Ruskin

Dear Good and (Patient) Friends, A day or so ago, I published a new Post. It appeared on the day of Clive Wilmer’s funeral in Cambridge, England. It was designed not only to paise Clive, but highlight some of his especial talents. One of these – indeed, one of the most important–was to underscore his marvelous skill as a poet. I intended to include a brief excerpt from one of his poems to illustrate that strength. But, for some reason, it was deleted from the final post. (One of my great teachers once told me when I had complained about this unpredictability of the digital world, that “the ways of cyberspace, like the ways of karma, are unfathomable.” This brief note is intended to “reinsert,” the omitted passage. Had it been included, I would’ve introduced it as below. (To see the original post, on the right-hand column of this page, click on “276” under the option, “Last 10 Posts” and you will be taken to to it.) In the paragraph that celebrates Clive’s poetic prowess, I wanted to say that, after I received the packet of poems I had requested from him, I was so taken by them I decided I wanted to use a brief passage from one at the end of my introductory chapter to my just completed manuscript on the evolution and reception of Ruskin’s political economy. To me, the passage captures not only Clive’s wonderful sensibility but, at the same time, whether he intended it or not (likely he did) his ability to remind his reader of Ruskin’s greatness and significance. Here it is: it is excerpted from his poem, “The Sleeping Giant,” in his longer poem, “Architecture.” What [Ernest] spoke for Was a new house, grafted on ancient roots In homage to the past, but with the scars Of ruin acknowledged and incorporated. (Arthur continued): “There will be a house in England Built to inaugurate an age of peace.”

Good Friends, For some time now–indeed, since the inception of this blog – I have been encouraging my readers to read Ruskin!! The central feature of all but a handful of our previous posts has been to present at least one passage from his works, passages highlighting not merely his consummate ability to arrange words delightfully and inspirationally on a printed page, but which throw into high relief what I regard as his always laudable concerns about the world in which we live. It has been my hope that these selections might inspire some to get copies of his books for their own and read them for their own pleasure. Alas, the ways of cyberspace being what they are (often unfathomable!), I have no way of knowing how many of you have been moved to do this. And so, with that mystery uppermost in mind, I dedicate today’s post to illustrating what I regard as “normal Ruskin” (!)–that is, to giving you a pair of examples not of his most famous passages, but passages representative of what you would be likely to encounter if you are reading on your own any of his lectures, essays, or books. Today’s passages have been chosen, intentionally, from works written at some distance from one another in order to suggest that, as I know to be the case from my own extensive reading, no matter where you read in Ruskin, you will find such lovely bits to enthrall your hours regularly, “Normally.” His genius was such that he simply could not write as one of we mere mortals would! He didn’t write to impress his readers with his grandiloquence (although he would often spend long periods composing passages he deemed as being particularly important to what he was trying to communicate); he simply wrote from his heart about things he had seen and registered, things he hoped he could help his readers see and register. Our first passage is taken from the third volume of The Stones of Venice (1853), from a section where he is considering what one needs to do if he (she) truly wishes to appreciate and understand a magnificent piee of great art: We have just seen that all great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul–but chiefly, the soul. But, it is not merely the work of the whole creature, it speaks to the whole creature. That in which a perfect being speaks must also have a perfect being to listen. I am not to spend my utmost spirit to give all my strength in life to my work while you, spectator or hearer, give me only half your attention or half your soul [in return.] You must be all mine, as I am all yours; that is the only condition on which we can meet each other. All your faculties–all that is in you of greatest and best, must be awakened in you, or I [painter or creator] have no reward. The painter is not to cast the entire treasure of his human nature into his labor merely to please a part of the beholder; not merely to delight his senses, not merely to amuse his fancy, not merely to beguile him into emotion, not merely to delight his thought; but to do all this! Senses, fancy, feeling, reason, the whole of the building spirit, must devote dedicated attention… else the laboring spirit has not done its work well. The second passage–more personal– is from his wonderful autobiography, Praeterita, written in the 1880s. He is describing, remembering actually, a visit, one evening, to the public, acquaduct-fed fountain of Branda in Siena. (Image below. Note: I have been to Siena, visited its justly famed fountain, and drank from it, and, later, passed through the gate where the quotation he rehearses can still be viewed carved deeply in stone above. It was a most moving experience. (Very roughly translated, the quotation can be read: “More than her gates, Siena opens her heart to you.”) The mentioned Charles Eliot Norton was a Harvard professor of Fine Art, and, for many years, one of Ruskin’s greatest friends and confidants. Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Eliot Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank [there] together, and walked together that evening on the hills above where the fireflies among the scented thickets shown fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shown!–moving like fine, broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shown through the sunset that faded into thunderous night when I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west and the openly golden sky calm behind the gate of Siena’s heart with its still golden words carved above it–“Cor magus tibi Sena pandit’. With the fireflies everywhere in the sky, and the clouds rising and falling, and mixed with lightning–and more intense than the stars! “Normal Ruskin”! Until next time! Please do continue well out there! Jim

Victorian Cromwell Wondering around the centre of Bradford, I spent some time staring at the huge City Hall (designed as the Town Hall in 1869 and completed in 1873), trying to take it all in. The tall central clock tower, the grand iron-gated entrance, the rows of Gothic arches, the decoration, the heraldic shields, the many of statues of kings and queens, there was so much for eye and brain to take on board. Here was a building that was the equal of other Victorian town halls I’d seen on previous northern forays – Gothic pinnacled Manchester, classically columned Leeds, for example. It may well be that the choice of the Gothic style was in part due to the wish of the town’s authorities and their architects Lockwood and Mawson to do something different from the gigantic town hall at Leeds. The influence of John Ruskin’s eloquent boosting of Gothic would also have been in influence – he had lectured in Bradford a few years earlier. The tower, modelled on Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, and the abundance of carving, certainly feel Ruskinian. The range of architectural detail made it feel perhaps still more engaging than either Leeds or Manchester town halls, and I was absorbed in examining the statues of monarchs – Elizabeth I and Victoria at either side of the main doorway, a run of others up above, all larger than life-size,* when I became aware of a man standing next to me. ‘Can you see who they’ve put up there?’ he said, and there was surprise in his voice. ‘Well, pretty much everyone,’ I answered. He replied: ‘Look next to Charles I. There’s Oliver Cromwell. How did they get away with that?’ The man who presided over regicide and became the leader of England’s only republic seemed an odd – even outrageous – choice to my interlocutor. Thinking about this afterwards, it didn’t seem so strange. From the late-17th to the early-19th century, Cromwell had widely been regarded as a nasty piece of work – a hypocrite who had mouthed Puritan religious views and denounced (and obliterated) the power of the monarchy, only to seize power himself and wield it ruthlessly. In the Victorian period, however, thanks in large part to the advocacy of Thomas Carlyle,† Cromwell had been rehabilitated as a sincere Protestant, whose religious beliefs had underpinned his actions, who had thwarted tyranny, and who fought, in a way Victorians could understand, on God’s side. Whether we agree or not with Carlyle’s view of Cromwell (or the extent to which we admire the monarchs whose statues surround his) matters little. The extraordinary array of 7 foot tall statues is not just impressive. It’s an attempt to put the building and the place it represents, I think, on a footing of national importance. Let other town or city halls have statues of local bigwigs or rulers who had a specific local connection. Bradford proclaims its connection with the entire country, and through monarchs such as the prominently displayed Elizabeth and Victoria, with British imperialism and the world. So rich was Bradford’s cloth trade, and so wide-reaching, that this was a connection that was to the Victorians entirely credible. - - - - - * They were made by ta London firm of architectural sculptors, Farmer & Brindley, who were responsible for a wide range of projects including the Albert Memorial and statues on the exterior of Manchester Town Hall. † Thomas Carlyle’s influential Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches came out in 1845.                                   Statue of Oliver Cromwell, centre  

Good friends, When last we left my sculpture of Mr. Ruskin a-borning (Post 266: “The Pour”), his clay image had been been surrounded by molten bronze encased within a cylindrical shape in Dexter Benedict’s kiln in that estimable artist’s studio in Penn Yan, New York. But that was by no means the end of this story. The next step, Dexter informed, was to extract the cylinder in which the great Victorian “rested,” let it cool, (a process I was told would not take terribly long). After which, our great fellow would be “broken out”, cleaned up, and polished into final form. Here is a picture of Chris Lavin and Dexter extracting the cylinder–called a “plaster-investment mold”–from the kiln (“Hot!”) following “The Pour.” And here’s what the plaster-investment mold looked like after it had cooled. (Mr. Ruskin is inside.) And so we set a date when I would return to the studio and the actual break-out process would take place. What was most remarkable about it to me was that such unremarkable tools were used – a hammer, as shown in the picture above, a metal spade, an electric drill (The same tools, Dexter told me, omitting the word “electric,” which had been used in sculpturing for thousands of years!) The following images show Dexter at work as the break-out process advanced and Mr. Ruskin’s head began to emerge from the encasement. Since the entire bust had to be extracted and cleaned, it is often necessary to turn the sculpture over–even turn it on its head–or, as the final picture in the series shows–turn it upside down. (Dexter has a kind of overhead crane to facilitate this part of the process.) Finally, the moment arrives when the bust is fully broken out. Cleaning and polishing are now needed before it is ready for installation. But regarding a description and depicting of that last step, we shall have to wait for the next post. Lastly, this is the point at which I must express my deep and enduring gratitude to Joe Calabrese of the IT department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. As I am always technically-challenged, Joe kindly helped me with transferring these pictures from my camera to this Post. He is remarkably talented and, in this case (a much-needed quality!) stunningly patient with antique sociologists who love Ruskin. In the meantime, friends, please do continue well out there! Until next time! Cheers, Jim

Megalopolis may have been brewing in Francis Ford Coppola’s mind for over four decades now, but details of the sprawling epic have remained mostly elusive for the rest of us. That changed a little bit today, as the director shared a more holistic glimpse into some of the events and historical figures that inspired the… Read more...

For Alex Pool In earlier posts, I have tried, at various times, to illustrate Ruskin’s conviction that, simply because we have been given the gift of being a human being, every person bears a responsibility to use some of their powers every day to do something which will improve the world — to “move the needle toward the good”– that is. do something which will lessen the stresses of the world or improve the lives of other human beings (see, for example, Post 235) He stated this conviction perhaps most beautifully in a pair of sentences in one of his lectures to his Oxford students in the early 1870s; Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life. and every setting sun be to you as its close. Then, let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others, some goodly strength or knowledge gained for yourselves. So strongly did Ruskin believe in this charge, when he designed a “Ruskin family crest” in the early 1870s, he used the word “To-day” repeatedly to encircle the whole. This is the day we have been gifted; it is the only one we have; let us use it to make the world, however slightly, better. The passage I have chosen for today’s post is another way of illustrating this belief. It has long been one of my favorites and I must note that I surprised myself when I discovered, upon encountering it again, that I have never shared it before. It is brief, but, as is the case with the “Every dawn of morning,” passage, it is none the less powerful for that. It is taken from his “Lectures on Architecture and Painting,” also delivered to his Oxford students in the 1870s. It speaks, as I read it, directly to our frequently indulged unwillingness to undertake or postpone, sometimes indefinitely, some important task or work because we (too glibly) regard it as “impossible” as, in short, “utopian”: “Quixotism,” or “Utopianism,” These are some of the devil’s pet words. I believe the quiet admission– which we are all of us so ready to make–that because things have been long wrong, it is impossible they should ever be right, is one of the most fatal sources of misery and crime from which this world suffers. Whenever you hear a man dissuading you from attempting to do well on the ground that perfection is “Utopian,” beware that man. Cast the word out of your dictionary altogether. There is no need for it. Things are either possible or impossible: You can easily determine which in any given state of human science. If the thing is impossible you need not trouble yourselves about it; but, if possible, try for it. It is very Utopian to hope for the entire doing away with drunkenness and misery out of the Canongate [a street in Edinburgh, part of the Royal Mile] but the Utopianism is not our business – the work is. It is very Utopian to hope to give every child in this kingdom the knowledge of God from its birth. But the Utopianism is not our business – the work is. Until next time, good friends, please do continue well out there, and, in the interim between now and the next time we meet, let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of new life… Cheers, Jim