Section 3, 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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hat can be the function of art in a society indifferent to its ministrations? How can art, compromised by its relation to the sensual, still maintain the social good? If the face of Nature is darkened, what ought art to imitate? And where can human beings look for value and hope, if not in art or nature? These questions dominate Ruskin's thought in the late 1850s, the second half of his great decade, when the foundations of his earlier faith -- Evangelical Christianity and the "gigantic moral power" of landscape -- continued to crumble. More clearly than ever before, the subjects of art and religion become from him symbols of psychic and social integration. More accurately, he conceived of his subjects as organic systems or economies, the elements of which refer to more than one thing -- to nature, to the soul, to society, to an aesthetic whole.
The Political Economy of Art used one version of this configuration -- the treasure house or four-dimensional circulation of wealth -- to establish art patronage as a category mediating between art and society. Ruskin had, of course, already developed the structure of this governing metaphor in the theory of Purity in Modern Painters II. In the final volume of the series (1860), in the chapter titled "The Law of Help," he developed the idea into an analogy between an aesthetic structure and a social structure. He defines "composition" as "the help of everything in the picture by everything"; a picture resembles an inanimate object, in which the atoms merely "cohere," less than a plant, the whole of which is affected if a part is removed. "The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life. Much more is this so in an animal.... Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness -- completeness of depending of each part on all the rest. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption." Corruption, then, is the antithesis of life: "The highest and first law of the universe-and [171/172] the other name of life is, therefore, 'help.' The other name of death is 'separation.' Government and co-operation are in all things and eternally the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, eternally, and in all things, the laws of death" (VII, 205-207). The diamond, which is Ruskin's paradigmatic symbol for purity, is the perfect antithesis to the smoke or mud of carbon, in which the crystalline structure has lapsed into disorganization. Light is to dark as Divine presence is to separation, as purity is to corruption, as energy is to entropy, and as life is to death.
These antitheses dominate Ruskin's vividest writings in the late 1850S down to the last, apocalyptic chapters of Modern Painters V (1860), the general theme of which is the relationship of social decline to a decline in the arts. In a lecture of 1858 he asserted this connection in paradoxical form: "At the moment when, in any kingdom, you point to the triumphs of its greatest artists, you point also to the determined hour of the kingdom's decline" (XVI, 342). The reason lies both within and beyond art itself: "beyond" in the sense that art becomes damaging when "misused" -- that is, by a system comprising artist, patron, and audience; "within" in the sense that the true subject of art in itself contains moral ambiguities. That subject Ruskin declares to be "organic form," meaning either landscape or the human figure, although in most contexts he means the second. The noble human figure is the type of vigorous and healthy life, but in its debased representation it becomes lewd and profane. Since Ruskin's own attitude to the sensuous remains ambivalent and confused, he resorts to the imagery of the organic and inorganic, which allows him to connect an attitude toward the human body with an attitude toward the human social body.
In the inaugural address to the Cambridge School of Art, he gives his most striking portrait of art misused, an epitome of the sensual Fall centered on the person of a Renaissance cardinal. The villa and garden of Cardinal Maurice rise far above Turin and the surrounding plain of the Piedmont -- a landscape that bears "the whole legend of Italy's past history before it by the finger of God" beneath a sky of "unsealed scrolls" and "mighty missal pages of sunset after sunset." By contrast the walls of the villa are decorated with frescoes of the four seasons, loaded down, according to the cardinal's request, with "una copiosa quantita di Amorini." These vapid landscapes, with their nude putti infesting meadow, tree, and sky, render nature as an erotic fantasy, a puff of blinded vanity that plays against the mountain scriptures, with their unheeded warnings (XVI, 196, 192). The paintings and the now dilapidated villa form a character of the corrupt cardinal, who resigned his commission in order to marry his niece. A "born intriguer" who "lived a dissipated life, surrounded by artists and men of letters" (XVI, 19 l, editor's note), he destroys in the name of religion what the Renaissance [172/173] had destroyed in the name of knowledge. (Oddly enough, the same cardinal commissioned the three great Veroneses in the Turin gallery -- the power of which, for Ruskin, was "almost superhuman" in its noble depiction of human form.)
In the cardinal's sin Ruskin has begun to see sensuality as an expression of solipsism, or hoarding. Maurice has cut himself off from the body of nature and the society of man; the other name of death is separation, and so the judgment upon the villa is decomposition of its organic forms. Ruskin infuses the ruin with sexual horror: "The creeping, insidious, neglected flowers weave their burning nets about the white marble of the balustrades, and rend them slowly, block from block, and stone from stone: the thin, sweet-scented leaves tremble along the old masonry joints as if with palsy at every breeze; and the dark lichens, golden and grey, make the foot-fall silent in the path's centre" (XVI, 196). This antithetical garden performs the work of death like a vegetal Lamia: the flowers, insidious and weaving, are spiderlike or snakelike, the leaves are both sweet and palsied, the "dark" lichens seem to still the heart as well as the footfall.
The Swinburnean imagery of decomposition also resembles the fate visited upon modern England, which has misused beauty not by sensualizing it but by banishing it altogether. The sin in each case, once again, is denying organic bonds. "Modern Manufacture and Design," a lecture delivered at the opening of a School of Design in Bradford, is about the impossibility of any true school of design in a country that, if its commercial desires reach their logical extension, will soon be one vast infernal machine -- in the south, lime kilns and brick fields to balance the coal pits in the Midlands, and in the Lakes, an immense quarry of slate and granite to supply the world with roofing and building stone. This state of affairs is of course not progress but decline, as Ruskin shows in a remarkable word portrait of a Bradford suburb.
In the foreground stands a seventeenth-century country house surrounded by stream and woods, now fallen into a common desolation: the garden is "blighted utterly into a field of ashes," the shutters hanging "in rags of rotten wood," the stream "soaking slowly by, black as ebony," the banks "trodden into unctuous, sooty slime," the furnaces of the city "foaming forth perpetual plague of sulphurous darkness" (XVI, 339). The landscape is antinatural, dominated not by machinery -- as a similar scene would be in Dickens -- but by decomposition, the reverse of the "law of help." Even the smallest detail anticipates the qualities of impurity as set forth in Modern Painters V -- the qualities of formlessness, filth, darkness, and inanition. Things are, first of all, indistinct -- "unregarded havoc of ruin," "shapeless rents," coiling clouds -- and all substances have decomposed to lower forms: shutters to rags, the bank to slime. The river soaks instead of runs, its banished energy displaced [173/174] onto the diabolic foaming and coiling of the smoke. The only distinct objects are the industrial equivalents of land enclosure: instead of hedges, "slabs of square stone, like gravestones," reminding one of Blake's "chartered" streets. But Ruskin sets against this scene a second, forming a contrast sharper than anything in the pages of Pugin. The alternative "school of design" is supposedly Pisa in the time of Nino Pisano, but it really belongs to the timeless imagination, like a glimpse from the window of the Lady of Shalott. In Ruskin's Pisa are gardens, courts, and cloisters; a street that is really a line of palaces "inlaid with deep red porphyry, and with serpentine"; the most beautiful ladies Italy ever saw; and troops of knights ("horse and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming light" -- rather like a stained glass window). This tableau displays the quintessence of "purity" -- light, color, energy, and above all, life -- not vegetable but human ("this scenery of perfect human life"), an animate earth mirroring a heaven equally animate ("every cloud that passed was literally the chariot of an angel"; XVI, 339-340). The utopian city is a human landscape: humans are to its streets as trees and blooms are to the Paradisal hills.
But we do not want a new Pisa, Ruskin says. "All that gorgeousness of the Middle Ages, beautiful as it sounds in description, noble as in many respects it was in reality, had, nevertheless, for foundation and for end, nothing but the pride of life -- the pride of the so-called superior classes." For us, on the other hand, "there can be no more the throne of marble -- for us no more the vault of gold -- but for us there is the loftier and the nobler privilege of bringing the power and charm of art within the reach of the humble and the poor" (XVI, 341-342). In this light the dream of Pisa becomes the emblem or the myth of the good society -- not a looking back but a looking forward to a human-centered world. Indeed all great art is such a vision, "the type of strong and noble life," because it sees truly; for the noble person looks "the facts of the world full in the face" and then "deals with them," becoming "no unconscious nor insignificant agent in consummating their good, and restraining their evil" (XVI, 287). Great art is the type (though not a sufficient cause) of a life open to anyone -- a painter, a housewife, a governor, a laborer, a man of science -- even though form (as the narrator of Death in Venice describes it) may be "hostile to morality -- in that of its very essence it is indifferent to good and evil, and deliberately concerned to make the moral world stoop beneath its proud and undivided sceptre."
What might our "magnificence," in its "universality and its lowliness," look like? I have said that Ruskin's lectures to the wealthy do not rebuke them so much as they awaken them to their latent powers, and that awakening is the aim also of "Modern Manufacturing and Design." An essential step in the argument is Ruskin's denial of any essential [174/175] difference between decorative art and "higher" forms; for just as, on the one hand, the sublimest works of genius can be decorative -- Gothic sculpture, for example, or the walls of the Scuola di San Rocco -- so the art, say, of manufactured articles depends also on spiritual concerns like "truth, tenderness, and inventive application or distribution" (XVI, 334). By closing the gap in kind between a cathedral and a domestic interior, or between Raphael's tapestry designs and a workman's designs for a shawl, Ruskin makes concrete and plausible his dream of a "magnificence" in widest commonalty spread. The audience at Bradford thus has an even heavier charge than the audience at Manchester, since the manufacturers are not simply patrons of geniuses but also the producers of any useful article that may be beautiful as well. Ultimately, their product is the "souls" of the public, as Ruskin makes clear in a very modern insight into the power of advertising to create false needs. The business of his audience as manufacturers, he says, is "to form the market, as much as to supply it" -- not by "retarding the arts, tarnishing the virtues, and confusing the manners" of England but by becoming "its guides, counsellors, and rulers -- wielding powers of subtle but gigantic beneficence.... Let such duty, such ambition, be once accepted in their fulness, and the best glory of European art and of European manufacture may yet be to come" (XVI, 344-345). That new glory might resemble something like the windows of Chartres that depict the tradesmen who paid for them: "There are smiths at the forge, curriers at their hides, tanners looking into their pits, mercers selling goods over the counter -- all made into beautiful medallions. Therefore, whenever you want to know whether you have got any real power of composition . . ., try to conventionalize a butcher's or a green grocer's, with Saturday night customers buying cabbage and beef" (XVI, 328). The wealthy, arrogant young man who could think of trade and labor only in ironic terms, as antitheses to a romantic vision, has vanished. In his maturer vision, art celebrates the dignity of mankind in its works and days, acting as the organic emblem of a perfected commercial society.
Last modified December 2000