Section 2, Chapter 7, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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n 1857 Ruskin began his assault on the Benthamite "gospel" by taking to the lecture platform -- with the effect, as his editors put it, of tickling the lion in its den. The "den" was Manchester, the home of laissez-faire economics; the occasion, the opening of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition; the result, the pair of lectures published as The Political Economy of Art and reissued as "A Joy Forever" (and Its Price in the Market). The situation was almost too rich in irony. The fashionable art critic was invited to address a fashionable audience at the Manchester Athenaeum, which was surrounded at some remove by the hideous slums whose inhabitants, by their wretchedness and their labor, made possible the purchase of art for middle-class ostentation. The word "treasure" unconsciously underscored the contrast. Ruskin explores this and other paradoxes in an ironic tour de force that uses as a central "conceit" the comparison of artists and patrons with workers and capitalists and of artworks with shirts and grain.
The Manchester press was enraged, but the audience, to all reports, was pleased and with good reason. From the start Ruskin strikes a note of malicious yet disarming urbanity that combines the manner of a preacher playing with his text with that of a tutor putting paradoxes to a pupil. (In an important essay, George Landow examines the rhetorical structure and mode of another lecture with far-reaching implications about Victorian nonfiction prose in general. Ruskin's subsequent rhetorical strategy is a shrewd alternation of flattery and abuse that both fulfills and undermines the expectations of the audience. Ruskin's rhetoric is so interactive -- at one point touching the consciences of his hearers, at another point their anger, at another their aspirations -- that the lecture becomes in effect a dialogue between a speaker and an audience-persona with whom in complex ways the speaker identifies. Superficially, Ruskin's procedure resembles a sermon or printed pamphlet, yet it is more wittily ironic than the one and far more intimate than the other (its "you" denotes a specific and present audience, not an impersonal one); in fact he refashions the lecture as a prose genre.
One of the "notable" characteristics of the age, Ruskin begins, is "the just and wholesome contempt in which we hold poverty. I repeat, the just and wholesome contempt; though I see that some of my hearers look surprised at the expression" (XVI, 15). The surprise comes, of course, from Ruskin's appearing to ally himself with his hearers against the Biblical religion they profess (and of course the contradiction between professed belief and commercial practice is the irony that makes possible all of Ruskin's social evangelism, as it does Carlyle's). But the surprise [166/167] deepens when he claims that the Greeks also held poverty in contempt, which means that, despite their pretensions, the British are a people in love with poverty. The central irony is that, given his sense of "wealth" Ruskin is not being ironic at all, and the "answer" of the paradox turns out to be two key principles of Ruskin's social thought: that there is true and false wealth and that wealth essentially consists in the management of labor. Thus the contempt of poverty means the wish to eradicate it, and the love of true wealth means the wish to spread the arts and also to employ all the workmen of England. This exclusion of alternatives (one either loves wealth or hates it) wittily plays against the actual case, which is that the wealthy want wealth for themselves, not for others. (Even more subtly, it parodies the Socratic definition of the good as what everyone desires; how strange if one should then object that most people should not have the good.) Indeed, Ruskin's irony and tone are eminently Socratic -- Socratic because of his exaggerated sense of the obviousness and simplicity of things. The condition of England is simply that of a housewife who has failed to give her servants enough work to do; Ruskin's audience has overlooked -- absentmindedly, as it were -- their true powers as governors of the nation, so that Ruskin's declaration of war on the lion
The notion of Discipline and Interference lies at the very root of all human progress or power; that the "Let-alone" principle is . . . the principle of death; that it is ruin to him certain and total, if he lets his land alone -- if he lets his fellow-men alone -- if he lets his own soul alone.... his whole life, in the contrary, must, if it is healthy life, be continually one of ploughing and pruning, rebuking and helping, governing and punishing. [XVI, 26]
The lectures, then, appeal to the "best selves" of the audience by a gentle mix of "ploughing and pruning" -- or perhaps we should say "seeding" -- the minds of his hearers.
When Ruskin turns to art, however, the manner changes suddenly to the melodramatic rebuke of the pulpit. "But your great men quarrel with you, and you revenge yourselves by starving them for the first half of their lives," he claims. People must praise them when they need it, in the "asphodel meadows of their youth," or it will be too late; what then can the painter do with "your sharp laurel crown" except "lay it on his mother's grave?" (XVI, 31, 33-34). And so on. The phrases marshal Ruskin's powerful feelings about childhood to induce an ideal paternal sentiment in his audience and to identify himself with them at the same time. In urging them to buy and preserve paintings wisely and to praise and blame artists judiciously, he endows his audience with his own expertise even as he appears to rebuke them. The effect is to confirm [167/168] beliefs, not to challenge them: no one in the room would quarrel about starving young geniuses or revering one's own parents.
Two pervading themes of the lectures are paternity and waste. The particular nurturing instinct Ruskin arouses is a kind of husbanding anxiety, a fear that things will slip or fade away and die. Thus the spirit of genius in its youth Ruskin compares to gold, emphasizing its scarcity ("You may lose it or you may gather it . . ., but the best you can do with it is always merely shifting, melting, hammering, purifying -- never creating" [XVI, 30]). The second precious substance is the work of genius. The snow sculpture commissioned of Michelangelo by Pietro de Medici is the "perfect, accurate, and intensest possible type of the greatest possible error" in the use of genius: "to put itself into the service of annihilation -- to make a cloud of itself, and pass away from the earth" (XVI, 39). But this is also the perfect type of the British use of artists-the British set artists to make cheap prints, for example, or inferior copies on paper made of "mere white and brown rags." The second lecture develops this theme with steadily increasing scope and intensity, expanding the region of the art economy to include first, the works of the great dead and second, the other nations of Europe. Thus, if the English people but knew it, Italy is the great garden and treasure house of their tradition as well -- Italy, which, in a furious passage, Ruskin likens to a marble hall infested with monkeys. This neglect he lays to the account of his audience, who are properly members not of England alone but of "the great Christian community of Europe." Frantically preoccupied with getting and spending, they are like the manufacturer "who attended to his looms, but left his warehouse without a roof," leaving the rain to flood, the rats to frolic, the spiders to spin, the choughs to build -- and still "keep weave, weave, weaving at your wretched webs, and thinking you are growing rich" (XVI, 75-76). At last the images of ruin -- servants unemployed, operatives destroying their own work, warehouses collapsing, paintings falling to rags, gold nuggets of genius cast into the dust -- build like a snowball into a vision of man replacing time as the Great Leveler: "I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm -- we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish-ourselves who consume: we are the mildew and the flame; and the soul of man is to its own work as the moth that frets when it cannot fly, and as the hidden flame that blasts where it cannot illuminate" (XVI, 64). This destructive energy, then, is subverted and subterranean, the perversion of energy; the last clause remarkably converts two metaphors of the soul's aspiration into a self-consuming embrace (the moth soul and the flame soul), while "frets" connects the palpitation of the moth with the gnawing of the worm and "blasts" connects the light hidden under the bushel with warfare and also with the blighting of grain. The whole [168/169] complex points to the scriptural passage that underlies Ruskin's argument: "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.... For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matt. 6:19-21).
This is the prophetic burden, in its negative aspect, of The Political Economy of Art. But if the analogy holds between artists and laborers and between art and wealth and between art economy and political economy, then the Manchester system is refuted -- refuted, that is, by a change of heart. The new attitude to human work is aesthetic rather than exploitative, but aesthetic in an exalted sense: as a work of art is contemplated as an end in itself and as the labor of an artist is a creative expression, so is human life an end in itself and all human labor potentially creative. Throughout the lectures Ruskin relies on a dominant image to induce this response, the image of a structure enclosing precious objects. This structure pervades The Stones of Venice as well in the forms of the city and the church. In the lectures it varies more widely, beginning with the Art Treasures Exhibition itself and including a garden, a tastefully furnished household, a museum, Italy with its works of art, and the eternal temple of art, "the rough stones and the smooth all finding their place, and rising, day by day, in richer and higher pinnacles to heaven" (XVI, 64), and these, of course, have their antitheses in places where things decay. The expanding scope of the enclosures suggests that they also stand for the expansion of sympathetic concern, at the achievement of which Ruskin's audience would pull down the walls of the false treasure houses that separate rich from poor, sacred from secular, the slums of Manchester from the glitter of the Exhibition. This use of metaphor is exactly that prescribed by Shelley in the Defense of Poetry, although Ruskin's "legislation" is acknowledged.
A second group of images, the noble governors, is of particular interest because Ruskin uses it typologically. Two of the governors frame the first lecture as the first and last panels of a diptych frame the center. The first is the Perfect Wife of Proverbs, the "perfect economist, or mistress of a household," who divides her care "between the two great objects of utility and splendour: in her right hand, food and flax, for life and clothing; in her left hand, the purple and the needlework, for honour and for beauty" (XVI, 20) -- a type, therefore, of the necessary balance in private life between use and pleasure and, in the life of nations, between useful products and beautiful products. (Ruskin's meaning depends also on some unquoted verses describing the wife who, like Britannia, weaves textiles for herself and for merchants, so that her household is a point of intersection, a "Queen among nations.") The balance of objects in the right and left hand is [169/170] the lecturer's arrangement: he has read the passage iconographically and schematically, as a medieval painter might, with the intention partly of balancing this composition against his second word picture, which frames the lecture at the other end. This passage describes Ambrogio Lorenzetti's fresco of Good Civic Government, with its central figure -- the male counterpart of the housewife in Proverbs-surrounded by the Christian and pagan virtues in spatial relationships that suggest their importance as qualities of a governor. Ruskin notes that the virtue entrusted with public revenues is neither Charity, who is too "hot," nor Prudence, who is too "timid," but Magnanimity -- "largeness of heart: not softness or weakness of heart, mind you -- but capacity of heart -- the great measuring virtue" (XVI, 56). This strength of heart, this impassioned judiciousness (the type also of divine "interference" as well as self-mastery) is the key to an economics of the soul -- the same power as that of the deeply feeling yet immovable soul of the great artist, transcending both deadness of feeling and the heat of the pathetic fallacy.
In the third word picture, which is really an antithetical pair, Ruskin brings to a single point of focus his weblike vision of the British economy. First, the antithesis of the flax-spinning housewife of Proverbs: "you think it perfectly just that [the rich man] should . . . use his breadth and sweep of sight to gather some branch of the commerce of the country into one great cobweb, of which he is himself to be the central spider, making every thread vibrate with the points of his claws, and commanding every avenue with the facets of his eyes" (XVI, 100). But a page later comes the reversal: "wealth well used is as the net of the sacred fisher who gathers souls of men out of the deep. A time will come -- I do not think even now it is far from us-when this golden net of the world's wealth will be spread abroad as the flaming meshes of morning cloud are over the sky" (XVI, 102-103). Suddenly the web is a net that unites men in charity, not destruction, in a gesture that is centrifugal rather than centripetal -- acting out the paradox that to lose is to keep and that to throw out in giving is truly to bind together in saving. The golden net, Ruskin's final image of enclosure, contains the Brotherhood of all humans united in the Fatherhood of Him who is also the Son of men, the saver of life and the Savior of the faithful. The net is also cast into the future. Thus every act of giving repeats the divine act of creation, for the ultimate aim of wealth is to "prolong the existence, of the whole human race."
Like The Stones of Venice, this vigorous performance is a lay sermon in Coleridge's sense, using the Bible as a practical guide not to politics but to economics. Of the three figures I have discussed -- Wisdom, the governor, and the fisherman -- only one comes directly from the Bible, though all are familiar types of Christ. But the lectures also take the book of Proverbs as their specific model. Both works are direct addresses, [170/171] composed of advice by experts in the field who rely for illustration on the figure of the capable housewife, who as Wisdom symbolizes the aim of the whole. According to Proverbs the gain from wisdom "is better than gain from silver and its profit better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor" (3:13-17). Riches and honor: the last clause is also Ruskin's last and the signature, so to speak, of his argument. Twelve years later he completed his portrait of Wisdom in The Queen of the Air, but in fact she remained, like Wealth and Life, his constant subject.
Landow, George P. "Ruskin as Victorian Sage: The Example of 'Traffic'" [full text ], in New Approaches to Ruskin. Ed. Robert Hewison. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Last modified December 2000