Ruskin and Modernism (review)

This excellent collection of essays is the product of a distinguished conference convened in Milan and Vercelli in 1997. Taken as a whole the book persuasively shows that Ruskin is part of the inception of Modernism, and that the Modernists' readings of Ruskin reward close attention. An important essay by Dinah Birch aligns Ruskin's use of myth with myth in Woolf and Joyce (especially in Ulysses)and with T. S. Eliot's seminal essay "Ulysses, Order and Myth." And Eliot is a big presence, inevitably, elsewhere in the volume. Giovanni Cianci writes with great perceptiveness about the way in which reconstruction in all the arts following the Great War is both a revisiting of the past and an invention of a new future; it is both appropriation and "reappropriation" of the "tradition" referred to in Eliot's other indispensable founding essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." A brilliant and extraordinary piece by Ronald Bush sounds at times as though it is turning into the comic tour de force in David Lodge's Small World where a young academic inadvertently gives a paper on the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare. We almost seem to hear that Eliot's "I shall not want Pipit in Heaven" had shown Ruskin how to think about the devastating death of his unattainable beloved, Rose la Touche, who died (probably of anorexia) in 1875. ¹ And the link, first shown by F. O. Matthiessen, between Eliot's poem and Ruskin's anguished private letter is a reminder, if any were needed, of Eliot's inexhaustible intellectual curiosity.

In this collection there are some excellent readings of Ruskin himself. In his essay on autobiography, Max Saunders gives one of the best short accounts of Praeterita that I have seen, and incidentally helps to enrich our understanding of "impressionism" (that elusive but necessary Modernist term) by establishing significant links between Ford Madox Ford and Ruskin. Laurel Brake writes very cleverly indeed on the relationship between Ruskin and Pater; she persuades me both that there is more to Pater than I had thought, and that in terms of the "issue of form" there is a linear progression which goes (roughly) Ruskin-Pater-Modernism. I found it hard, though, to see why Ruskin and Pater were being compared in terms of what she calls "the politics of gender." Ruskin's well-known sexual difficulties—his inability to consummate his marriage and his obsessional pursuit of various unattainable young women—certainly caused remark and embarrassment in his day. But Pater's homosexuality was a different matter: being punishable by law it made Pater a sexual outsider in an absolute sense, and there is not really much room for a fruitful comparison with Ruskin over that.

Luisa Villa gives a searching and careful examination of the tensions and agreements that existed between Ruskin and that ambitious young American, Henry James, who closely resembled Ruskin but urgently needed to differentiate himself from the older man. He has to repudiate what he feels to be Ruskin's prudery, provincialism and moral narrowness in order to see for himself. In Italy, for example, it is a relief to him that he was permitted to see Rome without the weight of Ruskin's authority (Ruskin mostly ignored Rome). I have a question about a detail in this essay, though: when James complains in the preface to The Tragic Muse about Victorian "loose baggy monsters" he is surely referring strictly to novels (his specific examples are from Thackeray, Dumas the elder and Tolstoy), and not to the kind of prose that Ruskin wrote?

A piece by Richard L. Stein acutely addresses the Whistler-Ruskin conflict, but this prompted me to reflect that surprisingly few of the essays deal with fine art and that there is a sense in which a whole aspect of Ruskin's relationship with Modernism is missing from the book. Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts, the visionaries...