Art and Society According to John Ruskin

170 Pages·2013·7.9 MB·English

by  Edward D. Reynolds

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Master's Theses Theses and Dissertations
1940
AArrtt aanndd SSoocciieettyy AAccccoorrddiinngg ttoo JJoohhnn RRuusskkiinn
Edward D. Reynolds
Loyola University Chicago
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Copyright © 1940 Edward D. Reynolds
ART AND SOCIETY
ACCORDING TO JOHN RUSKIN
BY
EDWARD D. REYNOLDS
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
AT
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
JUNE, 1940
VITA
Birthplace - Chicago.
Education
St. Ignatius High School, Chicago
St. Mary's Academy, Kansas
Loyola University, A. B., 1916
St. Louis University, A. M., 1922
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. THE CRITICISM OF RUSKIN'S WORK ••••••••••• 1
1. The Problem: What Can a Catholic Teacher make
or Ruskin?
2. The Criteria or the Catholic Teacher.
3. Light rrom Ruskin's Critics: Their Method.
4. Religious and Philosophical Disqualirications
or Ruskin's Critics.
. . . . . . . . . .
II. RUSKIN'S "WAY OF LIFE" ••••• 38
1. The Unity o£ Ruskin's Art and Social Teaching.
2. The Fundamentals o£ Ruskin's System.
3. The Perception of Beauty according to Ruskin.
4. Objections to Ruskin's Aesthetics.
5. Ruskin's Fundamentals in the Light or Scho
lastic Philosophy and Catholic Theology.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
III. THE TRUE AND TEE GOOD 68
1. Metaphysical Presuppositions or Ruskin's
Aesthetics.
2. Truth in Art.
3. Morality in Art.
4. Did Ruskin's Aesthetics Change with His
Religious Beliefs?
. . . .
IV. DEVELOPMENT OF RUSKIN'S VIEWS: ARCHITECTURE 97
1. "The Lamp of Sacri£ice."
2. "The Lamp or Truth." .
3. "The Lamp of Obedience."
4. "The Nature of Gothic."
. . . . . .
v.
DEVELOPMENT INTO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY • • • 130
1. The Transition f'rom Art to Economics and
Sociology.
2. "The Roots or Honour."
3. "Qui Judicatis Terram."
4. "Ad Valorem."
5. After Ruskin.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS--CONTINUED ·
Page
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CONCLUSION • • 161
. . . . . . . . .
BIBLIOGRAPHY • • • • • • • • • • • • 163
iv
CHAPTER I
THE CRITICISM OF RUSKIN'S WORK
The Catholic teacher of English literature has a perpetual
problem set before him. He must forever try to enliven a Catholic
culture in the minds of those given into his charge, and he must
forever do this by offering them the fruits of a non-Catholic
culture. He knows that literature is not a thing separate from
the rest of man's life,that it is only a way of viewing the same
thing that the science of theology, and the sciences generally,
that the whole cult and practice of religion regard - that whole
reality: God, Man, the relations between God and Man, between
man and man, between man and the world about him. And yet the
Catholic teacher must try to develop toward this reality an at
titude in his students, a culture that is Catholic, by the read
ing and interpreting of an attitude toward this reality which is
now partially, now totally, different from his and objectively
false. The Catholic teacher must teach a largely non-Catholic
~nglish literature.
He cannot, I say, teach literature as a pleasant thing quite
~ivorced from the fundamental culture of the Catholic, a thing to
be enjoyed all by itself and worth the study of youth simply for
its ovvn sake. He cannot say to youth: "Here are the beautiful
thoughts, the interesting play of mind, the interpretations of
1
2
experience of the best minds that have been recorded in English
literature. Of course, much of it is utterly fals·e; some of it
indeed is half-truth; some of it might be taken as true if you
read into it a Catholic sense, But it is stimulating to meet
such minds and to consider such a variety of thought. Do not,
therefore, trouble yourself with the error; consider only that it
.
.
is all human; and 'nil humani •• f II
Nor can the Catholic teacher set himself down before an
air~
abstraction called "style" and find that he can see it, handle it
separate it from a literary work for the edification of his
charges. He may well believe that no such distinction is possi
ble, and say with Newman that "Thought and speech are inseparable
from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style
is a thinking out into language." He may say to the youth before
him that he cannot talk to them of a master's style as something
really distinct from his thought, that he cannot speak to them of
the master's "choice of words", his "command of language" when
all he really means is the command of a wealth of concepts for
which those words stand- concepts which reflect their author's
philosophy of life, his religious views, his knowledge of history
his understanding of men and of himself. As these concepts,
thoughts, views are Catholic or as they are atheist, agnostic,
materialist, humanitarian, so the teacher must present them. He
cannot prescind from them by talking of the author's style.
Again, the Catholic teacher cannot ease himself of his prob
lem by offering his pupils the history of literature. He would
3
then turn the study of literature into a study of history, how
ever interesting and instructive the latter may be. Since the
day Samuel Johnson and, later, Hazlitt proposed that a better
understanding of literary works could be had from understanding
the minds of those who wrote them, this shifting of interest fro
the work itself to the man who produced it has been going on; it
now has so much the greater share of attention in the schools
that the Catholic teacher, beset by his own problem, might easil
beguile himself with this easy solution and devote himself to th
history of literary movements and the psychology of the great
authors.
No, there is no way out by the study of "style" or by the
study of history and biography and psychological analysis. The
teacher and student must sink their teeth in the meat, the solid
substance of the literature itself. And it is for the Catholic
teacher of English literature to find some way of treating it so
that this mass of intellectual food, grown by a non-Catholic cul
ture, can nourish in Catholic youth- for whom Catholic schools
and universities are painfully supported- a truly Catholic
culture.
With one instance of this problem, which perpetually and
everywhere meets the Catholic teacher of English literature, thi
study is concerned - the work of John Ruskin.
1.
The Problem: What Can a Catholic Teacher Make of John Ruskin?
It is not intended that this study will be made the occasion
4
to celebrate a sort of moral atmosphere in which Ruskin is sup
posed by some to have enveloped his aesthetics and his economics
It is true that this atmosphere seems to them to be the most dis
tinctive contribution that Ruskin made to the thought of the
nineteenth century; it is that which perhaps appealed most in
Ruskin to a generation beginning to tire of mechanistic, deter
ministic,economic views and finding itself rather fed up with an
art that had ceased to have much meaning; and again it is that
which has brought so much ridicule on Ruskin, perhaps as much in
his own day as in ours. It is, however mistakenly, the most ob
vious feature of Ruskin's mind and work to many readers, and fro
first to last has been the subject of praise or blame, the objec
of his friends' tender defense and of his critics' most scornful
attack. It is then quite uncalled for that once again should be
demonstrated that Ruskin saw in some cloudy way that great art
was the product of great souls, great in their truthfulness,thei
purity, their faith in God; that Ruskin had a sentiment that
there was more at work in the economic activities of men than a
blind selfishness, however "enlightened"; that, as a sort of su
preme and unique achievement Ruskin's "moral sense" saw in both
art and economics their dependence one on the other and describe
it in that famous chapter from The Stones of Venice, "The Nature
of Gothic." That passage alone, and indeed the whole tenor of
Ruskin's controlling ideas, might seem a sufficient recommenda
tion to the Catholic teacher who is suspected of asking only a
"moral" to make him happy in his literary preferences. But this
'5
atmosphere of thought, or this tenor of it, or this one great
moral intuition of Ruskin, if it may be allowed to reduce his
doctrine to a single principle, is not, it must be emphatically
asserted, the formal object of this study.
That Ruskin's "moral" temper, his blanketing of economics
and art in a shining mist of moral sentiment, is the object of
study here is denied so emphatically simply because it may so
easily be confused with what is the proper aim of this work.
Here we are concerned with something more realistic, something
both wider in its scope and deeper in all its implication, some
thing rational and real - emphatically not a matter of moral sen
timent. Vfuat then is conceived to be the proper object of this
investigation may be put thus: Is there in Ruskin's thought a
supernatural element that in any way corresponds to the Catholic
teacher's and the Catholic student's Catholic culture -a culture
which is supernatural in its very principle of life and which
looks for a recognition of that supernatural in the literature
and other forms of art which it makes use of?
This supernatural element, whether or not it exists in
~uskin, is not, it must be repeated, to be confused vaguely with
"moral" concept of art, or economics. It is, first of all,
~ny
something real, not a sentiment; again it is something more than
rational ethics; it is something which natural powers are
~ere
not enough to achieve. On the other hand, morality, at least as
it is so frequently understood to be mere natural ethics or mere
sentiment, is quite within the range of man's natural powers.