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Essays
As an art critic, Ruskin expressed his aesthetic
principles in Modern Painters. In the first volume of Modern
Painters, he not only makes a defense of Turner, but also goes in for
high praise of one of Turner’s pictures, “The Slave Ship”. In the third
volume, Ruskin shifts from his discussions on truth and Realism in art to
the same problem in literature and brings up the topic of “the pathetic
fallacy” in poetry. “While nothing could be good or useful, or ultimately
pleasurable, which was untrue”, there is “something pleasurable in written
poetry, which is nevertheless untrue.” And this “falseness in all our
impressions of external things” is characterized by him as “the pathetic
fallacy”. In addition, although “the greatest poets do not often admit this
kind of falseness,” considered in relation to the interior state of the
speaker the pathetic fallacy tells the truths. This idea that the pathetic
fallacy effectively conveys truths of man’s inner world makes it fulfill
what Ruskin takes to be the role of art, which is to present things, not as
they are in themselves— the role of natural science —but “as they appear to
mankind. Science studies the relations of things to each other; but art
studies only their relations to man: what one thing is to the human eyes and
human heart, what it has to say to men, and what it can become to them.” The
truth conveyed by the pathetic fallacy is phenomenological truth, the truth
of experience, the truth as it appears to the experiencing subject. Citing a
line from Dante’s Inferno, he concludes “the spirit of truth must
guide us in some sort, even in our enjoyment of fallacy”. Also, he maintains
that the greatest art should contain “the greatest number of greatest
ideas”, which should have an effect of moral instruction with truth and
concern the daily life of common people yet at the same time being
inventive. Because of his dislike for the capitalist civilization of his
day, Ruskin advocated a return to the arts and crafts of the medieval age.
“Life without industry is guilt and industry without art is brutality.”
Ruskin showed his enthusiasm for the medieval in his
two important works on architecture: The Seven Lamps of Architecture
and The Stones of Venice. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture,
Ruskin makes very strict aesthetic and moral demands upon art and considers
great art as dependent on high aesthetic and moral standards in the life of
the community that produces it. A more significant manifestation of Ruskin’s
medievalism is The Stones of Venice in which Gothic architecture is
highly praised.
Ruskin himself was also a brilliant artist, being
good at drawing and painting. Thus, he often wrote out of his own experience
in artistic creation. And his rhythmic style of writing also makes him “the
apostle of beauty” who helps the reader to see and appreciate the beauty of
the world around him.
Ruskin was the best art critic in the ninetieth
century. Rich but generous, he set up the Guild of St. George and gave away
his large inherited fortune to philanthropic enterprises. Although his
prescription for the social problems was unpractical, his deeds were worthy
of admiration. His social and aesthetic thoughts have exerted deep influence
on writers and poets, such as Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, Oscar Wilde and
Bernard Shaw.
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