by Simon Heffer
Luckily for Ruskin, his father was prepared to subsidise a literary life based upon art criticism; and it was his desire to defend his and his father’s friend Turner that was the genesis of Modern Painters, a multi-volume work that occupied Ruskin on and off from 1842 until 1860. In that period he continued his European travels and studies in the great galleries and museums of the Continent, eventually without his parents, moving from painting to architecture by the late 1840s. The first fruit of this developing interest was The Seven Lamps of Architecture, published in 1849, a crucial work culturally in giving further momentum to the Gothic Revival.
The Seven Lamps was, however, but an hors d’oeuvre to what in many respects is Ruskin’s masterpiece, The Stones of Venice, published in three volumes in the early 1850s after Ruskin and Effie – they married in 1848 – had spent two winters in the city, staying first at the Danieli and then in private apartments, while Venice was under Austrian occupation. Both books extol the moral aspects of architecture: the pious Gothic is preferred to the depraved baroque. Given this approach to his subject, it was a short trek from there to social and political commentary; a progress aided by Ruskin’s having met Carlyle in 1850, and having fallen under the spell of his love of feudalism.
In April 1854, out of the blue – or so it seems – Effie served papers on Ruskin for the annulment of their marriage on the grounds of its non-consummation because of his impotence. Ruskin did not deny the non-consummation – Effie had been medically examined, which removed any doubt in the matter – but did deny he was impotent. The marriage ended while he was with his parents in Chamonix in July 1854, taking the mountain air. Ruskin and Effie had spent large parts of their married life apart, with Ruskin apparently unable to sever the bond with his parents, and Effie’s father becoming more and more concerned on her behalf. In July 1855 Effie married John Everett Millais, the pre-Raphaelite painter who had collaborated with Ruskin on the illustrations for The Stones of Venice.
Before Ruskin began social and political commentary he had, though only in his mid-thirties, exerted the most profound influence over the next generation of Victorian artists. As well as Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones had all been attracted by his aesthetic criticism. He assembled a collection of Turners for exhibition out of the legacy to the National Gallery, which showed him as a leader of taste. Not least through the Carlyles and their circle, Ruskin met many of the leading literary figures in London: Froude, Tennyson, the Brownings, Coventry Patmore and William Allingham. He also met F. D. Maurice, who enlisted him as part of the intellectual arsenal of his London Working Men’s College, where he would give drawing lessons.
By 1860 Ruskin had undergone fundamental changes in character and outlook. His relations with his parents had been strained since the end of his marriage, he underwent a period of religious doubt that put him at a distance from his mother, and his anti-capitalism had become more pronounced, not least since he saw capitalism as a destroyer of beauty. He had also suffered from bouts of depression. This was the background to his four articles on political economy in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, edited by W. M. Thackeray, and republished in 1862 as Unto This Last.
Ruskin had chosen the Cornhill because of its middle-class readership, but they were so outraged by the anti-utilitarian tone of the first three articles that Thackeray told him the fourth would have to be the last. Indeed, the tone is not merely anti-utilitarian, but can be seen as an attack on capitalism and the mercantile system. For the benefit of those who could not grasp his message the first time, Ruskin used the preface to the reissue of the four essays to spell out a vision for the improvement of society that was, effectively, the establishment of a welfare state, with nationalised industries, of a sort that would take another eighty-five years to be created. He more than hinted that capitalism was not honest, and that ‘the acquisition of wealth was finally possible only under certain moral conditions of society’: which suggests the high idealism of his thoughts.136
His vision was in four sections. The first was that youth training schools should be set up, at the State’s cost, and all children permitted (‘and, under certain cases, be under penalty required’) to pass through them.137 In them a youth would learn ‘the laws of health, and the exercises enjoined by them; habits of gentleness and justice; and the calling by which he is to live.’ Second, the government would also set up and regulate factories and workshops, not just for the production but also for the sale ‘of every necessary of life’, with which private enterprise would be expected to compete.138 Third, the unemployed would be set to work by the government. If they were insufficiently educated to do a job, they would be trained. If they were too ill, they would be looked after until well. If they simply objected to work, they would be given the most ‘painful and degrading’ labour, until they mended their ways. Fourth, ‘comfort and home’ would be provided for the old and destitute. At the high water mark of Liberal individualism and the power of the free market, it is little wonder that this manifesto of Tory paternalism, veering into socialism, should have caused such outrage.
Ruskin’s attack on wealth, apart from being other-worldly, also seemed to consist in his resentment at the power that wealth gave a man over his fellow men. He quotes Adam Smith’s dictum of needing to ‘buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest’, but questions the morality of that process: the process that had made Victorian Britain as prosperous as it was.139 Ruskin had reached the stage where he saw wealth as something that could not be measured in money – a view he would confirm in practice when inheriting his father’s considerable estate and art collection a few years later, when he proceeded to give much of it away. His attack on the mercantile class – the engine of Victorian prosperity – was unbridled. He described the notion of ‘robbing the poor because he is poor’ as ‘especially the mercantile form of theft, consisting in taking advantage of a man’s necessities in order to obtain his labour or property at a reduced price’.140 He saw the relationship between master and servant as inherently unjust; he saw markets, regarded by Liberals as a meeting place for the exercise of respective free wills, as unjust too, feeling that the power always lay with the rich and never with the poor. He repeated a line he had written in Modern Painters, hoping it would have a wider audience now: ‘Government and co-operation are in all things the Laws of Life; Anarchy and competition the Laws of Death.’141
Ruskin accused society of having become profoundly unchristian: ‘I know no previous instance in history of a nation’s establishing a systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion,’ he writes at the end of his third article, Qui Judicatis Terram. ‘The writings which we (verbally) esteem as divine, not only denounce the love of money as the source of all evil, and as an idolatry abhorred of the Deity, but declare mammon service to be the accurate and irreconcilable opposite of God’s service: and, whenever they speak of riches absolute, and poverty absolute, declare woe to the rich, and blessing to the poor.’142 Given his readership, Thackeray took a risk allowing Ruskin to write a fourth and final broadside against their values. In fact the last essay is a damp squib, a religiose expression of Ruskin’s homespun ideas on economics. However, the damage done in the earlier essays by a man of Ruskin’s standing against the cult of capitalism was already serious enough.
By 1867, like Carlyle, and for similar reasons, Ruskin doubted reform would bring happiness. He had outlined his views in his letters to Thomas Dixon, a Sunderland cork-cutter, published that autumn as Time and Tide. In his preface Ruskin states his intentions in writing the letters: ‘The reform you desire may give you more influence in parliament; but your influence there will of course be useless to you – perhaps worse than useless – until you have wisely made up your minds what you wish Parliament to do for you; and when you have made up your minds about that, you will find, not only that you can do it for yourselves without the intervention of Parliament; but that eventually nobody but yourselves can do
it.’143 This was estote ergo vos perfecti! again, expressed in less erudite terms.
The letters are not so much Ruskin’s thoughts on reform as some early workings-through of his view on capitalism, and the relationship between master and servant. Like Arnold, he felt capitalism to have been far from an unbridled good. However, he sought to disentangle the demands for the ballot with those for shorter hours and more wages. Just as Arnold had noted the effects on the East End of an economic downturn, so did Ruskin discern the ‘utter grief, which the lower middle classes in England are now suffering’. He likened it to ‘as if I were living in one great churchyard, with people all round me clinging feebly to the edges of the open graves, and calling for help, as they fall back into them, out of sight.’144
He voiced contempt for the law of supply and demand, destroying families when demand tailed off. He suggested the working class should organise, not to ‘make a noise’ about laws it did not like, ‘nor call meetings in parks about them, in spite of railings and police; but keep them in your thoughts and sights, as objects of patient purpose and future achievement by peaceful strength.’145 He warned them that revolution would bring poverty, as capital would flee to a safe haven, ‘and you would perish in riot and famine’. He recommended honesty, and education, instead; and warned his upper-class readers to recognise the dignity of the labour of those who made their shoes or dug their gardens.
In The Stones of Venice he had called for a State education system, advocating a welfarist ideal that was anathema to ‘our Liberal practitioners’. He repeated this in Time and Tide: ‘Finally, I hold it for indisputable, that the first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attain years of discretion. But in order to the effecting this the Government must have an authority over the people of which we now do not so much as dream.’146 Education was the only way to limit crime; and he saw education as teaching, or developing, ‘reverence and compassion’.147
He did not doubt that the ‘teaching of truth as a habit will be the chief work the master has to do.’148 Like Arnold, with whom he shared a Christian faith, he believed in the possibilities of perfection; unlike Stephen, and to an extent unlike Carlyle – both of whom struggled with orthodox religion – he took an optimist’s view of human nature. He recalled seeing dirty small children in the slums of St Giles’s, as he walked to the British Museum: but ‘in those worst treated children of the English race, I yet see the making of gentlemen and gentlewomen – not the making of dog-stealers and gin drinkers, such as their parents were; and the child of the average English tradesman or peasant, even at this day, well schooled, will show no innate disposition such as must fetter him for ever to the clod or counter.’149
In 1873 Ruskin issued his collection of three lectures given in 1865–6 on aspects of social criticism, The Crown of Wild Olive, with the addition of a substantial fourth lecture, The Future of England. The lectures touch on ideas already expressed in works such as Unto this Last and Time and Tide. The preface concentrates on a stretch of once beautiful Surrey countryside ruined by the advance of capitalism; and the pointlessness of fencing off a small piece of land in front of a new public house with elaborate railings so as to create a rubbish dump. Sweetness and light remain absent.
The Future of England was given to an audience of young officers at Woolwich in December 1869. Ruskin again amplified a theme from Time and Tide: ‘A struggle is approaching between the newly-risen power of democracy and the apparently departing power of feudalism; and another struggle, no less imminent, and far more dangerous, between wealth and pauperism.’150 He lamented that these two struggles were viewed as identical, when he felt they were distinct. Riches, he believed were adverse to noblesse – great dynasties had always been founded by the poor, and truly chivalric knights never kept treasure for themselves. Also, ‘all anarchy is the forerunner of poverty, and all prosperity begins in obedience’.151
However, Ruskin conceded that nineteenth-century cynicism about kings and aristocratic rule had some justification – ‘the people have been misgoverned’, which led them to seek a form of rule without masters.152 Presciently, he reflected that ‘the world may be quite content to endure much suffering with this fresh hope, and retain its faith in anarchy, whatever comes of it, till it can endure no more.’ The lower classes were right to think they had done all the hard work, and their masters had taken all the profits of their labour. A result of the development of the mercantile State since Tudor times had been the creation of ‘a class among the lower orders which it is now peculiarly difficult to govern’ that had ‘lost the very capability of reverence, which is the most precious part of the human soul.’153 He echoed Arnold when he said that there is a ‘vast populace’ which ‘exists only in worship of itself – which can neither see anything beautiful around it, nor conceive anything virtuous above it; which has, towards all goodness and greatness, no other feelings than those of the lowest creatures – fear, hatred and hunger; a populace which has sunk below your appeal in their nature, as it has risen beyond your power in their multitude; whom you can now no more charm than you can the adder, nor discipline, than you can the summer fly.’154 He said that ‘light’ – one cannot tell whether the Arnoldian reference was conscious – was now required if the ‘darkness’ he had outlined were to be lifted. Otherwise, a new gospel would be preached – ‘Let the weak do as they can, and the wicked as they will.’155
Although some of what Ruskin said smelt of Arnold, he was still under the sway of Carlyle. ‘“Govern us,” they cry with one heart, though many minds. They can be governed still, these English; they are men still; not gnats, nor serpents.’156 Yet his solution is the most idealistic of any, but rooted in his eccentric ideas of political economy. He agreed that to make people governable they must be educated: but did not share Arnold’s view of what education was. ‘Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.’157 He said this was not about learning to read and count, since such talents could be put to nefarious uses: but ‘training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls.’158
He claimed that as much was spent in England in a year – £800,000 – on training horses as in educating children: and that the cost in the upkeep of paupers and the incarceration of criminals made it counterproductive not to have a compulsory, State-funded education system. ‘For every pound that we spend on education we spend twelve either in charity or punishment’.159 However, his other remedies are implausible: a compulsory national labour system (with no sign of how it would be funded or administered) with those thrown out of work by the advance of machinery put to mending the infrastructure and beautifying the landscape. There is a touch of Luddism in Ruskin, visible from his earliest essays on political economy in the late 1850s and from Unto This Last, published in 1862. One senses that when Carlyle laments an unattainable past he knows the game is up: but with Ruskin, defeat is never admitted. He continues to exhort and expect a class enriched by capitalism to make fair shares of their spoils with those put out of work, or kept from prosperity, by the effects of their investments. Ruskin was a soi-disant Tory – ‘a violent Tory of the old school; – Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s’ – but it is clear from The Crown of Wild Olive why he became lauded as a father of English socialism.160
The gulf between his – Carlyle’s – school and Mill’s continued to expand. Ruskin noted in his diaries on 30 October 1874 Carlyle’s disdain for Mill, showing the power his mood had over Ruskin. ‘We fell away upon Mill’s essay on the substitution of patriotism for religion. “Actually the most paltry rag of” – a chain of vituperative contempt too fast to note – “it has fallen to my lot to come in with. Among my acquaintance I have not seen a person talking of a thing he so little understood.”’ The point of his indignation was Mill’s supposing that, if God did not make everybody ‘happy’, it w
as because He had no sufficient power – ‘was not enough supplied with the article . . . Nothing makes Carlyle more contemptuous than this coveting of “happiness”.’161
VI
Millicent Garrett Fawcett reviewed Liberty, Equality, Fraternity in June 1873, three months after its publication, and republished her remarks in a pamphlet – Mr Fitzjames Stephen on the Position of Women – a few weeks later. Of all Stephen’s conservative arguments in the book, none has stood the test of time so poorly as his dismissal of women, and his disdain for their ‘rights’. Lady Egerton took him to task, but he was having none of it. ‘You think K[ate, his daughter] might have been educated into an equal to the boys. I think it would have spoilt her very much to try to make anything but a woman of her – indeed my own enthusiasm about women whom I really care for, is one main reason why I do not want them to be pitted against men. It is like trying the strength of porcelain or glass against . . . brass . . . or like putting a man who works with his brains against a man who works with his limbs in a trial of the strength of the limbs.’162
Although Liberty, Equality, Fraternity is usually viewed as an assault upon On Liberty, it is also in part an attack on The Subjection of Women, as part of an attempt to undermine the whole of Mill’s system of beliefs. ‘All the talk in the world will never shake the proposition that men are stronger than women in every shape,’ he asserts.163 ‘They have greater muscular and nervous force, greater intellectual force, greater vigour of character,’ he added. This was a ‘general truth’. Stephen’s views on women, more than perhaps on anything else in his book, are based on assertion rather than deduction: he simply cannot imagine a world in which ‘boys and girls [are] educated indiscriminately, and . . . instructed in the same things . . . Are girls to play at cricket, to row, and be drilled like boys? I cannot argue with a person who says Yes.’