Ruskin and the Twentieth Century: The Modernity of Ruskinism (review)

Marcel Proust, who translated The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies early in his career, remains the best-known link between Ruskin and the canonical European high culture of the first half of the twentieth century. It is not a link Ruskin and the Twentieth Century allows us to take for granted. In the first of the contributions to the volume, Carlo Lauro challenges a tradition of commentary that casts Proust's relation to Ruskin as one of filial piety; Lauro shows the author of À la recherche exorcizing Ruskin's shadow in the course of his great work. In Lauro's account Vermeer becomes the touchstone for a final failure of Ruskinian aesthetics, in the careers of Swann and Bergotte. Meanwhile English writing is characterized by the more reductive polemic of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908), in which Forster associates Ruskinian Gothic taste with a repressive complex of "Victorian values," and opposes it with a neo-paganism derived from Pater's essays on the Renaissance. Did Ruskin's legacy to the next generation consist, then, of obligingly playing the Victorian father against whom it was necessary to rebel?

A few of the essays cite Ezra Pound's ambivalent reference in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:

Gladstone was still respected,
When John Ruskin produced
"King's Treasuries"; Swinburne
And Rossetti still abused. ¹

Is this a tribute or a repudiation? Does Ruskin fall on the side of respect or abuse—of stuffy Victorianism or outlaw proto-modernism—or else form a kind of hinge between them? Massimo Bacigalupo contextualizes the verses to recover an allusion to the Ruskin-Whistler controversy, which would seem to set Ruskin decisively on the side of Victorian heaviness (39-40). Later in the volume, Clive Wilmer also unpacks the cultural context of Pound's lines; this time, however, parsing the reference to "King's Treasuries" (the first lecture in Sesame and Lilies) to recover a covert affinity. Pound's "curious and habitual ambivalence towards Ruskin" (173) articulates an intellectual debt to, especially, the elder writer's aesthetic critique of political economy—even though Pound would have been reluctant to acknowledge an association with Whistler's reactionary antagonist.

Ruskin himself always gave the word "modernism" a pejorative charge. In the Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854), Modernism is the last of the "Trinity of Ages," dark era of "the denial of Christ," after Classicalism and Mediaevalism; Ruskin follows the Pre-Raphaelites in dating its onset at around 1500. ² Charles Dickens served as Ruskin's example of the "pure modernist—a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence," who had "no understanding of any power of antiquity" or of "the nobler power of superstition." ³ Modernism, in other words, signifies a total immersion, of the will as well as intellect, in the phenomenology and psychology of modern life. In the next century more than one version of Modernism, of course, would define itself precisely in Ruskinian terms of a critique of modernity by way of an appeal to cultural or racial origins. Ruskin's prophetic amplification of aesthetic criticism supplies what may be the strongest link between the British movements of Romanticism and Modernism—his representative Victorianism, then, adumbrating a late or last-ditch Romanticism that was at the same time an early or prototypical Modernism. So much for these period titles.

Ruskin and the Twentieth Century, a collection of short essays by different hands, does not (and cannot) provide a sustained, coherent view of Ruskin's relationship to modernism, let alone to the range of twentieth-century aesthetic theories and practices across the visual and literary arts, in continental Europe and North America as well as the U. K. This is a strength as well as a defect; the volume's miscellaneousness keeps intact the sheer variety, complexity and contradictions of its subject. The individual contributions bear some of the...