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Ruskin in French Criticism: A Possible Reappraisal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Frank D. Curtin
Frank D. Curtin*
Affiliation:
St. Lawrence University, Canton, N. Y.
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Extract

Ruskin is no longer a controversial figure. Most contemporary critics, of art, of society, of literature, ignore him.

Ruskin's own weaknesses are responsible for much of this neglect—not least the flood of words which overflows the thirty-nine volumes of Cook and Wedderburn. No single volume, not even Unto This Last nor Praeterita, can be recommended without qualification, nor any single phase of Ruskin's work. His art judgments are often arrogantly inept, as toward Claude and Whistler and Renaissance architecture; his aesthetics is contradictory, homiletic; his social criticism is sometimes antiquarian, proposing quixotic reforms. The fervors of Ruskin's style offend current taste, with our preference for tight, flat, and uncommitted exposition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , 1962 , pp. 102 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Notes

1 Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (London, 1922; 1st ed., 1892), pp. 447 ff.; Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism (New York, 1936), pp. 183, 190; Katherine Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics (New York, 1939), pp. 412-422.

2 R. H. Wilenski, John Ruskin (New York, 1933); Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival (New York, 1950; 1st ed., 1928), and Ruskin at Oxford (Oxford, 1947); Joan Evans, John Ruskin (New York, 1954).

3 Mohandas Gandhi, “The Magic Spell of a Book,” The Gandhi Reader, ed. Homer A. Jack (Bloomington, 1956), p. 56: Unto This Last “brought about an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life ...”; Bernard Shaw, Ruskin's Politics (London, 1921). For Proust, see below; for Hobson, Geddes, and others, see my “Aesthetics in English Social Reform: Ruskin and His Followers,” Nineteenth-Century Studies, ed. Herbert Davis, William C. DeVane, R. C. Bald (Ithaca, 1940), pp. 199-245.

4 They are critics who published in the French language, in Geneva and Brussels as well as in Paris, including an occasional British scholar, such as H. A. Needham.

5 See E. Audra, “L'Influence de Ruskin en France,” Revue des cours et conférences, xxvii, 1st series (1926), 265-288. Audra, generalizing broadly about the acceptance of Ruskin in France, presents in evidence several of the critics considered below.

6 This is not to disparage the biographical achievements, including a major biography, Derrick Leon, Ruskin: The Great Victorian (London, 1949). Notable exceptions, substantial critical studies, include in this country: Francis G. Townsend, Ruskin and the Landscape Feeling: A Critical Analysis of His Thought during the Crucial Years of His Life, 1843-56, Illinois Studies in Lang, and Lit., xxxv, No. 3 (Urbana, 1951); John T. Fain, Ruskin and the Economists (Nashville, Tenn., 1956); John Lewis Bradley, ed., Ruskin's Letters from Venice, 1851-52, Yale Studies in English, Vol. 129 (New Haven, 1955); in addition to critical articles by Charles T. Dougherty and Van Akin Burd.

7 “Une nouvelle théorie de l'art en Angleterre,” 1 July 1860; “De l'influence de la littérature sur les beaux arts,” 15 August 1861.

8 L'Esthétique anglaise: Etude sur M. John Ruskin (Paris, 1864). For Milsand and Proust my special indebtedness is to the Ruskin Collection at Yale University.

9 P. x: “M. Ruskin est presque une expression complète du bien et du mal que l'influence littéraire peut faire aux arts plastiques.” The translations throughout this study are mine. The occasional French quotation aims to support an emphatic statement or to clarify an ambiguous one.

10 P. 123: “... en réalité il ne plaide que pour la vérité intellectuelle contre la vérité du sentiment ...”

11 Pp. x, xi: “On y trouve ... un profond sentiment des conditions morales que le peintre lui-même doit remplir pour pouvoir tirer profit de ses facultés et pour être vraiment inspiré par ce qu'il a d'imagination.”

12 P. 51: “... de rendre à la peinture le rôle qui peut le mieux la faire contribuer au perfectionnement de tout notre être.”

13 P. 79: “ . . . d'allier partout la complexité qui intéresse à l'unité qui soulage, de produire ses effets d'ensemble par d'innombrables détails ...; en un mot, de n'être jamais ni divisible, ni vide, et de toujours laisser deviner plus qu'elle ne permet de distinguer.”

14 “Ruskin à Nôtre-Dame d'Amiens,” Mercure de France, April 1900, pp. 56-88; “John Ruskin,” Gazette des beaux arts, 1 April 1900, pp. 310-318, 1 August 1900, pp. 135-146. Proust also wrote several brief notices from 1900 to 1906.

15 “Sur la lecture,” Renaissance latine, 15 June 1905, pp. 379-410. Both prefaces are reprinted in Pastiches et mélanges (Paris, 1919), with minor revision.

16 La Bible d'Amiens, as reprinted in Pastiches et mélanges, p. 187: “... pour moi un des plus grands écrivains de tous les temps et de tous les pays.” Pastiches et mélanges, besides reprinting the introduction to La Bible, incorporates the bulk of the footnotes.

17 La Bible, as reprinted in Pastiches et mélanges, p. 155: “ . . .avertis des parties de la réalité sur lesquelles leurs dons spéciaux départissent une lumière particulière.”

18 “Marcel Proust et John Ruskin,” Mercure de France, clxxxix (1926), 104.

19 Jean Autret, L'Influence de Ruskin sur la vie, les idées et l'œuvre de Marcel Proust (Geneva and Lille, 1955), esp. pp. 118 ff.—a book which presents suggestive parallels along with overbold conjectures.

20 Walter A. Strauss, Proust and Literature: The Novelist as Critic (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 178-179.

21 J. M. Cocking, Proust (London, 1956), p. 29.

22 “Proust et Ruskin,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, xvii (1932), 25: “Je voudrais essayer de montrer ici . . . combien une connaissance exacte du style de Ruskin a contribué à faire de Proust l'écrivain merveilleusement original qu'il a été.” P. 31: “a appliqué aux sentiments la vision minutieuse de Ruskin.”

23 Cocking, Proust, p. 29. Cf. also Cocking, “English Influences on Proust,” Listener, L (27 August 1953), 345-347.

24 Paris, 1901; reprinted under the new title, Le Culte du beau dans la cité nouvelle (Paris, 1931).

25 P. 172: “Mais dès que Ruskin parle d'un problème dont la solution rationelle ne saurait être découverte qu'après de patients et méthodiques efforts, il inquiète ses lecteurs, et désole ses amis.”

26 See p. 71: “If the essence of beauty is not in us, but beyond, how can Ruskin explain the power of the beauty of the abstract, arbitrary, and entirely subjective art which he considers in the Seven Lamps of Architecture and in the Stones of Venice? If the concern is with music where others, Germans, a Schopenhauer, a Nietzsche, have seen the essential art because freed of the object, reduced to a minimum of matter, and transmitting nothing but the rhythms and movements of the human soul,—the insufficiency of the doctrine is still more evident.” See also Chevrillon, “La Jeunesse de Ruskin,” Nouvelles Études Anglaises (Paris, 1910), p. 120.

27 Cf. John T. Fain, Ruskin and the Economists.

28 Ruskin et l'esthêtique intuitive (Paris, 1933).

29 Helen Gill Viljoen has suggested (in a recent note to me) that the French critical emphasis upon Ruskin's mysticism should be highlighted as “a pioneering perception” almost unheard of among English critics.

30 See Jean-Marie Carré, “L'Italie de Goethe, de Ruskin et de Taine,” Revue de la littérature comparée, xxv (July-Sept. 1951), 301-310—an acceptable summary.