return to homepage John Ruskin As promised to one of my
readers, this paper makes a brief apology for—or explanation of—my dismissal of
Ruskin “to the dustiest shelves” in a recent conclusion. To my mind, Ruskin is one of the great preachers of the 19th
century. He was a nearly peerless
stylist and moralist, matched only by Emerson and Carlyle and Thoreau. He was always at his best when lecturing—not
about art, but about religion. One of
my favorite lectures of all time, matched only by Emerson’s Self Reliance
and a handful of others, is Ruskin’s lecture to the town of Bradford in 1864—a
lecture called Traffic.1
Here he is called upon to advise the town leaders on a proper style of
architecture for their Exchange.
Instead he delivers a fiery denunciation of their whole way of life, a
denunciation in many ways more complete than Thoreau’s denunciation of poor
Concord. He begins by telling them he
doesn’t care a fig for their Exchange and ends by telling them he cares even
less for their worship of mammon and their hypocrisy in pretending to be
interested in architecture. In the most
memorable sentence of the lecture, he says, “I can never make out how it is
that. . . [people] will go anywhere barefoot to preach their faith, but must be
well bribed to practise it, and are perfectly ready to give the Gospel gratis,
but never the loaves and fishes.” For
the form of the Exchange’s architecture, Ruskin finally recommends “decorating
its frieze with pendant purses; and making its pillars broad at the base, for
the sticking of bills.” In a similar lecture to the city of Dublin in 1868,2 he used the opportunity to critique the whole
fabric of modern society, chiding the citizens for their taste for war and
their neglect of the commonest charity.
He accused many of being non-believers and of using this non-belief as
an excuse for selfishness and vulgarity: “Because you have no heaven to look
for, is that any reason that you should remain ignorant of this wonderful and
infinite earth, which firmly and instantly given you in possession?” So might have said Tolstoy, lecturing to
this audience’s children thirty years later. 3 But beyond his lovely prose
style, Ruskin was never a natural artist.
He was much more comfortable talking of religion and economics and
architecture and nature than art. Every
lecture on art soon devolves into one of these. All these subjects share a border with art, but they are not its
equivalent. As Ruskin himself said
many times, art is not mainly preaching, and Ruskin’s first talent was for
preaching. He said in the Dublin
lecture, “Art is neither to be achieved by effort of thinking, nor explained by
accuracy of speaking.” Much of Ruskin’s
writing is a forgetting of this maxim, but he had it right. As he did when he said to the same audience,
“But the main thing I have to tell you is that art must not be talked
about. The fact that there is talk
about it at all signifies that it is ill done or cannot be done.” And this, “The true possessor of
[imagination] knows it to be incommunicable, and the true critic of it,
inexplicable.” Now, my own writing about art is of art that is
extravagantly ill-done—or it is preaching.
I take no exception to Ruskin’s preaching about what he knows best: the
landscape, the Bible, and Gothic architecture, among other things. But I do take exception to his preaching
about what he knows less well, and that is painting and sculpture. In his career Ruskin moved from the
discussion of painting to the discussion of religion and economics, which
suggests he knew his own strengths.
Even when discussing art in his earlier years, he always tended to move
the discussion to morals. Art was from
the beginning a subject of ideas for him.
The most famous idea put forward in the first decade of Modern
Painters was the idea that “the greatest art contains the greatest
ideas.” And for Ruskin the greatest
ideas were always moral ideas. In some big blurry sense he was right, of course. Greatness itself is a big moral idea, of a
sort, so that a great work of art must have a cultural impact, and that
cultural impact must be, in the long run, for good or ill. Even the most amoral decorations of Whistler
might be called virtuous, simply because they give a positive pleasure. Anything that gives pleasure without any
accompanying harm might be called virtuous.
What greater good is there in life than conferring benefits upon
others?  However, in a more focused way, Ruskin was quite
mistaken. When viewing any particular
work, the greatest work is not the one that contains the greatest
ideas. Even Ruskin’s own example
proves that. Turner’s art is very far
from being an art of ideas. At a
stretch you can cram Turner’s canvases full of big ideas, and this is
unfortunately what Ruskin did. We get
big ideas like nature and religion stuffed into Turner’s clouds and fogs in the
haziest ways. At times this stuffing
can be quite exhilarating—Ruskin could form a sentence to convince one of
anything for the nonce—but in the end it simply won’t do. Art is not achieved by effort of thinking,
nor should it be viewed with an effort of thinking. If you are standing in front of a Turner
with all those big ideas in your head you are confused pedant—you are blocking
the emotions that should be falling into your head quite naturally, without the
expense of a single analytical thought.
An ignorant costermonger at your side, come in from the rain and passing
the canvas by accident, will likely see more in it than you, for he will simply
gasp and stand for a moment with his mouth open. Later it will infect his dreams, and maybe he will tell his
daughter of it over a breakfast of muffins and herbs. To take another example, what of The David? Where is the great idea in that? Again, one can stuff it full of ideas as
long as one likes, ideas Biblical and natural and pagan and sexual. But the simple fact is that its aesthetic
effect is emotional, not ideational.
You don’t need to think anything to get the full artistic impact of
it. You don’t even have to know that it
is David from the Bible. You certainly
don’t have to know that it is the symbol of Florence, or know the biography of
Michelangelo. A tour-guide would be
nothing more than a pest in the Accademia.
All you have to do is look at it, and, if you have any intuitive
artistic sense at all, you will deliquesce, without any help from your critical
self at all. Ruskin understood this but
didn’t often let it stop him from writing at great length of ideas in art. He said in volume III of Modern Painters,
Much time is wasted by human
beings in general on establishment of systems; and it often takes more labour
to master the intricacies of an artificial connection, than to remember the
separate facts which are so carefully connected. I suspect that system-makers are not of much more use, each in
his own domain, than, in that of Pomona, the old women are who tie cherries
upon sticks, for the more convenient portableness of the same. And yet he spent an inordinate
amount of time, at least in his early years, tying paintings to sticks, that
they might better be understood. For many years this defect of Ruskin lay nearly hidden
amongst his beautiful sentences. His
readers forgave him his blind spots, since his keenness of sight in other areas
was so acute. His audience truly
benefited from his exhortations to the various virtues, as surely as Emerson’s
audience benefited from his, or Tolstoy’s from his, or Carlyle’s from his. And his audiences benefited from his learning
true and deep of the Bible, of the Greeks, and so on. And as he became more a preacher and less a critic, they
benefited more. Ruskin is at his most
artistic as a prose writer because there he is most emotional, and most capable
of infecting his audience with emotion.
Beyond that, he is most infectious when talking of religion and
morality. The second half of the 19th century was a strange
time for preachers, though perhaps not as strange as now. God was dying or dead, as Nietzsche was
soon to inform the world, and it is probable that young men like Carlyle and
Ruskin knew this, in some sense of their own.
That is, they did not accept the end of “good and evil” but they saw
that the effectfulness of a preacher was perhaps no longer at a maximum within
the doors of the church. The preacher
must follow his audience into the world.
If they would talk of art, so would he.
If they would talk of nature, so would he. If they would talk of the Greeks and of Gothic architecture, all
the better. A talented preacher could
turn any subject to the improvement of his flock. And so the preacher became the art critic and the social
critic. He wrote “non-religious”
treatises for the newspaper and the magazines, somehow turning every treatise
to morals nonetheless. This trend that Carlyle and Ruskin followed in the early
years of secularization has continued up to the present day. The sermon is a different one, but the
preachers are still at work in art. Now
the text is centered on feminism and tolerance and equality and racial harmony
and denial of the past, but the text is still at bottom a moral one. I have almost as little to say against the
brotherhood that is, or poses as, the foundation of this movement, as I have to
say against the brotherhood of Tolstoy and Ruskin. Meaning, it is not so much that I disagree with the fundamental
declarations of goodwill underlying all these sermons, as it is that I disagree
with their art theory. Ruskin would
appear to be the antithesis of the contemporary critics, since he studied the
past with love and care and they study it, if at all, with presumption and
contempt; since he built his love for art around his love of nature and they
see no connection between art and nature; and since he wrote beautifully and
they write on the borders of the legible.
But there is this similarity at least: for both the idea is
central to art. Ruskin’s fundamental
idea was religion and theirs is politics, but both see art as a sort of
subcategory. They use it primarily as
a didactic or moral tool. But art cannot be and should not be a conscious tool of
acculturation. It may be rational to
fulminate against immoral art, as Tolstoy and Ruskin did, since immoral art can
and does have a real cultural effect.
But the solution is not to require that artists become consciously
moral. In fact, it is more sensible to
censor after the fact than to try to force art under the umbrella of the
superego. The first solution is
debatable but possible. Some limited
censorship may be salutary, if it is done by the right people in the right way
for the right reasons. Leaving our
children, and ourselves, some degree of innocence might be one such reason. The second solution is impossible. Beyond a very limited extent, an artist
simply cannot respond to group expectations and be creative at the same
time. That is not what creative
means. One part of the mind creates
art; another part is moral. One part
responds to inspiration; another part responds to group expectations. The two cannot be joined. To make art a subcategory or a tool is to
destroy it, nothing less. This is not a call for absolute artistic freedom, in the
way that it is currently understood. I
don’t think that artists are always right or that everything artists do is
valuable just because they do it. Most
contemporary art created under the cry of absolute freedom is worse than
garbage. But the answer to this is not
to require that artists begin to consciously paint and sculpt highly moral
ideas. The answer is to return to an
old-fashioned discrimination after the fact.
Put only the wonderful stuff in the museum and give the rest back to the
artist, to incinerate as he or she sees fit.
If we don’t get any wonderful stuff this year or the next, well, let the
museum sit empty as a sign. We will
then know where we stand. The other answer is to educate all our children as
moral people from the beginning, and to let them decide what art to create when
they reach the age where they want to make things. This is the natural way to get high art: ensure the existence of
high-minded people. Presently we seem
to think the only way to educate is through a constant barrage of late-arriving
propaganda. That is, we bring our
children up like monkeys, teaching them little more than how to eat and dress
and drive a car, and then expect them to absorb the correct politics—in or
around college age—by watching a series of public service announcements, seeing
a modern dance, and reading the blurbs on a couple of art installations. But this is madness. You cannot build a monument to the ages on a
base of silly putty. Virtues must be
taught, with or without the known religions, and they must be taught very
early, and constantly. Whenever we shore
up education, we can think of nothing to do but add math and science, or maybe
a foreign language, or maybe more reading comprehension. But what reading are the children
comprehending, in whatever language?
Is it worthy of comprehension?
We think it somehow impertinent to ask the question, or intolerant. But no question is more pertinent. We must choose some wisdom from the past or
present, and admit that it is wise, and hold to it. If we don’t we have delegated our most important decision to the
winds, and all else is hopeless. If
there are no known wisdoms or virtues, then our politics is left without an
anchor, and all education or propaganda or indoctrination is feckless and
bootless and all-too-late. The other place that Ruskin
betrays some connection to contemporary critics is in his Puritanism. Many will think my argument that the Moderns
are Puritans is extravagant, seeing the depths of vulgarity and brutality they
have been willing to go to shock and outrage.
But I remind that the Puritans were prone to shock and outrage. One might say they reveled in it. They liked nothing better than to melt into
a paroxysm of outrage, especially in sexual matters. Rather than become sexually excited, they became excited against
sex, somehow achieving a similar release.
Puritans have also not been averse to either physical or mental
brutality. The witch trials were not as
great an anomaly as is thought. They
were an extreme example of a commonplace.
Modern art and
criticism have been stridently anti-sensual, as I have argued elsewhere. The
vulgarity and brutality of contemporary art is all arrayed against sensuality,
not for it. Only a theory that put
little value on the body and on sex could use them to frighten and repel. Ruskin’s pathology no doubt paled in
comparison to the contemporary pathology, but his sexual problems are
well-documented. These problems could
not help but color his views on subject matter in art. I suspect that he would have little patience
with my subjects. I can’t remember if
it was Carlyle or Ruskin who was frightened into permanent celibacy by his
first sight of feminine pubic hair, but you can imagine what my oeuvre
would do to such a man. I would guess
that this cathexis was far from rare in Victorian England. It is still common, if my experience with
clients and galleries in the US is any measure. Even in avant garde galleries, you will sooner see hacked up
corpses than a tuft of pretty netherhair.
What can I have in common with this outlook? It would be like me being frightened into a permanent fear of
landscapes by my first sight of a wooly sheep.
Could Ruskin ever take me seriously on a stroll in the Alps? I must imagine that a painting like one of my nudes must
affect him like a painting of Teniers that he calls, “a prolonged contemplation
of a vile thing.” For him a picture
should be “the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality—it is the
taste of angels.” Tolstoy as well as
Ruskin would judge my Blue Bed, for instance, as prurient if not worse,
I think. A naked woman, painted so
immodestly—from both her view and mine—must have more in common with Teniers’
sots over their dice than with a lovely landscape. And yet, Ruskin says that all delight in art resolves into
“simple love for that which deserves love.”
Can a landscape deserve love more than a woman? Only in the abstract, if at all. For me the naked woman’s body is quite
simply the nearest sacred landscape, one that is lovely beyond all sacred grove
and mountain. And, unlike them, it can
be loved both abstractly and actually, with body as well as mind. This inclusion of the body and of real
action is no reason to lump sexuality and the nude in with gambling and
drunkenness. Just the opposite. Some nudity and sexual subject matter may
certainly corrupt. I don’t deny
it. Much non-nudity and non-sexual
subject matter may also corrupt. Much
is meant to. But there is nothing
inherently corrupting about nudity or sexuality, and a naked woman is no
temptation to evil for a virtuous man.
To assume so is to assume that sex is evil and must be evil. A naked woman is only a temptation to sex,
and may be even less than that. It may
be simply an allowance that she is admirable, and an invitation to admire her
without blushes on either side.
Finally, sex may itself be virtuous.
Good sex is a virtue, like any other good. To love well that which is lovely, as Ruskin says, is not only an
artistic act, it is a moral one. Only
an artist who implied that he did not love well what he presented as lovely, or
who loved what he presented as vile, could be accused of bad taste.  Another reason I have trouble
being convinced by Ruskin the closer he gets to art is his attack on
Whistler. This was my first knowledge
of Ruskin and can’t help but be prejudicial.
I still can’t comprehend how a critic whose first darling was Turner
could work up such emotion against Whistler.
In my eyes they are closer than any two artists in history, with all
that foggy mystery and soupy paint handling.
The exact same things that Ruskin said about Whistler in 1878 he was
defending Turner against in 1844. The
critics in the 40’s found Turner formless and lazy and lacking in detail and
definition. Whistler’s only sin appears
to be that he did not allow Ruskin to be his main promoter, as Turner had. We must remember that Ruskin was now almost 60 and had
suffered 45 years of chastity and sexual humiliation. At least two pretty young girls had refused him and broken his
heart. Who of us would not be a bit
grumpy by then? Carlyle did not mind the airing of his sexual problems,
believing that a hero’s faults were both fair game and forgivable. I agree with him. He and Ruskin were heroes, and what is more, my
heroes. I only meant to relegate
Ruskin’s views on art to the dusty shelves.
I never meant to send the bulk of his work there. I could wish that he, or any of his
caliber, were alive now, to lecture the ubiquitous Bradfordians and Concordians
and Pottersvillians who make up the present age. But who of these new citizens, these fellows of ours, would hire
him to speak?  That is finally the difference between his time and
ours: his audience was at least educated enough to sense its own lack of
education. It had not reached that
level of smug self-satisfaction and strident ignorance that allows our present
burghers to wallow away in the 19th hole or the high-rise club. His Bradfordians and Dubliners may have been
crass, but they were apparently able to follow the speech of John Ruskin. What graduating class of Princeton or Oxford
could follow it now, much less the rotary club of Dallas or Denver? What group, moneyed in whatever way, would
not much rather hire Robin Williams or Tiger Woods or Oprah Winfrey? Even Woody Allen is too erudite for American
audiences; how could Ruskin make it to the end of a sentence? He would have to remove all historical,
literary, Biblical, and artistic references, all uncommon words and phrasing,
90% of the commas, 80% of the opinion, and 75% of the emotion. What is left? Speak slowly from the teleprompter, John. Oh, and wear a red tie with a dark suit. 1Published in The
Crown of Wild Olive, 1866. 2Published as “The
Mystery of Life and its Arts,” in Sesame and Lilies, 1871. 3Not surprisingly,
Tolstoy was a fan of Ruskin, calling him “a man who thinks with his heart.” If this paper was useful to you in any way, please consider donating a dollar (or more) to the SAVE THE ARTISTS FOUNDATION. This will allow me to continue writing these "unpublishable" things. Don't be confused by paying Melisa Smith--that is just one of my many noms de plume. If you are a Paypal user, there is no fee; so it might be worth your while to become one. Otherwise they will rob us 33 cents for each transaction. |
