She ceased to speak, and we, unanswering turned to go? We had no further power to work the captive woe; Her cheek, her gleaming eye, declared that man had given A sentence unapproved, and overruled by Heaven.
1845 1846
2. Cf. the words of the dying Catherine in Wuth- escape into that glorious world, and to be always ering Heights (1847), chap. 15: 'The thing that irks there....! shall be incomparably beyond and me most is this shattered prison [my body]. . . . I'm above you all.' tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to
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JOHN RUSKIN / 1317
No coward soul is mine1
No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere I see Heaven's glories shine And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
5 O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds
10 That move men's hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thy infinity is So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality
With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years Pervades and broods above,
20 Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though Earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And thou wert left alone Every Existence would exist in thee
25 There is not room for Death Nor atom that his might could render void Since thou art Being and Breath And what thou art may never be destroyed.
1846 1850
1. According to Charlotte Bronte, these are the last lines her sister wrote. JOHN RUSKIN 1819-1900
John Ruskin was both the leading Victorian critic of art and an important critic of society. These two roles can be traced back to two important influences of his childhood. His father, a wealthy wine merchant, enjoyed travel, and on tours of the Continent he introduced his son to landscapes, architecture, and art. From this exposure Ruskin acquired a zest for beauty that animates even the most theoretical of his
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discussions of aesthetics. In his tranquil autobiography (titled Praeterita, 1885?89, or, as he said, 'Past things'), composed in the penultimate decade of a turbulent life, Ruskin reflected on the profound experience of his first view of the Swiss Alps at sunset. For his fourteen-year-old self, he writes, 'the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful':
It is not possible to imagine, in any time of the world, a more blessed entrance into life, for a child of such a temperament as mine. True, the temperament belonged to the age: a very few years,?within the hundred,?before that, no child could have been born to care for mountains, or for the men that lived among them, in that way. Till Rousseau's time, there had been no 'sentimental' love of nature; and till Scott's, no such apprehensive love of 'all sorts and conditions of men,' not in the soul merely, but in the flesh .. . I went down that evening from the garden- terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful.
Such a rapturous response to the beauties of nature was later to be duplicated by his response to the beauties of architecture and art. During a tour of 'this Holy Land of Italy' (as he called it), he visited Venice and recorded in his diary (May 6, 1841) his response to Saint Mark's cathedral square in that city: 'Thank God I am here! It is the Paradise of cities and there is moon enough to make herself the sanities of earth lunatic, striking its pure flashes of light against the grey water before the window; and I am happier than I have been these five years. .. . I feel fresh and young when my foot is on these pavements.'
Ruskin's choice of phrase in these accounts of how beauty affected him reflects the second influence in his life, often at odds with the first: his daily Bible readings under the direction of his mother, a devout Evangelical Christian. From this biblical indoctrination Ruskin derived some elements of his lush and highly rhythmical prose style but more especially his sense of prophecy and mission as a critic of modern society.
Ruskin's life was spent in traveling, lecturing, and writing. His prodigious literary output can be roughly divided into three phases. At first he was preoccupied with problems of art. Modern Painters (1843?60), which he began writing at the age of twenty-three after his graduation from Oxford, was a defense of the English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner (1775?1851). This defense (which was to extend to five volumes) involved Ruskin in problems of truth in art (as in his chapter 'Pathetic Fallacy') and in the ultimate importance of imagination (as in his discussion of Turner's painting The Slave Ship).
During the 1850s Ruskin's principal interest shifted from art to architecture, especially to the problem of determining what kind of society is capable of producing great buildings. His enthusiasm for Gothic architecture was infectious, and he has sometimes been blamed for the prevalence of Gothic buildings on college campuses in America. A study of The Stones of Venice (185 1?53), however (especially the chapter printed here), will show that merely to revive the Gothic style was not his concern. What he wanted to revive was the kind of society that had produced such architecture, a society in which the individual workers could express themselves and enjoy what Ruskin's disciple William Morris called 'work-pleasure.' A mechanized production- line society, such as Ruskin's or our own, could produce not Gothic architecture but only imitations of its mannerisms. Ruskin's concern was to change industrial society, not to decorate concrete towers with gargoyles.
This interest in the stultifying effects of industrialism led Ruskin gradually into economics. After 1860 the critic of art became (like the writer he most greatly admired, Thomas Carlyle) an outspoken critic of laissez-faire, or noninterventionist, economics. His conception of the responsibilities of employers toward their workers, as expounded in Unto This Last (1860), was dismissed by his contemporaries as an absurdity. What he was laboring to show was that self-seeking business relationships
