RUSKIN AND THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

F. W. ROE

One of the tutors at Oxford when Ruskin was an undergraduate there, "the only man among the masters of my day," said he, "who knew anything of art," Henry G. Liddell (afterwards the distinguished Dean of Christ Church), in a letter to Ruskin written in 1879 thus describes his earliest impression of the first volume of Modern Painters: "Thirtysix years ago I was at Birmingham, examining the boys in the great school there. In a bookseller's window I saw Modern Painters, by a Graduate of Oxford. I knew nothing of the book, or by whom it was written. But I bought it, and read it eagerly. It was like a revelation to me." This enthusiastic opinion is typical of the earlier judgments of Modern Painters, and not of the first volume only, but of the others as well. Ruskin was hailed as the evangelist of art and the apostle of a new revelation of beauty. He was looked upon as a miracle-worker who had opened the eyes of the blind and had taught them to see in nature and in art a new heaven and a new earth. He was the enchanter who, out of the old materials of his mother speech, had fashioned a fresh and exquisite fabric, rich and gorgeous beyond anything that had been seen since the days of Burke and De Quincey. The younger artists of those days were captivated. Holman Hunt sat up most of a night reading a borrowed copy of Modern Painters, until "the echo of the words" remained an enchantment to his ears. William Morris and BurneJones heralded Ruskin as a "Luther of the arts," and to groups of Oxford friends, Morris spouted passages of his prose in a voice that fired his listeners with exultant admiration. When the young Pre-Raphaelites were attacked in 1850 and 1851, Millais, in anger and despair, went for help

to Ruskin, who at once wrote a letter to The Times that turned the tide of opinion in favor of the brotherhood. Men might pardonably envy, as Swinburne said, "the authority and the eloquence" which gave "such weight and effect to praise." Ruskin's achievement was truly remarkable. At twenty-three, in an ecstasy of indignation, he had put aside his drawing and his mountain-rambling to defend a maligned reputation, with little thought of the path he was destined to take. At forty he stood at the summit of his fame, an acknowledged interpreter of the beautiful such as England had not hitherto produced. For taken together, the five volumes of Modern Painters, in spite of the heavy weight of imperfections their extravagant paradoxes and pieties, their dogmatisms and contradictions ("oscillations of temper and progressions of discovery," as Ruskin said)—contain the most inspiring and influential and probably the most enduring discussion of art yet written in English; a work that if it betrays a caprice fatal to the critic, reveals everywhere the passionate insight belonging only to the poet.

Modern Painters was begun as a defense of Turner. In 1843, when the first volume appeared, Turner already had a reputation as the first of landscape painters, he was a member of the Royal Academy, and he had made a fortune from his pictures. But he was passing into his later manner, and the reviews had violently attacked his canvases, describing them as meaningless and absurd, a series of distorted dreams evoked by a senescent imagination. Raised to the "height of a black anger" by these attacks, Ruskin rushed to the defense of his idol with all the abandon of youth and genius. Young as he was, his enthusiasm for Turner was even then old. At thirteen he had received the famous birthday gift of Rogers' Italy, illustrated with Turner's vignettes. At fourteen he had begun copying the painter's drawings, and at seventeen he had flung off his first reply to Blackwood's criticism, in which he had spoken of Turner's art as "embodied enchantment, delineated magic," and as "seizing the soul and essence of truth." Before he was twenty-one, his father had given. him two Turners, and when he was of age, he had begun

collecting for himself, until the Ruskin home contained one of the choicest collections in England, numbering by 1860, says Sir E. T. Cook, "two oil pictures and more than a hundred drawings and sketches." Turner's works were to him a symbol of all the beauty in landscape and of all the mystery and tragedy in man,-"studied melodies of exquisite color, and deeply-toned poems." To defend Turner was to defend all that Ruskin best loved in nature and most revered in art. What began as a magazine article to support a falling reputation soon grew into a book, and from one book into five, leading its discursive author into ever-widening fields of inquiry and speculation, not only upon nature and art, but upon poetry, society, education, and religion as well. Ruskin was intermittently occupied with the work for seventeen years, or until 1860, when the fifth and last volume came out; and if we take into account the early article of 1836, written for Blackwood's but withheld by Turner, and the epilogue of 1888, written for the last complete edition of Modern Painters to be published in Ruskin's lifetime, together with innumerable prefaces, annotations, and comments, that appeared in the intervening years, we find that the volumes as we now have them in the monumental Library Edition, stretch over a period of fifty-two years, and are richer in material than any other work that Ruskin produced. The expansion was inevitable. In making way for the truth of Turner, Ruskin found that there were great accumulations of falsehood that must be pushed aside. There was, on the one hand, the false idealism of the conventionalists, who strove so hard to secure generalities or "universals” in their art that they deliberately left out or falsified reality. Their position is best set forth in the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds and is illustrated in the inquiry of the painter, Sir George Beaumont, to Constable "But where is your brown tree?" and in the well-known dictum of Dr. Johnson that "poetry is to speak an universal language." There was, on the other hand, what Ruskin regarded as the vulgar and trivial realism of those who slavishly followed the Dutch school of artists, with their "cattle and market vegetables,'

their "flats, ditches, and hedges, enlivened by cows chewing the cud, and dogs behaving indecently"; and who therefore left no room in their pictures for the higher and more occult kinds of truth such as could be realized only by the visionary power of the imagination. Ruskin felt, too, that he must meet not only the prejudices of the schools, but the philistinism of the public and the esoteric aestheticism of the connoisseur. In order to enjoy art it was not necessary to cultivate a critical appreciation of technicalities and tricks of expression alone, nor to care more for pretty gewgaws like the "lining of a cloak, or the satin of a slipper," than for the large realities of human life and nature. He protested with all his soul against this "pursuit of beauty at the expense of manliness and truth." He would bring art into the open where it might be tested by principles that have their rootage in the healthy soil of our common humanity.

Ruskin thus found himself driven back to fundamentals. He must state, and endeavor to explain, the laws of art by which he meant to be guided, both in his attack upon the conventionalists and connoisseurs and in his defense of Turner. In the preface to the first edition of volume one (1843) his purpose is thus clearly set forth: "But when public taste seems plunging deeper and deeper into degradation day by day, and when the press universally exerts such power as it possesses to direct the feeling of the nation more completely to all that is theatrical, affected, and false in art; while it vents its ribaldry on the most exalted truth, and the highest ideal of landscape that this or any other age has ever witnessed, it becomes the imperative duty of all who have any perception or knowledge of what is really great in art, and any desire for its advancement in England, to come fearlessly forward, regardless of such individual interests as are likely to be injured by the knowledge of what is good and right, to declare and demonstrate, wherever they exist, the essence and the authority of the Beautiful and the True."" Relieved of digressions and irrelevancies in which throughout five bulky volumes they are intermingled and sometimes obscured,

III:4. The references throughout are to The Library Edition of Ruskin.

the principles upon which Ruskin rests his arguments are alike comprehensive and simple, the work of a mind that had an intuitive perception of the sanity of great art. And although it is our purpose here to deal with but one of these principles, a brief statement of them all will serve to remind the reader of the place that the notion of beauty holds in the general scheme. Art is defined by Ruskin as the expression of man's "rational and disciplined delight in the forms and laws of the creation of which he forms a part.

That art is greatest which includes the greatest number of greatest ideas." The ideas in great (fine) art are three,truth, beauty, and relation (thought). Truth is "the faithful statement, either to the mind or senses, of any fact of nature." Beauty is "the power in anything of delighting an intelligent human soul by its appearance." By the awkward term "relation" Ruskin denotes all those ideas "conveyable by art, which are the subjects of distinct intellectual perception and action, and which are therefore worthy of the name of thoughts." It is the intellectual and imaginative side of artistic creation or enjoyment, as opposed to the perceptive, that the term is intended to mean; questions involved in the choice of subject, collocation of materials, and imaginative treatment, by which the artist at last reaches the summit of his art, namely, the expression of himself. In later years Ruskin regarded this systematic arrangement as "affected and forced," and declared that by it he only meant to say that a work of art must be well executed, must possess truth and beauty, and must combine these two elements in such ways as to speak to the intelligence and arouse the imagination of those for whom it was intended.

One further question, however, remains; for according to the definition of art as quoted above we are bound to consider not only the kinds of ideas involved, but also in what sense "greatness" is to be understood. What makes an "idea" properly "great"? Does greatness reside in the object or in

'Ruskin names two other ideas, power and imitation, but he dismisses them after a brief exposition of their meaning, for the reason that they are either unworthy (imitation), or an account of them, so far as is necessary, is involved in the discussion of the other three. cf. III:116.