If you are new to Ruskin, this volume from Penguin’s ‘Great Ideas’ series is the perfect place to begin. It contains two self-contained essays, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (from The Stones of Venice) and ‘The Work of Iron’ (a lecture he delivered at Tunbridge Wells in 1858). The two essays are short enough to be both read over in a couple of hours or so, but they cut right to the heart of Ruskin’s concerns. What do examples of good art have in common, and why should those specific qualities make them better than bad art? What is the connection between beauty and morality, and how should a well-ordered society bring them together? What does it mean to know something?
Ruskin’s first great principle is that society should allow people to flourish as whole people, exercising all their aspects as human beings. This is something we might recognise in our own debates about how to match economic strength with that collection of all the things that make life worth living which we rather drably label “quality of life”. Gothic architecture, for Ruskin, showed how this fullness of life could be achieved, and that we must make radical reforms to our modern society in order to do so.
It was natural that Ruskin, as an art critic should tackle these issues because, as he wrote, “all art worthy the name is the energy – neither of the human body alone, nor of the human soul alone, but of both united, one guiding the other: good craftsmanship and work of the fingers joined with good emotion and work of the heart”. In other words, what Ruskin thought were the greatest works of art (such as a great cathedral like Lincoln), had been made by people living fully human lives. The thousands of carvings on Lincoln Cathedral are a solid record of those lives. It is a beautiful building to us today because we can see that happiness in it.
Ruskin’s second principle is that knowing something means perceiving it properly. This means literally seeing something right (he was constantly bemused by artists’ tendency to create conventionalised representations which are nothing like the flowers and trees we see every day), but also keeping in mind all the associations and implications of what we see. In ‘The Nature of Gothic’, he traces the associations and implications of gothic buildings, and finds them to offer an account of what it is to live as a free human being in society. In ‘The Work of Iron’, he begins with the image (remembered from childhood), of the rusty stain left by the spring-waters of Tunbridge Wells on a marble fountain, and unravels a web of associations which affirm the essential vitality of the created universe and our duty to live together in loving community.
These are exciting themes, and it is one of Ruskin’s great achievements that he clearly expressed ideas which, in almost any other hands, lead quickly into metaphysical labyrinths full of hard words and intimidating names. Ruskin isn’t a clever writer. That’s meant as a compliment. His energy flows, unstudied, like a river. He doesn’t sit you down to talk you through Hegel. Instead, he has an almost unmatched ability to implant life into ideas so that, as a reader, they seize hold of you before you even know they’re there.
Ruskin doesn’t have all the answers. Why, for example, buildings that are morally good should also be beautiful is one of the great puzzles left unresolved by ‘The Nature of Gothic’. But he’s asking a lot of the right questions. He’s been out of fashion for a hundred years but the things he’s interested in (freedom, social justice and real human progress), certainly aren’t.
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