’s own historical stage, which succeeds it, is defined on the one hand by a total saturation of the conditions of modernity, permeating and corrupting not just social relations but the very earth and atmosphere; and on the other by the Gothic revivalist’s – Ruskin’s – accession to a full, alienated consciousness. This critical consciousness, which is what distinguishes Ruskin from Scott and from a mere ‘reactionary desire’, is formed in the act of reading – an act which is not simply a motion but a discipline, an exegesis, the imagination’s induction into a symbolic order of types and correspondences from which it has become historically estranged. That is to say, Ruskin is able to recover Gothic – or, later in his career, Greek mythology – as a complex objective formation, like geology or botany, folded in the order of nature. Thus we may view Ruskin’s position in the genealogy of what he himself calls (in the urge to set himself apart from it) ‘modernism’.12 To name this genealogy – to identify it as a tradition – I prefer to use the old-fashioned term ‘romance revival’, as at once more precise than the vague (and ideologically loaded) ‘Romanticism’ and more capacious than ‘Gothic’, which it includes. By romance revival I refer to the miscellaneous enterprise, gathering momentum in the late Enlightenment, of scholars, poets and novelists who came to define their own modernity in the dialectical recourse to pre-modern cultural forms (classicism being understood as one of the ideological components of modernity). ‘Gothic’ expressed the most militant tendency of this romance revival, as an aesthetic not just different or remote from modern values but antithetical to them. The first historical stage of Gothic revival emphasized the negative force of this antithetical dynamic: eighteenth-century English

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Gothic fiction typically narrates the uncanny recursion of a repressed past that threatens to transfix the present under its own deadly shadow. Ruskin’s innovation, made with decisive reference to Gothic architecture, completed a movement of critical revaluation by interpreting the positive, material specificity of the pre-modern aesthetic form. The integrity of Gothic as a complex symbolic system secures its status as an autonomous source of meaning and value and an alternative, authentic ground of being, identified with an archetypal order of nature. In other words, Ruskin infused the concept of Gothic, a symbolic form expressing a pre-modern cultural identity, with the ideology of Romanticism, according to which the imagination enfolds a primordial core of identity alienated from modern life. To designate that core of identity Ruskin uses the Wordsworthian and Coleridgean vocabulary of ‘nature’, but unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in keeping with the tradition of romance revival, Ruskin is willing to locate ‘nature’ with the objective historical formations of pre-modern cultures – not only Gothic architecture but, later in his career, Greek mythology. This account of Gothic as an archaic symbolic system expressing the order of nature, set in opposition to a decadent modernity, distinguishes Ruskin not only from a historicist such as Scott, who still tended to subordinate pre-modern cultures within a progressive teleology of modernization, but also from Carlyle, who was as little inclined (even in Past and Present) as were the Romantic poets to invest much faith in the scholarly reconstruction of objective historical formations. (It distinguishes Ruskin too from Pater, for whom interpretation consists in the refinement of one’s own subjective impressions.) All of these authors profess, in their different ways, ‘reactionary desire’.13

III For his own critical work of the recovery of archaic symbolic systems, Ruskin would claim the discursive authority of myth. We might define a myth as a narrative that contains and explains other, phenomenologically and historically contingent, narratives. Following invocations by Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom of Ruskin as their great precursor in ‘myth or archetypal criticism’, a strong tradition of recent scholarship has studied the contents, literary and hermeneutic sources, and tropological peculiarities of Ruskinian mythography. 14 In the remainder of this essay, and referring the

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reader to the work of those scholars, I shall look briefly at the rhetorical status of myth in relation to the historical categories of fiction in Ruskin’s thought. The Stones of Venice offers the most elaborate and substantial version of Ruskin’s myth of culture, articulated in the interpretation of objective aesthetic formations under the disciplines of historical scholarship and iconology. Early in the second volume, Ruskin dismisses what he calls ‘the impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century’. He insists: they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their own strength. . . . The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. (10: 8) Ruskin replaces this decadent figment with his true vision of Venice, which consists of another, more vital narrative scheme, authorized by a rigorous programme of reading physical traces and material surfaces: in Richard Stein’s summary, ‘the legend of an ideal civilization, from its rise to its moral, social and artistic collapse’.15 Ruskin’s myth of Venice, which contains within it the history and meaning of European civilization, has received fruitful critical attention. 16 What I wish to notice here is the rhetorical convention by which Ruskin clears discursive space for it: the dismissal of an inauthentic kind of narrative, called ‘romance’, enmeshed in historical temporality and so subject to illusion and decay, in order to authorize the authentic narrative that replaces it. It is the foundational rhetorical gesture of the modern novel, referring back to the example of Don Quixote; and it remains the expression of a constitutive division within English fiction, which continues throughout its history to repudiate a discredited story of the Other, given the title of romance, in order to license its own proceedings, under the title of novel. 17 For Ruskin, then, all novels are romance – that is to say, mere fiction, a discourse dismally enmired in modernity. Against it, Ruskin erects another kind of symbolic order, called myth, an archaic order which expresses the order of nature and so precedes and contains particular, contingent narrative forms. Scott’s novels can be partially rescued for this order by readings that wrench their characters and events out of their local narrative context, and attach them to

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the critic’s own, immutable ethical typology. A footnote in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ celebrates ‘the old mountain servant’ who sacrificed his seven sons for his chief in The Fair Maid of Perth, but Ruskin cites Scott’s editorial preface rather than the tale itself, which renders the event as horrific and absurd rather than glorious.18 Likewise, the etymologically focused close readings in which Ruskin excels, exemplified by the dazzling analysis of Andrew Fairservice’s speech from Rob Roy in Fiction, Fair and Foul, depend on the critic’s abstraction of the text – the word – from its narrative context. Ruskin splits the cultural figure of fiction: between a story that represents the conditions of modern life and yet (therefore) tells lies about humankind, and a story that deviates from modern life and yet, therefore, tells the truth. This constitutes Ruskin’s exemplary contribution to the destiny of fiction in Modernism – the twentiethcentury aesthetic movement named for the very predicament against which his critique was aimed. The Ruskinian split would receive its canonical statement in T. S. Eliot’s famous essay of 1923, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’. There the critic denounces the obsolescence of the novel, on the grounds that its mimetic technology is doomed to reproduce ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’; fortunately, thanks to Joyce and to Eliot himself, ‘instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method’.19 As ‘the mythical method’ became institutionalized in North American academic literary criticism during the Cold War, in the work of Frye and his followers, it attached itself (interestingly enough) to the term ‘romance’, which it now dignified to mean a total register of narrative forms and figures articulating the structure of a collective, essential (racial or universal) human imagination. Ruskin, then, anticipates the curious fate of ‘romance’ in the twentieth-century critical lexicon: on the one hand, an empirical form degraded beneath the novel, mass-produced fiction for women; and on the other, an ideal form transcending it, Frye’s ‘secular scripture’. The dichotomy was already implicit in the antiquarian reconstruction and poetic imitation of pre-modern literary forms that comprised the Enlightenment romance revival. As those activities of reconstruction and imitation tended to reassemble both popular and elite traditions – ballads and ‘folklore’ alongside Chaucer and Spenser – they also, notoriously, included mythologizing inventions which blurred the categorical lines between scholarly recovery and outright fiction. The Rowley–Chatterton and Ossian–Macpherson

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scandals exposed the pressure put upon the rhetoric of empiricism that was supposed to license this archaeology of cultural origins. 20 These works were inauthentic both because they lacked texts, i.e. ancient originals, and because they were nothing but texts, i.e. modern forgeries. Nevertheless, inauthentic inventions prepared the way for authentic ones, in that they opened up the Modernist conceptual space of ‘myth’ as a designation of immaterial, imaginary, deepstructural narrative schemes and figures subtending the empirical and textual surfaces of everyday life. Ruskin’s own account of the mythical method, in The Queen of the Air (1869), brings us back to the rhetorical problem of ‘reactionary desire.’ How can we know that the symbolic order we have recovered really does represent an authentic, objective order of nature, and is not just our modern fantasy? (Especially since Darwinian biology has claimed authority over the objective order of nature.) What if it is only a nostalgic projection, a private and arbitrary system of associations? In other words, what if the myth be only – in the reduced sense of the term – a fiction? The problem is more acute as the ‘objective’ apparatus of authentication, in this case the scholarly account of Greek mythology, becomes more tenuous. Thus: A myth, in its simplest definition, is a story with a meaning attached to it, other than it seems to have at first; and the fact that it has such a meaning is generally marked by some of its circumstances being extraordinary, or, in the common use of the word, unnatural. (19: 296) George Landow and Dinah Birch have examined the sources of Ruskin’s allegorical mythical method in The Queen of the Air, in Evangelical typology, classical scholarship and the new comparative mythology. 21 It is noteworthy, however, that this description of myth as a narrative marked by some ‘extraordinary’ or ‘unnatural’ figuration also follows the standard nineteenth-century definition of ‘romance’, as a narrative deviating from a realism regulated by Aristotelian canons of probability. Scott himself, in his article on romance for the 1822 Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, defined it as a ‘fictitious narrative’ turning upon ‘marvellous and uncommon incidents’. 22 The ‘extraordinary’ or ‘marvelous’, in other words, advertises a discrepancy between signifier and signified which denotes ‘fiction’, a narrative deviant from ‘fact’. But does that

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deviation make the narrative something more or less than the facts – does it carry a surplus or a deficit or meaning? Ruskin seeks to stabilize the rhetorical dissymmetry with the appeal to allegory, making the discrepancy that of a semiotic surplus: the ‘unnatural’ is the point of suture at which another, further meaning is attached to the story. Ruskin rehearses the very problematic he describes in his example of the combat between Hercules and the water-serpent. As the narrator wants the tale to go on bearing meaning, it accumulates ever greater figurative surplus – like a Hydra sprouting heads, faster than exegesis can lop them off: in proportion to the fulness of intended meaning I shall probably multiply and refine upon these improbabilities . . . Only, in proportion as I mean more I shall certainly appear more absurd in my statement, and at last, when I get unendurably significant, all practical persons will agree that I was talking mere nonsense from the beginning, and never meant anything at all. (19: 296–7) Allegorical narration proceeds by a kind of deficit spending in which surplus of meaning is eventually revealed, in a semiotic crash, to be its opposite, and to have been so all along – an original debt that can only be multiplied, and never redeemed. With this jocose and ironical recognition, Ruskin adverts to a scenario of original, literal meaning, when story and reference maintained an exact balance: It is just possible, however, also, that the story-teller may all along have meant nothing but what he said; and that, incredible as the events may appear, he himself literally believed – and expected you also to believe – all this about Hercules, without any latent moral or history whatever. (19: 297) Ruskin calls for an act of piety in which the modern reader must remember the original community of ‘simple and credulous persons’ whose faith was the vital medium in which a mythology first circulated. But modern readers do not belong to such a community. They are obliged to inhabit the fallen dispensation of allegorical meaning, with its unstable, inflationary semiotic economy. Although Ruskin goes on to construct his polysemous mythographic

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order with all requisite vigour, he cannot resist the nostalgic backward glance at a community of original believers – the organic world of Schiller’s ‘naive poetry’ – which we moderns have strayed away from. Nor did Ruskin’s critics refrain from denouncing his mythography and its scholarly apparatus as indeed a private and arbitrary system of associations: as, in fact, no more than a fiction, the lavish and poignant expression of a reactionary desire. The grand attempt of Ruskin’s later life, of course, would be to solve the problem by a resort to praxis, to work, in the Guild of St George: turning mere romance into myth, or a private fiction into a true story, commanding collective assent, by institutionalizing it and performing it, realizing it in the form of a political economy, and so reinventing the community of believers. Ruskin’s literary expression of that attempt, Fors Clavigera, insists on its condition of continuous, evolutionary involvement – as a literary utterance, a genre – in the material and mental struggle through which the Guild forged itself into being. What Ruskin himself acknowledged to be his ‘quixotism’, part heroic geste and part ironic predicament, also looks forward to the epoch of Modernism, and more sinister attempts to turn romance into myth by realizing it politically – by agents who had far more in the way of material force at their command, if far less of imagination. Mere hindsight ought not to blind us, meanwhile, to the courage of Ruskin’s attempt to resolve in action what he lucidly recognized to be a theoretical impasse.

Notes I should like to thank Giovanni Cianci and Richard Stein for their generous encouragement and advice in the writing of this essay. 1 See The Works of John Ruskin, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 37: 7. Future references to Ruskin will be to this edition. 2 Ruskin, Works, 35: 13. The passage is reproduced verbatim from Letter 10 of Fors Clavigera (Works, 27: 167). 3 See e.g. Works, 9: 200. 4 Ruskin, Works, 34: 276, 318. For a subtle account of the rhetorical structure of Fiction, Fair and Foul, see Enrica Villari, ‘Strategies of Contradiction in Fiction, Fair and Foul’, in Jeanne Clegg and Paul Tucker, eds, The Dominion of Daedalus: Papers from the Ruskin Workshop held in Pisa and Lucca, 13–14 May 1993 (St Albans: Bentham Press, 1994), pp. 143–52. 5 See C. Stephen Finley, ‘Scott, Ruskin, and the Landscape of Autobiography’, Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987), pp. 549-72. In Finley’s fine account, ‘Ruskin rendered anew Scott’s marvellous narrative of his Borders

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7 8 9

10 11

12

13

14

Ruskin and Modernism childhood’ (550), even as ‘the shared ruin of Scott and Ruskin’ lay behind Ruskin’s late autobiographical musings on Scott (572). Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 22–41; the sentence from Carlyle is cited on p. 22. W. J. B. Owen, ed., Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, 1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 160. Works, 5: 337–8. The whole discussion of Scott, 5: 335–45, is of great interest. For Croxted Lane and its Ruskinian contexts see David Carroll, ‘Pollution, Defilement and the Art of Decomposition’, in Michael Wheeler, ed., Ruskin and Environment: the Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 64–73. On the nineteenth-century tradition of writings about urban pollution and disorder, see Phillip Mollet’s essay in the same volume, ‘The City and the Self’, pp. 48–9. Works, 10: 183. From the opening sentence of Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); cited in Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 4. Ruskin comes closest to giving historical coordinates for what he (always pejoratively) calls ‘modernism’ in the Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854), where he schematizes a ‘Trinity of Ages’ in the history of art: Classicalism, Medievalism, and Modernism. Ruskin follows the Pre-Raphaelites in dating the onset of Modernism, the era of the ‘denial of Christ’, at around 1500. See Works, 12: 136–9. In an important essay, Giulio Carlo Argan distinguishes between the principles of ‘revival’ and historicism: see Il Revival, ed. Argan (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1974), pp. 7–33. Where historicism (cf. Scott) defines the past as past, aligning it with the present in the temporal perspective of a linear progressivism, a ‘revival’ reimposes the past upon the present, abolishing the temporal distinction between them, and asserting the timeless, paradigmatic authority of the aesthetic form. Argan’s lucid and stimulating discussion does not, perhaps, sufficiently historicize its own insight – in viewing the modern sequence of revivals as a reiteration of identical principles, Argan tends to take the ideology of revival at its own word. Scott, for example, gives us a fascinating case of the dialectical combination of ‘historicist’ and ‘revivalist’ principles in the same work. Ruskin, however, fits Argan’s scheme very well. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 9–10, 198, 341; Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 174. For Ruskin’s own use and sources of myth see, in particular, George Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 329–420; and Dinah Birch, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Much recent Ruskin criticism has been written within a mythographic or mythopoeic system, reinforcing rather than criticizing its assumptions.

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17 18

19 20

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Raymond E. Fitch, The Poison Sky: Myth and Apocalypse in Ruskin (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1982) elaborates a Jungian, archetypalist approach, while Jay Fellows, Ruskin’s Maze: Mastery and Madness in his Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) thematizes a deconstructive ‘figure of the labyrinth’. Jeffrey L. Spear, Dreams of an English Eden: Ruskin and his Tradition in Social Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) gives a Fryean reading of Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris as authors of a modern anti-industrial mythography based on the schemes and figures of quest romance. Richard Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation: the Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 73. See Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation, pp. 69–118; Fitch, The Poison Sky, pp. 141–220; Paul L. Sawyer, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: the Design of the Major Works (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 91–126. See Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: the Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Works, 10: 195. Later, in Fiction, Fair and Foul, Ruskin will declare that The Fair Maid of Perth belongs to the epoch of Scott’s decadence (34: 276). Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1975), pp. 177–8. For a provocative account of this topic see Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 102–31. See Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, pp. 329–70, 399–420; Birch, Ruskin’s Myths, pp. 102–31. Cited in Duncan, Modern Romance, p. 10.

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6 The Early James and Ruskin: Intergenerational Frictions Luisa Villa

In trying to find a way of relating James and Ruskin which would avoid focusing on the much investigated question of their ‘use’ of Venice, I have eventually decided to explore some early episodes in the James–Ruskin connection, with a view to reading it as a meaningful specimen of late Victorian, or early Modernist, confrontation with writers of the previous generation. Although the historical specificity of their representational dilemmas has often been misconstrued, writers who started their career in the 1870s played a crucial role in the transition between the Victorians and the Modernists, eroding resistances, undermining what was left of surviving traditions and experimenting with new forms of aesthetic control over the ‘individual’, the newly enfranchised subject of fully-fledged democracy. What is most peculiar to their experience of modernity, however, is probably their bearing the brunt of the dramatic innovations that reshaped the field of cultural production, enforcing the logic of autonomy, specialization and professionalization and thereby providing, as Pierre Bourdieu would argue,1 the main mediation through which social change came to be felt by men of letters. Indeed, to writers enmeshed in such transformations the experience of modernity seems to have been a question of contradictory imperatives, prescribing on the one hand freedom from past constraints and on the other a new discipline of ‘self-imposed’ norms. Starting from these premises, I have worked on discrepancies between James and Ruskin, particularly those arising from James’s precocious attunement to a rapidly developing regime of autonomous discursive practices, as opposed to the very differently oriented ‘sagism’ of Ruskin. To James’s self-conscious professionalism, with 82

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its related sensitivity to questions of specialization and etiquette, his visionary predecessor was bound to appear at once too ‘loose’ and too ‘narrow’. As such, Ruskin indeed precipitated a twofold rhetorical strategy of self-differentiation which no doubt concurred to shape James’s attitude to questions of art appreciation, and more generally his particular brand of late Victorian avant-gardism.

1. An American critic on art criticism It is well known that the young Henry James formally started his literary career by submitting an article to the North American Review, having it quickly accepted and thereby entering the entourage of Charles Eliot Norton, one of Ruskin’s oldest and closest friends and perhaps the most influential Ruskinian voice in the States. Given his position of dependence on such a devoted Ruskinian, it is not surprising that – when around 1868 James started reviewing art books and art events – his first notice, on Hamerton’s Contemporary French Painters, should open with a characteristically verbose homage to Ruskin’s ‘very manifest and . . . very extended influence over the mind and feelings of his own generation and that succeeding it’.2 A case could easily be made for a lurking and rather fierce anxiety of influence on James’s part, since he has to admit, albeit through a maze of dilatory syntactical strategies, foreign words and negations, that Ruskin – like the quintessential Bloomian predecessor – seems already to have been almost everywhere: ‘those forms of intellectual labour, or of intellectual play, are not few in number, of which one may say without hesitation, borrowing for a moment a French idiom and French words, that Ruskin has passé par là’.3 The gist of James’s overall argument, however, clearly indicates that the trouble that presses behind this recognition has little to do with psychological questions of belatedness, and much more with James’s already marked sensitivity to questions of specialization and autonomy, which leads him to recall and tackle somewhat defensively the fact of Ruskin’s exuberant ventures in a variety of fields. Ruskin’s forays into politics and economics were, of course, an embarassment to many of his friends and admirers, and particularly they were a recurrent cause of epistolary bickering between Norton and Ruskin, the former exhorting his friend to focus on art, the latter stubbornly refusing to stick to the job – refusing, that is, to use his own words, to keep on telling ‘every fiddler to go on fiddling and every painter to go on painting – as if, there

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were yet ears to hear or – eyes to see’.4 As for the young and respectful James, he does not explicitly lament Ruskin’s dispersing his energies instead of fruitfully concentrating them into one channel. But under the self-imposed task of dealing preliminarily with the ‘profession of art critic’ and the specific function of art-criticism, he embarks on a rather convoluted attempt to reaffirm the primacy of ‘the aesthetic standpoint’, maintaining that what Ruskin is actually doing is exporting the ‘process of reflection and interpretation’ of the art critic to the criticism of ‘life in general’. James was still very young but was already prone to getting entangled in extended metaphors. Here, in order to convey the sense of Ruskin’s multifarious productivity, and his own feeling that art criticism remained the mainspring, and the organizing concern, of it all, he uses an agricultural metaphor, imagining Modern Painters as the main ‘section of the great central region which Mr Ruskin has brought under cultivation’, connected by ‘paths’ – sometimes tortuous and overgrown – to other areas of investigation.5 It is useful to remember that James will employ the gardening metaphor in dealing with Balzac, 6 while the image of overluxurious vegetation threatening to submerge ‘rims’ and forms will resurface in the ‘Prefaces’ to the New York Edition.7 In both cases, what is at stake is a feeling of seductive excess, which must be resolutely kept in harness, lest it should prove fatal to the narrative enterprise. The question of formlessness was of course James’s main quarrel with the Victorians, his notorious criticism of their ‘loose and baggy monsters’ always underscoring a faulty control over means and ends, such as befitted an early and more naive stage in the literary profession. James’s attacks on his eminent predecessors were, on this particular issue, very early and very outspoken, and Ruskin’s rambling discourse in Modern Painters could hardly escape censure. Thus, in reviewing John Tyndall’s Hours of Exercise in the Alps, in 1872, James praised ‘the admirable economy’ of the scientist’s style, its being ‘strictly constructive and positive, leaving in its march no stragglers behind’, as opposed to the ‘perpetual sense of waste exertion’ given by Ruskin’s writings, his lack of formal control over argument going hand in hand with the lack of mastery over his own creations: ‘[Professor Tyndall] exhales a kind of immense urbanity – the good humor of a man who has mastered a multitude of facts. Mr Ruskin, on the other hand, stands oppressed and querulous among the swarming shapes and misty problems his magnificent imagination and his “theological” sympathies have evoked.’8

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In this context James’s critique of Balzac is particularly relevant, since it is another instance of roughly the same intergenerational friction. Balzac’s career will appear to the mature James to have been overburdened and eventually brought to untimely end by an unguarded openness to the ‘facts’ of material life. Likewise, the idea of a reckless disregard of mediations will underlie James’s epistolary comment on meeting Ruskin in England in 1869: ‘In face, in manner, in talk, in mind, he is weakness pure and simple. . . . He has the beauties of his defects; but to see him only confirms the impression given by his writings, that he has been scared back by the grim face of reality into the world of unreason and illusion’. 9 In the 1868 review, which was not meant to be read privately, James appears of course much more cautious. His detachment from Ruskin’s example is unobtrusively implied in his choosing to dwell on the specific role of art critics who do stick to their job, and whom he regards as useful ‘mediators’ between painters, who no doubt ‘need to be interpreted and expounded’, and the general public.10 And since questions of specialization entail questions of authority, it is no surprise that James should feel, at this juncture, that he has to defend art critics from the suspicions entertained by the artists, who – he notes – often resent the intrusion of littérateurs into the field of art. Thus, writing on art criticism involves, for the young American critic, writing on Ruskin, and writing on Ruskin involves juxtaposing the unbridled concerns of the Victorian sage and the disciplined specialization of the new professional critic, caught in the act of establishing his own authority vis-à-vis the authority claimed by the art producers themselves. The inevitability of friction with Ruskin – whenever it came to questions of artistic autonomy, and to struggles for authority within the field of cultural production – was to reassert itself ten years later, when Whistler’s suit against Ruskin, with the public trial, and the press ballyhoo, would lead James to pick up the subject again. James’s unsigned report on the event for the Nation is a brief but juicy pronouncement touching upon a number of connected issues. First of all, the gap between avant-garde art and the general public – which James quietly records by underscoring the absurdity of the judicial proceedings: A British jury of ordinary taxpayers was appealed to to decide whether Mr Whistler’s pictures belonged to a higher order of art, and what degree of ‘finish’ was required to render a picture

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satisfactory. The painter’s singular canvases were handed down in court, and the counsel for defence, holding one of them up, called upon the jury to pronounce whether it was ‘an actual representation’ of Battersea Bridge. 11 This very awkwardness seems to imply that art has become a matter of specialization, which – like any other specialization – is but an elitist regime that fences out the multitudes of non-experts. Faced with a modern art-object, they do not know what questions to ask, and obviously would not know how to answer the right questions. Art, in other words, has become a matter of autonomy, irreducible to any other laws and norms, but those which it freely imposes on itself. Such a state of things – which appears as irrevocably given – makes Ruskin’s enraged ethical stance appear outmoded and seems to ridicule and blame his indiscriminate modes of critical intervention. James’s text takes it upon itself to make some of such disapproval explicit by casting the Victorian sage in the role of someone who ‘possessed himself by prescription of the function of a general scold’, a ‘transgressor’ of ‘the decencies of criticism’, a ‘promiscuous’ and violent wielder of language – someone who it is a ‘satisfaction’ to see ‘brought up as a disorderly character’.12 One ought to add that this note on the trial, and the connected article ‘On Art Criticism and Whistler’ (1879), with their emphasis on the interests, economic and otherwise, of the ‘artistic fraternity’, and their strictures on the lack of cool detachment and unselfish objectivity in Whistler himself, particularly highlight James’s precocious deployment of the logic of professionalism in the field of artistic production. The professional ideology always articulates an aspiration to transcend the merely personal and idiosyncratic in view of larger benefits accruing to the profession as a whole. The tendency to subordinate the individual to allegedly more disinterested concerns is part and parcel of James’s self-definition and it inevitably surfaces in his attempts at self-differentiation from young and old competitors alike.13 Also, James’s peculiar brand of avantgardism – whose break with tradition implies a disciplinary stiffening of borders – was bound to find the confrontation with the late Ruskin of Fors particularly disturbing. His unabashed mixing of private passions and public concerns, his outrageous blurring of boundaries and his squandering of intellectual and emotional energies, inevitably provoked alarm and called for defensive strategies in the form of derisory comments.

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2. Travelling companions This is, of course, just one facet of James’s early modernist confrontation with his powerful predecessor, since it underscores the disciplinary aspects of late Victorian modernity and leaves in abeyance the question of the gains, in terms of freedom and self-realization, which the rupture with the Victorian past always undoubtedly entailed both for the producer and the consumer of art and literature. Indeed, it could be argued that very much as in Pater, in James the expansive experience of liberation from the constraints of the past ideally precedes the disciplinary moment of recontainment. Time and again, whilst trying to dramatize the perplexities of late Victorian ‘autonomous’ subjectivity, avant-garde authors privileged a sequence in which the moment of emancipation itself generated the need of defensive restraint. It is well known that such a narrative sequence in James often involves American travellers facing the challenge of European complexity, which is always a question of art as well as of life. Henry James made his first adult journey to Europe in 1869; after spending some time in London (where through Norton he actually met Ruskin), he travelled through France and Switzerland, and at the beginning of September he crossed the Alps via the Simplon Pass, entering Italy at Isella. The ensuing exposure to the Italian picturesque came to represent the very climax in his European ‘banquet of initiation’. He had been across the Atlantic before, but he had never been South: going to Italy itself was, in a sense, a gesture towards autonomous self-definition. Indeed, it was a way of defying domestic cautions and suspicions, and of claiming his freedom from parental and fraternal guidelines by opting for an aesthetic education of the senses and the emotions as opposed to a purely intellectual one. Of course, contemplation of art played a crucial role in this educational project as well as in much of the writing connected to it: the very accomplished letters home, the early stories set in Europe, and the travel notes. All of which entailed a good deal of treading in Ruskin’s footsteps, and was not bound to alleviate James’s sense of Ruskin’s having been there well before. One ought to stress that the burden of Ruskin’s omnipresence was probably increased by Charles Eliot Norton’s own pervasive travelling in Europe then and for part of the Seventies, which led to James meeting him repeatedly, in England, in France and in Italy, during that journey and the following ones. Happy as he

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decidedly was to float through Venice with Ruskin in his pocket, and to profit from Norton’s acquaintance with people and places, the young Henry James seems to have felt very early on that self-definition as a ‘sentimental traveller’ required prompt selfdifferentiation from such overbearing ‘travelling companions’. Such recognition of course implied the emergence of more areas of friction. Since the issue was one of youthful freedom to enjoy art and life, such an agon of self-differentiation was bound to result in the deployment of an avant-garde rhetoric of emancipation from past conventions, a priori judgements, petty critical attitudes. And although Norton’s strenuous approach to art might have been psychologically the main catalyst of James’s impatience,14 in his published strictures he targeted Ruskin’s more ‘exasperating points’,15 ‘the narrow theological spirit, the moralism à tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies’, the ‘wild weeds’ in the Ruskinian ‘mountain of flowers’.16 Such a strategy notoriously culminated in ‘Italy Revisited’ (1877), a travel piece where James picked a quarrel with Mornings in Florence, and Ruskin figured as a veritable ‘marplot’ at the Italian feast of art: Art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease . . . In other connections our impulses are conditioned and embarassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience and well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her shining standard floats the need for apology or compromise is over; there it is enough simply that we please and are pleased. . . . One may read a great many pages of Ruskin without getting a hint of this delightful truth . . . And as for Mr Ruskin’s world’s being a place . . . where we may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who enters it with any such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he finds a sort of assize court in perpetual session. Instead of a place in which human responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a region governed by a kind of Draconian legislation.17 It is, of course, a case of James at his most liberal, faced with Ruskin at his most didactic and censorious; a case which can be usefully juxtaposed to that of James the ideologue of modern pro-

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fessionalism trying to confine the irrepressible verbiage of the Victorian sage. As for the early narrative, the question is not clear-cut. The young fiction writer, very much as the fully fledged ‘master’, was quite willing to exploit whatever resources were to be had – which included Ruskin’s mountain sublime, Ruskin’s likes (if not his dislikes), and Ruskin’s Venice. However, if we read the early stories set in Europe with an eye to the incipient divergence from Ruskin and Norton, we can easily spot revealing details. Indeed, the very choice of Rome as a privileged setting in the early Italian stories up to The Portrait of a Lady may be construed as quietly polemical. The Eternal city was – happily! – uncharted by Ruskin, and Norton wasn’t very keen on it either. But the young sentimental traveller immediately recognized its ‘inevitability’,18 and boldly made it his own favourite Italian haunt. ‘At last – for the first time – I live!’, he wrote to William on the day of his first arrival in Rome in 1869. ‘It beats everything . . . It makes Venice – Florence – Oxford – London – seem like cities of pasteboard!’ 19 Among the early stories, Travelling Companions is perhaps the most relevant here, because of its rich dialogue with Ruskin on matters of art appreciation. It is a first-person narrative written in 1870, telling of a young Europeanized American traveller in Italy who falls in love with a pleasant compatriot and eventually marries her. On the one hand, it represents an homage to Ruskin, setting the central and most magical sequence of the love story in Venice, lingering as it does on some unavoidable Ruskinian favourites (San Marco and the Ducal Palace, San Cassiano, the Giotto Chapel in Padua) and even indulging in a bit of modernity scolding, with the narrator’s self-rebuking critique of ‘the idle spirit of travelling’, the ‘vulgarity’ of its ‘search for pictorial effects’. 20 On the other hand, in selecting some of Ruskin’s dislikes (the uncanny mixture of art and science in Leonardo’s Last Supper, Milan’s Cathedral, Palladio’s palaces, St Peter’s in Rome) as objects of praise and admiration, as well as crucial settings in the story, he is quite explictly making an anti-Ruskinian (or anti-Nortonian) case for a good humoured appreciation of stylistic diversity, a broad catholicism of taste. It is, again, James at his most liberally expansive, the freedom of sheer aesthetic enjoyment being pitted against sterile a priori rules about what art ‘ought’ to be; likewise, the intensity of an erotic passion matured in Naples and fulfilled in Rome is pitted against the innocent transgressions and the Puritan hesitations of

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a New England courtship played out in Northern Italy, which ‘seemed, in contrast, a cold, dark, hyperborean clime, a land of order, conscience, and virtue’.21 However, James at his most liberal is decidedly not James at his most characteristic. Indeed, Travelling Companions was not included in the New York Edition. The Master was bent on favouring coherence of purpose over unruly multiplicity, and as the earliest specimen of his shorter fiction he picked up A Passionate Pilgrim (1871), a story of longing and ultimate frustration set in ‘hyperborean’ England. Also, James himself did not settle down in Rome, his more pondered opinion on the matter being that it was much too good a place for passive enjoyment to be conducive to serious work: romance and the picturesque were more productive of good writing if contemplated from afar, when mediated by distance and memory and mournful feelings of loss.22 As we know, the typical Jamesian recipe is one that shrewdly balances restraint and freedom, askesis and enjoyment, loss and imaginary gain – thereby concocting that peculiar mixture of narcissistic elation and painful contraction which was, for many a late Victorian writer, the very experience of modernity. It is part of my contention here that the early frictions with Ruskin did help James work through such an experience, as they did help shape the sustaining rhetoric of his peculiar stance. If they did, it was – one might say – by pushing him off balance, forcing him to face up to his own extreme reactions, before gradually modulating them into satisfactory narrative use.

3. Of present and past As I have been trying to demonstrate, the James–Ruskin connection can be fruitfully read as a question of intergenerational self-definition through self-differentiation, a process out of which James teased out his own peculiar way of insertion into the late nineteenth-century marketplace of literature. As we have seen, faced with Ruskin’s excess, James the disciplinarian deployed the professional logic of self-restraint. On the other hand, James the progressive liberal did his best to show that unmooring the self from traditional constraints implied no loss at all and much narcissistic gain. In the end, a satisfactory compromise was struck between the two. It boiled down to a Puritan work ethic in an updated, weakened form, allowing for plenty of holidays, even in Catholic countries, as a way of storing up cultural capital (of experience, information,

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taste . . .), whereof the dedicated literary professional might draw at leisure to satisfy his emotional as well as his business needs. It was a way of fulfilling the young James’s modernist manifesto celebrating the advantages of being ‘American born’:23 an oxymoronic condition of self-limiting freedom, unencumbered by blind acceptance of past dogmas and customs, and yet regulated by a totally internalized norm, ‘a lurking principle of asceticism’,24 a modern Super-ego – a condition that allowed him to ‘deal freely with other forms of civilization’ (to ‘pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically etc.) claim our property wherever we find it’) 25 without radical displacement of centre, or disruption of self. And it was, indeed, a fairly good way of turning lacks and losses into profits, ultimately resulting in a mild, self-complacent progressivism, which – though ready to criticize the present for its ‘vulgarity’ – viewed it as more richly interesting than the past, because of its increased complexity and its potential for disenchanted sophistication. As such, it inevitably implied further areas of friction with Ruskin, to whom the nifty logic of compensation, Emersonian or otherwise, was emphatically unknown. Indeed, James’s letters and travel notes of the 1870s make it clear that a crucial bone of contention between the young man of letters and Ruskin was the latter’s inability to come to terms with modernization, to accept the unavoidable fracture between present and past. Post-unification Italy was a place where old and new often met in very striking combinations, and this led many a nostalgic Anglo-Saxon tourist to complain of the political changes which seemed to be sweeping away much of the Italian picturesque. James himself was not averse to lamenting the ‘cockneyfication’ of modern Italy, but he seemed quite keen on differentiating his own occasional strictures from overall condemnations and a priori judgements. This was part of his modernism, as opposed to the ‘old-fashioned’ attitudes of Ruskin and Norton, and it entailed a frank scepticism towards interpretations of history and judgements passed thereon: ‘I regard the march of history very much as a man placed astride a locomotive, without knowledge or help, would regard the progress of that vehicle. To stick on, somehow, even to enjoy the scenery as we pass, is the sum of my aspiration . . .’. 26 Since the problem, for James, was to ‘enjoy’ Italy, drawing cultural as well as emotional profits out of it in the midst of the intervening changes, some of his criticism of Ruskin was bound to be triggered by the Victorian sage’s unaccommodating view of

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modernity. Indeed, the anti-Ruskinian passages of ‘Italy Revisited’ quoted above were ushered in by reflections on Ruskin’s inability to come to terms with modernization, to accept the unavoidable fracture between present and past. Of course, James was no believer in ‘the inevitability of new desecrations’. But he was ready to emphasize his own more flexible approach to the spectacle of modernity. Hence, he describes himself – while in Rome – as capable of contemplating the new line of ‘democratic’ tram-cars with equanimity.27 While in Venice, despite Ruskin’s censures, he shows appreciation for the new railway bridge, which ‘does truly, in a manner, shine across the green lap of the lagoon like a mighty causeway of marble’. 28 And while in Florence, faced with the new omnibus stand built at the foot of Giotto’s tower and disturbed by Ruskin’s thunderous expressions of dislike, he feels that ‘discord for discord, there isn’t much to choose between’ the two.29 ‘[W]hen we see a great tradition broken’ – James concedes – ‘we feel something of the pain with which we hear a stifled cry. But regret is one thing and resentment is another.’30 Thus, the cantankerous outbursts of the ‘informal votary of form’ are juxtaposed to the sour-sweet pleasures of the Jamesian flâneur traversing modernized Italy and freely collecting ‘impressions’ for later use. Unruffled by the sight of degradation, he is very much like the narrator in Travelling Companions, who manages to extract plenty of narcissistic satisfaction even from Leonardo’s Last Supper, defaced as it appears by the invisibile action of time as well as by much ill-usage at the hands of modern men. As Jeanne Clegg has suggested, such divergences from Ruskin are largely motivated by James’s more spectatorial attitude towards history – which seems to rule out indignation as well as any attempt to modify its course. 31 What I particularly want to stress is the foundational role played, at this juncture, by the Jamesian subject’s pronounced self-sufficiency, which seems to allow for larger margins of independence from external props, and more ‘healthy’ ways of negotiating experiences of distance, separation and loss. It might be tempting to naturalize this more efficient managing of mourning as a temperamental difference; but it is of course itself an effect of discourse pointing to a further area of intergenerational friction, the late Victorian partisan of autonomous and self-reflexive forms of cultural production tending inevitably to dismiss as naive and outmoded alternative forms of relationship between the writer and the world. Thus, among the implications of James’s rhetorical

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self-differentiation from Ruskin, there appears to be a construction of the latter’s fiercely interventionist stance towards the present as a sort of pathological mournfulness, an incapacity to let objects go while effecting their imaginary incorporation. The Jamesian subject, being skilled at turning losses into gains, could mirror itself in a view of history as a dialectical give and take, where things got lost but were somehow imaginatively preserved. On the other hand, the older writer’s rigidities, his unwillingness to compromise and adjust, figure as a somewhat childish disposition to tantrums in the face of new ugly things that were there to stay, and of old beautiful things forever gone. What is at stake is the aesthetic legitimacy of rage at loss and pain, of indignation at social and moral emergency, of the desire to deploy written words as well as positive action to oppose change or to control its consequences. That they should appear as infantilizing marks distinguishing the old-fashioned cultural producer from the truly professional practitioner of art and criticism, is indeed a crucial implication of the break with the previous generation effected by the late nineteenth century avant-garde. Bound up with the predilection for detachment, irony, objectivity and impersonality, it is a sign of adaptation to the logic governing the field of ‘autonomous’ cultural production as well as a component in the late Victorian legacy to High Modernist aesthetics. The early James–late Ruskin confrontation touches, as we have seen, on a number of issues connected to this decisive historical watershed, which I think inscribes an unbridgeable discontinuity in whatever appearance of continuity might otherwise connect the young American writer to his unwieldy master in visionary prose writing and art appreciation. Indeed, we know that the older James was able to cope with Ruskin less self-defensively; but this obviously did not imply he was coming to share, or radically to reassess, Ruskin’s pugnacious stance. If James the master did make more extensive use of Ruskin, even as the scolding sage,32 it was – it would rather seem – because of his later more relaxed attitude to his predecessors, which allowed him increased freedom and flexibility in claiming his ‘aesthetic property’ wherever he could find it. There are, however, isolated spots in the late Jamesian corpus where he does seem to be getting much closer to Ruskin. They occur where James can be caught at his most catastrophic, that is, when the Jamesian subject seems to feel imperilled by the changing world outside. I am thinking, particularly, of The American Scene,

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where rampant modernity looks as if wilfully bent on effacing every trace of the past, instead of blandly trading off losses and gains, and a new glass and iron architecture seems to undermine the very possibility of an interior, autonomous self. Faced with overwhelming ‘powers of removal’, the ‘sentimental traveller’ back in the States turns into a ‘brooding analyst’ perturbed at the destruction of old beloved buildings and streets and squares, ‘vanished as utterly as the Assyrian Empire’. 33 James’s proximity to Ruskin’s alarmed perception of ‘progress’ is here as great as it could be. And yet this does not precipitate anything comparable to Ruskin’s tirades at the barbarism of contemporary nations, or to his mournful lamentations at the sight of universal ruin – of people gone, and Turner’s paintings ‘perishing’, cities destroyed, lakes polluted and glaciers being no more. From such a poignant experience of uprootedness and dispossession, James’s ‘restless’ curiosity keeps on producing much urbane bemusement at the paradoxes of modernity, and the usual surplus of convoluted prose. Even in New York, and in spite of unprecedented feelings of loss, history in the making remains to Henry James a ‘very interesting’ sight, a very exciting show.

Notes 1 As will appear in the course of my argument, Pierre Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) is my main theoretical reference point in this paper. 2 Henry James, ‘An English Critic of French Painting’ (1868), in James, The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. J. L. Sweeney (London: Rupert Hart Davies, 1956), p. 33. 3 Ibid. 4 John Ruskin to C. E. Norton, 20 June 1874, in The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Ch. E. Norton, ed. J. Bradley and I. Ousby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 317. 5 James, ‘An English Critic of French Painting’, p. 34. 6 ‘We most of us aspire to achieve at the best but a patch here and there, to pluck a sprig or a single branch, to break ground in a corner of the great garden of life. Balzac’s plan was simply to do everything that could be done. He proposed to himself to turn over the great garden from north to south and from east to west.’ Henry James, ‘Honoré de Balzac’ (1902), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers (New York: The Library of America, 1984), pp. 191–2. 7 For instance where he discusses the ‘quite incalculable tendency of a mere grain of subject-matter to expand and develop and cover the ground’, and the risk that the ‘bright efflorescence latent in it’ should ‘produce complications almost beyond reckoning’. Henry James, ‘Preface’ to vol. IX of The New York Edition (New York: Scribner, 1908), p. v.

The Early James and Ruskin 95 8 Henry James, ‘John Tyndall’ (1872), in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: The Library of America, 1984), p. 1359. 9 Henry James to Mrs H. James Sr, 20 March 1869. Henry James: Letters, ed. L. Edel, vol. I (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1974), p. 103. 10 ‘An English Critic of French Painting’, pp. 35–6. 11 Henry James, ‘On Whistler and Ruskin’ (1878), in The Painter’s Eye, p. 173. 12 Ibid., p. 173. 13 Such strategies of James’s self-differentiation – particularly from Wildean aestheticism – have been persuasively investigated by Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 14 In a very early letter home from London, dated 10 May 1869, James declared his lack of sympathy for Norton (‘Charles inspires me with a terrible lack of sympathy and, unfortunately, there is a popular delusion between us that he is my guide philosopher and bosom friend. I must be an arrant Hypocrite’; Letters, vol. I, p. 117). Later on, during his 1872 journey, he complained to William specifically about Norton’s unsatisfactory approach to art (‘he takes art altogether too hard for me to follow him – if not in my likings, at least in his dislikes. I daily pray not to grow in discrimination and to be suffered to aim at superficial pleasure. Otherwise I shudder to think of my state of mind ten years hence’; ibid., p. 300). 15 In his letters to William, 25 Sept. 1869, James praises the usefulness of Stones of Venice’s last appendix, ‘with all its exasperating points’. Letters, I, p. 140. 16 ‘Venice’ (1882), in Italian Hours (1909, rpt. Grove Press, New York, 1979), p. 3. 17 Henry James, ‘Italy Revisited’ (1877), ibid., pp. 129–30. 18 Of the ‘inevitability of Rome’ as a residence for the expatriated American artist James wrote in William Wetmore Story and His Friends (London: Thames and Hudson, 1903), vol. I, p. 99. 19 Henry James to William James, 30 Oct. 1869. Letters I, p. 160. 20 Henry James, Travelling Companions (1870), in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. L. Edel, vol. II (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1962), p. 193. 21 Ibid., p. 220. 22 Such was the lesson that James thought he might draw from Story’s experience of expatriation: ‘the “picturesque” subject, for literary art, has by no means all its advantage in the picturesque country; it yields its full taste, gives out all its inspiration, in other words, in some air unfriendly to the element at large.’ William Wetmore Story, vol. II, p. 225. 23 I am thinking of James’s letter to T. S. Perry, 20 Sept. 1867 (Letters, vol. I, p. 77), where he defines being American as ‘an excellent preparation for culture’. Unburdened by tradition and reified social customs, and sustained by their ‘moral consciousness’, young American writers may prove able to achieve ‘a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various national tendencies in the world’ which is ‘the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen’.

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24 As James called it in Madame de Mauve (1874), The Complete Tales of Henry James 1873–1875, vol. III, p. 184. 25 Letter to T. S. Perry, 20 Sept. 1867 (Letters, vol. I, p. 77). 26 Henry James, letter to C. E. Norton, 31 March 1873. Letters, vol. I, pp. 362–3. 27 Ibid., p. 112. 28 Henry James, ‘Venice: an Early Impression’ (1872), in Italian Hours, p. 53. 29 ‘Italy Revisited’, p. 126. Ruskin’s abusive comments on Florence’s ‘principal hackney-coach and omnibus station’ are included in the ‘Shepherd’s Tower’ section of Mornings in Florence in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, eds E. T. Cook and A. Wedderbum, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 23: 460. 30 Ibid., p. 125. 31 Cf. Jeanne Clegg, ‘Superficial Pastimes, Fine Emotions and Metaphysical Intentions: James and Ruskin in Venice’, in Sergio Perosa, ed., Henry James e Venezia (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki editore, 1987), pp. 160–1. 32 As to James’s openness to the scolding Ruskin of ‘Traffic’ and ‘The Storm Cloud’ in The Wings of the Dove, particularly strong is the case made by Freedman, Professions of Taste, pp. 82–101. 33 Henry James, The American Scene (1905), ed. L. Edel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 190.

7 ‘Things Passed Over’: Ruskin, Modernism and Autobiography Max Saunders

This essay will offer a reading of Ruskin’s autobiography, arguing that his reading of his life in terms of moments of perception presents the crucial paradigm that allowed Impressionism to transform itself into Modernism, as the Ruskinian reading of ‘nature’ turns into a concern with the nature of ‘reading’.1

Things passed over Ruskin was proud of his analytic mind and excelled in giving close analytic attention to whatever he was studying: the painting of Tintoretto; a Gothic cathedral; a word, or a line of verse.2 And his writing demands a similar analytic saturation. He wants to change the way people look, the way they attend to their objects, whether natural or cultural. He wants to effect a revolution in taste. So it is appropriate to subject the title of his autobiography, Praeterita, to a Ruskinian meditation. Lewis’s and Short’s A Latin Dictionary defines ‘Praeterita’ as: ‘things gone by, the past’; then, in a second definition, as: ‘things passed over (Gr. παραλειπóµευα), a name of the books of Chronicles, because they contain what had been omitted in the books of Kings’. 3

Impressionism and time From one point of view, Ruskin’s work is centrally concerned with capturing the present. The ivy seen on the road to Norwood (311). The aspen at Fontainebleau (314–15). The sight of Mont Blanc. The rapture in front of an unexpected masterpiece. And in this sense, the aesthetics of Praeterita are those of its contemporaries, the 97

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Impressionists. Kenneth Clark, in his 1948 Introduction to Praeterita, said: ‘Ruskin was by nature an impressionist’.4 Ruskin defined his own writing as ‘impressional and emotional’ (67). The emphasis is on the immediacy and ephemerality of perception, not on the durability of the things perceived. I want to suggest that the only way to understand the relation between Ruskin and Modernism is via Impressionism. In particular, literary Impressionism: a concept less clearly defined than literary Modernism, perhaps, though like it dependent upon a sense of the interdependence of the arts. The chief literary critic in English to talk of ‘Impressionism’ in literature is probably Ford Madox Ford.5 For him, the term meant the kind of writing, between Realism and Modernism, exemplified by authors such as Stephen Crane, Henry James, Joseph Conrad; and Ford himself. Although Ford framed his aesthetic as a reaction against those he described as the ‘Middle Victorian, tumultuously bearded Great’ – the moral figures he felt had intimidated him as a child – we should also add, as significant Impressionist precursors, writers such as Walter Pater, and of course Ruskin. 6 An account of Modernism that doesn’t grasp the influence of Impressionism will make little sense of Proust, or the Joyce of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. From another point of view, though, Ruskin’s work is an attending to the past. To the archaeology of culture. Not for nothing was he nearly a geologist. As a geologist finds in the stones of the Alps the story of the planet, so Ruskin finds in the stones of Venice the story of Christian civilization. Like all revolutionaries, he changes the present by rewriting the past, offering a revisionist history of art, of architecture, of society. This antithesis between past and present corresponds to a central fissure in Ruskin’s work, between the visual and the verbal. The present of visuality contrasts with the past of narrative, of history. Ruskin’s work mostly exists on the cusp between the visual and the verbal; it turns on the effort to translate pictures into words, images into narrative, buildings into history.

Memory When Ruskin turns to his own past, it is memory that re-presents this paradox of present and past; this problem of translating impressions into autobiography. In his later years, as Dinah Birch argues, Ruskin ‘became a great writer of remembrance’.7 This paradoxical

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nature of memory is of course central to Modernism. Proust, Conrad, Ford, Joyce, Woolf, all explore the power of memory, and the relation between memory and aesthetics: the way memory can transform experience from temporality to permanence, as art does. They are also aware of how memory can transform experience in a more problematic way, from fact to impression, or, in extreme cases, from fact to fiction. 8 ‘Praeterita’: ‘things gone by, the past’; this denotes what is over, behind us: irrecoverable and irredeemable. But the second definition, ‘things passed over’, is more ambiguous. Things that have been passed over long ago? Or things that are being passed over again, gone over once more as they are summoned to memory? Another paradox of memory that becomes central as Impressionism turns into Modernism, is that it is only in memory, in retrospect, that the past can be known and understood. ‘I never have known anything of what was most seriously happening to me till afterwards’ (442). Thus Ruskin, but it could as well be the narrator of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, or Ford’s The Good Soldier. The characteristic predicament of the modernist self is bewilderment in the face of the present.9 The experience of mysteries, enigmas, uncertainties, which can only be resolved, if at all, later. Experience, that is, can only be present to the self when it is distant in time. The modernist tragedy is that we cannot experience our own experience as we live it. But Modernism explores the redemptive possibility that lost experience can be regained in memory. And the characteristic way Modernism expresses this temporal self-alienation is by disrupting linear chronology, and following instead sequences of mnemonic association. Ruskin is in the vanguard here too: ‘I think my history will, in the end, be completest if I write as its connected subjects occur to me, and not with formal chronology of plan’ (128). Again, we could be listening to those Conradian or Fordian narrators.10

Literary autobiography Impressionist or Modernist literary autobiography is particularly exercised by this problem of self-possession. Literary life-writing has a double focus: the life and the writing. Artists’ autobiographies characteristically don’t just chart their family backgrounds, their social and sexual lives, but tell the story of how and why someone becomes an artist. People also read a writer’s biography or

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autobiography in most cases because of the subject’s work: to find out how they came to write Sense and Sensibility, or A la recherche du temps perdu.11 Ford Madox Ford’s second book of autobiography, It Was the Nightingale, starts from his demobilization after the war, and goes on to tell the story of how he wrote his post-war masterpiece, the series of novels about the war now known as Parade’s End. And this corresponds to what we have in Praeterita: for example when Ruskin defines his ‘business’ as ‘to give account of the materials and mental resources’ with which he began to write the second volume of Modern Painters (389). For the modernist autobiographer, however, this strategy of telling the story of one’s stories raises a problem. The kind of modernist impersonality asserted by Eliot, Wyndham Lewis or Ezra Pound seeks to detach the work of art from its biographical origin. But literary autobiography is fundamentally attached to the author’s oeuvre. It poses itself as the necessary supplement to the author’s other work. Modernist autobiography characteristically avoids this problem by locating inspiration in intertextuality. That is, the epiphanies tend to be the author’s experiences of their art. For Conrad, or Yeats, or Ford, as for Proust, it was what they read, as much as what they did or saw, that made them writers. Thus Ford begins his first volume of literary autobiography, Return to Yesterday, with his oldest literary recollection: reading Kipling on a train. Or think of Yeats’s recollections of the impact on his youth of Shakespeare; or Conrad writing about Flaubert in A Personal Record. And again this is what we have in Praeterita: a history of Ruskin’s formative reading, together with a representation of what that reading was like: how it affected him.12

Reading I need now to demonstrate the importance of reading (in the literal sense of the books he read) in Praeterita. The autobiography famously starts with a statement (repeated from Fors Clavigera) about himself: ‘I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school’; but the biographical details here – paternity, temperament, politics – are immediately interpreted through literature: ‘Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s. I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters’ (13). And he then goes on to cite his Sunday reading, such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. Within a few pages

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we are given an account of his learning to read and write, complete with a sample of his earliest writing. Praeterita is full of his reading. Reading the Bible. Being read to. Hearing his father reading to his mother. Rereading. To give just the most salient examples: the last narrative chapter, ‘Joanna’s Care’, dwells fondly and fully on his reading, together with Joan, of Walter Scott. As Ruskin extracts material from Fors to construct the first two chapters, we see him rereading his own published work. Similarly, he rereads unpublished material, as when he reprints his own diary account of meeting Turner (305). Or, more strikingly, in the final part of the autobiography, ‘Dilecta’, Ruskin goes over and publishes the correspondence and diaries that he valued and reread. I have claimed that a definitive moment in the transition between Impressionism and Modernism occurs as Ruskin ponders the nature of ‘reading’. To show this, I need to demonstrate how he also talks of ‘reading’ in its figurative sense of interpreting, not just following the words on the page.13 It was the intensive training he received from his mother in Bible-reading that alerted him to how texts needed interpreting. ‘It had never entered into my head to doubt a word of the Bible, though I saw well enough already that its words were to be understood otherwise than I had been taught’ (189). This sense of reading as interpreting gets applied to things other than texts. He reads people: ‘my mother, as I now read her’ (122). He knew that he was primarily an interpreter; that his main gift was not to be a creator himself, but his ‘faculty of seeing the beauty and meaning of the work of other minds’ (383). ‘I can no more write a story than compose a picture’, he writes (304). But he had a genius for translating between picture and story. He explains how his father became his ‘guide’ in this, and he gives as an example the routine of watching him shave. His father had hung one of his own water-colours over his dressing table, and after shaving would tell Ruskin a story about it. 14 Beginning from wondering about the fisherman in a boat in the foreground – where he lived, and where he was going – they elaborated a dramatic ‘plot’ around the scene (38). Such a training in the narrative engagement with visual forms makes it less surprising than it might otherwise be that he should read the Campo Santo frescoes as like Scott’s novels (354). Or that he should describe Christ Church Choir as ‘written so closely and consecutively with indisputable British history’ (191). Describing himself reading shades off into describing how to read himself:

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This inconceivable passive – or rather impassive – contentment in doing, or reading, the same thing over and over again, I perceive to have been a great condition in my future power of getting thoroughly to the bottom of matters. (58; cf. 141) As he passes over his life again, he ‘perceives’ new patterns in it. That is, autobiography is a reading of the self: posing the self as a text to be reread, deciphered, construed, retold. It worries Ruskin that his readers read him differently from the way he reads himself. In vol. II, chapter II, he mentions receiving letters from acquaintances who say they like him more after obtaining new lights upon his character from the book. ‘Which was not the least the effect I intended to produce on them’, says Ruskin: ‘and which moreover is the exact opposite of the effect on my own mind of meeting myself, by turning back, face to face’ (279). Turning back to his past, in writing the book? Or turning back the pages, as he reads it over; lets his eye pass over it again? This follows an expression of concern about what his reader is making of the book. He reads his reader reading: In my needful and fixed resolve to set the facts down continuously, leaving the reader to his reflections on them, I am slipping a little too fast over the surfaces of things; and it becomes at this point desirable that I should know, or at least try to guess, something of what the reader’s reflections are! and whether in the main he is getting at the sense of the facts I tell him. (279) Setting down the facts sounds like an appeal to an empiricist objectivity. Yet Ruskin knows that the facts alone won’t suffice. You need ‘the sense of the facts’. Facts are something you have to make sense of: to interpret; to read. Ruskin could thus be said to have anticipated the recent debates in reader-based theories about how far reading is determined by texts, how far by readers, and how far by institutions or traditions of interpretation. That is, he knew how ‘reading’ was arguably a matter of reading something into, not just reading something off, or out of, an object.15 Indeed, this is the core of his anxiety about ‘The Pathetic Fallacy’: the psychology of modernity makes all acts of perception autobiographic, since the modern mind can’t help reading itself into the world.16

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Visual impressionism Ruskin’s career as critic of the visual wasn’t formed by books alone, of course, but other kinds of visual experience. It follows from what I have just been arguing that his earliest recollections of visual impressions are crucial too, since they are also ‘read’; are just as much the occasion for interpretation. Praeterita is of course rich with Ruskin’s vivid visual memories. Starting from the grim recollection of how he coped with the repressive and punitive regime of his parents by learning how to ‘pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet’, or looking for patterns in other decorative fabrics and wallpapers (21). Or he recounts his first encounter with painting, when he was taken to have his portrait painted at three and a half, by Mr Northcote (21–2). Within a few pages we are told of a gift that combines word and image: ‘the illustrated edition of Rogers’ Italy’. ‘This book was the first means I had of looking carefully at Turner’s work: and I might, not without some appearance of reason, attribute to the gift the entire direction of my life’s energies’ (29). Similarly he recalls ‘the really most precious, and continuous in deep effect upon me, of all gifts to my childhood’: a publication called ‘the Forgetme-not’ of 1827, containing an engraving of Prout’s ‘Sepulchral monument at Verona’ (91). Furthermore, as we can see from these examples, it isn’t that the moments of vision precede interpretation; are prior to art. In Praeterita even the crucial revelations of nature are mediated by art. As George Landow argues, Ruskin was prepared for his visions of the Norwood ivy and the Fontainebleau aspen by his experience of Turner’s work; and these moments then helped him return to Turner to understand, or interpret, him better. 17 Ruskin’s recollections of his first sight of the Alps are fascinating in this context, since he immediately translates the visual into the textual: Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought or dreamed, – the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful to us; not more awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death. (115) It is an account of the impression made by the natural world. But first he mediates it through scripture and religion. Then he considers the history of taste:

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It is not possible to imagine, in any time of the world, a more blessed entrance into life, for a child of such a temperament as mine. True, the temperament belonged to the age: a very few years, – within the hundred, – before that, no child could have been born to care for mountains, or for the men that lived among them, in that way. Till Rousseau’s time, there had been no ‘sentimental’ love of nature. (115) In other words, the reading of the age affects the age’s reading of the landscape. He does not just let the prose move from the literary to the natural, but brings it back again to the image of the book. ‘Thus’, he says, inspired by the sight: with so much of science mixed with feeling as to make the sight of the Alps not only the revelation of the beauty of the earth, but the opening of the first page of its volume, – I went down that evening . . . with my destiny fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful. (116) Our perceptions of the world are, after all, shaped by what we have previously learned about it. ‘My Venice, like Turner’s, had been chiefly created for us by Byron’, says Ruskin (295). One way of reading these figures would be a deconstructive one, insisting on the textuality of anything – even a mountain – that might seem to stand outside the realm of the textual. But it is perhaps best seen as at least a paradoxical figure, since it also asserts the primacy of the non-textual over the textual. When science is mixed properly with feeling, then you don’t need science books: the mere sight of the Alps is itself just as instructive. The Alps become the first page in the volume of the earth’s beauty. In a passage that follows close upon this, Ruskin touches on a central problem for the impressionist autobiographer. He is describing the effect of not understanding the language of the place you’re visiting: things are learnt about the country that way which can be learned in no other way, but only about that part of it which interests itself in you, or which you have pleasure in being acquainted with. Virtually, you are thinking of yourself all the time . . . We did not travel for adventures, nor for company, but to see with our eyes, and to measure with our hearts. If you have sympathy,

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the aspect of humanity is more true to the depths of it than its words; and even in my own land, the things in which I have been least deceived are those which I have learned as their Spectator. (119) This is alert to the way experience of otherness is inescapably autobiographic. In encountering the other, ‘Virtually, you are thinking of yourself all the time’. In describing what he has seen, therefore, he tells us – and himself – what he is. Yet the very mechanism which enables this, also disables it. For if seeing is privileged over saying, then the words in which he tells his experiences are charged with being less true, more deceptive. If the impressionist autobiographer must translate visual memories into verbal discourse, he can only be aware of the gaps between the two. In a sense, this notion of epistemological gaps is related to the gaps between the three main subjects of Praeterita: people (family, friends, artists); art (painting, writing, architecture); and nature (mountains, trees, light). One could say that his figures attempt to pass over the gaps between these subjects. Thus one reading of the title suggests that ‘things passed over’ need not simply be omitted, consigned to oblivion because finished; but that they can be ‘passed over’ as ravines or mountains can. Think of those accounts of the Alpine passes . . .

Gaps Praeterita, then, could be read as filling in the gaps in Ruskin’s other writings: ‘a name of the books of Chronicles, because they contain what had been omitted in the books of Kings’. But I want to suggest that the implication in the title, Praeterita, is that the gaps are more radically significant. They were for Henry James, perhaps the greatest Impressionist autobiographer, writing from a position precisely between Ruskin and Modernism: I foresee moreover how little I shall be able to resist, through these Notes, the force of persuasion expressed in the individual vivid image of the past wherever encountered, these images having always such terms of their own, such subtle secrets and insidious arts for keeping us in relation with them, for bribing us by the beauty, the authority, the wonder of their saved intensity.

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They have saved it, they seem to say to us, from such a welter of death and darkness and ruin that this alone makes a value and a light and a dignity for them, something indeed of an argument that our story, since we attempt to tell one, has lapses and gaps without them.18 Modernist narrative is notoriously disjunctive: fragmentary and juxtapositional rather than connective and evolutionary. Another kind of paradox emerges from James’s image here of vivid images, which insist on the gaps their absence would create. For, of course, the very disjunctiveness of such images means that a story told around them will inevitably have its gaps as well: the gaps James represents as the ‘death and darkness and destruction’ that surrounds the epiphanic moments of vividness. Ruskin’s autobiography has been described as a form of conversion narrative structured around moments of epiphany.19 But the corollary is that epiphanic narrative is by definition structured around gaps, the gaps between the epiphanies, the passages of mundanity from which the epiphanies stand out. In a post-Lacanian, Derridean universe, we know that discourse can never fill its own gaps: that there is an absence or lack at the heart of all we say or think. In this sense, all narrative is ‘things passed over’. Biographically this is obviously true of Praeterita. Kenneth Clark comments on the ‘remarkable’ omission of his marriage to Euphemia Gray from the narrative. But the sense of omission is much more pervasive. Ruskin cultivates a manner of dignified innuendo, hinting that he could always tell more. As with the strangely moving inclusion of the long letter from Rose La Touche, whom he simply names as ‘Rosie’, at the end of volume 3, chapter 3, saying: ‘Some wise, and prettily mannered, people have told me I shouldn’t say anything about Rosie at all. But I am too old now to take advice, and I won’t have this following letter – the first she ever wrote me – moulder away, when I can read it no more, lost to all loving hearts’ (529). And then glances at the ‘shadows’ that gathered round the happiness of those days (535). Autobiography never can fill all the gaps in the self, or in the sense of the self. It can only, in James’s suggestive phrase, ‘glory in a gap’.20 When Ruskin found in a bookseller’s ‘a little fourteenth century Hours of the Virgin’ (490), he used the reverse of the figure describing the Alpine view as the page of a book, saying now that each page opened a vision of a new world:

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The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had, counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten gold, – as many of them indeed were, – cannot be told, any more than – everything else, of good, that I wanted to tell. (491)

Mediation I shall end with a sketch of how we might map the relation between nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature – between Ruskin and Modernism – by considering the changing view of ‘mediation’ from Realism, to Ruskinian Impressionism, through Modernism, to Postmodernism. a) Realism denies the mediation of reality by art; it is based on an attempted suppression, or disattending to, this mediation. b) Impressionism accepts the mediation of reality, but locates it in the process of perception: in the phenomenology of vision, or the stream of consciousness. c) This emphasis on perceptual subjectivism and stream of consciousness is in Modernism too, of course. But there it co-exists with an awareness of how language or form mediates between the subject and the object. d) Postmodernism is founded on a denial, or suppression, of the thing mediated. A scepticism about the objectivity of the object. For Postmodernists, mediation and figuration is all we have. We can’t locate a stable subject or a stable object outside the field of mediation, beyond representations. Figuration is no longer grounded in the real. Ruskin represents a turning point between Impressionism and Modernism, because he can just about accept the mediation that is ‘reading’, but only by displacing reading from its literal, literary sense (of reading a book, a verbal text) onto a figurative, and visual sense: reading a landscape, or a painting, or a person. But this strategy of trying to steady himself against the vertigo of interpretation lures him further towards the edge. To talk of reading a landscape or a person appears to ground hermeneutics in the natural. To naturalize interpretation. But it also does the converse, opening up that ground, since nature is no longer self-present and self-declaring,

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but is a text demanding an interpretation: a representation of an absent essence. And so it is with autobiography. Writing, and reading, the self, may start as a strategy for plenitude, for integration, making the self cohere into a story. But the story becomes that of the self in need of such strategies; the self not self-present but passed over in the process of living; present neither to others nor even to itself, but only recuperable as interpretation, in the act of passing over its past again, in writing and in reading.

Notes 1 George P. Landow, Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 73–4. 2 See for example the lovely analysis of the Scottish expression ‘mind’ for ‘remember’: Complete Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols, eds E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, vol. 35, Praeterita and Dilecta (London: George Allen, 1908), pp. 464–6. Page references given in brackets in the text are to this edition. 3 Ruskin’s title may have been influenced by that of Schopenhauer’s popular work of 1851, Parerga und Paralipomena (παρεργα translating as ‘secondary business’, or ‘appendages’). 4 Kenneth Clark, ‘Introduction’, Praeterita (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), p. xvi. 5 See Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 123–33, for a good account of literary Impressionism and Ford’s place within it. The most elaborate of Ford’s many discussions of the topic can be found in ‘On Impressionism’, Poetry and Drama, 2 (June and Dec. 1914), pp. 167–75, 323–34. 6 Ford, Mightier Than the Sword (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1938), p. 264. 7 Dinah Birch, ‘Fathers and Sons: Ruskin, John James Ruskin, and Turner’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 18 (1994), pp. 147–62 (p. 161). 8 Ford posed himself as just such a provocatively extreme case, claiming of his first book of reminiscences, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), pp. xv–xvi: This book, in short, is full of inaccuracies as to facts, but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute . . . I don’t really deal in facts, I have for facts a most profound contempt. I try to give you what I see to be the spirit of an age, of a town, of a movement. This can not be done with facts. Yet this position is not in fact so far from Ruskin’s, who could argue: ‘There is a moral as well as material truth, – a truth of impression as well as of form, – of thought as well as of matter; and the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the more important of the two’: chapter V of Modern Painters, ‘Of Ideas of Truth’, in Works, 3: 104. Ford is merely exaggerating a central set of Victorian anxieties

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about the relation between objectivity and subjectivity; between fact and value; between matter and spirit. See Paul B. Armstrong, The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). See Landow, Ruskin, p. 84, arguing that Ruskin’s narrative strategies, like Tennyson’s, anticipate Modernist developments. These issues are developed more fully in Max Saunders, ‘A Life in Writing: Ford Madox Ford’s Dispersed Autobiographies’, Antaeus, 56 (Spring, 1986), pp. 47–69; and Ford Madox Ford: a Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), I, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–16; II, ch. 23, ‘Ford’s Autobiography’, pp. 437–67. As he says in a rather defensive footnote: ‘How I learned the things I taught is the major, and properly, only question regarded in this history’ (368). See Landow, Ruskin, p. 74, on ‘his two concerns with perception and interpretation’. See Dinah Birch’s fine discussion of this episode in ‘Fathers and Sons’, pp. 147–62. See for example Andrew Bennett, ed., Readers and Reading (London and New York: Longman, 1995), p. 2. Modern Painters, in Works, 5: 201–20. Landow, Ruskin, p. 79. James, The Middle Years, in Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 551. See Landow, Ruskin, p. 83. James, ‘The New Novel’, in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Morris Shapira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 332.

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8 Ruskin and the Fascination of Words Toni Cerutti

The anti-Victorian reaction that developed during the first half of the twentieth century displaced Ruskin from the centre of the literary scene, making people forget that his works were still a cornerstone of literary education on both sides of the Atlantic. The rejection of his views, paradoxically, was more marked in those who had been bred on them and had greatly admired him. Joyce is a case in point. Like all modernists, Joyce read widely from Ruskin while at school, as indicated by the frequent quotations and recurrent paraphrasing from the originals in his early writings. He even ‘borrowed’ some passages from Mornings in Florence in one of his compositions. At the time of Ruskin’s death, the young Joyce wrote a laudatory obituary entitled ‘The Wild Crown of Olive’. But judging from the humorous allusions to the pompous Oxford Professor in Ulysses,1 Joyce’s youthful admiration shifted into ironic disparagement. What most distanced Ruskin from the new generations was his moralistic attitude to aesthetic values. Moreover, like most Victorian novelists, he enjoyed playing the Omniscient, creating an aggravating impression that his omniscience was aimed at the real and not the fictional world, often verging on the presumption of lay-preaching. In spite of its old-fashioned turn, Ruskin’s reputation survived in fine arts criticism and in social studies. But not so in literature. Though men of letters held different opinions of him – Yeats, for instance, was most appreciative of his work, while Joyce, Woolf and Eliot had doubts about his artistic qualities – they all agreed that Ruskin had had his day, his diction having the flavour of moth-balls. Even now, when his fame is again running high, one is under the impression that, in spite of the admiration and interest in the multiple facets of his world, his reputation as a creative writer is 110

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still at a low ebb. Thus, it is not an easy task to argue, as I propose to do, that Ruskin’s voice was not so entirely discordant with that of modernity and that it continued to affect the evolution of literary language long after the turn of the century. In fact, one needs to refer to some recent paradigms in linguistic analysis to prove the existence of a protomodernist Ruskin, and none could be more appropriate than those inherent in Joycean grammar, for no linguistic manifesto in the twentieth century has more radically subverted literary discourse than have Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In trying to define the workings of the Ruskinian word, I have had recourse above all to Joycean scholarship and to recent studies by J. J. Lecercle and Derek Attridge on the peculiarity of language in literature, throughout both of which Joyce plays a major role.2 The difficulty in outlining the connection between the language of modernity and that of Ruskin stems from the subtle way in which its influence can be detected. References to direct sources are fairly rare, and are usually parodic elaborations of the original rather than integrations into the new discourse. The best examples of a Ruskinian presence belong to the branch of intertextuality that Cesare Segre has defined as vischiosità, viscousness, that is to say the recreation of a stylistic atmosphere through verbal and thematic coincidences rather than by direct derivation. Once more Joyce supplies some interesting material. Some passages from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicate both a cognitive and stylistic proximity to Ruskin’s work. In 1953, Charles Dougherty cited Fors Clavigera as the source of Stephen’s famous disquisition on aesthetics and literary forms: If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides into three forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others. 3 Stephen’s opening and extended analysis are an enriched reworking of the following lines: All truly imaginative account of man is poetic; but there are three essential kinds of poetry, – one dramatic, one lyric, and one epic.

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Dramatic poetry is the expression by the poet of other people’s feelings, his own not being told. Lyric poetry is the expression by the poet of his own feelings. Epic poetry is account given by the poet of other people’s external circumstances, and of events happening to them, with only such expression either of their feelings, or his own, as he thinks may be conveniently added. (27: 628) What is significant to our discussion is not Joyce’s debt to Ruskin’s poetics (since almost everybody at the time would have had a similar debt), but the indication that he was familiar not only with the language of the major works, but also with that of the most debatable and the most experimental of his late compositions. It is not surprising that it should be so, because, in spite of all their diversity, the two artists were both great wordsmiths. Furthermore, Joyce always had a keen ear for the diction of his Victorian ‘farraginous fathers’. Ruskin’s later productions, Fors Clavigera above all, contain some extraordinary linguistic innovations which can establish a precedence of linguistic experimentation with words, especially in his exploitation of the linguistic mean, a typical Joycean device. Dougherty’s assertion that ‘of all the Victorians, James Joyce’s greatest material debt may be to Ruskin’4 is thus not wholly unfounded. This aspect of his art, however, was overlooked for a long time. Naturally, there have been objective difficulties in tackling the novelty inherent in Ruskinian language. The long-established conviction, born in the heyday of his success and still holding fast with some, that the greatness of his diction lay in the ornamental beauty of his visual imagery, prevented further investigations into the syntactical complexity of his discourse. It became a truism to talk of his art as word-painting; Ruskin himself had for a long time favoured such an interpretation by arguing that great art should be representational rather than expressive. No one can doubt the role of verbal iconology in his art, but this does not account for the creation of an extraordinary magnetism in his diction.5 Furthermore, the lack of formal unity in his compositions, which often appeared like the disjointed members of a disharmonious, fragmented body, made his work unpalatable to a modern sensibility. When formalism and New Criticism rejected the assumptions of expressive realism, which had governed British poetics during the nineteenth century and within which Ruskin’s word painting operated, he was ousted from the contemporary canon and placed like

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a relic in the records of literary history.6 In the overview of the first half of the twentieth century, he was an oddity. His unpopularity resulted from both the didactic urge in his art (something he shared with the majority of Victorians), and his dabbling in several literary modes: Ruskin never fully qualifying either as a non-fiction or as a fiction writer. His conception of literature also sounded dated long before his death. At the time when the aesthetic movement maintained that ‘one of the greatest pleasures of really good prose literature is in the critical tracing out of the conscious artistic structure, and the pervading sense of it as we read’, 7 Ruskin was still extolling emotion in artistic creation. Much later, when the Victorians were brought back to the forefront, Ruskin was one of the last to be rescued from silence. In the fifties, John Holloway did not place him on the Olympus of the great sages of the age.8 Eventually, the revolt against the Victorian fathers subsided, and Ruskin’s thought, contextualized within the Victorian frame of mind, assumed its relevance to the history of ideas in the West. This reevaluation gave rise to culturally oriented studies of his work. Once G. P. Landow had exposed the complexity of his polymathic world in The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (1971),9 many of the subjects of his wide range of interests were investigated. Yet, although one can say that justice has been done to Ruskin the thinker, the same cannot be said for Ruskin the writer. In fact, while contemporary scholarship has given ample scope to the study of his thought, little has been dedicated to that of his language. Though still a minor issue, dating from the time of Helsinger’s Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder in 1982, the investigation of his ideology has occasionally been combined with that of his language, with remarkable results.10 What emerges from such analysis is that one cannot talk of Ruskin’s style as a monolith. In fact one must distinguish two phases, an earlier period of word painting (up until the mid-fifties), and a second phase of word experimentation. The shift resulted from a rethinking of the interrelation between language and thought, which had up to that point relied on empiricist poetics of Lockian inspiration. 11 Ruskin’s rethinking of the relationship between language and thought was caused by two correlated events. First his ideological crisis of the late fifties, which affected his religious and social views and had a great impact on his private life, and secondly his coming into contact with contemporary philological studies. It is apparent that Ruskin had always been attracted to words as

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he was to the visual arts. Right from his early writings, he centred his attention on the language of the arts, and he lost no opportunity in stressing the close analogy between verbal and visual language. He declared more than once that he used ‘the words painter and poet quite indifferently’ (5: 221) and was determined to treat poetry and paintings as synonymous.12 Thus he favoured the representational aspects of art and made a semiotic use of the terms language, sign and text, which he applied indiscriminately to verbal and visual objects, sporadically mixing writing and drawing as his inclusion of etchings on some printed pages shows.13 His training in classical rhetoric, his extensive reading in English literature combined with his good ear for sound associations, made him an ornate stylist, a refined creator of verbal landscapes with a penchant for decorative language. His theoretical formation, rooted in neoclassical studies, made him look at words from a Lockean vantage point, language still being for him, as it was for Blair and for earlier eighteenthcentury rhetoricians, ‘the dress of thought’. Ruskin did not commence his literary career as an experimenter in words, though he was aware of the artistic need for the occasional deviation and transgression from the ordinary in figurative as well as in verbal language; take for example his statement in The Seven Lamps of Architecture: ‘The liberties that a great speaker takes with the language, [are] not a defiance of its rules for the sake of singularity; but inevitable, uncalculated, and brilliant consequences of an effort to express what the language, without such infraction, could not’ (8: 254). Only much later, in the mid-fifties and the early sixties, did the changes in his theoretical approach to social and linguistic problems promote a deliberate play with language on both a syntagmatic and a semantic level. Soon after his first social essays were published, he perceived a shift in his writing style toward increased expressive density. From Geneva on 12 August 1862, he wrote to his father that ‘the language of Unto This Last is as much superior to that of the first volume of Modern Painters as that of Tacitus to that of the Continental Annual’ (17: xxv). So convinced was he of the better quality of Unto This Last that later, in Readings from Moderns Painters (recording his lectures on art held at Oxford), he compared some of its passages with passages from the earlier volumes of Modern Painters, as a lesson in style. 14 The linguistic innovation in his writings on economics, which Ruskin attributed to a more close-knit structure and better-argued Tacitean concision, was marked by the prevalence of the expressive

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aspects of the language, with a particular emphasis on the performative function of discourse to the detriment of the aesthetic function. In socially oriented texts, such as Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris, linguistic innovation activated a process of marginalization of pictorial effects to the advantage of mental images, and the reification of thought, as the following extracts taken respectively from Unto this Last and A Joy for Ever show: Capital signifies ‘head, or source, or root material’ – it is material by which some derivative or secondary good is produced. It is only capital proper (caput vivum, not caput mortuum) when it is only thus producing something different from itself. It is a root, which does not enter into vital function till it produces something else than a root: namely, fruit. That fruit will in time again produce roots; and so all living capital issues in reproduction of capital; but capital which produces nothing but capital is only root producing root; bulb issuing in bulb, never in tulip; seed issuing in seed, never in bread. (17: 98) Now, we have warped the word ‘economy’ in our English language into a meaning which it has no business whatever to bear. In our use of it, it constantly signifies merely sparing or saving; economy of money means saving money – economy of time, sparing time, and so on. But that is a wholly barbarous use of the word – barbarous in a double sense, for it is not English, and it is bad Greek; barbarous in a treble sense, for it is not English, it is bad Greek, and it is worse sense. Economy no more means saving money than it means spending money. It means, the administration of a house; its stewardship; spending or saving, that is, whether money or time, or anything else, to the best possible advantage. In the simplest and clearest definition of it, economy, whether public or private, means, the wise management of labour; and it means this mainly in three senses: namely, first, applying your labour rationally; secondly, preserving its produce carefully; lastly, distributing its produce seasonably. (16: 19) The search for a greater precision of expression in debating political issues reveals not only the deliberate construction of oratorical effects, but also a marked interest for the semantic density of words and for the story of their derivation.

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The birth of a new linguistic consciousness is well documented on a theoretical level too in the works after 1855, and especially in Sesame and Lilies (1865). While the search for the elegance of style had always formed part of Ruskin’s art, the interest in the study of language sprang from both interrelated facts: the loss of his traditional Christian faith and his engagement with contemporary philology. In retrospect what he called his ‘unconversion’ of 1858 was something that had been latent for a long period.15 His conversion from the old Puritan belief to humanistic scepticism, which blurred the border between reality and representation of reality, undermined the intrinsic value of the Christian Faith and so made it impossible for him to consider the Bible as a source of truth. 16 Once the Scriptures ceased to be The Book and became one among the many through which man could reach knowledge, the entire concept of truth was put under scrutiny. Truth had been a cornerstone in Ruskin’s thought and still remained a keyword in his writings; so, he had to look elsewhere for support for his moral premises, or else his whole intellectual frame would collapse. Ruskin was no philosopher, and hence his loss of the original Christian belief did not mark the dismissal of all his early convictions. He never openly admitted in public – hardly even to himself – that his scepticism was so profound as to imply a complete disbelief in the divine, but, from the mid-fifties, his inner convictions needed external evidence from the secular world. The contemporary studies of the history of language offered an ideal basis for his new credo; etymology especially supplied proof of the existence of continuity in the life of the human tongue. Thus the Logos, still the governing force of the world, found a basis for its authority in history rather than in Revelation. When his faith in the immanence of the word began to waver, Ruskin transformed his search for stylistic beauty and formal perfection into a search for scientificity and reliability in language. The work of two distinguished philologists, Müller and Trench, both of whom were personal acquaintances, contributed to his new perspective. In Lessons on the Science of Language (1864), the Sanskrit scholar Max Müller highlighted the semantic potential of words, and focused attention on the performative function of the figurative use of language, although he retained a disparaging view of metaphor which he considered a disease of language. In The Study of Words (1851) the Anglican Archbishop and writer Richard Trench first dismissed the embarrassing problem of the divine origin of

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language, and continued by concentrating on man’s power to name and on how it was affected by time. However different in their outlook, both scholars favoured and popularized the study of the derivation of words. That loss of faith should find comfort in linguistics was not an unheard-of thing in the nineteenth century.17 Trench’s and Müller’s confidence in the possibility of reconstructing the history of the human tongue in terms of the history of the human mind, and of applying the scientific method to linguistic studies, gave a new foundation to the credibility of the word, now that faith in natural language and its divine origin was declining. The philosophical application of philology had been a peculiar feature of European culture and it persisted at the crucial time of the controversy between the Church and Darwinism. It was only much later, in the days of Saussure, that linguistics became universally accepted as a separate branch of knowledge independent of ethical implications. Like many of his contemporaries, Ruskin sought moral guidance in philology and found comfort in the study of the origin of the words. In the long debate on the historical development of language, etymology became charged with meanings which went beyond the linguistic task and reached out to myth, which so much attracted Ruskin at the time of his spiritual crisis. Etymology, like myth, gave him ‘a much needed means of integrating broken belief into new patterns, combining political convictions and social actions with an obsessive internal language’.18 For him derivation of words and mythical narration travelled hand in hand. As Sawyer has observed, although Ruskin derived his theory of etymology from contemporary philology, ‘the roots of that theory lie also in Carlyle and, before Carlyle, in the Coleridgian theory of symbol and myth’.19 The first move towards a renovation of Ruskin’s verbal universe stemmed from an historical analysis of the lexis. In their diachronic dimension, words became for Ruskin, as they had been for Trench, not only ‘fossil poetry’ (in Emerson’s phrase) but ‘fossil ethics’ and ‘fossil history’, each fossil bearing a wealth of semantic strata, to be unveiled before one could evaluate the force of its meaningfulness. For Ruskin, who ‘valorises the original meanings of words that arise from visionary apprehension, etymology is ontology and therefore a criticism of modern life, providing the key for distinguishing true meanings from accrued false ones.’20 Prompted by his need for certitude, Ruskin used etymology as a

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means of exploring discourse. In The Kings’ Treasuries, he instructs the young scions of affluent families that: in order to deal with words rightly, this is the habit you must form. Nearly every word in your language has been first a word of some other language – of Saxon, German, French, Latin, or Greek; (not to speak of eastern and primitive dialects) . . . undergoing a certain change of sense and use on the lips of each nation; but retaining a deep vital meaning, which all good scholars feel in employing them, even at this day. (18: 68) The citation is followed by a close reading of some lines from Lycidas, which reaches its apex in the rendering of the well-known metaphor blind mouths, by which Milton designates St Peter and his successors. ‘Of other care they little reckoning make, Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast: Blind mouths . . .’ I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly. Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the two great offices of the Church – those of bishop and pastor. A ‘Bishop’ means ‘a person who sees’. A ‘Pastor’ means ‘a person who feeds’. The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind. The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, the want to be fed – to be a Mouth. Take the two reverses together, and you have ‘blind mouths’. (18: 71–2) Combining synchronic sense with original derivation, Ruskin has done a ‘word-by-word examination’, worthy of the best New Critics, highlighting the impressive power of Milton’s poetic diction. It little matters whether his reading may or may not be philologically correct. What matters is the penetrating suggestiveness of his interpretation. Since philology was unveiling for him the unknown complex world

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of diachronic polysemy, Ruskin (who in former days stood up for the innocence of the perceiver), discovered the impossibility of innocent reading. It was not that he had been unaware of the multiplicity of meaning before then; defining words in their semantic fullness had always been a paramount preoccupation in his books. At first a mere didactic aim, it became in time an ontological obsession. And yet, because of its evocative power, etymology more than once betrayed the writer’s expectations of linguistic reliability; the inherent qualities of the words and their potential metaphorical wealth producing an endless stream of lexical variants that exposed the intrinsic instability of meaning, which was subject to mutation and external interference. This was something rather menacing for anyone who confided in historical reconstruction in the search for truth. In The Queen of the Air (1869), Ruskin examines the origin of the word ‘spirit’, and warns his readers: beware always of contending for words: you will find them not easy to grasp, if you know them in several languages. This very word, which is so solemn in your mouths, is one of the most doubtful. In Latin it means little more than breathing, and may mean merely accent; in French it is not breath, but wit, and our neighbours are therefore obliged, even in their most solemn expressions, to say ‘wit’ when they say ‘ghost’. (19: 352) Etymology, therefore, could reinforce authoritativeness as well as undermine it. Some years earlier in Munera Pulveris (1863) Ruskin had remarked that ‘the derivation of words is like that of rivers; there is one real source, usually small, unlikely, and difficult to find, far up among the hills; then as the word flows on and comes into service, it takes in the force of other words from other sources, and becomes quite another word’ (17: 292). Here the black Derridian hole seems to stand at the back of the newly found source of certainty. The awareness of the fragile foundation of his new convictions did not produce the negative effect on Ruskin’s art that it had on his private life, but it marked a widening of his linguistic experience. The transition happened without great trauma to the structure of discourse, for, although at a theoretical level Ruskin had long remained faithful to the Lockean belief in the link between les mots et les choses, in his literary practice he had always played about with surface elements. The new ontological subtext found a natural way of expressing itself through an updating of old linguistic strategies.

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Though fascinated by science, Ruskin could never stick fully to scientific argumentation. Having incorporated the history of words into his texts, he immediately inserted it into the world of literary imagination. By exploiting the scholarly features of etymology, he creates narratives that relate the stories of words, similar to his technique of narrating painting, feeling free to complete the derivation process ad libitum. Some of his verbal myths were born out of this practice. Compared to Joyce, Ruskin acts very timidly; but at times, he does what Joyce will eventually do in Finnegans Wake. That is to say, he starts to play with words, extending their meaning through puns, rather than by scholarly analysis. For him, as for Joyce, reconstructing the origin of a word meant recovering a wider semantic field than the one usually denoted by a single term. He felt free not to stick to the original root of the word whenever verbal associations would carry his imagination elsewhere and he brought unhistorical elements into play that were based on semantic affinities and phonic consonances. 21 In his works one comes across a series of false etymologies, from the one of Mercury as the wool-bearer in The Queen of the Air, to the amusing and fanciful note on feminine Shakespearean names in Munera Pulveris. 22 In some cases, they originate from scholarly errors; but, more often than not, they derive from the creative force of subjective interpretation. Thus, engaging with the science of language was, for Ruskin, both a way to found his convictions and a way to experiment with language. His loss of faith, which caused such great anxiety in his later years, prompted a shift, from conceptualizing language as the mirror of the relation between perception and words, to conceptualizing language as the informing power of the relation between the mind and the outer world. The signifier became a way of perceiving things rather than the result of things perceived.23 Shifts of such import do not happen within the sphere of the critical conscious, but become apparent in speech independent of the mind’s control. Authority was transferred from external reality, from an object, which could and should be correctly perceived and hence known, to the methodological process outlined by the authorial voice – a process, which, in being unravelled, unveils the mystery of language. In the first case, language acts as mimesis of the real, in the second, as the producer of reality. The word that cannot represent but can contain, in essence, experience, conceals its significance in metaphors. The hidden secret of the word is its hidden treasure.

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Thus the role of the master, which Ruskin so much enjoyed, shifted from unveiling the truth to developing the way to perceive the existence of possible truth. As he writes in Sesame and Lilies, the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge, and does not come from above. During this process, the rapport between author and audience deeply altered: Ruskin attempted to transform the reader from an admiring disciple into a travelling companion who shared his life and culture. The inner life of a writer rests, above all, on words; and Ruskin tried to convey his linguistic sensibility to his audience in order for them to benefit from an awakening of their interpretive skills. By the time Ruskin embraced this new line of thought, much had happened in his discourse to make it an intellectual challenge for the reader. Gradually his style had moved towards obscurity and opacity. One has only to consider the changing structure of titles and subtitles. As Helsinger remarked, ‘beginning with some of the most important chapters of Modern Painters IV, titles begin to serve not as guides to reading but as cryptic, summary expressions of the chapter’s major themes, as worked out in what is primarily a metaphorical structure.’ 24 The titles in volume I from the early 1840s informed the reader of the chapter content – for example, ‘Definition of the Greatness of Art’. However, the titles in volume IV from the mid-1850s supplied only some enigmatic clues, ‘The Firmament’ or ‘The Mountain Gloom’, whose resonance became evident through the reading process. Eventually, general titles offer only enigmatic clues, often rich in classical allusions unfamiliar even to most classicists, such as The Cestus of Aglaia, Aratra Pentelici and Ariadne Florentina. The letters addressed to the workmen and labourers of Britain also bear a Latin inscription, Fors Clavigera. This new tack provoked some hostile reactions and Ruskin had to defend himself from the accusation of whimsicality. ‘I am not fantastic in these titles, as is often said: but try shortly to mark my chief purpose in them’ (22: 315). Ruskin was certainly not fanciful in his new approach to constructing discourse, but there was a definable stylistic shift in his writings. In fact, an altered ideological subtext inevitably altered the uses of rhetorical patterns. While in the earlier period figures of speech and syntactical strategies had been employed to decorate his prose with rhythmical and declamatory effects, in his later production they served to renovate discourse from within. By the late 1850s, Ruskin was working in an experimental arena,

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pushing against the borders of what was then considered the linguistic norm. Like Joyce, Ruskin often violated linguistic decorum. The greatest infractions were deliberately committed in Fors Clavigera, which, when the first letters were published, struck his contemporaries as not only unusual but fragmentary and segmented. The general introduction to Fors in the Library Edition comments upon Ruskin’s radical reworking of style: He often knows not where to begin, by reason of ‘the thousand things flitting in my mind, like sea-birds for which there are no sands to settle upon.’ Nothing settles itself down in Fors Clavigera for long at a time, and this is a characteristic which annoys some readers. . . . ‘Don’t read me wiggling books,’ said Leslie Stephen in the nursery to his mother. ‘He liked to have a great deal on one subject, and to have it in regular order.’ That, perhaps, was one reason why he found Fors Clavigera little to his taste, for it is eminently a book that ‘wiggles.’ It may indeed, in one aspect of it, be called a Commonplace Book, in which the author jots down his thoughts, impressions, fancies, as the ‘Fors’ of the day dictated. But this is by no means the whole truth about the discursiveness of Fors Clavigera. It lends to the book a compensating charm, and the discursiveness is found, on a close reading, to be not inconsistent with real unity of purpose and drift. On the former point, Mr Frederic Harrison’s characterisation seems to me (so far as it reaches) very true: – ‘Fors (he says) produces on us the effect of some strange electrical disturbance in the heavens, which we watch with wonder and admiration, constantly struck by some unexpected flash, from whence coming, whither going, we know not, but always beautiful and profoundly impressive. . . . It is written in a style of which there is no other example in the language – a style of measured abandon, of surrender to any fancy, whim, association of the passing moment. Nothing so utterly inconsequent, so rambling, so heterogeneous exists in print. And yet, the connotations of ideas are so fantastic, and the transitions so original, that the effect of the whole is charming as well as exciting.’ (27: xxix) We can now go beyond Harrison’s impressionistic reactions and try to pinpoint where such disturbances comes from. As Derek Attridge has pointed out, in discourse analysis of experimental language –

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such as Fors has proven to be – it is always possible to isolate, somewhat arbitrarily, different kinds of deviations from (or excessive adherence to) good style in experimental language.25 In Ruskin’s case, these characteristic deviations, which typify his diction through time, can be identified in word associations, coinage of new words and catchphrases, cross-referencing, and broken syntax. Word association, which is one of the most ancient and common literary artifices, plays a dominant role in Ruskin’s works. He had been attracted by sounds and signs ever since, as a young child, he was introduced by his parents to the pleasures of language: Walter Scott and Pope’s Homer were reading of my own election, but my mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart; as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year; and to that discipline – patient, accurate, and resolute – I owe not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature. From Walter Scott’s novels I might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other people’s novels; and Pope might, perhaps, have led me to take Johnson’s English, or Gibbon’s, as types of language; but, once knowing the 32nd of Deuteronomy, the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having always a way of thinking with myself what words meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English, and the affectation to write like Hooker and George Herbert, which I now with shame confess of having long tried, was the most innocent I could have fallen into. (27: 167–8) The verbal, phonetic and graphic features of words cast a spell over him before he understood their meaning. In the attempt to convey that fascination to his audience, he recalls in Praeterita how he declined to learn to read by syllables, as tradition had it, and preferred to amuse himself learning whole words at a time, as he did patterns. ‘This effort to learn the words in their collective aspect, was assisted by my real admiration of the look of the printed type, which I began to copy for my pleasure’ (35: 23). Reading and writing had been for him a visual and aural experience,

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before it acquired a cognitive function. The sensuous feel of language long remained with him. For Ruskin, words always had sounds and colour as well as meaning and he always had a radical interest in their evocative power; words, for him, were not only informative, but also suggestive. In his writings, he aimed at the perfection of poetic prose in a harmonious blend of aural and visual elements. Associating words worked at times as an enrichment to meaning; but, in most cases, it acted just as an ornament created through wandering variants, in which a logic of the surface took precedence over the logic of the signified. When asked what ‘tourmaline’ meant in The Ethics of the Dust, he replied: ‘they say it is Ceylonese, and I don’t know Ceylonese, but we may always be thankful for a graceful word, whatever it means’ (18: 325). Even in his earlier works, where style was still conceived as the clothing of thought, love of words for their own sake was common. In the later works, Ruskin explored the full capacity of language to create and expand itself. The following passage taken from the description of the visionary Valley of Diamonds in The Ethics of the Dust, is a fine example marking the transition from the earlier mode to the later one: L ECTURER: ‘It is up and down, broken kind of ground: the road stops directly; and there are great dark rocks, covered all over with wild gourds and wild vines; the gourds, if you cut them, are red, with black seeds, like water-melons, and look ever so nice; and the people of the place make a red pottage of them: but you must take care not to eat any if you ever want to leave the valley, (though I believe putting plenty of meal in it makes it wholesome). Then the wild vines have clusters of the colour of amber; and the people of the country say they are the grapes of Eshcol; and sweeter than honey: but indeed, if anybody else tastes them, they are like gall. Then there are thickets of bramble, so thorny they would be cut away directly, anywhere else; but here they are covered with little cinque-foiled blossoms of pure silver, and, for berries, they have clusters of rubies. Dark rubies, which you only see are red after gathering them. But you may fancy what blackberry parties the children have! Only they get their frocks and hands sadly torn. L ILY: But rubies can’t spot one’s frock, as black-berries do? L ECTURER: No; but I’ll tell you what spots them – the mulberries. There are great forests of them, all up the hills, covered with

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silkworms, some munching the leaves so loud that it is like mills at work; and some spinning. But the berries are the blackest you ever saw; and, wherever they fall, they stain a deep red; and nothing ever washes it out again. And it is their juice, soaking through the grass, which makes the river so red, because all its springs are in this wood. And the boughs of the trees are twisted, as if in pain, like old olive branches; and their leaves are dark. And it is in these forests that the serpents are, but nobody is afraid of them. They have fine crimson crests, and they are wreathed about the wild branches, one in every tree, nearly; and they are singing serpents, for the serpents are, in this forest, what birds are in ours. (18: 212–14; italics mine) In this passage the associative power of language is fully exploited: alliteration, internal rhyming, synonyms and opposites create a thick network of correspondences. Through the words people, place, pottage, crimson crest, blossom, berries, rubies and blackberry we are led to perceive syncretic animism in a geological scenery. The vegetable element, which infuses organic life into inanimate objects, turns a lesson in mineralogy into a fantastic story where the magic and the mythical combine in repeated figures of speech.26 Moreover, the wealth of intertextual references fills the imaginary landscape with layers of innuendoes, charged with pleasure and fear. The literal and metaphorical use of rubies and the hidden menace of the serpents in the visionary valley add a dramatic impact to the Edenic scene. The impact is strengthened by the allusion to the Shakespearean ‘encarnadine seas’, evoked in the red of the blackberries which tint the river and which ‘nothing ever washes out’. Clusters of sounds, deliberate redundancies, and symmetrical constructions produce rhythm as well as metaphorical routes, contributing to the formation of an intricate fabric of meanings. Ruskin also used the coinage of new words and catchphrases both to broaden vocabulary and to vary register. The formation of new words was common in the nineteenth century, especially in the scientific and sociological fields. Mill, Arnold, Newman and most intellectuals contributed to this. While they usually operated within the current frames of communications by supplying tools to define new phenomena, writers of a more fanciful imagination – such as Carlyle, Dickens and Carroll – used coinage to enter the untrodden field of the mystery of language by means of the pun, the play on words, phonetic and etymological associations.27

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In coining new words, Ruskin stands between the two trends. On the one hand, he followed the rational need to furnish convenient tools to express experience, very much in keeping with Mill’s nominalism, and, on the other, he was moved by the visionary compulsion to define reality within an ethical frame. In the first category one stumbles upon poignant terms such as ‘anatomiless’, which in The Nature of Gothic defines ‘those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid’ (10: 193). In the second one encounters the most colourful and irreverent of his neologisms, born out of acrimony and bitter satire, which much resemble Carlylean invective. Many, such as ‘The Goddess of Getting on’, ‘Britannia of the Market’, ‘Common-Illth’ come from the social writings, where references to money-grubbing British society abound. They usually level discourse down, introducing a popular register that Austin defines as his demotic mode of utterance.28 Neologisms are usually charged with a mixed series of crossreferences, which colour the novelty of expression, while smacking of the old. ‘Common-Illth’, for instance, subverts the meaning of a long-established compound noun, ‘common-wealth’, and at the same time is a coinage of a former Ruskinian invention, that of ‘illth’. In effect Common-Illth appeared in Fors Clavigera at the time of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war: ‘whether you are striving for a CommonWealth, and Public-Thing; or, as too plainly in Paris, for a Common-Illth’ (28: 122). Years before, at the time of the publication of Unto This Last, discussing the good and evil of wealth, Ruskin had stated that there were cases in which wealth acted ‘not as wealth, but (for we ought to have a correspondent term) as “illth”’ (17: 89). The chronological distance between the two texts and the fact that the author seems to expect the reader to remember the first citation show an unusual Ruskinian modernist use of cross-referencing. In itself one of the most common devices in human speech, crossreferencing appears in modernism as ‘an inordinately long span for a reader’s memory to cross’ (Attridge) between the two referents. In distancing correlated objects, Joyce is an undisputed master, but Eliot, Pound and Woolf do not lag far behind. This change marked a new conception of the relation between authorship and readership, turning the latter into an active subject in the rendering of the text. However far apart the terms in cross-referencing might be, the younger Ruskin had made it a point of honour to guide his reader to tracing the connection. But after his religious and linguistic

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‘unconversion’, Ruskin wanted him to work it out by himself. As extreme examples of this device there are the interrelated allusions to the story of the Yorkshire goose pie in Fors, and to the story of St George throughout his entire work. The endless chain of crossreferences to all that George and the Dragon stand for in English history makes us realize how the operation becomes more and more demanding once the author stops guiding his reader through the maze. Ruskin is fully aware of this difficulty, since he constantly warns his audience to take an active role in solving the puzzle:29 And I write in words you are little likely to understand, because I have no wish (rather the contrary) to tell you anything that you can understand without taking trouble. You usually read so fast that you can catch nothing but the echo of your own opinions, which, of course, you are pleased to see in print. I neither wish to please nor displease you; but to provoke you to think; to lead you to think accurately; and help you to form perhaps, some different opinions from those you have now. (27: 98–9) In addition to cross-referencing, broken syntax marked the transition of Ruskinian diction to modernism. Examples of incomplete syntactical structures are frequent in his entire production, the most common being the elision of the finite verb in the main clause, which either precedes or follows the presentation of the action in a past-tense narrative.30 In the earlier writings, this elision was embedded in high-flown descriptions of the beauty of art and nature. The following extract from the Two Boyhoods offers a typical specimen of how a series of non-finite sentences, inserted in a well-structured paragraph, renders in a sort of musical crescendo the romantic tension that beautiful visual experience caused to the mind: And at last fortune wills that the lad’s true life shall begin; and one summer’s evening, after various wonderful stage-coach experiences on the north road, which gave him a love of stage-coaches ever after, he finds himself sitting alone among the Yorkshire Hills. For the first time, the silence of Nature round him, her freedom sealed to him, her glory opened to him. Peace at last; no roll of cart-wheel, nor mutter of sullen voices in the back shop; but curlew-cry in space of heaven, and welling of belltoned streamlet by its shadowy rock. Freedom at last. Dead wall, dark railing, fenced field, gated garden, all passed way like

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the dream of the prisoner; and behold, far as foot or eye can race or range, the moor, and the cloud. Loveliness at last. (7: 383–4) In later writings, especially in his memoirs, the same device is used to convey the inner flow of unfinished thought, in a sort of premonition of the stream-of-consciouness technique that would one day be used by the Moderns: The events of the ten years 1850–1860, for the most part wasted in useless work, must be arranged first in the main order, before I can give clear account of anything that happened in them . . . 1852. Final work in Venice for Stones of Venice. Book finished that winter. Six hundred quarto pages of notes for it, fairly and closely written, now useless. Drawings as many – of a sort, useless too . . . 1853. Henry Acland in Glenfinlas with me. Drawing of gneiss rock made, now in the school at Oxford. Two months work in fair weather could be gleaned out of that time. . . . 1856. With my father and mother to Geneva and Fribourg. Two drawings at Fribourg took up the working summer. My father begins to tire of the supposed work on Swiss towns, and to enquire whether the rest of Modern Painters will ever be done. 1857. My mother wants me to see the Bay of Cromarty and the Falls of Kilmorock. I consent sulkily to be taken to Scotland with that object. Papa and mamma, wistfully watching the effect on my mind, show their Scotland to me. I see, on my own quest, Craig-Ellachie, and the Lachin-y-Gair forests and finally reach the Bay of Cromarty and the Falls of Kilmorock, doubtless now the extreme point of my northern discoveries on the round earth. I admit, generously, the Bay of Cromarty and the Falls to be worth coming all that way to see, but beg papa and mamma to observe that it is twenty miles’ walk, in bogs, to the top of Ben Wyvis, that the town of Dingwall is not like Milan or Venice, – and I think we have seen enough of Scotland. (35: 483–4) Both Proust and Woolf fell in love with Ruskin’s later style, discovering in him a fellow artist. Writing of Praeterita, Virginia Woolf says that Ruskin ‘has ceased to preach or to teach or to scourge. He is writing for the last time before he enters the prolonged season

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of death, and his mood is perfectly clear, more sustained than usual, and unfailingly benignant . . . The words lie like a transparent veil upon his meaning.’ 31 Woolf was wrong in believing in the transparency of Ruskinian discourse. The passages which fall into the flow of the interior monologue are those in which Ruskin most hides himself. The above extract from La Grande Chartreuse is a superb example of random telling of over ten years of life. He omits the story of his marriage and staying in Venice while writing The Stones of Venice. Events are reported chaotically, breaking into the present tense and aggregating impressions, reflections and facts in a rather fragmentary way. It is not so much the omissions that make the passage interesting, but the way in which such omissions are executed. No attempt is made to sum up past experiences in a brief synthesis, which would justify the absence of detailed information. Ruskin’s depression, a man of 45 going back to Scotland after the summer he spent there with Effie and Millais, the ensuing annulment of his marriage, his unresolved emotional problems on the eve of his meeting with Rose La Touche – all this lies unmentioned, and transparency is removed from the telling of his own life. His mind wanders in a phantasmagorical way through the page until the narrative is resumed; and, however desultory, it starts again telling what can be told. Here, as in all autobiographical writings, the unsaid bears a marked sexual connotation. Rose La Touche, the Turinese ballerina, Dean Lyddell’s little girls, St Ursula – they are all present, loved, untouched and untouchable. The sexual undertones draw his language close to Joyce’s and many modernists’ whose art was constructed around sexual symbolism. Much more remains to be explored in the linguistic correspondence that exists between Ruskin and the moderns, yet something always prevented his entering the world of modernity at full sail. This was due to an absence of a critical distance between the self in the book and the self in life. Ruskin’s tentative use of the stream of consciouness technique was not deliberate, but something he inadvertently stumbled upon while running away from himself, or at least from that part of himself he did not dare to face. As Lecercle would put it, it is not the coherent meaning of information and communication, but the partially (in)coherent meaning of emotion which connotes the language; (in)coherence is performed either through textual excess or textual reticence,32 and this applies to Ruskin’s diction.

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Notes All citations from Ruskin’s works are from the Complete Works of Ruskin, Library Edition, eds E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12). 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

D. Gifford, Joyce Annotated (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); C. T. Dougherty, ‘Joyce and Ruskin’, Notes and Queries, 198 (1953), pp. 76–7; see also S. Feshbach, ‘Joyce read Ruskin’, James Joyce Quarterly, 10, no. 3 (Spring 1971), pp. 333–6. J. J. Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); D. Attridge, On Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Methuen, 1988). J. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1964), pp. 220. Dougherty, ‘Joyce and Ruskin’, p. 76. G. P. Landow, Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See C. Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1980), ch. 1. W. Pater, Appreciations (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1987), p. 24. J. Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan, 1953). G. P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). E. K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). See also P. Sawyer, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: the Design of His Major Works (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); L. M. Austin, The Practical Ruskin: Economics and Audience in the Late Works (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991). See J. D. Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See 3: 88. See Landow, Ruskin, pp. 21–38. Quoted in 22: 514–15: 21 ‘Now the intense fault of all my early writing is that you know in a moment it is my writing; it has always the taste of me in it. But that is the weakness of me, or the insincerity. As I advance in life, and get more steady and more true, you don’t see the manner so distinctly, but you will see the matter far more. Now I will read you two very short but quite characteristic passages, fifteen years apart, for the one of which, at the time, I was much applauded; the second, nobody, that ever I heard of yet, cares about: – “He who has once stood beside the grave, to look upon the companionship which has been for ever closed, feeling how important there are the wild love and the keen sorrow, to give one instant’s

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pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart, which can only be discharged to the dust.” 22 Now, that is a true saying, and in the measure of me at that day a sincere one. But with my present knowledge of literature I could tell in an instant that the person who wrote that never had so stood beside the dead. I could be perfectly sure of it, for two reasons – the first, that there was in the passage feeling, and the melody that comes of feeling, enough to show that the writer was capable of deep passion; and the second, that being so capable, if he had ever stood beside his dead before it was buried out of his sight, he would never, in speaking of the time, have studied how to put three d’s one after another in debt, discharged, and dust. 23 Next, I will read you the passage nobody has cared about, but which one day many will assuredly come to read with care, the last paragraph, namely, of that central book of my life: – “And if, on due and honest thought over these things, it seems that the kind of existence to which men are now summoned by every plea of pity and claim of right, may, for some time at least, not be a luxurious one; – consider whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. Luxury is indeed possible in the future – innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruellest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold. Raise the veil boldly; face the light; and if, as yet, the light of the eye can only be through tears, and the light of the body through sackcloth, go thou forth weeping, bearing precious seed, until the time come, and the kingdom, when Christ’s gift of bread, and bequest of peace, shall be “Unto this last as unto thee”; and when, for earth’s severed multitudes of the wicked and the weary, there shall be holier reconciliation than that of the narrow home, and calm economy, where the Wicked cease – not from trouble, but from troubling – and the Weary are at rest.” Now, first, that passage is better than the other because there’s not any art of an impudently visible kind, and not a word which, as far as I know, you could put another for, without loss to the sense. It is true that plea and pity both begin with p, but plea is the right word, and there is no other which is in full and clear opposition to claim. But there is still affectation in the passage – the affectation of conciseness.’ 15 See Praeterita, 35: 495–6. See also Q. Bell, Ruskin (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), pp. 78–9. 16 J. Abse, John Ruskin, the Passionate Moralist (London: The Four Quartets, 1980).

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17 The conception dates back to the eighteenth-century, to A. R. J. Turgot’s article on Étymologie in the Encyclopédie in 1756. See H. Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1967). 18 D. Birch, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 4. 19 P. Sawyer, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument, p. 235. 20 Ibid., p. 239. 21 On the uses of etymology see Attridge, Peculiar Language, pp. 90–126. See also C. H. Plotkin, The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), p. 5 et passim. 22 See 29: 322–3; 17: 223. 23 J. Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 24 Helsinger, Ruskin, p. 269. 25 Attridge, Peculiar Language, p. 175. 26 On language and myth in Ruskin see Sawyer and Birch. 27 See B. M. H. Strang, A History of English (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 73–103; see also C. Gillie, ‘Language and Literature in the Victorian Period’ in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 6, From Dickens to Hardy, ed. B. Ford (London: Penguin, 1982), pp. 285–300. 28 Austin, p. 120 et passim. 29 On the receipt of the goose pie, see Fors Clavigera, Letters 25, 27, 35, 48, in vols 27 and 28. St George and the Dragon is a leitmotiv in most of Ruskin’s writings on art and myth. See in particular Modern Painters, St Mark’s Rest, The Queen of the Air and Fors Clavigera, Letters 17, 26, 30. 30 See Attridge, p. 179. 31 V. Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. I (London: The Hogarth Press, 1968), p. 207. 32 Lecercle, p. 5.

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9 Tradition, Architecture and Rappel à l’Ordre: Ruskin and Eliot (1917–21) Giovanni Cianci

Surprisingly little has been written about the relationship between Ruskin and T. S. Eliot’s work. 1 Ruskin’s name is infrequently mentioned in Eliot scholarship, and is not even considered, as William Chace suggests, ‘as a public notification of his own [Eliot’s] course of development’. 2 It would seem that Eliot’s critiques of Ruskin3 can be taken at face value and are evidence enough to dispel any suggestion of Ruskin’s possible impact on the poet. Eliot’s concept of tradition and his ‘sense of the past’, a ‘historical sense’ which ‘involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’,4 would, given Ruskin’s notable absence from discussion, appear to have little connection to Ruskin’s concept of cultural continuity rooted in cultural duration. I shall concentrate on the early Eliot of 1917–21; a period during which – as Ronald Schuchard5 and Kenneth Asher6 point out – Eliot’s moral and aesthetic canon (particularly under the influence of T. E. Hulme and Charles Maurras) had already been shaped, long before the poet’s religious conversion. I propose that in this period one can already glimpse certain affinities and detect important connections between Ruskin and Eliot. It was later in the thirties that Eliot invoked publicly the need for another Ruskin,7 yet there is evidence indicating, in spite of the silence of Eliot himself and Eliot scholars, that Ruskin had already had a significant impact on Eliot’s critical and creative work. The extent of this influence has remained largely unexplored. As Ronald Bush points out, Eliot ‘as an undergraduate drank deeply in Ruskin’s lamentations about the spiritual decline of Western culture, 133

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imbibing Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice in the course of his first, intense encounter with Venice in a 1911 student tour of Venice and Northern Italy’. 8 As Eliot’s letters show, he read and studied Ruskin in 1916–17, when he was preparing his Extension teaching courses on Victorian literature. 9 P. Dale Scott suggests that Ruskin’s contribution to the tradition of ‘cultural self-consciousness’ is confined to ‘the realm of economics’,10 a rather reductive view which does some disservice to Ruskin’s role. Perhaps a broader contextualization of Eliot’s position and an approach which is not restricted to the written word may help us to better understand the nature of Eliot’s debt to Ruskin. I shall begin with Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. This seminal essay loses part of its significance if we fail to place it in the larger context of European modernism, where not only literature but also the visual arts and architecture played a central role. Indeed, the post-war cultural politics of rappel à l’ordre in the arts and literature, with its shift from unrestrained individualism to community and cultural inheritance, was a crucial factor in Eliot’s rediscovery of Ruskin’s cultural relevance and importance. Eliot’s familiarity with and absorption of Ruskin’s work at this point in his career has a particular significance, since it was in this period that Eliot was developing and articulating his major critical concepts, meditating on history and probing the problematic, dialectic relationship between past and present. It was at this point, too, that he began his examination of the nature of tradition, its legacy, and the relationships artists negotiate with the past. To fully understand the importance of this historical moment, I shall begin by giving a brief sketch of the rappel à l’ordre and its international context.

The rappel à l’ordre and its international context During 1919, the year in which Eliot published ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, following the chaos and disruption of the war, there was a concerted attempt throughout Europe to put extremist experimentation to one side. The rappel à l’ordre was a call for stability following the ‘blasting and bombardiering’ (as Wyndham Lewis characterized it) of the artistic innovations of the antebellum era. This rappel à l’ordre, with its revival of classicism and emphasis upon the role of tradition and rational order, affected major artists and writers, and had a lasting effect on the whole Zeitgeist.11

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One must stress that the post-war call to order (or rather ‘calls to order’, given the plurality and complexity of the different strands and developments) did not conflict directly with the continued practice of radical innovative techniques. The rappel à l’ordre did not entail a discarding of the experiments of the antebellum era and a simple return to old, naturalistic conventions as if nothing had happened in the meantime. In fact the return to order was only a different stage in the development of modernism, and certainly not its rejection. As art historians state, it was not only the fake classicism of the academic arrière-garde that came to the fore after the war, but an ‘avant-garde classicism’ which continued to renovate language and perspective with an enquiry into ‘form and line as passionate as the search for deformation between 1900 and 1913’.12 In its resumption of contact with tradition, the rappel à l’ordre assumed a daring, questioning and selective attitude. Although the return to order was neither vociferous nor iconoclastic, it rejected uncritical, inert imitation and could claim a vital link with classical tradition: not in the spirit of, as Eliot put it, a ‘comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archeology’,13 but rather as a ‘source for radical modernism’.14 As Apollinaire wrote in his ‘L’Esprit Nouveau et les Poètes’ in 1918, neoclassicist rappel à l’ordre was not ‘simply the recollection of antiquity’.15 In Paris during 1917, Apollinaire reverted to the classics, while Picasso turned to Ingres and Raphael. Juan Gris, embracing a wartime neo-traditionalism, looked to Corot. One art historian remarks that ‘The transformation of revolutionaries into classicists, by way of the art of Ingres, was in fact taking place in ateliers all over Paris’.16 And Eliot’s own concern for cultural interface, his critique of provinciality and expansive interest in European culture, should not be forgotten. It is widely known that he kept particularly abreast of what was going on in Paris, which was now the centre of artistic innovation in this period. Ronald Schuchard highlights the fact that Eliot on his return from Paris in 1911 subscribed to the Nouvelle Revue Française and ‘followed literary and intellectual developments in France for the next several years’.17 In Italy, the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà turned to Giotto and Paolo Uccello, while Gino Severini took inspiration from Quattrocento paintings. In Valori Plastici (Rome: 1918–22), an internationally read art journal, Giorgio de Chirico wrote of his new concern with technique and tradition. In 1920, the famous exponent of ‘Pittura Metafisica’ launched the manifesto ‘Il Ritorno al Mestiere’ (The Return

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to the Craft) which concluded with the defiant declaration, ‘Pictor classicus sum’.18 This was the point at which the avant-garde broke away from abstraction and repudiated its earlier non-representational and transgressive codes by returning to a classically influenced form of figurative painting. This return of the avant-garde to a ‘new spirit’ and to principles of classical order is evident in Après le Cubism (1918), a joint essay by Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, which presents architecture as the symbol of logic, order and self-discipline. Their ‘Purism’ manifesto (published in the journal they founded, L’Esprit Nouveau, during 1920) affirmed the centrality of logic and order: ‘The highest delectation of the human mind is the perception of order, and the greatest human satisfaction is the feeling of collaboration or participation in this order’.19 The key words of L’Esprit Nouveau, during its publication from 1920–4 were ‘ordre’ and ‘construction’. In England the rupture with tradition was not as radical as on the continent, and the ‘classical revival’ there had, in fact, preceded the war. Vorticist artists like Wyndham Lewis (to whom Eliot was so close), Wadsworth and Bomberg moved back to representational painting, having practised non-figurative art in 1914 and 1915.20 Significantly, in the same year that Eliot published his seminal essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Clive Bell, referring to the fine arts, asserted that: movements are nothing but the stuff of which tradition is made . . . tradition is nothing but the essence, congealed and preserved for us by the masters in their works, of innumerable movements . . . movements are mere phases of tradition from which they spring and in which they are swallowed up.21 At that time a need was felt throughout Europe not only to return to sources – Eliot himself wrote in 1919 that ‘the maxim “Return to the sources”, is a good one’22 – but also to the artist’s métier and technique. This in effect signalled a return to constructive values. Artists felt it necessary to redeem form and structure following the Cubist and Futurist fragmentation of the pre-war years. Cubism itself, now in its synthetic phase, was engaging in a critical redefinition which emphasized its continuity with the past. Léonce Rosemberg, introducing recent cubist productions in 1919, emphasized the new constructive dimension of postwar cubism in Valori Plastici. The journal’s introduction, entitled ‘Tradition et Cubisme’, was published a year later in Paris. 23 Writing of the ‘Reaction Against Romanticism in France’ (from

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Syllabus of a Course of Six Lectures on Modern French Literature24 ) Eliot characterized the current ideals of classicism in art as a preoccupation with ‘form’ and ‘restraint’. In poetry, too, there was an increasing concern with precision of form. Both Pound and Eliot recognized the appeal of the French model of ‘form’ and métier. 25 In fact, it was at this juncture (1916–17) that both poets, in Pound’s words, decided that the dilutation [sic] of vers libre, Amygism, Lee Masterism, general floppiness had gone too far and that some counter-current must be set going . . . Remedy prescribed ‘Émaux et Camées’ (or the Bay State Hymn Book). Rhyme and regular strophes.26 At the instigation of Pound, who introduced him to the sculpted qualities of Gautier, 27 Eliot moved away from his earlier vers libre in favour of the tight structure and the strict form of the quatrain poems he wrote between 1917 and 1919.

Tradition: the primacy of architecture; order and cohesion During the period of the rappel à l’ordre, architecture came to occupy a central position as both an art and practice symbolic of stability and rationality. Architecture ‘would not simply provide the physical material for a reconstructed Europe, but would serve moreover as the basis of a moral and spiritual reconstruction’.28 It was to architecture that the ‘more individualistic arts had now, at least in the critical debate, to pay homage’.29 In Weimar, during 1919, the modernist Walter Gropius appealed to architects, sculptors and painters to return to ‘the crafts’; to the tradition of the medieval brotherhood of artisans. This was an effort to resurrect the Gothic Einheitskunstwerk, the cathedral conceived as site of communal values and their full expression. Given this historical context, it is highly significant that the Bauhaus Manifesto displayed a woodcut of a Gothic cathedral by Lyonel Feininger. 30 On the continent the strong paradigm of tradition was represented primarily by painting, whereas in England architecture provided the most powerful model. There were no powerful role models such as Mantegna, Perugino, Poussin, or Ingres to revert to in Britain. But Ruskin’s major writings on architecture and his deeply influential reflections on the culture, memory, tradition and heritage of past civilization 31 provided a crucial point of reference. Most

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influential was Ruskin’s lifelong project of bringing ‘the art of the past to bear upon the present’, 32 in Eliot’s phrase. It remains extremely difficult to differentiate the loci of Eliot’s debt to Ruskin and the climate of rappel à l’ordre, since both these influences and pressures are, when not transformed, often submerged and naturally interwoven with other cultural forces and resonances. John Margolis, for example, writes that ‘few modern literary figures have been so open to the influence of other men as was Eliot; fewer still have been able to assimilate and transform those influences so thoroughly’.33 Yet there are instances which ring familiar and strike the reader as belonging to that specific historical circumstance. Take, for example, a well-known passage from Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which suggests that in the acquisition of a sense of tradition What happens is a continual surrender of [the poet’s self] as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.34 This passage is singularly attuned to the virtues of architecture exalted by Ruskin (the suggestive religious language echoes The Seven Lamps of Architecture) and also promoted during the après-guerre years. Following the First World War, the discipline and restraint involved in the pre-eminently social art of architecture was seen as an antidote to the anarchy of individualism. Architecture was thus seen as an effective reminder of a moral duty to subordinate the individual will or the narrowly personal (Eliot’s ‘private mind’) to a higher law. 35 This passage also reflects the contemporary emphasis on self-control, self-imposed limitations and a sensibility of sacrifice. These were all important key words in the lexicon of those in favour of re-establishing a classical tradition. One has only to consider Charles Maurras’s propaganda and the post-war practice of painters like Braque, Derain and Juan Gris. Eliot famously declared of the poet that ‘we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’.36 The statement is in line with the general shift within the European cultural climate, with a new respect for past generations, with a ‘new apprenticeship to old masters being served by so many members of the Parisian avant-garde’ during

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the postwar years.37 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ has been described as ‘less a pronouncement about the nature of literary history than . . . an expression in literary historical language and analysis, of Eliot’s desire for community-in-history’.38 It is this desire for ‘community-in-history’ – for, in Eliot’s own words, ‘something outside the artist to which he owes allegiance, a devotion to which he must surrender and sacrifice himself’39 – that Eliot found in Ruskin and in the general cultural climate of the post-war years. In the period following the devastation of the First World War, an emphasis was placed upon reconstruction.40 There was a general demand for cohesion and an appeal to social values and ethical obligations.41 Eliot aligned himself with the impatience with the excesses of romanticism, the sense of the insufficiency of the autonomous individual, the recognition of the need for discipline, humility and order; and the certainty that any truly significant modern achievement must be built upon what went before.42 These attitudes recall not only those Eliot encountered in the writings of Irving Babbitt (one of his mentors),43 but also a position he might have meditated upon when, in England, he read Ruskin and was confronted with the intellectual climate of the return to order, at a national and international level. This climate must have reinforced the conservative ideology which Eliot first encountered in Paris during 1911 through his contact with the reactionary thought of Charles Maurras and the writers associated with L’Action Française.44 Later, following his return to London, and certainly between 1915 and 1916, T. E. Hulme was to be a further influence. In considering the nature of influence, Eliot wrote that ‘people are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction’.45 In this sense, Ruskin’s writings on tradition and architecture ‘influenced’ the Eliot of the post-war years at a crucial point. They became an important source and stimulus aiding him to formulate his own critical position and furthermore partly directed his critical development. Eliot along with other intellectuals (such as Paul Valéry, who published his ‘Une crise de l’esprit’ first in English in The Athenaeum during 1919),46 felt at the time that European culture was in a state of emergency. In his response to this cultural crisis Eliot appealed for a conscious

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cultivation of a sense of tradition and order. I argue that he drew inspiration not only from Irving Babbitt and Matthew Arnold, but also from John Ruskin.

Against the demolition of churches and an ugly city environment In the work of radical modernists such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis architecture assumed a crucial role in addressing the acute dissatisfaction felt towards the environment of the modern city. Within this context it is not hard to find significant continuities with Ruskinian issues, often self-consciously so. During the late teens and early twenties, figures such as Pound and Lewis increasingly railed against what they considered to be the ugly and degraded environment of the modern metropolis.47 At the same time other artists such as the painters Frederick Etchells and E. A. Wadsworth turned to architecture for their formal inspiration. Eliot himself did not criticize modern builders with the same vituperative force as Pound or Lewis. Yet, less subversively, a Ruskinian echo is clearly perceptible in the Eliot of 1921. Writing a response in that year to the proposed demolition of church buildings, Eliot insists upon the ‘irreparable’ and ‘unforgotten’ loss of beauty that the demolition would incur. Ruskin had defined architecture as ‘the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health and pleasure’. 48 He had written about the uplifting effect of a ‘marble church’ which might be ‘a joy and a blessing even to pass near our daily ways and walks’ and might bring ‘the light into the eyes to see from afar, lifting its fair height above the purple crowd of humble roofs’.49 He had also invited us to acknowledge that ‘there will be surely some within the circuit of the disquieted walls [of our feverish and ugly city] who would ask for some other spots than these wherein to walk; for some other forms to meet their sight familiarly’. 50 Compare Eliot’s ‘London Letter’ of May 1921, with its Ruskinian equation between economic affluence and religious decline. The following paragraph details the environment in which the churches appear as ‘disconsolate fanes’ – as shelters of rest which also give beauty to ‘vulgar’ and ‘hideous’ surroundings:

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While the poetry lovers have been subscribing to purchase for the nation the Keats house in Hampstead as a museum, the Church of England has apparently persisted in its design to sell for demolition nineteen religious edifices in the City of London. Probably few American visitors, and certainly few natives, ever inspect these disconsolate fanes; but they give to the business quarter of London a beauty which its hideous banks and commercial houses have not quite defaced. Some are by Christopher Wren himself, others are by his school; the least precious redeems a vulgar street, like the plain little church of All Hallows at the end of London Wall. Some, like St Michael Paternoster Royal, are of great beauty. As the prosperity of London has increased, the City Churches have fallen into desuetude; for their destruction the lack of congregation is the ecclesiastical excuse, and the need of money the ecclesiastical reason. The fact that the erection of these churches was apparently paid for out of a public coal tax and their decoration probably by the parishioners, does not seem to invalidate the right of the True Church to bring them to the ground. To one who, like the present writer, passes his days in this City of London (quand’io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto) the loss of these towers, to meet the eye down a grimy lane, and of these empty naves, to receive the solitary visitor at noon from the dust and tumult of Lombard Street, will be irreparable and unforgotten. 51 In this passage the aversion Eliot feels towards a secularized urban landscape runs deep. The City of London where Eliot ‘passes his days’ becomes the equivalent of Dante’s Hell with Ugolino’s Hunger Tower (quand’io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto 52). As in The Waste Land, where this immured condition coincides, as Eliot’s footnote suggests, with the Bradleyan ‘finite centre’ of personal experience, the poet contemplates the key that will set him free. 53 In considering the ‘London Letter’, we should recall that one of the points of relief in the sordid landscape and ‘unreal city’ of the The Waste Land is the vision of ‘Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold’ which the walls of one of Wren’s churches, St Magnus Martyr, ‘hold’, just as Saint Apollinare outside Ravenna ‘tient la forme précise de Byzance’. The ‘Inexplicable splendor’ can be linked, in Ruskinian terms, to a bright lamp of memory which functions in The Waste Land, albeit only too briefly, as a symbol of beauty. The image in effect is an evocation of a sacred monument suggesting in the spirit of Ruskin both community and transcendence.54

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Classicism via Cézanne and la forme précise de Byzance Memorable monuments of architecture and ancient churches suggestive of a former age’s splendour had been on Eliot’s mind for some years. Ezra Pound had followed Ruskin in his pilgrimage to the crypt of the Church of San Zeno in Verona to see a marvelous piece of Gothic workmanship ‘possible in the non-usurious Middle Ages’. 55 It was the famous inscribed capital which had been singled out for praise in The Stones of Venice, and illustrated with a fine engraving from one of Ruskin’s drawings.56 Eliot, too, visited San Zeno,57 and it seems highly probable that once again it was Ruskin who inspired him to travel to another famous architectural site – Ravenna – to admire Byzantine monuments during his 1911 student tour mentioned earlier. In 1917, another year characterized by the rappel à l’ordre throughout Europe, Eliot evoked in Ruskinian terms, a ‘lamp of memory’: his focus was the austere, permanent form of the basilica of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe which he contrasted ironically with the materialistic and degraded tourism of modern honeymooning couples. ‘Bloomsbury was wild about Byzantine mosaics’, states a scholar of British formalism.58 The revival of Byzantine art in England during the heyday of Post-Impressionism goes hand in hand with the discovery and promotion of the ‘classic’ art of Cézanne. The critical attention given to Cézanne is paramount in the work of the Bloomsbury art critics, who were anxious to establish a close link between the new experimental painting and tradition.59 Cézanne was praised as the painter who had reacted against the ‘fluidity’, or anarchy of form, of the impressionists, by rescuing and re-evaluating the craft of the old masters. In 1908, Roger Fry had written that Cézanne and Gauguin ‘are not really Impressionists at all. They are proto-Byzantines, rather than Neo-Impressionists’. ‘Byzantinism’ (i.e. ‘the technical skill’, ‘the perfection of some Byzantine craftsmanship’) in Fry’s interpretation of it ‘was the necessary outcome of Impressionism, a necessary and inevitable reaction from it’.60 It was on probing the art of Cézanne that Clive Bell came to realize the importance of what he would term ‘significant form’. Writing in 1914, Bell asserted that Cézanne was ‘the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form’. 61 In a passage which celebrates Byzantine art and urges his readers to visit Ravenna, he claims that ‘This alone seems to me sure: since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe has created

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forms of greater significance unless it be Cézanne’.62 T. E. Hulme, champion of the ‘classical revival’, as an art emphasizing order, solidity and permanence in contrast with ‘the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things’, 63 equated classicism with a religious attitude. In his lecture ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ (delivered to the Quest Society in London in January 1914),64 he compared Cézanne’s work with the Byzantine mosaic in S. Vitale at Ravenna. In one of Cézanne’s last pictures, ‘Women Bathing’, Hulme argued that All the lines are arranged in a pyramidal shape, and the women are distorted to fit this shape . . . The form is so strongly accentuated, so geometric in character, that it almost lifts the painting out of the sphere of ‘vital’ art into that of abstract art. It is much more akin to the composition you find in the Byzantine mosaic (of the empress Theodora) in Ravenna, than it is to anything which can be found in the art of the Renaissance.65 Hulme here elevates the transience of the organic to a transcendental dimension. 66 Following these observations, it is worth considering Eliot’s recollection of Saint’ Apollinare in his poem ‘Lune de Miel’, which was composed in French during 1917. Its architectural form is recalled in the following lines: Et Saint Apollinaire, raide et ascétique, Vieille usine désaffectée de Dieu, tient encore Dans ses pierres écroulantes la forme précise de Byzance 67 Eliot borrows both his terms (‘pierres’) and theme from Ruskin. The poet turns to the art of architecture in order to rescue a ‘forme précise’ from the chaos and flux of the modern world. The Basilica of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe outside the walls of Ravenna is depicted as representative of architectural formalism and artistry. Ravenna symbolizes a site of memory, it is home to the famous Byzantine mosaic which had such a momentous impact on T. E. Hulme in 1914.68 Eliot’s evocation of Sant’ Apollinare’s permanence assimilates Ruskin: the deeply religious dimension, with its ‘stern watching’ and ‘their lasting witness against men’ born by timehonoured monuments. In his poem, Eliot appropriates avant-guerre and après-guerre Post-Impressionism debates which proposed a

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relationship between Cézanne and Byzantine art. ‘Lune de Miel’ shares Hulme’s fascination with past geometric archaic arts with its combination of absolute values, historical memory and severe, ascetic forms. The following excerpt from Hulme’s discussion of early geometric arts provides a helpful commentary on the poem. Hulme suggests that Byzantine compositional strategies demonstrate a ‘disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes’, a view which might recall the human misery of the bug-eaten honeymooners of Eliot’s poem, with their itching and scratching. For Hulme ‘the searching after an austerity, a monumental stability and permanence, a perfection and rigidity, which vital things can never have, leads to the use of forms which can almost be called geometrical’.69 This word ‘geometrical’ and its synonyms, ‘abstract’, ‘inorganic’, ‘anti-vital’ echo Wilhelm Worringer’s vocabulary, standing for ‘rigid’, ‘durable’, ‘permanent’, ‘fixed’, ‘necessary’ (Eliot’s own ‘raide et ascétique’).70 These terms seem to be an updated, modernist variant of Ruskin, and suggest an unacknowledged continuity with Ruskin’s own attribution to Byzantine architecture of a ‘religious nobleness’71 and ‘severity’.72 As indicated earlier, the Bloomsbury critics asserted that Byzantine art prefigured or anticipated the nonmimetic forms of Post-Impressionism. And we should not forget the pioneering role played by Ruskin in focusing attention on Byzantium. E. T. Cook writes that Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, with its elaborate account of St. Mark’s, one of the buildings which derive from St. Sofia, had much effect in arousing interest in Byzantine architecture . . . It is not unreasonable to trace back to the Stones of Venice . . . some share in the influences which have led to a Byzantine Revival.73 As Herbert Read has argued, ‘though in the end Ruskin had to criticize its barbarity, it must be admitted that all our present enthusiasm for Byzantine art springs ultimately from Ruskin’s original sensibility’.74 It was, moreover, Ruskin, particularly the Ruskin of ‘The Lamp of Memory’, who equated visible history, social memory, tradition, the perennial, the timeless, with the great monuments of architecture. Architecture thus became the embodiment of the collective memory of a society, the living memory of a community persisting through generations:

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there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sorts includes the former, and is mightier in its reality: it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life. The age of Homer is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. Not so that of Pericles: and the day is coming when we shall confess, that we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled fragments of her sculpture than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians.75 Another well-known passage from Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture powerfully expresses the force of witness with which architecture is endowed. Architecture’s historical memory and its capacity to maintain the ‘sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable’ (Eliot’s ‘la forme précise’) is traced and developed by Ruskin in the following passage: the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witnesss against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strengths which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth, and of the limits of the sea, maintains the sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy of nations.76 It is generally agreed that Pound provided a pivotal source for Eliot’s approach to history, 77 but although Pound’s influence cannot be disputed, we should not underestimate Ruskin’s unacknowledged yet important presence in Eliot’s conception of history. John D. Rosenberg, for example, argues that ‘We owe to Ruskin more than to anyone else the substitution of historic conscience for capricious alteration’.78

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Dynamic tradition Eliot was too intelligent and creative to conceive tradition nostalgically. Definitely a modernist, he refuted Ruskin’s ‘retrogressive’ tendency. He knew that for tradition to remain alive, it had to be made new. Tradition could not stand still. Tradition could not atrophy, nor remain as a fixed, immovable standard. It was a process of constant development. We should not – and here we quote Eliot – ‘associate tradition with the immovable, to think of it as something hostile to all change’, for ‘the word itself implies a movement’.79 But it is wrong, despite Ruskin’s contradictions, to characterize Ruskin as a Ruskinite.80 Far from prescribing a passive reception of tradition, Ruskin himself highlights its constant change and transformation. Ruskin writes in dynamic, even revolutionary terms in The Seven Lamps: two very distinguishing characters of vital imitation are, its Frankness and its Audacity: its Frankness is especially singular, there is never any effort to conceal the degree of the sources of its borrowing. Raffaelle carries off a whole figure from Masaccio, or borrows an entire composition from Perugino, with as much tranquillity and simplicity of innocence as a young Spartan pickpocket; and the architect of a Romanesque basilica gathered his columns and capitals where he could find them, as an ant picks up sticks.81 Ruskin provides Eliot with both a concept of tradition as dynamic, and an affirmation of the methods of free appropriation (‘plagiarism’) or borrowing from sources. In Ruskin’s writings, Eliot was able to find a prefiguring of his own fascination with forms of intertextuality. Indeed, Eliot’s notion that ‘mature poets steal’ finds an echo in Ruskin’s image of the young Spartan pickpockets: Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.82 In writing of the architecture of Lombardy, Ruskin refers rather similarly to a process which he characterizes as ‘re-construction’

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and ‘re-arrangement’. Here he describes the transformation of something borrowed into a new ‘text’: Surrounded by fragments of a nobler art of which it is quick in admiration and ready in imitation [this architecture is] yet so strong in its own new instincts that it re-constructs and rearranges every fragment that it copies or borrows into harmony with its own thoughts, – a harmony at first disjointed and awkward, but completed in the end, and fused into perfect organization. 83 It seems as if Ruskin’s concept of ‘vital imitation’, of absorption and transformation, of ‘re-use’ – an architectural equivalent to literary quotation – had engaged Eliot’s own imagination. There are distinct parallels between Eliot and Ruskin in the symbolic importance both have ascribed to ‘monuments’ in their critical works. Take for example the following image from Eliot which again seems to echo Ruskin: ‘The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them’.84 There seems to be a Ruskinian subtext here, a hidden imbrication of literature and architecture, an oscillation between monuments to be seen and documents to be read, between architecture and literature, between seeing and reading which is, as has often been noted, habitual with Ruskin. It is as if Ruskin’s pivotal art – architecture – were too powerful an example not to resurface, not to leave a linguistic vestige in Eliot’s new formulation. For Ruskin, word and image are intrinsically connected, so much so that the reader of The Stones of Venice is advised ‘to read a building as we would read Milton or Dante’. 85 So too, for Eliot, with his notion of the ‘ideal order’ of tradition as something shared, an expression of community, it is architecture, as for Ruskin and Morris, which offers the quintessential expression of social memory. Ruskin’s image of the Spartan pickpocket, then, may have set a precedent for literary thefts and compositional dislocations, and ultimately, perhaps, for a new poetics of non-linearity and discontinuity. It is no wonder that Eliot’s formative experience during the most radically modernist decades led him to radically up-date the ‘frankness’ and ‘audacity’ of his ‘plagiarism’. As is well known, Eliot was to introduce his shocking technique of borrowings, quotations, echoes and allusions. In this direction he himself

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acknowledged the influential examples of Pound’s ‘Three Cantos’ and Joyce’s ‘Circe’ episode, which Eliot had been reading in manuscript drafts as editor of The Egoist. Eliot’s experimentalism also allowed him an ironic detachment from the very sources which had initially stimulated him. Some commentators read ‘Lune de Miel’ as a criticism of Ruskin’s aestheticism (Ruskin exemplifying ‘the aesthetic passion of the amateurs de chapiteau’). 86 I read the poem rather as a criticism of Ruskinism, that is of the ‘canonical’ Ruskin87 and of the Ruskinian amateurs satirized by Edwardian novelists who ‘laughed at him for all they saw was the display of his ideas and sensibility as cultural possession’.88 This sensibility of the rappel à l’ordre, with its reappropriation of tradition, thus served a crucial role in the formulation of a differently inflected modernism. The post-war cultural climate focused its attention on cultivating a neo-traditionalism and moral order that held a contemporary currency. Within this matrix of re-evaluative approaches, Ruskin’s work proved to be a pivotal intellectual source for Eliot. It was inevitable that in his pursuit of an ‘ideal order’, in the necessary dialectic between past and present, tradition and the individual talent, rappel à l’ordre and new invention, Eliot would find in Ruskin an appealing model. Of course, he re-read Ruskin from a twentieth-century, modernist perspective, but it was precisely through that kind of re-reading that he could experience at once the allure of the past and its demystification. The complexity of that double gesture absorbed Ruskin’s ideas into modernism at the same time as it distanced them from the posturing of the Ruskinites and the dogmatism of their legacy.

Notes 1 For a few relevant observations see E. Lobb, T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition (London: Routledge, 1981). 2 William M. Chace, The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), p. 128. 3 See Ronald Bush, ‘Eliot and Ruskin: Second Thoughts’ in this volume, note 6. 4 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) in The Sacred Wood (1920) (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 49. Hereafter cited as SW. 5 Ronald Schuchard, ‘Eliot and Hulme in 1916: Toward a Revaluation of Eliot’s Critical and Spiritual Development’, PMLA, 88, no. 5 (1973) 1083– 94. Schuchard’s opinion is that Eliot’s ‘classicism even in 1916 was as much moral and “religious” in its formulation and attitude as it was aesthetic and literary’ (p. 1084).

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6 Kenneth Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7 See Ronald Bush’s article in this volume, note 16. 8 Ibid. 9 See The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber, 1988), pp. 168, 175–6; and Eliot’s Syllabus for a Course of Twenty-Five Lectures on Victorian Literature which Ronald Schuchard discusses in ‘T. S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer, 1916–1919’, R.E.S., New series, 25, no. 98 (1974), 163–73. 10 See Peter Dale Scott, ‘The Social Critic and his Discontents’ in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. D. Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 63. 11 See On Classic Ground: Picasso, Leger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930, eds Elisabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1990). Classicism influenced many avant-garde artists from the turn of the century. La Nouvelle Revenue Française engaged in a revival of classicism in literature as early as 1909. But it was during and in particular immediately after the war that the call to order and a ‘return’ to a classicist stance gathered momentum. For an understanding of the French conservative use of ‘classicism’ and especially a discussion of Charles Maurras as an author who had a profound impact on Eliot, see Kenneth Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology, pp. 23–8. André Lhote is generally considered the originator of the term ‘rappel à l’ordre’. It appeared in Nouvelle Revue Française on 1 June 1919. Yet according to Jean Laude, the first to use this expression, applying it to Cubism, was the French painter Roger Bissière. Laude contends that the painter used it in reviewing Georges Braque’s exhibition of paintings at the ‘L’Effort Moderne’ gallery in L’Opinion, issues of 29 March and 26 April 1919. For a full discussion see Jean Laude ‘Retour et ou Rappel à l’Ordre’ in Le Retour à l’ordre dans les arts plastiques et l’architecture, 1919–1925 (Université de Saint-Étienne: Travaux VIII, Centre Interdisciplinaire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur l’Expression Contemporaine, 1975), pp. 15–19. Bissière was a well-known figure among the Salon Cubistes and was sympathetic to Charles Maurras’s nationalism. His conservatism was similar to that of other post-war painters and critics who advocated a return to classical values. This community of artists reinterpreted Cubism in terms consonant with the call to order. They came to consider Cubism as a movement which far from constituting a break with the masters of the past, re-established the link with an overlooked order and tradition. Bissière was the first to write a book on Braque (1920) and contributed regularly to the Purist periodical L’Esprit Nouveau. It is significant that Eliot, too, associated Cubism with the virtues of clarity and order. Writing the ‘London Letter’ in The Dial in 1921 he pointed out that ‘Cubism is not a licence but an attempt to establish order’. Finally it is worth noting that Bissière also may have been aware of Ruskin’s concerns and writings. For a further discussion of this connection see R. M. Arbour-Mayrand, Bissière et la tradition de la peinture (thèse de doctorat en 3e cycle présentée à l’Université de Paris 1, 1973), p. 35.

150 Ruskin and Modernism 12 Jacques Vernay reviewing the Triennale of 1916 in the Gazette des BeauxArts, cited by K. E. Silver’s Esprit de Corps – the Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 72. 13 SW, p. 47. 14 On Classic Ground, p. 21. 15 Art in Theory 1900–1990, eds Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 226. 16 Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 249. 17 Schuchard, ‘Eliot and Hulme in 1916’, p. 1085. 18 Giorgio de Chirico, ‘The Return to the Craft’ (Nov.–Dec. 1920), trans. C. Tisdall in Art in Theory 1900–1990, p. 237. 19 Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) and Amédée Ozenfant, ‘Purism’, trans. R. L. Herbert in Art and Theory 1900–1990, p. 240. 20 See Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, 2 vols (London: Fraser, 1976, 1977). 21 Clive Bell, ‘Fine Arts – Tradition and Movements’, The Athenaeum, 4 April 1919, pp. 142–4. Eliot’s familiarity and engagement with the debates relating to visual and other arts has been underestimated. He established a closer connection with Bloomsbury during the post-war years. There is an echo of Clive Bell’s well-known formula of ‘significant form’ elaborated by him between 1912 and 1914, in Eliot’s own concept of ‘significant emotion’ in the third section of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. For Eliot ‘significant emotion . . . has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet’ (SW, p. 59, italics in the text). This depersonalized emotion appears to be the equivalent of Bell’s definition of ‘significant form’ as being a pure and self-subsistent form; an aesthetic emotion in which ‘we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions’ (cited in Art in Theory 1900–1990, p. 115). 22 Eliot, ‘War-Paint and Feathers’, The Athenaeum, 17 Oct. 1919, p. 1036. 23 Léonce Rosemberg, ‘Tradizione e Cubismo’, Valori Plastici, Feb.–March 1919 (see the English translation in Art in Theory 1900–1990, p. 234). The Paris edition was published by the Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne. 24 See Schuchard, ‘T. S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer, 1916–1919’, p. 165. 25 In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ Eliot writes of ‘the métier of poetry’. ‘Métier’ is a loaded word since the general rappel à l’ordre with its emphasis on self-discipline and labour was a reaction to the excessive licence of pre-war experimentation and innovation. ‘Métier’ becomes a key word in the writing of painter-critics associated with the ‘call to order’, such as André Lhote and Roger Bissière. 26 Ezra Pound, ‘Harold Monro’, The Criterion, XI, no. 45 (July, 1932), p. 590. 27 Eliot, ‘at a certain moment my debt to him [Pound] was for his advice to read Gautier’s Emaux et Camées, to which I had not before paid close attention’ (from New English Weekly, 7 Nov. 1938, cited by R. Kojecky in T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (London: Faber, 1971), p. 44. 28 B. Fer in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism – Art Between the Wars, eds

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29 30

31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40

41 42

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B. Fer, D. Batchelor, P. Wood (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, 1994), p. 29. Esprit de Corps, p. 190. See in particular Ezio Godoli’s discussion of Feininger’s woodcut in ‘Il mito gotico nell’architettura dell’espressionismo. La cattedrale perduta’ in Rossana Bossaglia, ed., Il Neogotico nel XIX e nel XX Secolo (Milano: Mazzotta, 1989), pp. 368–77. On Ruskin’s concept of tradition and the role of architecture see The Lamp of Memory, eds M. Wheeler and N. Whiteley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). T. S. Apteryx (T. S. Eliot), ‘Observations’, in The Egoist, V, 5 May 1918, p. 70. J. D. Margolis, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development 1922–1939 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 4. SW, pp. 52–3. William Arrowsmith points out that ‘in Modern Painters Ruskin remarks in a way which vividly anticipates and perhaps influenced Eliot’s doctrine of poetic “impersonality”’; ‘Ruskin’s Fireflies’ (1982) in John Ruskin ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), p. 90. Here is the passage Arrowsmith discusses: ‘The power of the Masters is shown by their self-annihilation. It is commensurate with the degree in which they themselves appear not in their work . . . Every great writer may be at once known by his guiding the mind far from himself to the beauty which is not of his own creation, and the knowledge which is past his finding out’ (Works 3: 23). SW, p. 48. Esprit de Corps, p. 239. See Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 259. Lentricchia rightly points out that ‘“community” meant for Eliot, in 1917, the literary tradition since, and proceeding from, Homer. In the following well-known passage, change “order” to “community” . . . “novelty” to “self”, and Eliot’s vision of organic mutuality, his social hunger, is clear: “The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it . . . the existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly altered”’ (pp. 259–60). Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’, The Criterion, Oct. 1923, p. 32. Huntly Carter’s article is one of many attending to the cultural developments on the continent: ‘it has come to pass that the only talk that matters in France turns upon the element of reconstruction and more especially upon spiritual fundamentals’, The Egoist, Sept. 1917, p. 123. Following the pre-war experimentation of The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford also adopted a poetics of narrative ‘reconstruction’, see for example Parade’s End. Esprit de Corps, pp. 324–6, 377. J. D. Margolis, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development, p. 26.

152 Ruskin and Modernism 43 Ibid. 44 See Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology, p. 53. Another author to consider as involved with rappel à l’ordre and the re-evaluation of ‘classicism’ is Julien Benda. His anti-romantic pamphlet Belphégor (1918) was influential and in 1926 was referred to by Eliot as exemplifying a new classical tendency. On the conflation of classicist and avant-garde elements see also Peter Nicholls, ‘From Fantasy to Structure: Dada and Neo-Classicism’ in his Modernisms: a Literary Guide (London: Macmillan Press, 1995), pp. 223–50. 45 Eliot, The Criterion, XVI (1937), p. 667 cited in T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare. Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber, 1996), p. 384. 46 ‘Foreign Literature – Letters from France. I: The Spiritual Crisis’, The Athenaeum, 11 Apr. 1919, pp. 182–4 and ‘II: The Intellectual Crisis’, The Athenaeum, 2 May 1919, pp. 279–80. ‘Crise de L’Esprit’ was published in the same year in La Nouvelle Revue Française, Aug., no. 78, and later collected in the first volume of Valéry’s Variété (Paris: Gallimard, 1924). 47 See the Introduction to this volume. 48 ‘Lamp of Sacrifice’, Works, 8: 27 49 Ibid., p. 39. 50 ‘Lamp of Memory’, Works, 8: 247. 51 ‘London Letter’, The Dial, LXX, May 1921, pp. 690–1. 52 ‘When I heard the door being nailed up’. This is a slightly alterated quotation from Dante’s Inferno, XXXIII, 46, which reads ‘and below I heard the door of the horrible tower being nailed up’. 53 See The Waste Land, line 411 and Eliot’s referencing Dante’s Inferno, XXXIII, 46. 54 Originally in Eliot’s draft of The Waste Land facsimile the reference is to ‘Michael Paternoster Royal, red and white’, in T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber, 1971, 1990), p. 47. In Eliot’s note to Magnus Martyr (line 265), the reader is directed to the report on ‘The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches’ which provoked Eliot’s ‘London Letter’. 55 Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 272. On Pound’s visit to Verona see Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972) pp. 323–6. 56 See Clive Wilmer, ‘Sculpture and Economics in Pound and Ruskin’, PN Review, 122, vol. 24, no. 6 (Jul.–Aug. 1998), p. 47. 57 See W. Arrowsmith, ‘Eros in Terre Haute: T. S. Eliot’s “Lune de Miel”’, The New Criterion (Oct. 1982), p. 27, and Ronald Bush’s essay, note 7, in this volume. 58 See Beverly H. Twitchell, Cézanne and Formalism in Bloomsbury (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), p. 145: ‘Fry had seen and admired Byzantine mosaics on trips to Italy since the 1890s, and had enough interest in Eastern Orthodox art to travel to Constantinople with the Bells and H. J. Norton in April 1911’, ibid. p. 241, note 97. For an overview of the appropriation of Byzantium art by the modernists see Jane Spirit, ‘Emerging Views of Byzantium, 1850–1930: Germs

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60

61 62 63 64 65 66

67

68

69 70 71 72 73 74

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of the Modern and its Paradoxes’, English Literature in Transition, 38, no. 2 (1995), pp. 157–67. On parallels between Eliot’s developing aesthetic theory and Cézanne’s formalism and classicism see Daniel S. Schwarz, ‘Cézanne and Eliot: the Classical Temper and the Unity of Eliot’s Gerontion’, in his Reconfiguring Modernism – Explorations in the Relationship Between Art and Modern Literature (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 99–131. Schwarz points out that ‘Eliot would have been aware of Cézanne from the Armory Show, from his sojourn in Paris (1910–11) where Cézanne had long been recognized as a major figure, and from the effects of the 1910 and 1912 London shows of Post-Impressionists . . . Both exhibits created the occasion to expose England to the formalist art criticism of Fry and Bell, especially to Bell’s concept of significant form. Fry, whose ideas occupied a prominent place in London to which Eliot emigrated, transformed Denis’s ideas about Cézanne’s classicism into a formalist and Modernist mode’ (pp. 99–101). Letter to the editor of The Burlington Magazine, March 1908, reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 73. Art (1914), ed. Barrie J. Bullen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 287. Ibid., p. 130. ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’ (1914) in The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. K. Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 274. The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, pp. 268–85. Ibid., p. 281. It is important to note that the appeal to Cézanne’s iron discipline and constructive art continued to be made during the period of rappel à l’ordre. Cézanne’s influence reached its maximum intensity in the work of painters such as Juan Gris, Derain and Vlaminck. For a further discussion see Esprit de Corps, pp. 161–4 and Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia – Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 9. Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1963), p. 50. For a full discussion of the poem see Giovanni Cianci, ‘”Monuments on the Page”: John Ruskin e T. S. Eliot a proposito di “Lune de Miel” (1917)’, Stultifera Navis – Studi di Anglistica, 2 (1997), pp. 5–17. See T. E. Hulme, ‘Modern Art II: A Preface Note and Neo-Realism (1914)’, in Collected Writing, pp. 286–7. Arrowsmith remarks that ‘in Eliot’s office at Faber and Faber hung reproductions of San Zeno Maggiore, of Theodora’s tomb at Ravenna and of the Madonna of the Byzantine mosaic at Murano’. Cited from ‘Eros in Terre Haute’, p. 27, note 1. Hulme, ‘A Notebook’, Collected Writings, p. 426 (italics in the text). For a related discussion on the connection between Worringer and Ruskin see the Introduction to the present volume. The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Works, 8: 120. The Stones of Venice, Works, 11: 10. Introduction to The Stones of Venice, Works, 10: 11. The Meaning of Art, 1931 (London: Faber, 1972), p. 116. A few scholars

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75 76 77 78 79

80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

have focused upon Bloomsbury’s debt to Ruskin. For a discussion of Clive Bell see Bullen’s Introduction to Art; for Roger Fry see Twitchell, Cézanne and Formalism in Bloomsbury. Christopher Reed states that ‘To explain the culture that produced Roger Fry it would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of Ruskin’; cited from A Roger Fry Reader, p. 167. Works, 8: 224. Works, 8: 233–4. See J. Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History – Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 62–3. See Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass – a Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, 1986), p. 81. Eliot, After Strange Gods (1934) cited by Harriet Davidson in T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 79. Tony Tanner in Venice Desired, p. 289, draws our attention to Ruskin’s methods of ‘incrustation’: ‘Proust knew all about writing as citing – as quotation, allusion, incorporation. Proust and Pound incorporate, “incrust”, elements of Ruskin for their own ends . . . “Incrusting” is a Ruskinian usage.’ Tanner quotes a passage on ‘incrustation’, too long to be transcribed here, as being ‘powerfully relevant . . . for writers working like Proust and Pound’. Works, 8: 196. Eliot, ‘Philip Massinger’, Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1950), p. 182. Works, 8: 195. SW, p. 50. Works, 10: 206. See Arrowsmith, ‘Eros in Terre Haute’, p. 25. See the Introduction to this volume. See Brian Maidment, ‘Interpreting Ruskin, 1870–1914’, in The Ruskin Polygon, eds J. Dixon Hunt and F. M. Holland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 170.

10 Eliot and Ruskin: Second Thoughts Ronald Bush

The story of T. S. Eliot and John Ruskin is a tale – quirky enough to be genuinely interesting – of absorption, rejection, and positive second thoughts. But to get an initial fix on it, we should remember how Ruskin’s reputation with the most progressive element of the British avant-garde changed when he attacked James McNeill Whistler in 1877, an attack that resulted in a libel battle that Whistler famously won only to be bankrupted by its costs. Ruskin had published what was arguably his most influential book, The Stones of Venice, in 1853, and became a hero to the generation that followed him. His lustre increased for twenty years, but tarnished after the row with Whistler, most severely with an influential group of Whistler’s American followers who thought of themselves as the party of the future. Thus, as Michael Coyle has suggested in a recent book on Pound and the idea of culture, by the time that Pound and Eliot started writing, certain preoccupations of Ruskin’s, including an understood connection between cultural practices from economics to aesthetics and a sense of the way the profit motive corrodes culture, seemed part of the intellectual wallpaper, leaving Ruskin a relic whose responsibility for those ideas had been forgotten, but whose crankiness was remembered all too well. 1 In such circles, to regard Ruskin as a contemporary was to disclose either one’s advancing years or one’s intellectual shallowness. Pound, who was more interested in the progress of artistic generations than Eliot, would suggest in the Cantos how far away the Ruskin era seemed even in his youth. In a vignette from Canto 89, Selwyn Image, a survivor of the nineties, shows his great age by declaring:

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‘What he meant to us in those days’ said old Image (Selwyn) referring to Ruskin.2 Eliot was crueler, and portrayed characters whose overblown respect for Ruskin suggests their immaturity, or gullibility, or sentimental proclivities. In this, negative, sense, Ruskin, or at any rate Ruskinism, played a quite important role in some of Eliot’s early poems, an accident, really, of the fact that Eliot had agreed to teach Victorian literature in 1917, obliging him to reread Ruskin, a labour he undertook sometimes with malicious glee and sometimes with pleasure. (In April Eliot gleefully reported that he read out a passage in which Ruskin ‘cursed out America because he said he detested liberty’, but in 1921 he tweaked Richard Aldington by suggesting that in Aldington’s terms ‘the greatest nineteenth-century poets’ might be Ruskin and Newman.3) On the whole, the lectures on Victorian Literature Eliot produced for extension students in 1917 make it clear that he regarded Ruskin as a major source of Victorian ideas, especially concerning ‘Art and Economics’. Eliot’s lecture notes have not survived, but his public syllabus tells us that Eliot grouped Ruskin in the first instance with William Morris and George Bernard Shaw as a socialist, secondly as a sponsor of what he called ‘medieval influence’, and finally as an all-purpose Victorian sage, with Carlyle, Mill and Huxley. He did not mention him with the poets or even with the ‘Aesthetes’, in which latter category he pointedly did include Pater.4 Eliot suggested a similar set of emphases in more detail in part of that year when, under the auspices of the University of London, he offered to a group of Southall students a Tutorial Class in Modern English Literature. Here Eliot’s syllabus promises comments on Ruskin’s ‘Life and Personality’, his work as an ‘art critic’, his ‘emphasis upon moral values in art’, his ‘greatness and limitations as a critic’, the ‘unevenness and extraordinary brilliance of his writing’ style, and his stature as a social reformer.5 As conscientious teacher, Eliot included a reading list of important work (The Stones of Venice, selections from Modern Painters and Lectures on Art, Unto this Last, Crown of Wild Olive, and Munera Pulveris) and added for the diligent student suggestions for secondary reading (‘W. C. Brownell on Ruskin’s style’). It is worth noting, however, that although Eliot calls Ruskin a brilliant stylist, and although Eliot showed himself through commentary and practice a keen observer of the prose tradition, Ruskin’s absence from Eliot’s later accounts of English prose

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suggest that this remark should be taken with a grain of salt. In the surveys Eliot wrote in the twenties and thirties of the English prose tradition, Ruskin merits hardly a mention (and when he does he is called ‘too unrestrained’, or ‘often exaggerated and perverse’). Pater, however, whom Eliot thinks of as ‘a literary descendant of Ruskin and Matthew Arnold’ although he is in Eliot’s more polemical essays discounted as a benighted humanist, in these essays is honoured as ‘the model for the last ten years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth’ and designated a ‘great influence’ on Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and most significant, F. H. Bradley (the last being the subject of Eliot’s doctorate in philosophy and one of the primary models for Eliot’s own prose style).6 The Ruskin that counted for Eliot was not Ruskin the critic or Ruskin the prose master, but Ruskin the reformer, about whose double focus on aesthetics and economics Eliot felt distinctly ambivalent. On the one hand Eliot as an undergraduate drank deeply in Ruskin’s lamentations about the spiritual decline of Western culture, imbibing Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice in the course of his first, intense encounter with Venice in a 1911 student tour of Venice and Northern Italy.7 On the other hand, Eliot came to disapprove of the way Ruskin over the years valued art above religion and of the way Ruskin turned to art for moral wisdom which in Eliot’s view it could not give. We can see the terms of Eliot’s ambivalence about Ruskin in the verse he wrote in the years that followed his Victorian lectures. In the first of these, an impersonal satire in French entitled ‘Lune de Miel’, Eliot telescopes Ruskin’s memory of a famous figure of Dante 8 in The Stones of Venice (the ‘drifting leaves of acanthus’, in Ruskin seen in the capitals of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice) with his own notebook observations about San Zeno Maggiore in Verona, making his honeymooners swoon over ‘chapitaux d’acanthe que tournoie le vent’ at Sant’ Apollinaire in Classe in Ravenna. As Giovanni Cianci suggests, one effect of Eliot’s irony is to juxtapose the frantic culture of modern tourism with the gravity and timelessness of Christian architecture – what ‘Lune de Miel’ calls ‘la forme précise de Byzance’. In this mood, Eliot and Ruskin are at one, and Eliot’s contrast almost uncannily recalls Letter XX of Fors Clavigera, in which the hectic boredom of two American girls and their parents is contrasted with the implied glories of Venice and Verona.9 However, as William Arrowsmith notes, the poem adverts to Ruskin primarily to caricature the late nineteenth-century vogue of ‘Ruskin’s aestheticism’. 10 Eliot puts Ruskinian phrases in the honeymooners’

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minds, and their recall of Ruskin is entirely sentimental, in the sense that they use it to evade rather than sharpen what they see. And so their elevation of Ruskin’s authority turns comic, in exactly the way in ‘Cousin Nancy’, Nancy’s aunts invite ridicule when they imagine Arnold and Emerson as ‘Matthew and Waldo, Guardians of the faith, / The army of unalterable law.’ In ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, another of the satirical poems that Eliot wrote between 1917 and 1919 (but one much closer to the circumstances of his own life), Eliot repeats Ruskin’s horror at how Venice had become a tourist venue along with Ruskin’s revulsion for the later stages of Venetian corruption, even as he simultaneously criticizes the premises Ruskin used to make those judgements. In the poem, Burbank, a Yankee naif on the prowl for culture, succumbs to the volupine charms of a Venetian princess of that name, but excuses his own ‘descent’ into sexual licence when he compares his aesthetic sensibility with that of a vulgar fellow tourist named Bleistein, whose ‘lustreless protrusive eye / Stares from the protozoic slime / At a perspective of Canaletto’. The poem is prefaced by a fragmentary anthology of comments made by earlier writers about Venice, but only comes into focus at its conclusion, when we are made aware that Burbank has been contemplating Ruskin all along. The poem’s culminating rhetorical question – ‘Who clipped the lion’s wings / And flea’d his rump and pared his claws? / Thought Burbank, meditating on / Time’s Ruins, and the seven laws’ – shows Burbank piously turning to Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture to resolve his moral confusion. More precisely, the lines recall The Stones of Venice and Unto This Last: Eliot’s image of the lion of Venice with its wings clipped is a sardonic restatement of Ruskin’s declaration, in the chapter called ‘Wings of the Lion’ of Unto This Last, that at the moment of Venice’s decline, ‘the enchanter’s spell, woven by centuries of toil, was broken in the weakness of a moment; and swiftly, and utterly, as a rainbow vanishes, the radiance and the strength faded from the wings of the Lion.’11 Eliot at 30 still vividly remembered being under the spell of Ruskin’s Jeremiad about the fall of the city of art, but he caricatures his earlier enchantment by enclosing it in irony. That Burbank is thinking about architecture when he should be thinking about his spiritual peril displays a morally opaque aestheticism that is the point of Eliot’s poem. Its villain is not so much Ruskin as Ruskin’s dangerous influence on even more idealistic types like the younger Eliot

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or his New England alter ego Burbank. Eliot’s formal assurance in the poem derives from his reading of Henry James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’, a work, he admitted in unpublished Harvard Lectures on modern literature, which supplied the donnée of ‘my problem in Bleistein’.12 In ‘The Aspern Papers’ as in Eliot’s homage to it, we get as a focus for our perception a character whose aesthetic response to Venetian art keeps from him a darker reality that resides both in the history of the city and in his own life. Still, there are more things to be said about Ruskin’s importance for Eliot at the end of the teens. ‘Lune de Miel’ and ‘Burbank’ are primarily sardonic, but not entirely so. The autobiographical connections between Eliot, Burbank and the honeymooner suggest an identification with Ruskin that goes beyond satire and enters the realm of a mask of self-understanding and self-disgust. Ruskin’s veneration of art and his horror of modern society went deep in Eliot even if Eliot considered them atavistic. By the same token, having experienced such feelings, he used them to explore the emotional sources of Ruskin’s work and recognize the passion that fuelled it (and that by implication also fuelled an aspect of himself that Eliot did not like). Writing a poem contemporary with ‘Burbank’ and ‘Lune de Miel’ called ‘A Cooking Egg’, Eliot takes as his starting point one of Ruskin’s letters about Rose La Touche, the girl Ruskin fell in love with in middle life. After Rose died, Ruskin wrote Susan Beever comparing his loss to one of hers and explained his grief: ‘But Susie, you expect to see your Margaret again, and you will be happy with her in heaven. I wanted my Rosie here. In heaven I mean to go and talk to Pythagoras and Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I shan’t care a bit for Rosie there, she needn’t think it.’ 13 Eliot takes the remark, in the context of Ruskin’s letter uneasily playful but out of context at once moving and chilling, and turns it, in ‘A Cooking Egg’, into: I shall not want Pipit in Heaven: Madame Blavatsky will instruct me In the Seven Sacred Trances: Piccarda de Donati will conduct me. .... But where is the penny world I bought To eat with Pipit behind the screen? The red-eyed scavengers are creeping From Kentish Town and Golder’s Green

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The result is wickedly funny but also surprisingly perceptive. In its expression of the way a suspect high-mindedness crowds out the space of genuine feeling, leaving room only for sentimentality and inevitably exploding into social rage, Eliot undermines the illusion of objectivity in Ruskin’s social analysis. After this demystification, Ruskin’s cultural histories look rather like screens for private obsession. Which is exactly how other high-Victorian achievements appear in Lytton Strachey’s contemporary Eminent Victorians and how Richard Ellmann described Ruskin’s histories many years later, stimulated I suspect by Eliot’s provocation. Ellmann noted that Ruskin had dated the fall of Venice ‘not only to a specific year, but to a specific day, 8 May 1418’, and added that although Ruskin’s putative explanation for this was that it was the death day of the Venetian military leader, Carlo Zeno, a more pressing explanation was that 8 May 1418 was ‘four hundred years to the day before [Ruskin’s] own conception’. (Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819.) ‘In his parents’ fall’, Ellmann speculates, ‘as in that of our first parents, he saw the determination of [his] age’s [corrupt] character and of his own.’ Ruskin, Ellmann muses, telescoped what he perceived to be the dissolute behaviour of his wife Effie on their first trip to Venice with the dissolution of Renaissance Venice itself, and later all but acknowledged what he had done when he said about The Stones of Venice in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) that the book ‘had, from beginning to end, no other aim than to show that the Renaissance architecture of Venice had arisen out of, and in all its features indicated, a state of concealed national infidelity, and of domestic corruption’.14 Ellmann considers the force of Ruskin’s associations to skirt madness, and it is just that tension in Victorian culture brought close to madness that haunted and fascinated Eliot, and inspired his self-portraits as a young Victorian. In ‘A Cooking Egg’ (the title refers to food almost too old to eat, and figuratively to an old man), Eliot utilizes the complex of Ruskin’s psychological compensations as a mask for the malodorous highmindedness he so disliked in himself. Like the better-known poems, ‘Prufrock’ or ‘Gerontion’, ‘A Cooking Egg’ is a case study in the perversity of Victorian idealism. Little wonder that after 1920 Eliot put Ruskin out of his mind for almost a decade. Though (as Cianci points out) still a vital source of much in Eliot’s modernist sense of past and present, Ruskin faded from Eliot’s conscious attention. What he had expressed, others in the interim (Pater, Whistler, James, Wilde, Joyce) expressed more subtly. And so, after the quatrain poems

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and The Waste Land (not without its own nods to Ruskin when it acknowledges a Byzantine stillness in ‘the walls / Of Magnus Martyr [which] hold / Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’), Eliot went on to other things. At the onset of the 1930s, however, social and economic conditions reminiscent of the 1830s for a little made Ruskin the Victorian moral economist worth the second thoughts of my title. By then, the scientific economics that had seemed to superannuate Ruskin, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw, started to look distinctly threadbare, and the crisis of the Great Depression provoked political, social and economic reactions so extreme that even Rukin’s ‘unrestrained’ rhetoric again seemed almost sensible. Or at least that is the suggestion that Eliot leaves in one of his extended meditations of the time. One of Eliot’s commentators reminds us that 1931 was a ‘year of bewildering financial crisis for Britain. By Easter nearly three million men were unemployed, and the unemployment insurance fund was more than a hundred million pounds in debt; the budget suffered from a deficit of more than thirty million pounds, though onethird of Britain’s income was being spent upon taxes and rates; the Bank of England was drained of forty-five million pounds in gold during July alone. . . . At the general election, in October, Labour was smashed.’15 Toward the start of this horrendous year, Eliot, writing as editor of the Criterion, cried out in exasperation at so-called scientific education, history and economics. ‘Unless popular education is also moral education,’ he wrote, ‘it is merely putting firearms into the hands of children. For education in History is vain, unless it teaches us to extract moral and spiritual values from History; and education in Political Economy is vain . . . so long as it is offered as a pure science unfettered by moral principles. I am not depreciating the importance of Economics, but on the contrary elevating it.’ ‘We need’, he concluded, ‘another Ruskin. The trouble with the Science of Economics of to-day is that it appears in a form in which very few people, if any, can understand it.’ 16 It was this conviction among others that, starting in 1931, turned Eliot into the kind of cultural moralizer he had once been happy to mock. His writing up to and after the Second World War, culminating in Notes Toward a Definition of Culture (1949), was increasingly concerned with matters of social coherence and social purpose. During these years, Eliot consistently involved himself with

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matters of country, countryside and landscape – matters which turned his composition toward the British landscapes he rendered in minor poems like ‘Usk’ and ‘Rannoch, by Glencoe’ (1935), and in major poems such as ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, and ‘Little Gidding’ (the three of the Four Quartets concerned with England). And while it would be wrong to say that Eliot wrote his great landscape poems of the thirties and forties according to Ruskin’s prescription, an argument can be made that he shaped those poems in the process of a renewed absorption and rejection of a Ruskin whose account of British landscape could not be ignored. In Steve Ellis’s words, in a book called The English Eliot: Design, Language, and Landscape in Four Quartets, arriving at an ‘emphasis on the “ordinary countryside”’ and a focus on a ‘village or [p]arish where the “real”’ England is to be found’, Eliot had to first consider and then reject Ruskin’s landscapes, with their ‘exhaustive detailing of particulars’ and their ‘Gothic Romanticism . . . marshalled only on behalf of the abnormal, the beauty spot’.17 Eliot, Ellis argues, fashioned in the Quartets a more eighteenth-century and generalized English topography than Ruskin’s, one conducive to ideologies of the 1930s and 1940s rather than those of the 1860s. But he could not help but engage with the tradition of moralized Englands that Ruskin had inherited and indelibly altered. Yet even in rejection, Eliot paid Ruskin the tribute of serious consideration that he had withheld earlier in his career. The thirties had taught him that political economy and the genre of paysage moralisé were not to be disdained, and his prose and his poetry at the time of Four Quartets acknowledged as much without embarrassment. Ruskin of course would have been pleased to have seen Eliot’s change of heart. And with a certain poetic licence we might even say that he glimpsed it in his crystal ball. Consider this coincidence, good enough for Ruskin to have elaborated at length: the block of flats in Crawford Place in which Eliot and his wife Vivien lived with a few breaks from 1916 to 1926 was once the object of Ruskin’s special attention. In a letter to the editor of The Daily Telegraph of 17 October 1865, Ruskin noted with characteristic disapproval the pronouncement of the owner of the Crawford Place buildings that he had bought them as a ‘most profitable investment’. Ruskin responded by asking what such an account of political economy might mean for the working-class tenants of Crawford Place, and implied that it could only mean ill. By contrast, Ruskin said, ‘I have bought a little bit of property of the Crawford Place

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description, and mending it somewhat according to my notions, I make my tenants pay me what I hold to be a “just price” for the lodging provided. That lodging I partly look after, partly teach the tenants to look after themselves’ (pp. 15–16).18 In the end we might say that in a similar way Ruskin taught the most famous twentieth-century denizen of Crawford Place how to ‘look after’ himself. He would effect more thoroughgoing and more influential conversions. But perhaps it would not be too much to suggest that to have moved so obdurate a case as Eliot presents real evidence of his impact on the modernist generation.

Notes 1 See Michael Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995), pp. 35–64. 2 Cited in Coyle, Ezra Pound, p. 42. 3 See The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 176, 470. The passage Eliot read to his class was from Time and Tide (1867), Letter 22, par. 141. 4 See Ronald Schuchard, ‘T. S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer, 1919–1919 (Concluded)’, R.E.S. New Series, xxv, no. 99 (1974), pp. 292–304, esp. pp. 292–3, 296. 5 See Schuchard, ‘T. S. Eliot as an Extension Lecturer’, R.E.S. New Series, xxv, no. 98 (1974), pp. 163–72, esp. p. 171. 6 For Eliot’s overviews of the English prose tradition, see ‘Contemporary English Prose, A Discussion of the Development of English Prose from Hobbes and Sir Thomas Browne to Joyce and D. H. Lawrence’, Vanity Fair, XX, no. 5 (July 1923), pp. 51, 98; the unsigned and until recently unacknowledged review of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Prose, ‘English Prose’, TLS, 4 March 1926, pp. 1, 4; and ‘Views and Reviews’, New English Weekly, VII, no. 10 (20 June 1935), pp. 190–1. Eliot’s comment about Ruskin being ‘too unrestrained’ comes from the latter (p. 190). The other citations are taken from the Vanity Fair essay, p. 51. 7 At the end of his 1910–11 year in Paris, Eliot went south from Munich in the summer, travelling, William Arrowsmith speculates, to see the places of Dante. He stopped at least in Verona, Modena and Venice, and probably also in Ravenna. He kept a notebook, and in the section on San Zeno Maggiore in Verona, noted the Romanesque foliage on four capitals, whose relation to Ruskin is discussed below. For more, see William Arrowsmith, ‘Eros in Terre Haute: T. S. Eliot’s “Lune de Miel”’, The New Criterion, Oct. 1982, pp. 22–41, esp. p. 27 (Arrowsmith mistakenly dates the notebook and tour as 1910, but Eliot did not arrive in Europe until October of 1910, and made the extended tour described in the notebook from July 1911. See Valerie Eliot, ed., The Letters of T. S. Eliot, p. 15.) 8 See Purgatorio XXVIII.7–21: ‘Un aura dolce . . . / per cui le fonde,

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tremolando. . . .’ (cited in Arrowsmith, ‘Eros in Terre Haute’, p. 26). 9 See Giovanni Cianci, ‘“Monuments on the Page”: John Ruskin e T. S. Eliot a proposito di “Lune de Miel” [1917],’ Stultifera Navis. Studi di anglistica, 2 (1997), pp. 5–17; see esp. pp. 8–9 and 6–7. 10 Arrowsmith, ‘Eros in Terre Haute’, pp. 23–5. 11 Ruskin, Collected Works, VII, p. 299. Cited in Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 131. 12 I refer to Eliot’s account of ‘The Aspern Papers’ in the third lecture on Conrad and James in his 1932–3 English 26 Harvard undergraduate lectures on modern literature. Notes in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. (For a general account of these lectures, see A. Stuart Daley, ‘Eliot’s English 26, Harvard University, Spring Term, 1933’, T. S. Eliot Review, Fall 1975, pp. 5–7; and more recently, Ronald Bush, ‘“As if You were Hearing It from Mr. Fletcher or Mr. Tourneur in 1633”: T. S. Eliot’s 1933 Harvard Lecture Notes for “English 26 (Introduction to Contemporary Literature)”’, ANQ, 11, no. 3 (Summer 1998), pp. 11–20. 13 First noted by F. O. Matthiessen, who quotes the letter in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; rev. 1958), p. 92. 14 See Richard Ellmann, ‘Overtures to Salome’, in The Golden Codgers (New York: New York University Press, 1973), pp. 39–59. Citations from pp. 48–9. 15 Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age (Peru, Ill.: Sherwood, Sugden, 1971; rev. 1984), p. 183. 16 From ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion X, no. 39 (Jan. 1931), pp. 307–14. See pp. 309–10. 17 Steve Ellis, The English Eliot: Design, Language, and Landscape in Four Quartets (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 84, 83, 82. 18 I owe this citation to Joseph DiNunzio, who also provided suggestions for other parts of this paper.

11 Ruskin’s Grotesque and the Modernism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis Peter Nicholls

When one thinks of the qualities that placed Pound and Lewis at the centre of the Modernist ‘vortex’, it is hard to see how the massively influential thought of Ruskin could not have played a significant part in their intellectual formation. Both men were keen critics of their time (capable of producing rousing jeremiads in the Ruskinian vein), and both were, in their different ways, preoccupied with the relations between great art and social justice. Ruskin had in a sense laid the ground for both men: ‘The art of any country,’ he wrote in Modern Painters, ‘is the exponent of its social and political virtues. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life.’1 Pound formulates this essential proposition in many ways; for example: ‘I suggest that finer and future critics of art will be able to tell from the quality of a painting the degree of tolerance or intolerance of usury extant in the age and milieu that produced it.’2 Lewis’s position is rather more ambiguous because of his wariness of any complicity between artistic production and the Zeitgeist, but in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, a work which refers to Ruskin several times, he cautions that ‘The absurd things which are happening in the visual arts at present are what must happen when an art becomes almost totally disconnected from society, when it no longer has any direct function in life, and can only exist as the plaything of the intellect.’ 3 Yet, as a number of commentators have noted, neither Pound nor Lewis ever felt it necessary to engage very closely with Ruskin’s work. We may sense a major debt, as Robert Casillo has done in an 165

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extended analysis of Pound’s relation to Ruskin, but the fact remains that, while neither Pound nor Lewis was generally slow to acknowledge intellectual debts, Ruskin’s name rarely figures in their writings. 4 In part this may be explained by their shared sense of his historical remoteness. Ruskin had finally resigned from his post at Oxford in 1885, the year of Pound’s birth, and his silence and isolation after 1889 meant that a much younger generation saw his works, like those of Carlyle and Emerson, as ponderous legacies of another age. What is particularly striking about the rare comments Pound and Lewis make about Ruskin is an ease of judgement which implies that the great Victorian is now safely labelled and pigeon-holed, no longer a force to be reckoned with in the kind of textual dialogues both modernists conducted with the past. The lack of tension is notable if we compare, say, Ford Madox Ford’s account of his youth: To me life was simply not worth living because of the existence of Carlyle, of Ruskin, of Mr Holman Hunt, of Mr Browning, or of the gentleman who built the Crystal Palace. These people were perpetually held up to me as standing upon unattainable heights, and at the same time I was perpetually being told that if I could not attain these heights I must just as well not cumber the earth.5 For the modernist generation, however, Ruskin (along with Carlyle and Arnold) simply ‘personif[ies] an ethos’, as Lewis puts it.6 This seems to be the point of Pound’s allusion to Ruskin’s essay ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Gladstone was still respected, When John Ruskin produced ‘Kings’ Treasuries’; Swinburne And Rossetti still abused.7 The connection with Gladstone, and the deliberately weighty diction (‘respected’, ‘produced’) define a conservative world in which the Pre-Raphaelites Swinburne and Rossetti receive only abuse.8 Yet, for Pound, Ruskin turns out to be less a cause than a symptom of the world against which he inveighed: John Ruskin was the only man who ever worried over the horrors of 19th-century British architecture and John Ruskin was

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driven insane. Ruskin’s fussy little copies of the Stones of Venice and Ruskin’s final insanity should be perfectly understandable to anyone who spends even half an hour in observing the ornamentation of Oxford Street.9 Pound can admire Ruskin for grasping the social importance of architectural ornament, but that achievement is compromised by romantic nostalgia: Ruskin was well-meaning but a goose. The remedy for machines is not pastoral retrogression. The remedy for the locomotive belching soft-coal smoke is not the stage coach but the electric locomotive. . . .10 Pound could recommend Ruskin as reading only for ‘the suburban wife’, 11 as he put it in 1920, for when it came to adumbrating a new, modernist aesthetic the author of Modern Painters apparently had little to offer: When Ruskin was telling Oxford and the wives of the Oxford dons about the effects that could only be got with the palletknife, Pater was learning ‘that all the arts approach the conditions [sic] of music.’12 Just as he had sniped at those ‘fussy little copies of the Stones of Venice’, so Pound seems to have associated Ruskin with an outmoded form of realism. Reviewing an exhibition at the Old Dudley Society in 1919, for example, he notes that ‘Here we find watercolour as Ruskin conceived it. L. Burleigh Bruhl still contends for true representation of nature, the “impression”. Chas. Spenclayh contributes a large miniature with meritorious drawing, but done in the illusion that floorboards, etc., gleam and glisten with great altitude of “finish”.’13 While Pound was also critical of Pater and what he called his ‘sentimentalesque Hellenism’,14 the famous essays on the Renaissance did offer intimations of a theory of form and image – a ‘condition of music’ – which seemed to prefigure the new modernist experiments with abstraction. Ruskin, of course, in his notorious polemic against Whistler, had placed himself irretrievably in the conservative camp for someone like Pound for whom Whistler was to be associated with Kandinsky as a painter ‘ousting literary values’, as he put it. 15

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Pound, we conclude, must have read Ruskin, but we are hard pressed to find many specific references in his writings. In a piece on ‘Music in Ca’ Rezzonico’ he promotes Browning as ‘Italy’s greatest and least appreciated press agent’, and he does so at the expense of ‘Mr Ruskin’s maunderings [which] are in a Tauchnitz edition in many shop windows’ (the reference is, presumably, to The Stones of Venice or to St Mark’s Rest).16 But why does Pound never engage directly with Ruskin’s writings on Venice, given his own intense interest in the city? 17 And why (this is even more puzzling at first sight) does he never discuss Ruskin’s economic theories? I can find no mention of Unto this Last or The Political Economy of Art (or A Joy Forever) in Pound’s writings, nor does he ever refer to Fors Clavigera where Ruskin’s rhetoric has seemed to some critics to foreshadow aspects of Pound’s own.18 Michael Coyle concludes that ‘Pound did not actively seek to bury his debts to Ruskin because he was largely unconscious of them – they were already buried.’ 19 That seems a reasonable solution to the problem, especially if we also accept Coyle’s argument that Ruskin’s economic thought was mediated for Pound by the theories of A. R. Orage and the Guild Socialists. Significantly, when the idea of guilds was related by Pound to his own enthusiasm for the Corporate State in the thirties, the occasional mentions of Ruskin became a little more positive. In 1938, for example, a piece defining usury acknowledges that the mercantilist culture of the nineteenth century still contained, as Pound puts it, ‘a few cranks like Shelley and Godwin and Ruskin and Wm. Morris, but if they ever got down to brass tacks the public was not let into the secret.’ 20 Two years later, in an article for Meridiano di Roma, these ‘cranks’ are viewed as members of a sort of artistic ‘guild’: William Morris, Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites and all the other active and productive groups in London and Paris fought in a kind of association [collegamento] for artistic autonomy in the [very] heart of usurocracy. . . . 21 In all of these allusions, however, Pound doesn’t think much beyond ‘Ruskin’ as a name for a cultural problem, and the same is broadly true of Lewis. Like Pound, Lewis sees Ruskin as a ‘Romantic’ and a ‘dreamer’ – ‘One of his main doctrines,’ says Lewis, ‘illustrates this. He wished all machinery to be destroyed’22 – and in The Art of Being Ruled Lewis ridicules the ‘sugar-sweet misinterpretation of the period of medieval rebirth, when everything was happy and the

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workshops were full of songs, and craftsmen jostled with amateur masons.’ 23 It is this ‘soft’ side of Ruskin that comes in for some devious satirical treatment in Lewis’s 1937 novel, The Revenge for Love. Lying by a mountain stream, marvelling at ‘the grandeur of these stones’, Lewis’s heroine Margot rereads ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ from Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. On this occasion, however, ‘she started to scrutinize, with unexpected independence, the propositions of which this particular piece of special pleading was composed’. 24 Ruskin’s argument, that Shakespeare created only heroines and no heroes, is mischievously interwoven with an earlier passage in the novel in which Margot daydreams in ‘A well of beautiful loneliness’ (p. 233) of her ‘goddess’ Virginia, ‘an incomparable “queen”’ (p. 310). Margot now questions Ruskin’s romantic myth of queenliness, dismissing the ‘threadbare arguments of this chivalrous passage’ (p. 312) which, Lewis implies, reappear under a different guise in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. 25 This, then, was Ruskin the dreamer, elaborating arguments about femininity which had no historical grounding – a Ruskin bound to irritate Lewis, who by this time had developed a relatively sophisticated understanding of the politics of gender. Yet Ruskin, of course, was not always as fey as this, and in the later The Demon of Progress in the Arts (1954), Lewis quotes a passage from The Stones of Venice to illustrate, as he puts it, ‘the extent to which painting may produce in a man a bitter hatred of entire schools, and the art of a number of countries’ (Ruskin is denouncing Renaissance art and everything that flowed from it). 26 Nothwithstanding this kind of ‘aberration’, as Lewis calls it, Ruskin is later adduced as ‘the most outstanding example of the literary man who goes over and lives with the artists, stimulates their activity, interprets them to the rest of the world’. 27 Lewis aims to belittle Roger Fry and Herbert Read, contemporary examples of this ‘literary man’, by contrasting them with Ruskin, ‘who was not only a very great writer, who had a remarkable influence upon the prose style of his contemporaries, and who was so many-sided a man as to have astonished later economists by his originality, but who, by his prophetic activities in the field of art, was a benefactor.’ Lewis for a time shared Pound’s interest in Social Credit and underconsumptionist economic theory, but, again like Pound, he did not have to go direct to Ruskin for ideas which by now had taken on a distinctive twentieth-century cast. So too, when it came to aesthetic theory, Ruskin apparently had little to offer to those thinking

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about the possibilities of machine art and a modernism of line and angular form. The move away from representation was also a move away from Ruskinian theoria, as Andrew Brighton has noted, for ‘Lewis’s pictorial work suggests no sympathetic common nature or reality behind appearances. It evokes edges and surfaces at odds with their context.’28 Equally, Ruskin’s literary pictorialism had little to say to a new art which was intent on ‘ousting literary values’, in Pound’s phrase. Is there, then, no really significant line of intellectual contact between Lewis and Ruskin? I think that in Lewis’s case, as in Pound’s, the connection has to be thought less in terms of specific ideas – ideas which, given the widespread currency of Ruskin’s thought, had by now become too well absorbed to be easily noticed – than in terms of the modernistic inflections of his concept of the Gothic and the grotesque. With these terms, Ruskin had sought to define a particular aesthetic energy deriving from what he called ‘that magnificent condition of fantastic imagination’.29 The grotesque, as Richard Stein puts it, ‘encompasses both the fear of death and a vision of delight’, 30 coupling ‘decorative accumulation’, as Ruskin calls it, 31 with a ‘savage’ humour: ‘There is jest,’ he observes, ‘perpetual, careless, and not infrequently obscene – in the most noble work of the Gothic periods.’32 Ruskin isn’t always so sanguine about the effects of ‘jest’ – ‘all truth that makes us smile is partial’, he cautions33 – but this presentation of the energetic, not to say transgressive, grotesque perhaps foreshadows Lewis’s theory of satire and laughter.34 ‘Violence,’ writes Lewis, ‘is of the essence of laughter . . . it is merely the inversion or failure of force. To put it another way, it is the grin upon the Deathshead. It must be extremely primitive in origin, though of course its function in civilized life is to keep the primitive at bay. But it hoists the primitive with its own explosion.’35 I am not suggesting, of course, that Ruskin’s sense of ‘jest’ closely resembles Lewis’s ‘volcanic’ humour, but only that Lewis may have been drawn to a certain ‘savageness’ in Ruskin’s work which he preferred to the gentler contours of nineteenth-century aestheticism. This certainly seems to be the implication of a chapter in Men Without Art which, significantly, is entitled ‘The New Gothic’. Lewis is considering the writer’s role in the post-war period, a period in which, he says, ‘The “author” is asked to write nice, kind, cheerful, empty books, full of the opiate of forgetfulness.’36 The Peace, argues Lewis, has been characterized by ‘a sort of smug and listless dreaminess, mimicking peace’, 37 hence the

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need for a ‘New Gothic’ art which is marked by a certain ‘coarseness’: ‘It is only by “coarseness” that we can paint our picture truly. As with the War-novel, so (only more so) with the Peace-novel (if it is to be the genuine article), a good measure of coarseness must be allowed.’38 This ‘coarseness’ is tacitly associated by Lewis with his familiar thematics of visuality, objectivity and the ‘external method’ – his ‘philosophy of the EYE’, as he calls it. 39 Like Ruskin and Pound, Lewis seeks some sort of middle path between false idealization and mere imitation, between aesthetic ‘form’, on the one hand, and a truth to the object-world, on the other. From this point of view, Ruskin’s campaign against the ‘pathetic fallacy’ might be seen to prefigure Lewis’s claims for an art which resists sentimental humanization and which in that sense ‘has no inside’: ‘Instead, then, of being something impelled like an independent machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.’40 Lewis’s desire for pure exteriority is one with his pursuit of a ‘coarseness’ which inhibits narcissistic identification. His distrust of introspection and of what he terms the ‘internal method’ of narration echo Ruskin’s desire for the elimination of what one critic calls a ‘distorting self’.41 It is likely that, indirectly, Ruskin’s attention to the object shaped both Lewis’s and Pound’s respective claims for forms of ‘objectivity’. 42 At any rate, neither of them seems to have made T. E. Hulme’s mistake of seeing Ruskin as a romantic because he lacked both the capacity ‘to see things as they really are’ and ‘the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees’. 43 Ruskin’s repudiation of the pathetic fallacy was, of course, carried out in the name of ‘the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings’.44 ‘A poet is great,’ he claims, ‘first in proportion to the strength of his passion, and then, that strength being granted, in proportion to his government of it.’45 Pace Hulme, Ruskin here predicts the modernist emphasis on objectivity and restraint, and his literary judgements often strikingly prefigure those of Pound. Ruskin speaks, for example, of Homer’s ‘practical common sense’, 46 and praises Dante because he has ‘in his most intense moods . . . entire command of himself’, a ‘command’ which results from his ability to ‘keep his eyes firmly on the pure fact’.47 Like Pound and Eliot, Ruskin sees in Milton’s work a loss of this sharp focus: ‘Milton’s effort,’ he remarks, ‘in all that he tells us of his Inferno, is to make it indefinite; Dante’s, to make it definite’,48 and we might detect an

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even stronger echo when we find that one of Ruskin’s prized examples of Dantean fidelity to ‘fact’ is the passage from Canto III of the Inferno (ll.112–15) describing falling leaves which from The Spirit of Romance onwards is also one of Pound’s favourite touchstones. 49 Yet the grotesque comprises something more than the presentation of ‘pure fact’, as Ruskin makes clear in one of the most famous passages in Modern Painters: A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character. 50 In light of this formulation, Hulme’s critique of Ruskin seems even more misjudged, for the condition of the grotesque is actually more in tune with modernist poetics than Hulme’s own vague and impressionistic account of ‘A Poem’ in his ‘Notes on Language and Style’.51 Indeed, the importance of Ruskin’s grotesque as a prefiguring of modernist techniques was brilliantly grasped by Marshall McLuhan in a 1951 paper on ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’. McLuhan finds in the juxtapositional structure of the grotesque a model for the discontinuous perspectives which were to characterize modern writing from Rimbaud through to Joyce and Eliot. ‘Ruskin,’ he suggests, ‘saw in this kind of abrupt symbolic juxtaposition the means to great compression, and . . . the extreme of democratic inclusiveness of experience and taste.’52 Furthermore, says McLuhan, Ruskin’s formulation implies that ‘shift from exterior to interior landscape’ which was to be decisive for modernist poetics.53 As far as I know, McLuhan’s association of Ruskin with modernism has not been systematically developed, though the idea of the grotesque itself has received sophisticated analysis.54 McLuhan doesn’t refer to Pound in any detail in his essay, though it’s difficult to resist a comparison between Ruskin’s grotesque and the poetics of Imagism. In addition to their shared commitment to juxtaposition, we may note the emphasis on ‘concentration’ and the arrested moment in each formulation (Pound’s ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’55 ) and the idea of some attendant aesthetic ‘liberation’ (Pound’s ‘sense of freedom from time limits

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and space limits’, Ruskin’s ‘overleaping’ imagination and his celebration of ‘play’). The collocation of elements in the grotesque is ‘fearless’, not bound by external rules or constraints, and it is the product of a ‘haste’ which circumvents the procedures of ordinary discourse. 56 Pound, too, contrasts the ‘sudden crystalization [sic]’ possible in poetry with the ‘dray work’ of prose, 57 and he is fascinated from an early stage by myths of metamorphosis which teach that ‘things do not remain always the same. They become other things by swift and unanalysable process’.58 In similar vein, the imagist poem is conceived as an effort ‘to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective’.59 Yet perhaps most significant is Ruskin’s account of the grotesque as a structure in which the ‘gaps’ left between elements are as important as the elements themselves, since they demand an active role from the ‘beholder’ who has to work to solve the ‘perceptual riddle’ posed by the grotesque.60 Something is always lacking in the grotesque, something always remains in shadow, imperfectly present. This is, in Ruskin’s words, ‘Art arising from the confusion of the imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly grasp’;61 or, as Gary Wihl puts it, ‘The truth of the allegorical grotesque is not perfectly expressible. The disjoined character of the whole indicates the lack of perfect conceptualization. Yet no part is amiss.’62 On one level, this topos of inexpressibility recognizes ‘man’s inability to imagine the totality of the divine’,63 but the resulting sense of humility is an acknowledgement at once of human limitation and of human labour (hence Ruskin’s embrace of artistic imperfection, since ‘Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions’64 ). This is important, for Ruskin sees elliptical structure as inhibiting the selfreflexive movements which simply take the object as a mirror for the self, and at the same time he construes the ‘imperfect’ nature of the grotesque – its ‘allegorical rudeness’ 65 – as the sign of the very constructedness of the art object. As Wihl observes, ‘For Ruskin, sincerity is increasingly figured as allegory, as a writer’s or sculptor’s self-consciousness about the fictiveness, or erroneousness, of his idealizations. The allegorical gap that separates a sign from its meaning represents this self-consciousness.’ 66 It seems to me that there is a certain affinity, at the very least, between this ‘allegorical rudeness’ and the particular ‘coarseness’ Lewis seeks in modern fiction. While Lewis’s idea of art as ‘a

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mechanising of the natural’ 67 would be anathema to Ruskin, his commitment to ‘externality’ entails a repudiation of metaphor and sentimental identification that certainly recalls the Ruskinian grotesque. 68 Wihl neatly catches the distinction: Proust’s attempt to subsume, in Wordsworthian fashion, the rude, flat aspect of an allegorical figure within a metaphorical structure of phenomena and sensations goes directly against the Ruskinian attempt to preserve this very allegorical rudeness as a protection against the deceptions of the imagination. 69 In Lewis’s fictional world, of course, nothing is ‘natural’, and its particular grotesqueries, presided over by the savage ‘grimace’ of the artist-as-enemy, constantly reveal ‘life’ as a cultural construction. Just as the ‘gaps’ in the Ruskinian grotesque renounce ‘the possibility of an identity or identification’,70 celebrating instead the ‘rude’ externality of allegory, so the ‘savage’ satire of Lewis’s fiction tirelessly mocks any art which attempts to find a home for the metaphysical in the ‘fluid’ immediacy of existence.71 Lewis, we might say, reformulates the Ruskinian grotesque as a kind of disarticulation, retaining its sense of the fragmentary and ‘superficial’ while at the same time denying it the promise of any ultimate coherence. Pound’s handling of these ideas is significantly different. He, of course, is increasingly committed to a poetics of ‘gaps’ and traces, but primarily as an alternative means of articulation. Pound’s conception of the image and his related ideas of ‘form’ and ‘energy’ parallel Ruskin’s grotesque in their emphasis on what is not seen, though increasingly the space of ellipsis becomes one of cognitive process rather than, as for Ruskin, the sign of what the mind ‘cannot wholly grasp’. Pound’s thinking on this matter shifts from an early mysticism, through ideas about ‘form’ as something impalpable like the equations of mathematics, 72 and on to the ‘ideogrammic method’ of The Cantos. Pound shares Ruskin’s distrust of generalization,73 developing instead a poetics of fragmentary detail and allusion, ‘luminous details’, ‘ply over ply’, caught up together in what Ruskin calls ‘the haste of the imagination’. But where in Lewis’s version of the grotesque, things are pulled apart to reveal nothing ‘inside’, for Pound the ‘throwing together’ of elements ‘which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way’ ultimately yields, exactly as it did for Ruskin, a powerful sense of culture as an integrated, single organism. 74

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For this reason, Pound is perhaps at his most Ruskinian in Cantos 17 and 20, not only because (as Caterina Ricciardi has shown75 ) passages from The Stones of Venice seem to function as a kind of intertext here, but also because the motifs absorbed from Ruskin – the ‘marble foam’, the ‘marble foliage’, the ‘forest branches turned to marble’, the ‘drifting leaves of acanthus and vine’76 – define a ‘floating’ Venetian world in which detail and contiguity summon a totality in which the mind can move purposefully between literal and figurative, natural and artificial, visionary and historical.77 It is as if, with his ideogrammic method, Pound not only compresses Ruskinian effects (as Ricciardi notes, p. 243), but also applies the structural mode of the grotesque to his own writing. From this perspective, we might say that the real importance of Ruskin to the modernists lies in his conception of work; but ‘work’ less as the object of ideological or moral investment than as a sort of textual operation which makes reading an active process at the same time as it refuses to efface its own processes of construction in the name of ‘perfect conceptualization’. For both Pound and Lewis, Ruskin’s work may have seemed to lie beyond the purview of modernism, muffled by its historical remoteness, unappealing in its strenuous moralism, romantic, even unhinged, in its desire to turn back modernity’s clock. Somehow, though – and we have no way of explaining systematically these intricacies of transmission – Ruskin’s work left its impress on modernism, not just as a body of ideas, but as a formal imperative so deeply laid as to need a new generation to reinvent it.

Notes 1 The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 2: 38–9 (cited hereafer as Works). See also SueEllen Campbell, The Enemy Opposite: the Outlaw Criticism of Wyndham Lewis (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1988), pp. 185–6. 2 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Peter Owen, 1938), p. 27. 3 Wyndham Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts (London: Methuen & Co., 1954), p. 46. 4 The fullest discussion of Pound’s relation to Ruskin is Robert Casillo, ‘The Parallel Design in John Ruskin and Ezra Pound’, unpub. Ph.D. thesis, John Hopkins, 1978. See also Michael Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park, Penn: Pennylvania State University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 48–61, 68–72. Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 269 concludes that ‘Pound is reticent

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Ruskin and Modernism to the point of occlusion with respect to Ruskin, but the debt is large and undeniable’. Perhaps the most striking instance of Pound’s apparent failure to acknowledge Ruskin is, as Tanner (pp. 271–2) observes, his allusion to the signed column in San Zeno which had been noted and reproduced in The Stones of Venice. On this, see Hugh Witemeyer, ‘Ruskin and the signed capital in canto 45’, Paideuma, 4, 1 (1975), pp. 85–8. Ford Madox Ford, Memories, quoted in Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: a Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 56. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (1934), ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), p. 209: ‘Such names as (in England) Dickens, Darwin, Ruskin, Carlyle, are names that, more than those of statesmen and soldiers, personify an ethos.’ Lewis showed a keener interest in Matthew Arnold, whom he ranked above Carlye and Ruskin; see ‘Matthew Arnold’, in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature and Society 1914–1956, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), pp. 372–7. Ezra Pound, Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 209. For this reading, see, for example, Massimo Bacigalupo, ed., Ezra Pound: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1982), p. 70. Hugh Witemeyer in ‘ “Of Kings’ Treasuries”: Pound’s Allusion to Ruskin in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, Paideuma, 15, 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 23–31 argues the opposite view, that ‘the allusion to Ruskin aligns him with Pound’s positive values in the Mauberley sequence’. Pound clearly uses Ruskin’s name as a metonym for a remote past in Canto LXXXIX/615: ‘What he meant to us in those days’/said old Image (Selwyn) referring to Ruskin.’ Ezra Pound, ‘Art Notes’ (1918), in Harriet Zinnes, ed., Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (New York: New Directions, 1980), p. 76. On Ruskin’s insanity, see also Wyndham Lewis, ‘Matthew Arnold’, p. 377. Ezra Pound, ‘The City’ (1928), in William Cookson, ed., Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965 (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 194–5. Ezra Pound, ‘The Drama as a Means of Education’, Athenaeum, 94, no. 4694 (16 April 1920), p. 520. Ezra Pound, ‘Wyndham Lewis’ (1914) in Zinnes, ed., Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, p. 187. Ezra Pound, ‘Art Notes’ (1919), in ibid., pp. 122–3. Ezra Pound, ‘Exhibition at the Goupil Gallery’, Egoist, 1, 6 (16 March 1914), p. 109. Ezra Pound, Gaudier Brzeska: a Memoir (1916) (Hessle: The Marvell Press, 1960), p. 85. Cf. ibid., pp. 119–20: ‘Whistler was the only man working in England in the “Eighties” who would have known what we are at and would have backed us against the mob.’ Ezra Pound, ‘Music in Ca’Rezzonico’ (1937), in R. Murray Schafer, ed., Ezra Pound and Music: the Complete Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), p. 408. See Robert Casillo, ‘The Meaning of Venetian History in Ruskin and Pound’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 55, 3 (1986), pp. 235–60. See

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also the discussion in Caterina Ricciardi, EIKONEΣ : Ezra Pound e il Rinascimento (Naples: Liguori, 1991). See Robert Casillo, ‘The Parallel Design’, p. 10 and Coyle, Ezra Pound, pp. 48–51. Coyle, Ezra Pound, p. 43. Ezra Pound, ‘A Place for English Writers: Definition of “Usurer”’ (1938), quoted in Coyle, Ezra Pound, p. 43. Ezra Pound, Idee fondamentali: ‘Meridiano di Roma’ 1939–1943, ed. Caterina Ricciardi (Rome: Lucarini, 1991), p. 39 (my translation). Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927), ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), p. 5. Quoted in Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 119. Mao provides the fullest discussion to date of Lewis’s relation to Ruskin. Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love (1937) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 309 (further references will be given in the text). See the discussion of this rather complex sequence in Douglas Mao, Solid Objects, pp. 117–21. Mao observes that ‘Extracting from Woolf’s text a moral perfectly antithetical to her expressed point, which is that real women have borne distinctly small resemblance to literature’s queens, Lewis’s calculating misrepresentation does call attention to the fact that Woolf, like Ruskin, exhorts in part by affirming the value of women qua women in the teeth of their historical subordination . . .’. Wyndham Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts, p. 9. Ibid., p. 49. Andrew Brighton, ‘Post-War Establishment Distaste for Wyndham Lewis: Some Origins’, in Paul Edwards, ed., Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewis’s Painting and Writing (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996), p. 177. Ruskin, Works, 9: 145. Richard L. Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation: the Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti and Pater (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 118. Cf. Ruskin, Works, XI, 151: ‘. . . there are few grotesques so utterly playful as to be overcast with no shade of fearfulness, and few so fearful as absolutely to exclude all ideas of jest.’ On this double aspect of the grotesque, see also Maristella Trulli, I Volti del Grottesco (Bari: Palomar, 1997), pp. 84–7. Ruskin, Works, 10: 244. Ruskin, Works, 11: 136. Ruskin, Works, 11: 156. As Maristella Trulli, I Volti del Grottesco, p. 92, notes, Ruskin drew back from ‘chaotic’ forms of humour which posed a threat to human dignity. Lewis’s theory of satire might be regarded, then, as a deliberate lifting of the controls Ruskin sought to impose upon forms of ‘jest’. Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1982), p. 101. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art, p. 201. Ibid., pp. 202–3. Ibid., p. 201.

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39 Ibid., p. 97. For a discussion of this theme, see Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Sherry does not, however, consider Ruskin’s possible influence on this aspect of Lewis’s thought. 40 Wyndham Lewis, Tarr: the 1918 Version, ed. Paul O’Keeffe (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1990), pp. 299–300. 41 Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: the Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 24. See also Robert Casillo, ‘The Parallel Design’, p. 23, for the suggestion that both Pound and Ruskin ‘distrust introspection, and give a special value to unselfconscious activity in both art and life’. Jay Fellows, The Failing Distance: the Autobiographical Impulse in John Ruskin (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 69 discusses Ruskin’s anxiety about ‘self-contemplation’. Fellows also suggests (p. 34) that ‘For Ruskin, writing is like looking into a mirror that does not reflect his image.’ 42 On this aspect of Ruskin’s thought, see Patricia Ball, The Science of Aspects: the Changing Role of Fact in the Work of Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins (London: Athlone Press, 1971), pp. 48–102. 43 T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed., Herbert Read, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, 1936), p. 133. 44 Ruskin, Works, 5: 209. 45 Ruskin, Works, 5: 215. 46 Ruskin, Works, 5: 244. Cf. Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), pp. 43–4: ‘The sheer literary qualities in Homer are such that a physician has written a book to prove that Homer must have been an army doctor. . . . Odysseus is emphatically “the wise guy”, the downy, the hard-boiled Odysseus.’ Pound also promoted the work of Victor Bérard which ‘has more or less shown that the geography of the Odyssey is correct geography; not as you would find it if you had a geography book and a map, but as it would be in a “periplum”, that is, as a coasting sailor would find it.’ 47 Ruskin, Works, 5: 210, 211 (emphasis in original). 48 Ruskin, Works, 5: 206. 49 Ruskin, Works, 5: 206; Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (1910) (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 156. 50 Ruskin, Works, 5: 132. 51 T. E. Hulme, Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. 95 on ‘The accidental discovery of effect, not conscious intellectual endeavour for it.’ 52 Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’, English Institute Essays (1951), p. 173. See also McLuhan, ‘The Memory Theatre’, Encounter, 27, 3 (March 1967), pp. 61–6 on Ruskin’s attention to a ‘quality of abruptness and discontinuity in celebrating the advantages of Gothic art’. McLuhan observes that Rimbaud’s Illuminations are ‘structured on the Ruskinean principle of the grotesque as a multi-dimensional art of discontinuity’. 53 ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’, p. 174. 54 See, for example, Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, pp. 53–92. Casillo,

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in ‘The Parallel Design’, remarks in a footnote (p. 10) that the ‘discontinuous and allusive style’ of Fors Clavigera anticipates Pound’s ideogrammic method in The Cantos: ‘Both employ a grammar of images rather than a grammar of logic. They rely on emblematic and spatial organization rather than plot or linear exposition, and in many cases the connections between individual parts and images are suppressed or else left to the reader to discover. Their analogue in style is in Ruskin’s admired mediaeval art of the Fine Grotesque. . . .’ Alexandra K. Wettlaufer’s ‘Ruskin and Laforgue: Visual-Verbal Dialectics and the Poetics/Politics of Montage’, Comparative Literature Studies, 32, 4 (1995), 514–35 is as suggestive as its title sounds, but it does not consider the relation of montage to the grotesque. The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 4. Cf. Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, p. 67, on Ruskin’s fascination with ‘portability, self-containedness, smallness’ which offers ‘a type of short-cut to sublimity that could not have occurred in a pre-photographic era.’ See Ruskin, Works, 5: 133, on the conveyance of ‘truths which nothing else could convey . . . with a delightfulness . . . which no mere utterance of the symbolised truth would have possessed’. Unpublished letter to Isabel Pound (23 Feb. 1910), quoted in my Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 6. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, p. 431. Ezra Pound, Gaudier Brzeska, p. 89. Cf. Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, p. 52: ‘For as a conflation of the indeterminate with imagination . . . the aberrant tendency of the grotesque formulates both the moment of an object’s gradual metamorphosis before the eye and the accompanying “gaps” in understanding caused by its change of appearance and the object’s ability to fluctuate between two states of appearance.’ The phrase is taken from Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, p. 91. Cf. Ruskin, Works, 5: 133, on ‘the effort of the mind to unweave the riddle’ and ‘the sense it has of there being an infinite power and meaning in the thing seen, beyond all that is apparent therein . . .’. Ruskin, Works, 5: 130. Gary Wihl, Ruskin and the Rhetoric of Infallibility (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 89. Ibid., p. 106. Cf. Ruskin, Works, 9: 181: ‘Now, so far as the truth is seen by the imagination in its wholeness and quietness, the vision is sublime; but so far as it is narrowed and broken by the inconsistencies of the human capacity, it becomes grotesque; and it would seem to be rare that any very exalted truth should be impressed on the imagination without some grotesqueness. . . .’ Ruskin, Works, 10: 192. Gary Wihl, Ruskin and the Rhetoric of Infallibility, pp. 113–14. Ibid., p. 113. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art, p. 129. Cf. Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, p. 231: ‘that we are surface creatures, is the truth that Nietzsche has insisted on so widely. All the meaning of life is of a superficial sort, of course: there is no meaning

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Ruskin and Modernism except on the surface. . . . it is on a faculty for exteriorization that our life depends.’ Cf. John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 67: ‘It was surface, not structure, to which he [Ruskin] instinctively turned.’ Casillo, ‘The Parallel Design’, p. 111 notes of Pound and Ruskin that ‘Each admires sculptural work which is flat and sharply incised.’ Gary Wihl, Ruskin and the Rhetoric of Infallibility, pp. 113–14. Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2nd ed., p. 207: ‘Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.’ From a different perspective, Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, p. 92 discusses Ruskin’s gap as a ‘temporal disjunction’. For this aspect of Lewis’s work, see my Modernisms: a Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 268–73. See Ezra Pound, Gaudier Brzeska, pp. 91–2. See Ruskin, Works, 3: 37–8: ‘generalization, as the word is commonly understood, is the act of a vulgar, incapable, and unthinking mind. . . . The more we know, and the more we feel, the more we separate; we separate to obtain a more perfect unity.’ Cf. Pound, ‘A Study in French Poets’, Little Review, IV, 10 (Feb. 1918), p. 55: ‘There is in inferior minds a passion for unity, that is for a confusion and melting together of things which a good mind will want kept distinct.’ See Coyle, Ezra Pound, passim, for this aspect of Pound’s thinking. Caterina Ricciardi, EIKONEΣ : Ezra Pound e il Rinascimento (Naples: Liguori, 1991), pp. 227–67. See Ricciardi, EIKONE Σ , pp. 242–3; Ruskin, Works, 10: 82–3. Ricciardi, EIKONE Σ , p. 247 notes, for example, that in Canto 17 the architectural becomes vegetal, and vice versa in Canto 20. Donald Davie, The Poet as Sculptor (London: Routledge, 1965), p. 129, observes that ‘Where “marble” appears, or “stone”, it is a sign of resurgence and renewed hope’, and Tony Tanner, Venice Desired, p. 306, remarks that ‘the intimate conjunction of the organic with the inorganic or mineral is often radiantly positive in Pound’.

12 Laying the Ghost: D. H. Lawrence’s Fight with Ruskin Stefania Michelucci

1. Crushed lilies Factual information about Lawrence’s relationship with Ruskin is somewhat scanty;1 for instance, in the index of The Letters 2 the name of the Victorian writer appears only three times and the only evidence we have of Lawrence reading his works is provided by a passage in Jessie Chambers’ D. H. Lawrence: a Personal Record, where she relates that ‘he read Ruskin at this period [1908], and passed on Sesame and Lilies to my eldest brother’.3 But this does not necessarily mean that the author of The Stones of Venice is a minor influence on Lawrence. On the contrary, especially in the early writings, one senses his presence as a kind of ghost he fights with, and tries to exorcize, in order to get rid of a frame of mind which, by the time he was writing Sons and Lovers, he already felt to be a lethal threat to his intellectual emancipation. In Lawrence’s early works, Ruskin’s presence is clearly perceivable in descriptive passages – particularly in landscape descriptions – which combine quasi-scientific accuracy and an idyllic quality largely deriving from a Pre-Raphaelite influence, an influence which is betrayed particularly by an insistence on flower imagery. While on the one hand these passages reflect a profound and genuine love for Nature, which Lawrence romantically sees as the seat of the divine, on the other hand they also manifest a bent for aestheticism. But in the early stage of Lawrence’s artistic career, the idyll with Nature is disturbed by the writer’s awareness of the need to come to terms with the other side of Nature, the Darwinian one, with the jungle constantly threatening and encroaching upon the garden where his young characters seek shelter from the brutality 181

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of life. Thus, while cherishing the beauty of the natural world, Lawrence cannot deny the physical, biological side beneath it, which implies violence, filth and corruption.4 This is clearly seen, for example, in his use of the image of the peacock, whose feathers, celebrated by Ruskin as the embodiment of Nature’s glory, become for Lawrence a symbol of vanity and of inward corruption hidden behind the lure of surface beauty. It is not by chance that by the time he was writing The White Peacock (the book where he introduces this symbol), he ironically used the metaphor of the peacock to describe his idea of the ‘Ruskinite’ in his letter to Blanche Jennings (see note 7). The only work by Ruskin that he explicitly mentions is Sesame and Lilies in ‘Goose Fair’, one of his early short stories originally written by Louie Burrows in 1909, which Lawrence revised and then published in 1910. But it must be said that this reference is a significant one. In fact the book plays a central function in the story, in that it becomes almost the symbol of a world of romance the heroine is attached to and cherishes in her dreams, but which she has to leave behind in order to face reality. An idealistic young woman, after having discovered the moral squalor of her lover (who is suspected of having set a factory on fire to claim the insurance) and having realized the necessity of engaging with the dull world of material interests and social conflicts outside her room (the world of industrial England at a time of economic crisis), she takes him by the arm and courageously marches towards the flawed married life that awaits her. This awakening to reality is suggested, on the symbolic level, by what happens to Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, the book about education and the role of women in society that she is apparently reading at the beginning of the story, and which, at the end, is found crushed under the weight of her mother, who fainted on top of it on hearing of the arson attack; eventually ‘the flattened Ruskin [is taken] out of the chair’.5 Significantly enough, this story is Lawrence’s only one with a setting that can be called Ruskinian both because of the period in which it is set (about 1870, just a few years after the publication of Sesame and Lilies in 1865), and in view of the negative image it presents of the world of industry and economic processes in general, which appears to obey only the law of the savage market. It may be remarked, however, that the implicit attitude to Ruskin that emerges in it is rather ambiguous; while on the one hand the protagonist Lois clearly embodies Ruskin’s ideal of a ‘superior’ life, in which aesthetic values

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go hand in hand with ethical ones, on the other, these ideals are questioned by the development of the narrative, which suggests their inapplicability to real life. 6 Lawrence’s criticism becomes more explicit in the definition of ‘Ruskinite’ that Lawrence gives in his letters to Blanche Jennings, where he condemns what he calls not an individual but a collective widespread frame of mind based on intolerant self-righteousness. 7 From these letters, it emerges that the mature Lawrence clearly perceived the negative effects that a Ruskinian attitude to life had produced in the women who had most conditioned his inward growth, his mother and Jessie Chambers. These two women, although very different from one another, shared the Ruskinian aspiration to a ‘higher quality of life’ and saw intellectual accomplishments as an essential part of it. As a young man, Lawrence himself shared this aspiration, and in fact he never completely rid himself of a psychological dependence on ‘superior women’ (in a way also Frieda was one of them). But little by little, through an inward process which ultimately led to the radical rejection of the system of values he had absorbed from them, he came to associate Ruskin with the ‘mind’, the negative pole whose hypertrophy he saw as responsible for all the evils of modern life, to which he opposed the positive pole of the ‘soul’, the seat of the great natural energies in man, of instinctive, intuitional knowledge, of life itself. 8

2. Gothic verticality versus Norman horizontality Although Lawrence’s direct knowledge of Ruskin’s works was limited, he could absorb his influence indirectly through other sources which were part of the common cultural background of the lower middle class in the English Midlands at the beginning of the century, particularly the work of William Morris.9 Aside from the direct reference to Sesame and Lilies in ‘Goose Fair’, this influence is clearly perceivable in other works belonging to the period of the First World War. For example, in Sons and Lovers Walter Morel almost invariably gets drunk when coming back from his alienating work in the coal mines, but sings gaily when using his hands for creative purposes to make tools and other objects at home, thus illustrating Ruskin’s ideal of the happy craftsman. Another typical Ruskinian figure appears in The Rainbow. Will Brangwen, the male hero of the second generation, like his cousin Fred (a sensitive soul who longs to escape from the farm, aspiring to same vague form of transcendence) is

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imbued with a Ruskinian feeling of the spiritual élan pervading the stones of old churches.10 Far from approving of the kind of mystical escape from trivial material circumstances that Will Brangwen seeks in the gloom of Gothic cathedrals, Lawrence views it as a symptom of Will’s inability to integrate into the community he is part of, and as a sterile sublimation of sexual energies through an immersion in womb-like darkness.11 No doubt in this novel Lawrence’s position is akin to that of Will’s wife, Anna, who in refusing to share her husband’s adoration for Gothic churches (and the ideal of transcendence attached to them), sarcastically opposes to it the world of earthly life she lives in. Here the writer implicitly reintroduces the architectural metaphor he had used in Sons and Lovers, where Paul describes the relation between Miriam and himself in terms of Gothic verticality versus Norman horizontality. 12 Interestingly, the defeat of Will and the shattering of his mystic aspirations is the result of Anna’s attention to the gargoyles, the ugly little faces which sneer at the sanctity of the church, sarcastically hinting at the world outside it. If we consider that Ruskin praised these ‘ugly goblins, and formless monsters’ in The Stones of Venice, as the democratic mark of the Gothic, ‘the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who . . . struck the stone’ (10: 193–4), it becomes clear that Lawrence here is on the one hand mirroring the widespread misinterpretation of what he called the ‘Ruskin dogmas’,13 and on the other, inverting the meaning the Victorian attributed to gargoyles. In presenting them through Anna’s eyes, they become the expression of energies which are not flowing within the church but moving outside it. The inapplicability of dogma to real life, expressed by Will’s failure to transpose the perfect world of the inside of the church into the outer world of everyday life, is also echoed in the characterization of his daughter Ursula. Despite her name, given to her ‘because of the picture of the saint’,14 St Orsola, she gradually moves away from the church and all its symbols, which she sees as inadequate to face reality. Eventually this leads her to a complete rejection of the Christian morality of self-abnegation and denial.

3. Exorcising Ruskin and other ghosts Lawrence’s way of connecting ideas and intellectual issues to personal relationships and to all the psychological and emotional problems involved in them, also characterizes the way he makes

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use of Ruskin’s influence both in his life and in his work. As suggested above, both the writer’s father and his fictional projection, Walter Morel, embody Ruskin’s opposition between alienating work and fulfilling work. Similarly, his mother, like Gertrude Morel and the majority of female characters in his early works, embodies Ruskin’s conception of morality. Jessie Chambers, like Miriam in Sons and Lovers and Will Brangwen in The Rainbow, illustrates the ‘verticality’ of a Ruskinian religious attitude to life which Lawrence was increasingly inclined to account for in terms of Freudian psychopathology, that is, as a sublimation of the libido and/or as the unconscious manifestation of a desire for regression into a uterine world. It is not necessary to quote Harold Bloom to describe Ruskin’s influence on Lawrence in terms of ‘misreading’, but it must be emphasized that this ‘misreading’ was partly a consequence of the lack of direct knowledge of Ruskin’s texts. What Lawrence knew about his ideas mainly derived from their popularization in magazines and other books, especially those of William Morris, 15 and from anthologies used for school teaching.16 Paradoxically, however, this very lack of precise, detailed knowledge made Ruskin’s impact upon Lawrence’s sensibility and imagination stronger. It encouraged a process of psychological identification with the Victorian writer, which was, in turn, favoured by what was popularly known about Ruskin’s personality and life. For example, according to a widespread rumour,17 Ruskin’s morbid attachment to his mother and his consequent tendency to idealize women, depriving them of all physicality, had been the cause of the failure of his marriage. This Oedipal situation was similar to the one Lawrence had experienced in his adolescence and early youth with devastating intensity, and it is not surprising, therefore, to find reference to it in the famous letter to Edward Garnett written before the publication of Sons and Lovers, where Lawrence observes that the ‘book . . . is the tragedy of thousands of young men in England – it may even be Bunny’s tragedy. I think it was Ruskin’s, and men like him’.18 A further reference is found in chapter 10 of Fantasia of the Unconscious, significantly entitled ‘Parent Love’: ‘When Mrs Ruskin said that John Ruskin should have married his mother she spoke the truth. He was married to his mother’.19 What was the real tragedy of Ruskin, besides his being morbidly attached to his mother, besides idealizing his parents’ marriage and divorcing Effie Gray because his own was unconsummated? This tragedy was a curious, pathological one, closely related to the physicality of the female body, and

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Lawrence might have heard about it from friends. Effie Gray, in a letter to her father of 7 March 1854, had written that on the first night of her marriage to Ruskin, he was almost disgusted by her body and that he told her he did not expect women to be like that.20 The part of Effie’s body which upset him, like many of the people of his and Lawrence’s generation, was her pubic hair. 21 We have no firm evidence as to whether Lawrence suffered the same shock in the course of his own initiation, but his portrayal of Paul’s first sexual experience with Miriam in Sons and Lovers would encourage the supposition that he did. Curiously, his fight with Ruskin thus also involved overcoming similar sexual problems, which made it necessary, on the intellectual level, to shed the remnants of his Victorian education and to give form, with the philosophical support of Darwin and Nietzsche, to the vitalistic, pansexualistic gospel which informs his mature literary production. A work which is very interesting in this respect is John Thomas and Lady Jane, the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Lawrence, while still showing himself influenced by Ruskin’s ideas, carries on the fight with him on a multiplicity of levels. On one hand, like his predecessor, Lawrence denounces the destruction of England’s heritage by mechanized work, and on the other, he exposes Sir Clifford’s attempt to recreate in his home a degenerated Ruskinian lifestyle in which the role of the woman is still to ‘praise’ her husband, to be the ‘angel in the house’. Ruskin’s ghost also hovers over the scene in which Parkin, the gamekeeper, describes to Constance his horror at the sight of pubic hair on Bertha’s body, which had made him run away from her and had later had a taboo effect on him, preventing him from touching the female body. This taboo is triumphantly violated (and Ruskin’s ghost exorcized) in the final version of the novel, where Constance and the gamekeeper seem to have no problem with each other’s body, including the pubic hair. This liberation is ample proof of their conversion to the religion of Nature, and accentuates their contrast with Sir Clifford, the industrial manager who divides his energies between the economic exploitation of his mines and a collection of abstract paintings (sterile, over-intellectualized art for Lawrence) through which he tries to exorcize the ugliness of the world outside his property. Although Ruskin, of course, would have despised Clifford and his cult of the machine, and in his insistence on ‘faithfulness to nature’ was not at all appreciative of abstract art, the fundamental reasons why Lawrence rejected it were not entirely extraneous to his rejection

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of the ‘spiritual’ (that is, the ‘mental’) element which Ruskin saw as the essence of all great art. Lawrence’s struggle with Ruskin’s ghost was not only directed against the social reformer and preacher (of whom, however, he was the direct heir), but also against the art critic, whose basic aesthetic assumptions he refuted in the name of an art which expressed the primeval energies of nature.

4. The lily of Florence: a spiritual or earthly flower? This contrasting aesthetic attitude already emerges in the respective responses of Lawrence and Ruskin to the Italian landscape, and in the impact that Renaissance art, the city of Florence and the statue of David by Michelangelo had upon them. While, for example, when crossing the Alps, Ruskin celebrates the mountains, in accordance with the tradition of the ‘sublime’, as the place where man can most intensely feel the divine power in beholding the perfect forms shaped by God in nature, Lawrence is impressed by their awful silence and lifelessness and associates them with sterility and death. It is not by chance that in Women in Love, the inhuman Gerald finds his grave in the cold embrace of the mountain snow, and that in the novella The Captain’s Doll, Hannele’s romantic infatuation with the mountains is contemptuously attacked by the Captain, who explicitly declares his hatred for the glaciers because of their absence of life (‘I prefer the world where cabbages will grow on the soil. Nothing grows on glaciers’).22 It is difficult to establish whether Lawrence’s response to the Alps involves a deliberate attempt to deflate Ruskin’s celebration of them, but it would be hard to deny that Lawrence had Ruskin in mind when he entitled his first travel book Twilight in Italy. This sounds like an ironic paraphrase of Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence, thus anticipating the contrast between the content of the two works. While Ruskin celebrates Florence as one of the great centres of Christianity and European culture, and suggests with the word ‘mornings’ the idea of the blossoming of a new civilization which he proposes as a model for contemporary England, Lawrence sees the journey towards the South as an approach to a world where the decadence brought about by mechanization is already quickly spreading. Similarly, while Ruskin sees in early Christianity the great spiritual force which can bring new life to Europe, Lawrence, like Nietzsche, attributes to it the responsibility for the decadence of Europe. Lawrence considers Italy a country which is Christian only on the surface

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but pagan at its core; and it is to this pagan heritage that Italy owes its residual vitality and through which it can perhaps find its regeneration. In his view, the same is also true of other countries, and it is for this reason that he uses the word ‘mornings’ in another travel book, Mornings in Mexico, in relation to a country where, according to him, the re-emergence of the Aztec tradition constitutes the promise of a true rebirth, the restoration of a lost vitality. 23 Ruskin’s idea of the survival within Christian art in Tuscany of an indigenous ‘Greek’ tradition descending from the Etruscans, of Tuscany as the point where North and South meet, and where the pagan, pre-Christian heritage is creatively incorporated into the Christian tradition, is refuted by Lawrence, who is deeply convinced of the discontinuity between the Etruscan and the Christian world. He views Etruscan communities as places where life and art were the direct emanation of a pagan, earthly relationship with Nature. He therefore opposes their pagan serenity, their joyful acceptance of life, to Christian asceticism, and celebrates them as an alternative tradition, which he sees as a possible source of revitalization for mankind. Ruskin’s and Lawrence’s contrasting attitudes towards the Christian heritage are reflected, of course, also in their way of ‘reading’ Florence and its works of art. Whereas Ruskin celebrates the purity and the spiritual ardour that emanate from them, ‘of living Christian work, none so perfect as the Tower of Giotto’ (23: 413), Lawrence is struck by the proud, pagan virility that he captures in Giotto’s Campanile, in ‘the long slim neck of the Palazzo Vecchio up above’24 in Piazza della Signoria, and above all in the powerful, youthful form of Michelangelo’s David. Like Lawrence, for the protagonist of Aaron’s Rod, a self-educated man with a working-class background, his journey to Italy is an existential adventure, a source of intellectual and emotional experience, during which he apparently allows himself to be led by chance and impulse, rather than by the books he has read about it, although he ends up partly following the traditional route of the Grand Tour.25 Thus when he leaves Novara, he chooses to go to Milan to see the cathedral, but the city, too modern, too much like English ones for his taste, disappoints him, and he finds himself unable even to appreciate the Duomo. The second city he chooses, Florence, is even more of a fixed point on the traditional tourist itinerary, but the experience it induces in him is a powerful one. He sees Florence not only as one of the great European centres of

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civilization, but as a unique, essentially manly city, whose essence is expressed both by its bold, muscular architecture and by its works of art, above all by Michelangelo’s David, ‘the genius of Florence . . . representing the undaunted physical nature of the heavier Florentines’.26 This statue particularly attracted Lawrence, who, at the time he was writing Aaron’s Rod, wrote an entire essay on it, included in Phoenix, celebrating the pagan virility that emanates from it, a force which he perceives as the centre of aggregation of the Florentine community. Thus while Ruskin sees Florence as a city of the spirit, Lawrence sees it as a city of the body whose houses, monuments, paintings and statues reflect the impulse to glorify earthly beauty and man’s creative powers. Like his predecessor, he does not so much stress the importance of the individual geniuses who worked in it as that of the community of which the city is the expression, or rather that ‘spirit of place’ which he saw as the concrete result of an interaction between man and nature.27

5. Lawrence’s relationship to Ruskin: rejection and continuity Lawrence’s relationship to Ruskin seems to be a rather complex and contradictory one, in which surface contrasts mask an essential continuity, a common path leading from the one to the other. Lawrence’s social criticism, the vehement denunciation of industrial degradation, mechanical work and plutocracy which pervades all his works,28 clearly echoes Ruskin. Lawrence is even closer to him in his aesthetic attitudes, in his rejection of sheer formalism, and his search for the original, vital grain of artistic creation. Both writers turn to the past to find the source for renewal, although Ruskin, like most Romantics and post-Romantics, finds it in the Middle Ages, and Lawrence, like many of the Modernists, in primitive cultures. Both see art as the spontaneous, almost inevitable outcome of a world where man interacts harmoniously with the community and with nature, even if Ruskin regards all great art as springing from the irrational forces of the spirit, of which the individual genius is the direct emanation, while for Lawrence it derives from the perfect unity of mind and soul, from ‘blood-consciousness’. Even Lawrence’s idea of ‘the spirit of place’, as a force which moulds the life of a people, shaping their traditions and myths, and is, in turn, moulded by them, is ultimately rooted in Ruskin’s claim that

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the beauty of the work of art can only spring from a harmonious relationship between a community and the environment in which it lives.

Notes 1 There are only two essays which are focused on the relationship between Lawrence and Ruskin: one by George P. Landow, ‘Lawrence and Ruskin: the Sage as a Word-Painter’ in Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), D. H. Lawrence and Tradition (London: The Athlone Press, 1985), pp. 35–50, and the other by John H. Stroupe, ‘Ruskin, Lawrence, and Gothic Naturalism’, Ball State University Forum, 11: 2 (1970), 3–9. In most monographs and critical works on Lawrence, the name Ruskin rarely appears in the index, and when it does, it is generally in reference to Lawrence’s famous letter to Edward Garnett of 19 November 1912. Cf. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 477. See, for example, Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 89; Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 44. Anne Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), has a chapter on ‘Art and Technology: Victorian Predecessors’, pp. 130–9, where she focuses on a ‘triangle’ of influences, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris, pointing out their intertwining in Lawrence’s criticism of industrial England and of the mechanized world, in the use of language and imagery, and in his protest against the destructive effect machines have on human beings. Fernihough shows how some of Ruskin’s claims in ‘The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy’ reflect a sensibility and a way of thinking and writing Lawrence was very close to, although it is not the result of a direct influence. Richard L. Drain’s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1962, Formative Influences on the Work of D. H. Lawrence, takes into account some ideas of Ruskin and Carlyle which had become a central issue in Victorian culture and which were inherited by Lawrence, such as the ones about the celebration of organic society, the link between art and science, which in Lawrence manifests itself in his interest in flowers and in botany in general. New insights into the Ruskin/Lawrence relationship, with reference to the Cathedral chapter in The Rainbow emerge in Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), pp. 54–99. For Pinkney, The Rainbow, ‘yoking the “female Gothic” and the Gothic of Ruskin and Morris, effects an unprecedented textual fusion of two of the most powerful strands of British oppositional social and literary thought’ (p. 78). 2 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 7 vols, edited by James Boulton et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979–93). Ruskin is mentioned only in vol. I, pp. 54, 80, 477, and in a note in vol. II, p. 616. 3 Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: a Personal Record (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 72. 4 Lawrence’s close attention to Nature from a scientific point of view is

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clearly manifested in Ursula’s interest in botany in The Rainbow and Women in Love. ‘She [Ursula] was fascinated by the strange laws of the vegetable worlds. She had here a glimpse of something working entirely apart from the purpose of the human world’. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 404. D. H. Lawrence, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 138. It is worth noting that in another novel belonging to the same years in which Lawrence wrote ‘Goose Fair’, E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), a character belonging to the working class, Leonard Bast, in spite of his interest in literature and his admiration for Ruskin, whom he considers one of the masters of English prose, finds his language obsolete and his works too far from the ugly reality of industrial England. ‘The deep damnation of self-righteousness sticks tight to every creed, to every “ism” and every “ite”; but it lies thick all over the Ruskinite, like painted feathers on a skinny peacock.’ The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. I, p. 81. In connection to Lawrence’s idea of the ‘Ruskinite’, John Dixon Hunt, The Wider Sea: a Life of John Ruskin (London, Melbourne and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. 1982), p. 414, claims that Ruskin was ‘a complicated man, as various in idea, emotion and mood as the range of his writings suggests; this variety has often been obscured by the caricatures of him or his supposed followers’. One of these was D. H. Lawrence. In relation to the dichotomy mind/soul, Anne Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, p. 135, observes that ‘following medieval typology, Ruskin sees in the union of iron and air the union of body and soul, the integration which was to be so central to Lawrence’s philosophy. Just as, for Ruskin, the health of the environment depends upon the integration of iron and oxygen, so the health of the individual (inseparable from creativity in his/her work) is dependent upon an integration of body and soul, for “without mingling of heart-passion with hand-power, no art is possible”’. William Morris acknowledged a longstanding debt to Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’ by printing it at the Kelmscott Press (1892), and attaching an enthusiastic preface to it. ‘The influence of Ruskin had stimulated him [Will] to a pleasure in the mediaeval forms’; ‘Fred was sensitive and fond of reading, he pondered Ruskin and then the Agnostic writings’, D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, pp. 105, 224. Fred and Will Brangwen reflect Lawrence’s response to the twofold Ruskinian presence in the cultural background of the English Midlands: Ruskin as a social reformer and Ruskin as an art critic and central figure of the Gothic revival. On the ‘feminization’ of the Gothic and the prevalence of womb imagery in The Rainbow, see Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), pp. 245–62, and Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence, pp. 54–79. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 215. Lawrence’s interest in church architecture at this stage of his literary career and the direct

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Ruskin and Modernism reference to Ruskin in The Rainbow are, at least in part, the result of his discussions with Alfred Burrows, Louie Burrows’ father, who was the model for Will Brangwen in The Rainbow. Alfred Burrows was appointed – as Will in The Rainbow – Art and Handwork Instructor for the County of Nottingham. In her diary, Louie writes that Lawrence and her father used to discuss church architecture. Alfred Burrows, who was living with the family in Cossall in a cottage just opposite the church, spent most of his time there working at wood carvings and metal work; in exchange for his devotion, a glass window in the church was dedicated to him. The biographer John Worthen, who interviewed Louie Burrows’ sister, says that ‘everything he has seen of Alfred Burrows was clearly influenced by the medieval (not just the church screen, which had of course to be Gothic in style, to fit in with the rest of the architecture). One of the influences upon such medievalism was Ruskin.’ D. H. Lawrence, Manuscript of The Rainbow, in The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, p. 570. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 179. The most famous pictures are by Hans Memling, in Bruges, and Carpaccio in Venice; the latter impressed Ruskin so much that he recommended St Orsola as the patron saint of the Guild of St George. In a letter of 29 August 1911 to Louie Burrows, Lawrence mentions reading William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere and being quite fond of it. Cf. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. I, p. 298. Such as Samuel R. Gardiner’s Outline of English History (1881) and A Student’s History of England (1890). The reference to it appears in some of the letters of Effie Gray, Ruskin’s wife, and it is mentioned by Mary Lutyens in Effie in Venice (London: John Murray, 1965), pp. 20–1; Millais and the Ruskins (London: John Murray, 1967), pp. 154–7, and in The Ruskins and the Grays (London: John Murray, 1972), pp. 216–17. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. I, p. 477. D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 121. ‘For days John talked about this relation to me but avowed no intention of making me his Wife. He alleged various reasons, Hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year told me his true reason (and this to me is as villainous as all the rest), that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April.’ Mary Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, pp. 155–6. At Ruskin’s time most of the nudes were without hair and often set in a classic, idyllic or exotic setting; till the time a man had a relationship with a woman it was quite unlikely that he would have known about the existence of pubic hair. It was for the first time with the avant-garde (the Post-impressionist exhibition in London in 1910) that female nudes resembled real women who had taken off their clothes. As Mary Lutyens points out in Millais and the Ruskins (p. 156), ‘Ruskin suffered a traumatic shock on his wedding night when he discovered

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that Effie had pubic hair. Nothing had prepared him for this. He had never been to an art school and none of the pictures and statues on public exhibition at that time depicted female nudes with hair anywhere on their bodies. Ruskin’s later love for little girls may well have stemmed from his disgust with this aspect of puberty’. See also Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: the Early Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 117–20. D. H. Lawrence, The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 144. Lawrence was rather pleased with this title: ‘I think Mornings in Mexico is a good title’. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 580. It was in existence from the first writing of the first four essays in December 1924. Cf. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, pp. 185–6. The original manuscripts appeared in Lawrence’s notebook with the titles: ‘Mornings in Mexico, Friday Morning’; ‘Mornings in Mexico, Saturday Morning’; ‘Mornings in Mexico, Sunday Morning’; ‘Mornings in Mexico, Monday Morning’. Cf. E. W. Tedlock Jr, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts: a Descriptive Bibliography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1948), p. 184. D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 211. A similar situation characterizes the female protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, in A Room with a View by E. M. Forster: initially at a loss in Santa Croce, where she is unable to identify the work of art celebrated by Ruskin, she gradually discovers, under the guidance of chance, following her instincts and feelings, the hidden, powerful side of Florence. D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, pp. 211–12. This insistence on concreteness, this refusal both of spiritualism and of vague romanticism is part of Lawrence’s fight with Ruskin: a fight which also led to a contrasting appreciation of the English tradition of landscape painting; see, for example, his criticism of Turner’s ‘haziness’, which, in opposition to Ruskin, who praised Turner’s ‘faithfulness to Nature’, Lawrence tended to see as an escape from the real world into a world of transcendence where ‘he [Turner] sought, and he found, perfect marriage in the spirit’. D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 86. ‘Bread should be free, / shelter should be free, / fire should be free / to all and anybody, all and anybody, all over the world’. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Money-Madness’, Pansies (London: Martin Secker, 1929), p. 79.

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13 Architecture as Commentary: Ruskin’s Pre-modern Architectural Thought and its Influence on Modern Architecture Giovanni Leoni

Ruskin as a pioneer of modern architecture Evaluating Ruskin’s influence on contemporary architecture1 is a complex matter since the history of his legacy is fraught with contradiction. On the one hand, Ruskin’s architectural thought has enjoyed considerable ‘official’ success, but at the expense of its fundamental content. Furthermore there exists an authentic but secret legacy, a little explored terrain whose power and range we are only beginning to glimpse now that the century is drawing to a close and the concept of the modern is becoming clearer. Thus Ruskin’s fundamental influence on twentieth-century architectural thought may be said to be in conflict with the most commonly held views of Ruskin as architectural theorist. It would certainly be worthwhile to sketch a history of the misunderstandings that mark the ‘official’ but unfaithful success of Ruskin’s ideas in the field of architecture. Such an account would begin with Ruskin still alive. In the preface to the third edition (1874) of The Stones of Venice he writes: No book of mine has had so much influence on contemporary art as the Stones of Venice; but this influence has been possessed only by the third part of it, the remaining two thirds having been resolutely ignored by the British public. And as a physician would, in most cases, rather hear that his patient had thrown all his medicine out of the window, than that he had sent word to his apothecary to leave out two of its three ingredients, so I 194

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would rather, for my own part, that no architects had ever condescended to adopt one of the views suggested in this book, than that any should have made partial use of it which has mottled our manufactory chimneys with black and red brick, dignified our banks and drapers’ shops with Venetian tracery, and pinched our parish churches into dark and slippery arrangements for the advertisement of cheap coloured glass and pantiles. 2 One should note that this remarkable text has had an unfortunate fate in Italy, where it has too often been translated in an abridged form only and frequently reduced to a kind of guide-book. However, one should not assume that Ruskin is aware only of the negative results unintentionally brought about by his investigations in Venice. He is also well aware of the positive outcomes his architectural theory has, or might have, had and offers precise references in his work to the wealth of yet uncharted ideas and theories. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette dated 16 March 1872, Ruskin replies to a review of Charles Lock Eastlake’s essay 3 on the Gothic Revival. Eastlake regards Ruskin’s immediate influence on architecture as disastrous while his indirect influence he sees as praiseworthy, a view which now seems far from mistaken. Ruskin in his letter denounces the unsought and unintended effects of his architectural theories: I have had indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa builder between this [Denmark Hill] and Bromley . . . And one of my principal notions for leaving my present house is that it is surrounded everywhere by accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making.4 But in the same letter, he declares himself proud of, for example, his influence on George Edmund Street.5 What links Street to Ruskin, and also to Pugin 6 and a whole school of English architects in the second half of the nineteenth century, is not the revival of a style but rather the search for a ‘substantial manner’, or for a form of architecture that was natural, appropriate, correct and functional. By venturing beyond the limits imposed by the choice of Gothic, this search leads to the definition of principles that are more general and not historically fixed. Indeed, Ruskin’s own first ‘master’ in architecture, J. C. Loudon (1783–1843),7 had himself attempted to define a ‘substantial manner’

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and specifically architectural ‘fitness’, visually illustrated in his Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture (1833).8 Loudon here reproduces a number of model cottages, and in the subsequent chapters continues by redesigning them in a variety of different styles. The styles and architectural languages become mere masks concealing a common architectural substance. The search for a ‘substantial manner’ found in the so-called ‘domestic revival’ promoted by architects such as Shaw, Webb and Voysey is certainly one of the seminal episodes in the late nineteenthcentury move towards anti-historicism and, through Muthesius,9 underlies the German work that forms the basis of the Modern Movement. I shall attempt to examine the idiosyncratic way in which Ruskin pursues the search for an architectural substance totally independent of style. The account of the search for a ‘substantial manner’ and the move towards anti-historicism which underlies Modernism prompts one to note another important episode in the history of misreading Ruskin’s architectural thought. One need only examine Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design, from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), 10 an essay which, as is well established, played a decisive role in defining the Modern Movement. It seems to me that, viewed from our present conceptual understanding of Modernism, Pevsner’s essay may be read as a brilliant piece of critical mystification. He presents innovative architectural work of the period between Morris and Gropius as a single ‘historical unit’ and thus traces the origins of the Modern Movement back to the theories of Morris. A more detached reading shows that Pevsner’s real critical intention is to show how the Modern Movement was born once Morris dissociated himself from Ruskin’s theories and thereby freed himself from nineteenth-century historicism. It is not continuity, therefore, but discontinuity which Pevsner demonstrates, in his desire to liberate the Modernist tradition from origins perceived as being too regressive. It is now evident to us how much Pevsner himself owed to Ruskin’s thinking, and how redolent the very language of his essay is of Ruskin’s style. 11 It should also be remembered that through Bruno Zevi and Leonardo Benevolo Pevsner’s ideas were a formative influence on Italian historians too, which resulted in Ruskin’s thought being confined to the theory of restoration. In order to understand the true extent of Ruskin’s influence on twentieth-century architecture, we have to invert Pevsner’s theory

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and move beyond the assumption that for the architects of this century Ruskin’s positive legacy and true influence derive from his anti-modern – or, more precisely, pre-modern – outlook. Ruskin’s medievalism, which I would prefer to define as his ‘investigations into the Medieval’, is both a lucid analysis of the crisis of form in the modern age and of the crisis of architecture as the structuring of a formal system. Ruskin’s fundamental architectural insight may be defined by the following general rubric: a concern with form and representation is no longer to be held the central and defining act of architecture. When Ruskin formulated his theory, this idea was devoid of currency and anti-modern. No one approached the twentieth century convinced that the problem of architectural language could be solved by reviving a historical idiom and re-embracing its rules with faith and conviction. Yet the Modern Movement has itself neither resolved nor disposed of the problematic search for an architectural style. All the best-known anti-classical theories have been nothing other than attempts to define a modern style. Take for instance the influential critical ‘invention’ of the International Style by Philip Johnson and Henry Russel Hitchcock, or in Italy Bruno Zevi’s essay on the ‘modern language of architecture’.12 Until the close of the nineteenth century, however, architecture had been grounded in a figurative culture capable of inventing fully realized forms. Once this figurative culture began, under the pressure of the avant-garde, to act as a negative influence, ceasing to propose forms and beginning rather to deny, destroy and dismantle form, architecture attempted to follow suit, but in doing so encountered difficulties which this particular discipline was perhaps incapable of overcoming. Although painting and literature were able to place the crisis of form at the very heart of their concerns, this was not possible for architecture. Architecture does not permit the same degree of expressive freedom as the other arts. It does not allow the total deconstruction of its own language and forms, since structurally it is positive and constructive. This elementary fact should force one to reconsider and possibly re-evaluate the influence exerted on architecture by the founding avant-garde movements. Architecture is constitutionally incapable of taking over the whole pars destruens of these movements, since it merely accepts the formal solutions as its own language. Deconstructivism, the most recent neo-avant-garde fashion, is the extreme and paradoxical outcome of everything discussed so far.

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Gehry or Hadid require complex and expensive constructive methods to simulate an atectonic approach which in reality is supremely figurative.13 Ruskin’s insight, originally devoid of currency and now so widely accepted as contemporaneous, regards precisely the need to forgo representation and figurative invention as the central and defining act of architecture. This refusal is based on a lucid analysis of the full realization of form, a problem architecture has still to solve. Briefly Ruskin’s position is as follows: with the great Renaissance artists, form reached perfection, hence its fullest possible realization; and the achievement of wholeness and perfection has granted form an independent existence, dissociated from that of the object represented. On close examination this is not so different from Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Foucault speaks of elision of the subject: ‘representation can present itself as pure representation’.14 For Ruskin the attainment of full representation, and its autonomy too, is something we have to accept and which leaves us only two possibilities. The first is to continue to imitate the perfect forms of Renaissance art, doing away with all opportunities for invention. The second consists in renouncing all ‘will to form’ so as to revive the idea of formal invention as commentary. In other words, this second opportunity consists in the attempt to recover a subject or concrete term of reference by attributing a purely instrumental function to representation. This is one of the central themes of Modern Painters, in a sense its main theoretical tenet. In Modern Painters, Ruskin sets out a theory of landscape painting as commentary on the book of nature. The theory is clearly argued with respect to painting, in so far as this is a form of expression which does not extend beyond representation. It is easy enough to say that a painting has a subject, that the painting represents that subject and that, in so far as it does so, it constitutes only one of the many possible forms of commentary on the subject. The representation nevertheless remains a duplicate of the subject. Of course, in the figurative arts too, the inversion of the relation between representation and subject proposed by Ruskin leads to unforeseen results. Not only does it not amount to pictorial naturalism, it also permits Ruskin to be the first to understand and explain Turner’s shift towards a more abstract art, one of the sources of twentiethcentury abstraction. Ruskin’s theory becomes more complex once applied to architecture, since architecture is a complex practice which cannot at all

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be reduced to mere representation. One might consider architecture to be threefold in nature. First it has a verbal dimension. Architecture is a group of languages linked to a series of decisions that accompany the realization of the project: the expression of a desire to construct, the communication of that desire, the fixing of limits and functional aims and the definition of economic and productive aspects. But in addition there is an aspect to architectural design which proceeds discursively or verbally rather than visually, through images. Secondly, there is a gestural dimension: the actions performed first in realizing and then in using the architecture. Lastly, there is also the need to give figurative form, or forms, to the rational and gestural element in architecture; hence the need to represent the architecture, which also entails the invention of a form endowed with its own autonomy. Of course, these three dimensions are not linked by logical or chronological succession, and they also need to be reconditioned, for the total number of participants: client, architect, builder and user, all of whom have their own words, gestures and representational needs. This complexity, which is the frame within which Ruskin habitually views architecture, accentuates the problem of the full realization of form and the autonomy of representation. The prevalence of representation in painting constitutes a simple inversion of means and end. Yet painting nevertheless only exists in representation. On the other hand, architecture that only exists in representation and has no life beyond representation is not architecture. Indeed it would be more accurate to maintain that architecture only exists outside of representation and that representation is thus a purely instrumental factor in architectural existence. The problem is defining this mode of architectural existence beyond representation. Quaroni uses the expression ‘form of life’, as opposed to ‘life of form’;15 and perhaps it might be defined as architectural experience. Ruskin’s aim to rediscover the object thus repeatedly faces the difficulty of definition, or even naming the architectural object which representation must endow with form. In the modern period, all reflection on the crisis of form and architectural language presupposed a twofold problem: the conviction that there must be an architectural ‘substance’ as opposed to the forms in which it is expressed, or by which it is covered and hidden. The crisis of the language of form seems to have made room for (or seems capable of making room for) an ‘architectonic’ rather than ‘artistic’ ‘fact’, one not related to

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‘beauty’ or communal values; indeed ‘not’ many different things, according to the situation and the formulas adopted. But a positive definition of this architectural subject proves to be extremely difficult, precisely since it is a subject which is outside the ‘world of forms’ and so insusceptible of description by means of the representational modes characteristic to that world. For this reason it is also impervious to the language of historians and critics.

Venice: ‘the commandment written on the heart of the thing’ It is no accident that once Ruskin had clarified his project of inverting the relation of subject and representation in the first two volumes of Modern Painters he put aside the study of painting for ten years and devoted himself mainly to architecture. Furthermore, it is equally no accident that Venice should have been the scene of his reflections,16 since many architectural historians had returned to the city to reflect upon the problems under consideration here. I am of course thinking of Wittkower’s essay on San Francesco della Vigna, which provided the model for a certain interpretation of Renaissance architecture, and I am also referring to the ‘revision’ of this historiographical model by Manfredo Tafuri.17 Having left the magic circle of painting and having understood the need to tackle the problem within the sphere of architecture, Ruskin views Venice as the place in which he may best complete his ‘project’ and reflect on the problem of the Foundation and the Law. For Ruskin, Venice is the city of the Foundation and Law above all because he sees it as a compendium of all western architecture. The reader will now begin to understand something of the importance of the study of the edifices of a city which concludes, within the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between the three pre-eminent architectures of the world: – each architecture expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.18 This passage contains an important first clue. Ruskin’s Venice is not a single unequivocal whole. He sees it as an intricate text, containing elements that contradict and correct one another, but none the less a Text.

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Venice becomes a Text and not a sum of differences, due to the city’s ability to metabolize differences or to absorb and thus appropriate to itself foreign languages. they [the Venetians] were exiles from ancient and beautiful cities, and had been accustomed to build with their ruins, not less in affection than in admiration: they had thus not only grown familiar with the practice of inserting older fragments in modern buildings, but they owed to the practice a great part of the splendour of their city, and whatever charm of association might aid its change from a Refuge into a Home. 19 There are two features of the city as described by Ruskin which need to be explored before we can continue our discussion of the problem in hand. The first feature is the way that both the past and the present are typically unified in Venetian history. The city inhabits a triple time, a coexistence of past, present and future which corresponds to the dynamic of the real prophecy in St Paul and Augustine and which is so important in Ruskin’s thinking on art20 (as in that of the Middle Ages). This triple dimension transforms Venetian time into an eternal time, in that it is a time composed of all possible times. But Ruskin does not simply discuss a new construct comprised of elements from the past. He refers to a new construct which possesses the ‘charm of association’ with the past. He also refers to a practice of building ‘in admiration’, and above all ‘in affection’. The practice of bulding ‘in affection’ clearly subverts the authority of the ancient and is precisely what allows the city to harbour a multiplicity of images. Each new image and fragment, Ruskin writes, becomes a means to the ‘change from a Refuge into a Home’. The presence of many different images does not change Venice’s substance or obscure its identity. On the contrary, it reinforces that identity. But in the context of the terms I have applied this means achieving the inversion of the relation between representation and object which defines Ruskin’s aim. Let us concentrate on the issue of representation for a moment. The most interesting way of entering Ruskin’s Venice, a city freed as it were from representation, is to explore Ruskin’s understanding and explication of the Venice painted by Turner, a city either correctly recorded, down even to the technical detail of its fishing boats, or else transfigured in a mist of blues and greys, but

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which never loses its identity and substance even when modified in representation. 21 In an architectural context, what does it mean for representation to be a commentary upon an object – Venice – while remaining true to itself and not being betrayed by any form of representation? Above all, it means acceptance of linguistic diversity and even transgression. Ruskin does not see Venice either as a harmonious whole free of all contradictions, or as a fullness of word and language; but as a form of truth which resolves without abolishing conflict. Referring to biblical exegesis, he defines this as ‘polygonal truth’. Law and Foundation do not reside in the language but in the object of which the language speaks. Thus transgression of the rule is not only permitted but is a necessary element of respect for the Law. Only a diversity of architectural languages can make visible the truth of which all, in their different and contrasting ways, speak. Modern Painters and Stones of Venice both contain some beautiful passages on this coexistence of Law and transgression. But here the most important proposition is the separation between the expressive component and an order or law intrinsic to architecture, what Ruskin very effectively defines as ‘The commandment . . . written on the heart of the thing’: 22 It is not, therefore, possible to make expressional character any fair criterion of excellence in buildings, until we can fully place ourselves in the position of those to whom their expression was originally addressed, and until we are certain that we understand every symbol, and are capable of being touched by every association . . . I shall continually endeavour to put the reader into such sympathetic temper, when I ask for his judgment of a building . . . But . . . I can neither force the reader to feel this architectural rhetoric, nor compel him to confess that the rhetoric is powerful, if it have produced no impression on his own mind. 23 It is precisely on the basis of this distinction between the engaging but inessential expressive element in architecture, on the one hand, and a non-linguistic substance, on the other, that Ruskin erects his criticism of Renaissance architecture. The architecture of Venice clearly reveals as it counters what Ruskin views as the ‘evil’ of the Renaissance. And let us remember that when Ruskin analyzes the Renaissance he is also analysing the modern age:

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It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only, that effectual blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance. Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else. This, therefore, will be the final purpose of the following essay. 24 As I have already emphasized, the ‘evil’ of the Renaissance is the result of perfection and the full realization of form, and the consequent separation of form and life: over the whole of Italy a style arose, generally known as Cinquecento, which in sculpture and painting, as I just stated, produced the noblest masters whom the world ever saw, headed by Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Leonardo; but which failed of doing the same in architecture, because, as we have seen above, perfection is therein not possible.25 The changes effected in form, however, were the least part of the evil principles of the Renaissance. As I have just said, its main mistake, in its early stages, was the unwholesome demand for perfection, at any cost.26 to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.27 In architecture perfection is impossible since architecture cannot be entirely reduced to representation; for it has a substance, concreteness and life independent of representational form. Hence Ruskin’s examination of the stones of Venice, his constant drawing and describing them, leading him to harbour desires such as that expressed in a famous letter to his father: ‘I should like to draw all St Mark’s . . . stone by stone, to eat it all up into mind, touch by touch.’28 The Law is not in the representation, not in the manifold and contradictory tale told of the Law. For Ruskin the Law is in the stones, or substance; it is in architecture as a concrete fact, a thing created by the work of man. This work alone constitutes the Foundation, however it may be represented. ‘The commandment is written on the heart of the thing.’ Ruskin’s investigations into the Medieval yield this thoroughly ‘modern’ insight: we need to free ourselves from the dominion of representation and return to ‘the thing’. In the visual arts Ruskin’s line of thought has gained the upper hand. It is no accident that

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his theory of painting prefigures many elements and preoccupations of twentieth-century art, such as the rediscovery of the Italian ‘Primitives’, intimations of what would come to be called the ‘psychology of form’, and an early awareness that the representation of reality would have to go one of two ways, either towards hyper-realism or towards abstraction. And all of these insights tend to undermine the dominion of representation and fully realized form. But in the field of architecture the same set of ideas has remained a dead letter. Indeed, twentieth-century architecture continues to be dominated by an interest in fully realized form, or we might say by the mournful struggle to prolong the fulfilment of form – in fact, by form’s death throes.

The stones of architecture: Ruskin, Tafuri and Frampton In addressing the contemporaneity of Ruskin’s idea that architecture should be founded anew not on language but on its material substance, I shall briefly examine recent writings by two of the most important critics of the Modern: Manfredo Tafuri and Kenneth Frampton. Tafuri’s Ricerca del Rinascimento29 may rightly be defined one of the most lucid critiques of the Modern which the present century has produced. One is struck (especially in the passages on Venice) by its extraordinary affinities with the Ruskinian ideas set out above. Using Panofsky’s analysis of the tricipitum, or three ages of man as represented in the famous painting by Titian, Tafuri himself attempts to define a special Venetian ‘time’, one which, as in Ruskin’s symbolical mode of thought, is a coexistence of past, present and future. In Tafuri’s account this triple time is at the basis of Venice’s peculiar idea of tradition and special capacity to absorb alien languages while remaining true to its own origins. This is not so different from Ruskin’s idea of a ‘change from a Refuge into a Home’. Tafuri writes that: ‘Venice’s enduring truth to its origins, is guaranteed through prudence. This also supplies her with the measure of “good government” and establishes criteria of judgement permitting the “resistance” of tradition within the new, which is experienced in a cosmic time, one without breaks.’30 In Tafuri’s account also, Venice appears a fitting place in which to take the criticism of Roman Renaissance architecture to its logical extreme, showing how that criticism also contains all the elements of a profound critique of Modernity (see specifically his essay on Sansovino’s Case Moro31 ).

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Sansovino, an exponent of the Roman style, had earlier been at the centre of the San Francesco della Vigna episode precisely because he was a ‘specialist’ in different architectural languages. In the Case Moro he renounces his specific linguistic identity and, following the Venetian consuetudo, erects a thoroughly ‘anonymous’ building. Here is a style or language which is no longer pure representation but, as Tafuri says, ‘a language of existence’. ‘It is to myth of everyday experience that Sansovino “abandons himself” in the Case Moro. He silences the pride of the innovator by paying homage to him. By accommodating ratio, he dissolves it into a form of craft.’32 Sansovino is prepared to speak an anonymous and therefore mystical language. Granted, Tafuri shows that Sansovino’s choice is entirely consonant with Humanist logic and that his encounter with life is an encounter with the ‘greatest of all myths’. It is also undeniable that from a metaphysical point of view there is a radical difference between the consuetudo in which Sansovino immerses himself and the Law Ruskin detects in every stone of Venice, in that the former is the product of a human community while the second is a sign of Divinity. But if it is true that both consuetudo and Law foreground the ‘stones of Venice’ and encourage immersion in life and resistance to the dominion of representation, and that both lead to the same dissolution of ratio into the skill of the craftsman, then is the difference only a metaphysical one? Tafuri’s analysis of the concept of sprezzatura is undeniably close to the Ruskinian (or if one prefers medieval) idea of ‘polygonal truth’, or of a linguistic transgression of the Law from within the Law. Tafuri defines sprezzatura as ‘linguistic innovation, infringement, habit, metaphor and dissonance’, ‘a bold and sophisticated balance between a concern with the Foundation and experimentalism.’ Yet what is the Foundation that allows a balance between rule and transgression? Where does the freedom to transgress without destroying a rule come from if not from a rediscovered or retained conception of Foundation, even if secularized? Is sprezzatura not the recovery of a linguistic Foundation one of whose rules is the possibility of breaking rules, but with the important proviso that language is not thereby dissolved into absolute otherness? What is this secular Foundation? Is it not that ‘substance’ of architecture, that ‘thingly’ mode of architectural existence we are variously trying to name? Is it not in the ‘thing’, in the stones themselves that Ruskin searches for his Law? Is it possible to restore body and visibility

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to an architectural ‘substance’ that is more than mere form? Can we hope to rediscover a ‘language of existence’, a language which shall not be pure representation but once again closely involved in the content of architectural experience, a language that speaks of the ‘thingness’ of architecture? Tafuri ends his essay with a sentence which provides us with a important clue as to how we may today radically rethink our idea of the Modern: The unfoundedness we detected behind Alberti’s words is linked to Sansovino’s self-immersion in the language of existence conceived as alternative to the artificial tradition which those same passages sanction. This complexio oppositorum will mean little to those who think such readings go beyond the demonstrable. In my own view it places a question mark over that rootlessness which our historical condition demands we take into account, but without prejudging the results.33 I believe that in this new journey ‘beyond the demonstrable’ – beyond the dominion of the classical language of architecture – Ruskin’s thought may prove central. Further proof of this comes from Kenneth Frampton’s most recent book, Studies in Tectonic Culture. 34 Frampton too reconsiders the whole history of modern architecture within the framework of the problem posed by Ruskin: the overcoming of the dominion of representation. Without wishing to deny the volumetric character of architectural form, this study seeks to mediate and enrich the priority given to space by a reconsideration of the constructional and structural modes by which, of necessity, it has to be achieved . . . Inasmuch as the tectonic amounts to a poetics of construction it is art, but in this respect the artistic dimension is neither figurative nor abstract . . . One may also add that building, unlike fine art, is as much an everyday experience as it is a representation and that the built is a thing rather than a sign.35 Frampton’s book does not mention Ruskin once, but the reader who is familiar with Ruskin’s thought as a whole, and with his thinking on architecture in particular, cannot help but see how the ‘Copernican revolution’ Frampton advocates merely revives certain

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topics excluded from Modernity for the same reasons that Ruskin himself has been excluded. First and foremost among these is the recovery of a cosmological dimension for architecture, the recovery of the earth–body–cosmos triad. This is a fundamental Ruskinian theme, one taken up by a disciple of his in another important ‘underground’ text of the Modern, Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth.36 Mies van der Rohe’s ‘almost nothing’, understood as the search for a trans-historical, so eternal, form, freed from the historicity of language; Kahn’s concern with ‘archetypal, universal forms’ understood as ‘ultimate morphemes of building culture without which one cannot create anything’, a concern which grants Kahn’s architecture an equally trans-historical evocative force, ‘modern without being utopian and referential without being eclectic’;37 Utzton’s architecture without an architect, both organic and geometric, local and universal; Scarpa’s interest in ‘thingness’, and ‘nearness to things’, an archaic ability to disclose the thing itself, due to a ‘gestural impulse passing almost without a break from the act of drafting to the act of making’38 – all these themes are found in Ruskin’s thought, and in many instances it would be possible to trace a direct line linking Ruskin and the ideas discussed by Frampton. But the most important thing is that Frampton’s book is both a historical study and also the work of a militant critic aiming to give expression to the numerous and increasingly visible architectural modes based on a refusal of the prevalence of representation. Frampton wishes to spare architecture the fate of the visual arts, given that, owing to its nature as a positive act, architecture cannot abstain from ‘giving form’ to things, and cannot admit a negative solution to this problem. He in turn seeks to lend a voice to those looking for a different form of expressiveness in architecture, based on its specific character. In the face of this new wish on the part of architects at the close of this century to reconnect with the archaic and pre-modern dimensions of the discipline, our task is now that of retracing Modernity’s path of development and bringing to light the many hidden ways in which Ruskin’s thought has exerted its influence. His premises may conflict with the language of modern architecture, but they have considerable affinity with a tectonic culture and poetics of construction which remain our one hope today that the discipline of architecture may survive.

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Notes 1 There is a long line of studies concerning the relationship between Ruskin’s thought and contemporary and later architecture. The following at least deserve mention, in so far as they are entirely dedicated to this subject: K. O. Garrigan, Ruskin on Architecture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973); J. Unrau, Looking at Architecture with Ruskin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978); M. W. Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (London: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987); M. Swenarton, Artisans and Architects: the Ruskinian Tradition in Architectural Thought (New York: St. Martins, 1989); M. Wheeler & N. Whiteley, eds, The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993). A useful general outline is the chapter dedicated to Ruskin in N. Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Further references may be found in R. B. Harmon, The Impact of John Ruskin on Architecture: a Selected Bibliography (Monticello, Ill.: Vance Bibliographies, 1982). For Ruskin’s links with the so-called ‘Gothic Revival’ see K. Clark, The Gothic Revival (1928), republished by Penguin Books for the first time in 1962; N. Pevsner, Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc: Englishness and Frenchness in the Appreciation of Gothic Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969); G. L. Hersey, High Victorian Gothic: a Study in Associationism (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); E. Blau, Ruskinian Gothic: the Architecture of Deane and Woodward. 1845–1861 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and C. H. Herford, ‘Ruskin and the Gothic Revival’, in Quarterly Review, 206 (1907), pp. 77–96. Among the bibliographies in Italian see L. C. Forti, John Ruskin, un profeta per l’architettura (Genova: Compagnia dei librai, 1983) and G. Leoni, ‘Il pensiero e l’opera di John Ruskin’, in J. Ruskin, Opere, ed. G. Leoni (Roma & Bari: Laterza, 1997), pp. 1–140. 2 The Works of John Ruskin, eds E. T. Cook & A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904–13), IX, p. 11. 3 C. L. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (1872), republished by American Life Foundation, New York, 1975. 4 Works, X, p. 459. 5 For Street’s work see H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, George Edmund Street (London: Ecclesiological Society, 1983) and D. B. Brownless, The Law Courts: the Architecture of G. E. Street (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). 6 The standard work on Pugin is still P. Stanton, Pugin (London & New York: Thames and Hudson, 1971). For a more concise account see N. Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers, pp. 103–22. 7 As is well known, Ruskin began his career as an architectural theorist with the essay The Poetry of Architecture (1837–8), published under the pseudonym ‘Kata Phusin’ in the Architectural Magazine edited by Loudon. 8 See J. Gloag, Mr Loudon’s England: the Life and Works of John Claudius Loudon, and his Influence on Architecture and Furniture Design (Newcastleupon-Tyne: Oriel Press, 1970). 9 I am of course thinking of the book which was the result of Muthesius’ researches in England in the course of a long period in which he worked

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11

12

13

14 15 16

17

18 19 20

21

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there as a cultural attaché, Das Englische Haus, 3 vols (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1904–5). An English translation exists of part of this work, The English House, ed. and with an intro. by D. Sharp (New York: Rizzoli, 1979). First entitled Pioneers of the Modern Movement (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), it was republished in 1949 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, while in 1960 a revised and enlarged edition, since reprinted many times, was issued by Penguin Books. It was Pevsner himself, writing less as a militant critic than as a historian, who in Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century restored the continuities earlier denied in this essay. See P. Johnson & H. R. Hitchcock, The International Style: Architecture since 1922, recently republished (New York & London: Norton & Co., 1997) and B. Zevi, The Modern Language of Architecture (New York: Da Capo, 1994). The subject is naturally much more complex than my deliberately provocative reference suggests. The work of F. Gehry in particular needs to be analysed less as that of an ‘avant-garde academician’ than as a sometimes extremely sophisticated investigation of the relation between the creation of the model and actual construction. See the recently published catalogue of Gehry’s works by F. Dal Co, K. W. Forster, H. Soutter Arnold: Frank O. Gehry: Tutte le opere (Milano: Electa, 1998). M. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), ch. 1. Ludovico Quaroni, Progettare un edificio: otto lezioni di architettura, ed. G. Esposito Quaroni (Roma: Gangemi Editore, 1993), p. 124. The following deserve singling out from the vast critical bibliography on the subject of Ruskin and Venice: R. Hewison, Ruskin and Venice (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978); J. Clegg, Ruskin and Venice (London: Junction Books, 1981) and J. Unrau, Ruskin and St Mark’s (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984). R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism ([1949] London: Academy Editions, 1997). The following at least among Tafuri’s works deserve special mention: A. Foscari & M. Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti: La chiesa di S. Francesco della Vigna nella Venezia del ‘500 (Torino: Einaudi, 1983); M. Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento (Torino: Einaudi, 1985 (English edn, Venice and the Renaissance, trans. J. Levine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990)). Works, IX, 38. Works, X, 96–7. See Herbert L. Sussman, Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979). On Turner and Venice see L. Stainton, Turner’s Venice (London: British Museum, 1985) and M. L. Evans, Impressions of Venice from Turner to Monet (Cardiff: Cardiff National Museum of Wales in association with Lund Humphries, 1992). Works, IX, p. 306. Works, IX, pp. 61–2. Works, IX, p. 47. Works, XI, p. 15.

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26 Works, XI, p. 17. 27 Works, X, pp. 203–4. 28 E. T. Cook, The Life and Works of John Ruskin (London: Methuen, 1983), I, p. 263. 29 M. Tafuri, Ricerca del Rinascimento: Principi, città, architetti (Torino: Einaudi, 1992). 30 Ibid., pp. 18–23. 31 Ibid., ch. 7. 32 Ibid., p. 345. 33 Ibid., p. 346. 34 K. Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: the Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 35 Ibid., p. 2. 36 W. R. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (London: Percival & Co., 1892). 37 Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, pp. 217–18. 38 Ibid., p. 307.

Index abstraction 18, 19, 21, 24–25, 26, 26–27, 31n Acland, Henry Wentworth 35, 54, 128 Action Française, L’ 139 aesthetics xiv–xv, 76, 99, 110; ‘aesthetic criticism’ (Pater) 61–62; aestheticism/Aesthetic Movement xv, 52, 148 Aldington, Richard 156 allegory 77, 78, 173, 174, 180n Allen, George 54 Alps: reactions to 103, 104, 187 Altichero fresco 2–3 anthropology 32, 40, 45n, 46n Apollinaire, Guillaume xii, 135 Apollo 36, 37, 42, 46n Aratra Pentelici (Ruskin) 121 architecture: Byzantine 142–145, 152n; in cities 140–141; cosmological dimension 207; embodies memory 144–145; Lawrence and 184, 191–192n; modernism to improve xv–xvi; return to classical order 136, 137–140; Ruskin’s influence on xi, 194–210; ‘substantial manner’ in 195–196; Venetian 23, 200– 207; ‘vital imitation’ in 146–147; see also Gothic architecture; incrustation; modernist architecture; ornamentation Argan, Giulio Carlo 80n Ariadne Florentina (Ruskin) 121 Arnold, Matthew 49, 52, 55, 57, 63, 176n; criticism 51, 61; influence on Eliot 140 Arrowsmith, William 151n, 153n, 157, 163 art: classicist revival 134–137; ‘ends’ of 59, 62; galleries: purpose of 9–10; history of xi, 52, 196; influence of money on

1–3, 7–8, 9, 14; and science 190n art criticism 2–3, 51, 53; formalist 142, 153n; Henry James and 83–86; Pater on 60–61 ‘Art Treasures’ exhibit, Manchester 9, 14 arts and crafts movement xi; see also Morris, William Asher, Kenneth 133 Athena 37–38, 40 Attridge, Derek 111, 122–123 Austin, J. L. 126 autobiographical writing 69, 79–80n, 97–109, 128–129 Babbitt, Irving 139, 140 Balzac, Honoré de 84, 85, 94n Bauhaus Manifesto 137 Bell, Clive 136, 142–143, 150n, 153n Benda, Julien 152n Benevolo, Leonardo 196 Bérard, Victor 178n Bible 101, 116, 123 Birch, Dinah 52, 64n, 77, 98 Bissière, Roger 149n, 150n Bloom, Harold xii, 74, 185 Bloomsbury Group 142, 144, 150n Boccioni, Umberto xiv Bomberg, David 136 book trade: discount system 54, 65n botany 33, 190–191n Botticelli 64n Bourdieu, Pierre 82 Bradley, F. H. 157 Braque, Georges 138, 149n Brighton, Andrew 170 broken syntax 123, 127 Browning, Robert 52 Burckhardt, Jacob Christopher 52 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward 10

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Index

Burrows, Alfred 192n Burrows, Louie 182 Bush, Ronald 133–134 Butler, Christopher xiii Butler, Marilyn 34 Byron, George Gordon, 6th baron 34, 104 Byzantine art and architecture 142–145, 152n ‘Byzantinism’ 142 Cambridge classicist school of anthropology 40, 46n Cambridge criticism xii–xiv, 112 Carroll, Lewis 125 Carlyle, Thomas 69, 74, 117, 190n; portraits of 11, 13 Carpaccio, Vittore 192n Carrà, Carlo 135 Carter, Huntley 151n Case Moro, Venice 204–205 Casillo, Robert 165–166, 178–179n, 180n catch phrases 123, 125 Cavalli Monuments, Milan 1–3, 5 Cestus of Aglaia, The (Ruskin) 41–42 Cézanne, Paul xiv, 142–144, 153n Chace, William M. 133, 148n Chambers, Jessie 181, 183, 185 Chatterton, Thomas 76–77 Christianity: in Italy 187–188; in relation to myth 33–34, 35, 37 churches: architecture of 191–192n; demolition in London 140–141, 152n Cianci, Giovanni 157 Cinquecento style 203 Cis-Alpine Gothic 23 city architecture: Eliot despairs 140–141; Venetian 200–207 Clark, Sir Kenneth 50–51, 98, 106 classicism: architecture returns to 136, 137–140; rappel à l’ordre revives 134–137, 142, 143, 148n, 149n Clegg, Jeanne 92 coinage of new words 123, 125, 126 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 74

Collingwood, W. G. 64n colour xiv, 19, 29n ‘community’ concept 139, 151n, 189–190 comparative mythology 33–34, 35–36, 38 Conrad, Joseph 98, 99, 100 conservativism 139, 149n Cook, E. T. 144 Cornford, Francis 46n Coyle, Michael 155, 168 Crane, Stephen 98 Crawford Place, London 162–163 criticism see art criticism; literary criticism cross-referencing 123, 126–127 crystal forms 21–22, 23, 29n, 30n Cubism 136, 149n culture/cultivation 57 Dada 12 Dante Alighieri 171–172 Darwin, Charles 181, 186 Davie, Donald 180n De Chirico, Giorgio 135–136 deconstructivism 197–198 Demeter 42, 43–44 Derain, André 138, 153n diachrony 118–119 Diana 36 Dickens, Charles 67, 68–69, 70, 71 ‘domestic revival’ in architecture 196 Dougherty, Charles 111, 112 Drain, Richard L. 190n du Maurier, George 52, 64n Dupuis, Charles 33 Eastlake, Charles Lock 195 economics: and art 1–3, 7–8, 9, 14; language of 114–115; see also political economy Egyptians, ancient: mythology 37, 40, 42 Einheitskunstwerk 137 Eliot, George 52 Eliot, T. S. xv, 110, 133–164; ‘Burbank with a Baedeker’ 158–159; ‘A Cooking Egg’

Index 159–161; Four Quartets 162; ‘London Letter’ 140–141, 152n; ‘Lune de Miel’ 143–144, 148, 157–158, 159; as modernist writer 100, 126, 137, 147–148; ‘mythical method’ of Ulysses 32, 38, 76; social concerns 161–162; and tradition 133, 136–137, 146, 148n; ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 134, 136, 138, 139, 150n; Victorian lectures 156–157; The Waste Land 39–40, 42, 44, 45, 141, 152n Ellis, Steve 162 Ellmann, Richard 160 empathy 18, 19, 21, 26, 29n, 31n Esprit Nouveau, L’ 136, 149n Etchells, Frederick 140 Ethics of the Dust, The (Ruskin) 124–125 ethnography 32 Etruscan heritage 188 etymology 116–120 experience: memory processes 99; Pater advocates 59, 60 Expressionism xi Farnell, Lewis R. 51–52 Feininger, Lyonel 137 Fellows, Jay 178n Ferguson, J. 35, 45n Fernihough, Anne 190n, 191n fiction 67–81; authenticity and 76–77; categories of 68, 75, 76–77; and myth 74–79 Fiction, Fair and Foul (Ruskin) 68–72, 76 Finley, C. Stephen 79–80n Florence, Italy 187, 188–189, 193n flower myths 40–41, 42, 43 Ford, Ford Madox xii, 98, 99, 100, 108n, 151n, 166 formalism 112, 142, 189, 153n Fors Clavigera (Ruskin): influence 111–112; language of 121, 122, 126, 179n; mythography in 33, 79; on sympathy 29n; on Whistler’s art 8, 9

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Forster, E. M.: A Room With a View 68, 193n; Howard’s End 191n Fortnightly Review 53, 59, 64n, 65–66n Foucault, Michel 198 Frampton, Kenneth 204, 206–207 Frankl, Paul 27n Frazer, Sir James 32 Fry, Roger 142, 152n, 153n, 154n, 169 Frye, Northrop 74, 76 Futurism xv, xviin, 13 gaps: reading of 105–107, 129, 173, 174, 179n gargoyles 184 Garnett, Edward 185, 190n Gauguin, Paul 142 Gautier, Théophile 137, 150n Gehry, Frank O. 198, 209n geology 98 geometrical in art and nature 21–22, 23, 144 George, St 127 Gibbon, Edward 123 Gibbs, Margaret (Ann Hunt) 13–14 Giotto di Bondone 2, 188 Gombrich, Ernst xi, 21, 29n Gothic architecture 23, 25, 28n, 142, 184, 195; ornamentation in 20; Scott’s enthusiasm for 70, 72, 73 Gothic style 17–31; as antithesis to modernism 72–74; in fiction 73–74; Gothic Revival 4–5, 72–74, 195; grotesque 170–174; and language 17–18; in Lawrence 190n; naturalism in relation to 18–20, 24–25, 26–27, 31n; Pater enemy of 49; Scott’s fiction protected against 69; see also Gothic architecture; ‘romance revival’ Grande Chartreuse, La (Ruskin) 128, 129 Gray, Euphemia (Effie) see Ruskin, Euphemia Greece, ancient: art of 52, 59–60,

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Greece – continued 64n; myths and religion 34–35, 37, 40–41, 42–44, 74, 188; origins of drama 46n Gris, Juan 135, 138, 153n Gropius, Walter xi, 137, 196 Grosvenor Gallery, London 8, 9, 10, 11 grotesque xv, 170–174, 178n, 179n Guild of St George 9, 79, 192n Guild Socialists 168 Harrison, Frederic 122 Harrison, Jane 46n H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) 43, 45 Helsinger, E. K. 113, 121 Hercules 78 history/historicism xv, 80n; architecture bears witness to 144–145, 201; in art criticism 2–3; history of art xi, 52, 196; history of language 23–25, 116; in nature 23–25, 30n Hitchcock, Henry Russel 197 Holloway, John 113 Homer 38, 39, 67, 68, 171, 178n homosexuality: Ruskin on 59–60 Hulme, T. E. xiv, 133, 139, 143, 144, 171, 172 humour 170, 177n Hunt, John Dixon 191n hyacinth: myth of 42–43 Imagism xiv, 172–173, 174, 179n Impressionism xi, 103–105, 107–108; literary 97–98 ‘incrustation’ concept 2, 5, 15n, 154n Inman, Billie 60 ‘innocent eye’ doctrine xi inorganic laws see organic and inorganic laws International Style in architecture 197 Italy: Christianity in 187–188; see also Florence; Milan; Ravenna; Renaissance; Rome; Tuscany; Venice

James, Henry: accepts modernity 90–94; art criticism 83–86; The Aspern Papers 159; early connections with Ruskin 82–96; as literary Impressionist 98, 105–106; Travelling Companions 89–90, 92; travels 87–90; on Whistler libel trial 85–86 Jennings, Blanche 182–3 ‘jest’ 170, 177n Johnson, Philip 197 Jowett, Benjamin 55 Joy for Ever, A (Ruskin) 115 Joyce, James 53, 58, 99, 110, 120, 126, 148, 157; Portrait of the Artist 98, 111–112; Ulysses 32, 38–39, 45, 76 Kahn, Louis 207 Kandinsky, Wassily xiv, 167 Keats, John 34 Kings’ Treasuries, The (Ruskin) 118 Klee, Paul 24, 27 ‘Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen’ 28n La Touche, Rose 40, 48, 106, 129, 159 labour: Ruskin values 56–57 Landow, George P. 77, 103, 113 landscape painting 193n, 198 language: of Gothic style 17–18; history of 23–25, 116; of modernity xiv, 110–132; and myth 36–37, 46n; Ruskin and 113–129; and sympathy 29n; see also philology Laude, Jean 149n Lawrence, D. H. 181–193; Aaron’s Rod 188–189; and architecture 184, 191–192n; ‘Goose Fair’ 182–183; and Italy 187–188; John Thomas and Lady Jane 186; Mornings in Mexico 188, 193n; The Rainbow 183–184, 185, 190n, 191–192n; ‘Ruskinite’ term xii, 182, 183, 191n; Sons and Lovers 183, 184, 185, 186; Women in Love 187, 191n

Index Le Corbusier xi, 136 Lecercle, J. J. 111 Lectures on Art (Ruskin) 48, 49, 50–51, 57, 58, 62 Lentricchia, Frank 151n Lethaby, William Richard 207 Levey, Michael 50 Lewis, Wyndham 100, 134, 136; on architecture xv–xvi, 140; in relation to Ruskin 165, 168–171, 173–175, 179–180n; theory of satire 170, 177n Lhote, André 149n, 150n Lindsay, Sir Coutts 8, 9, 10 linguistics 116–117; see also language; philology literary criticism xii–xiv, 112; mythographical 74–75; see also fiction literary Impressionism 97–98 literature see fiction; literary criticism; modernist literature; poetry ‘Living Architecture’ (Ruskin’s concept of ) 28–29n ‘London Letter’ (T. S. Eliot) 140–141, 152n Loos, Adolph xi Loudon, John Claudius 195–196 Lutyens, Mary 192–193n McLuhan, Marshall 172, 178n Macpherson, James 76–77 McQueen, John Rainier 65n Mallock, W. H. 52, 64n Man, Paul de 180n Mann, Thomas: Ruskin anticipates 6, 15n Mao, Douglas 177n Margolis, John 138 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso xv, 13 materialism 63 Maurras, Charles 133, 138, 139, 149n medievalism 197, 203 Memling, Hans 192n memory: architecture embodies 144–145; paradoxical nature of 98–99; Turner’s 11–12, 15–16n

215

Merrill, Linda 15n, 16n métier: use of term 137, 150n Michelangelo: statue of David 187, 188–189 Michelet, Jules 52 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 207 Milan, Italy 1–3, 5, 188 Mill, John Stuart 125 Millais, Sir John Everett 13–14 Milton, John 171; Lycidas 42, 118 Modern Painters (Ruskin) 4, 11–12, 16n, 53, 165; on grotesque 172; on landscape painting 198; language of 114, 130–131n; Pater reads 49; on religion 34–35; on Scott 70; on style 58, 65n; on sympathy 29n; on Venetian architecture 200–201, 202; on ‘vital beauty’ 21 modernism: genealogy of 73–74; language of 110–132; mediation from Realism 107–108; see also modernist architecture; modernist literature modernist architecture xii–xiii, xv–xvi, 194–200, 204–205 modernist art xi; see also Cézanne; Cubism; Lewis; Vorticism; Whistler modernist literature xi–xiv; and myth 38–45; Ruskin’s style and influence on xi–xiv, xvi, 110–115, 121–123; tradition in 134, 149n; see also Eliot; fiction; Lawrence; Lewis; poetry; Pound; Woolf money: influence on art 1–3, 7–8, 9, 14 Mornings in Florence (Ruskin) 187 Morris, William xi, 52, 64n, 183, 185, 190n, 191n; origins of modernism in 196; Pater on 50, 59, 63 Müller, Carl Otfried 35, 45n Müller, (Friedrich) Max 35, 36, 45n, 46n, 116, 117 Munera Pulveris (Ruskin) 44, 119, 120 Murray, Gilbert 46n

216

Index

Muthesius, Herman xi, 196, 208–209n myth xv, 32–47; comparative mythology 33–34, 35–36, 38; fiction and 68, 74–79; in modernist literature 38–45; mythical femininity 40–44; philological theory of 36–37, 46n, 117; reinterpretations 33, 38–45, 74 ‘mythical method’ (Eliot on Joyce) 32, 38, 76 naturalism 18–20, 24–25, 26–27, 31n Nature: in art 20–21; in D. H. Lawrence 181–182, 190–191n; history in 23–25, 30n; in myth 36, 37; Romantic interpretation of 34, 36, 74, 102–103; Ruskin seeks faith in 36, 44 Nature of Gothic, The (Ruskin) 17, 19, 25, 126, 191n Neith (Egyptian goddess) 40 neologisms 123, 125, 126 New Criticism see Cambridge criticism ‘New Gothic’ art 170–171 Newman, John Henry 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich 186, 187 Niobe 41, 42, 47n Norton, Charles Eliot 35, 67, 83, 87–88, 95n nostalgia 23, 71–72 Nouvelle Revue Française, La 135, 149n novel see fiction Opinion, L’ 149n Orage, A. R. 168 organic and inorganic laws 22–25, 26–27, 180n, 190n, 191n ornamentation 18, 20, 21, 25, 28n, 29n, 30n, 167 Orsola, St 184 Ortega y Gasset, José 11 Ossian 76–77 Oxford University: Slade professorship 48, 50, 54–55, 57 Ozenfant, Amédée 136

paganism 33–34, 68, 188, 189 Panofsky, Erwin 204 Pater, Walter 48–66, 74, 98, 156, 167; advocates experience 59, 60; ‘aesthetic criticism’ 61–62; background 53–54, 55–56, 65n; Fortnightly Review essays 59, 64n, 65–66n, 68; Marius the Epicurean 55, 65n; Ruskin’s influence on 48–53; sexuality 50, 56; Studies 49, 51–52, 55, 58, 60–61; ‘Style’ essay 58, 65–66n ‘pathetic fallacy’ critique xiii, 102, 171 Patience (opera) 52 Payne Knight, Richard 33, 35 Peacock, Thomas Love 34 peacock imagery 182 pedagogy 58 Persephone see Proserpina Pevsner, Nikolaus xi, 196–197, 209n philology 36–37, 46n, 113, 116–120, 117 Picasso, Pablo xiv, 135 Pinkney, Tony 190n poetry: modernist 137, 172–173, 179n; see also Eliot; Pound political economy: and art 7–8, 57; Ruskin’s use of language for 114–115; Ruskin’s views on 48, 55, 57, 83–84, 161, 168, 169 Post-Impressionism 142, 143–144 postmodernism 107 Pound, Ezra xii, 100, 126, 137, 142, 145, 154n; Cantos 148, 155–156, 174–175, 179n, 180n; Imagist writing xiv, 172–173, 174, 179n; on modern architecture xv, 140, 166–167; in relation to Ruskin 165–168, 171–175, 176n, 178n, 180n practical criticism see Cambridge criticism Praeterita (Ruskin) 67, 97–98, 99, 103–107; reading gaps in 105–107, 129; on Ruskin’s reading 100–102, 107–108, 123; visual impressions 103–105; Virginia Woolf on 128–129

Index Pre-Raphaelites 52, 64n, 166, 182 ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ (Ruskin) 11, 15–16n, 49, 56 Proserpina 40–41, 42, 43–44 Proserpina (Ruskin) 33, 40–41 Proust, Marcel 30n, 98, 99, 100, 128, 154n, 174 Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore 52 Punch 52, 64n Purism 136, 149n Quaroni, Ludovico 199 Queen of the Air, The (Ruskin) 33, 37–38, 40, 77, 78, 119, 120 rappel à l’ordre 134–140, 142, 148, 149n, 152n, 153n Ravenna 142–143, 157 ‘reactionary desire’ 72, 74, 77 Read, Herbert 144, 169 reading: of architecture 147; as formative experience 100–102, 107–108, 123–124; gaps 105–107, 129, 173, 174, 179n Realism 107 Reed, Christopher 154n ‘Relation of Art to Morals’ (Ruskin) 57, 59–60 religion: in Italy 187–188; in relation to myth 33–34, 35, 37 Renaissance art and architecture: critique of xiv, 202–203, 204–205; form in 198; Lawrence admires 187; Pater’s Studies 49–50, 65n; in Venice 6, 198, 202–203 representation in art and architecture 198–200, 201–202, 203–204, 205, 206 ‘revival’: use of term 80n Ricciardi, Caterina 175, 180n Richards, I. A. xiii Richardson, Mary 13, 14 Riegl, Alois 18, 23 Rimbaud, Arthur 178n Robertson, Fiona 69 ‘romance’: use of term 76, 77–78 ‘romance revival’ 73–74, 76–77

217

Romanticism 33–34, 36, 68, 74, 189, 193n; ‘romance revival’ 73–74, 76–77 Rome: Henry James in 89, 90, 92 Rosemberg, Léonce 136 Rosenberg, John D. 15n, 145 Rowley, Thomas (Thomas Chatterton) 76–77 Ruskin, Euphemia (Effie, née Gray) 48, 106, 129, 160, 185–186, 192–193n Ruskin, John: autobiographical writing 69, 79–80n, 97–98, 99; Christian faith 34–35, 48, 53, 116; family background and wealth 53–55; marriage 6, 48, 106, 129, 160, 185–186, 192–193n; mental instability 11, 48; pricing of published work 54, 65n; public debates 48; range of influence 83; relationship with Rose La Touche 40, 48, 106, 129, 159; reputation xi–xii, 110–111, 155; Slade professorship 48, 50, 54–55, 57; works see individual titles Ruskin, John James 7, 8, 67, 101 Ruskin, Margaret 101, 123, 185 Ruskinism xii, 156 ‘Ruskinite’ term (Lawrence) xii, 182, 183, 191n St Anastasia church, Verona 1–2 St Mark’s Cathedral, Venice 5–6, 203 St Mark’s Rest (Ruskin) 168 San Zeno Maggiore, Verona 142, 157, 163n, 176n Sansovino, Jacopo 204–206 Sant’ Apollinare basilica, Classe 142, 143, 157 satire: Lewis’ theory of 170, 177n Saussure, Ferdinand de 117 Sawyer, P. 117 Scarpa, Carlo 207 Schuchard, Ronald 133, 135, 148n Schwarz, Daniel S. 153n science: and art 190n; and myth 34; Ruskin and 36, 63

218

Index

Scott, Peter Dale 134 Scott, Sir Walter 67, 68–73, 74, 75–76, 101; defines ‘romance’ 77; love of Gothic architecture 70, 72, 73 Segre, Cesare 111 Sesame and Lilies (Ruskin) 116, 121, 181, 182, 183 Seven Lamps of Architecture, The (Ruskin) 53, 54, 114; architecture as witness to history 145; crystal forms 22, 30n; ornamentation 29n; on ‘vital imitation’ 146 Severini, Gino 135 Severn, Joan 101 Shakespeare, William: The Winter’s Tale 40–41, 43 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 34 ‘significant emotion’ (Eliot) 150n ‘significant form’ (Bell) 142, 150n, 153n Slade professorship at Oxford 48, 50, 54–55, 57 Social Credit system 169 sprezzatura concept 205 Stein, Richard 75, 170 stone 21, 29n Stones of Venice, The (Ruskin) xv, 1–2, 3–8, 29n, 53, 54, 168, 202; Byzantine revival influenced by 142, 144; Dickens allusions 68; on gargoyles 184; on Gothic 72; on his influence on architecture 194–195; literalism of title 3–4; mythical reading 75; Pater reads 49, 53; Pound influenced by 175; on St Mark’s 5–6, 12 Strachey, Lytton 160 stream-of-consciousness technique 128–129 Street, George Edmund 195 structure in art 20, 28–29n ‘substantial manner’ in architecture 195–196, 205–206 suffragette movement 13–14 Sullivan, Louis xi Swinburne, Algernon Charles 51, 52, 66n, 166 Symbolism xviin Symonds, J. A. 52

sympathy in art 20–22, 29n syntax, broken 123, 127 Tafuri, Manfredo 200, 204–206 Tanner, Tony 154n, 176n, 180n Tickner, Lisa 14 time: and Impressionism 97–98; Venetian 201, 204 titles of works 3–4, 121 tradition 133–154; in architecture 137–140; dyanamic nature of 146–148; in modernist literature 134, 149n; rappel à l’ordre 134–140, 142, 148, 149n, 152n, 153n travel writing 54 Trench, Archbishop Richard 116–117 Trulli, Maristella 177n Turner, J. M. W. 4, 6–8, 103, 193n, 198, 201–202; memory 11–12, 15–16n Tuscany, Italy: art of 188 Two Boyhoods (Ruskin) 127–128 Tylor, Alfred 45n Tylor, Edward Burnett 35, 45n Tyndall, John 84 Tyrwhitt, Richard St John 36 Unrau, John 29n Unto This Last (Ruskin) 114, 115, 130–131n, 158 Ursula, St (St Orsola) 184 Utzton, Jorn 207 Valéry, Paul 139 Vallier, Dora 31n Valori Plastici (journal) 135–136 Velázquez, Diego 13, 198 Velde, Henry van de xi Venice, Italy: architecture of 23, 200–207; decay in 4–5, 6–7, 75; Eliot and 134, 157, 158–159; Henry James in 87–88, 92; Ruskin dates fall of 160; Ruskin on see Stones of Venice, The; Venetian time 201, 204 vischiosità 111 ‘vital beauty’ 20–21 ‘vital imitation’ 146–148

Index Vlaminck, Maurice de 153n Vorticism xv, 13, 136; see also Lewis, Wyndham; Pound, Ezra Wadsworth, Edward A. 136, 140 Waite, Geoffrey C. W. 31n Weston, Jessie 32 Whistler, James McNeill 8–12, 167, 176n; libel trial 10, 11, 12, 15n, 16n, 85–86, 155 Wihl, Gary 173, 174 Wilde, Oscar 49, 52, 58, 157 Wittkower, Rudolf 200 women: Lawrence’s relations with 183, 185, 186; and myth 40–45; Ruskin’s relations with 182, 185–186, 192–193n; writers and myth 43–44 Woolf, Virginia 53, 58, 99, 110,

219

126, 169, 177n; and myth 44–45; on Ruskin’s later style 128–129 word associations 123, 124–125 ‘word-painting’ 112, 113 Wordsworth, William 34, 69, 74 Worringer, Wilhelm xi; Abstraction and Empathy 26, 30n; Formprobleme der Gothik 17, 25, 26, 27n; and Gothic style 17–31; ‘Griechisch-Römisches’ 28n; on naturalism 18–20 Worthen, John 192n Wright, Frank Lloyd xi Wright, Samuel 51 Yeats, William Butler 100, 110, 157 Zevi, Bruno 196, 197