In Our Time - John Ruskin

Episode Date: March 31, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of John Ruskin. He was the most brilliant art critic of his age, perhaps the most brilliant that Britain has ever produced, but he was much more than that. A champion of Turner and an enemy of Whistler, he placed the study of art and architecture at the heart of a moral assault on Victorian life. In the stone work of a Gothic cathedral, Ruskin saw all that was right about medieval society and all that was wrong about his own capitalist age.But why was Ruskin so critical of his own time? What deep currents of thought infused his ideas? And how much does our thinking, about society, the environment, art and work owe to this unusual man?With Dinah Birch, Professor of English, Liverpool University; Keith Hanley, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Ruskin Programme, Lancaster University; Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, John Ruskin was the most brilliant art critic of his age, perhaps the most brilliant that Britain's ever produced. But he was much more than that.

A champion of Turner and an enemy of Whistler, he placed the study of art and architecture at the heart of a moral assault on Victorian life. In the stonework of a Gothic cathedral, Ruskin saw all that was right about medieval society and all that was wrong about his own capitalist age. But why was Ruskin so critical of his own time? What deep currents of thought infused his ideas

and how much is our thinking about society, environment, art and work owe to this unusual man. With me to discuss John Ruskin, I'd Dinah Birch, Professor of English at Liverpool University, Keith Hanley, Professor of English Churchill and Director of the Ruskin Program at Lancaster University, and Stefan Kalini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Dan and Birch, let's start at the beginning with his early influences, born in South London, affluent.

He was born into quite a rich family. Yes, he was. But the background wasn't quite as stable and affluent as one might suppose. There had been problems in the family history to do with the madness and eventual suicide of his grandfather. So there was a turbulent past from which his father's interest. industry had rescued the family. So the security and prosperity of the family was something that was enormously valued by Ruskin's parents and Ruskin himself. They lived in London, as you say, the background was Scottish, and I think that's very important to Ruskin forming sense of self

in South London, that they were a family of part of the community, but at the same time felt themselves to some extent a little bit separate and a little bit different because of that Scottishness. His mother was a very fervently committed evangelical Christian and Ruskin's early boyhood, indeed right through his early years, was trained within that tradition primarily by his mother. One of the things that he always remembers in recalling his education was the very rigorous daily practice of biblical reading and biblical interpretation. And that, I think, was a foundation for his work as a critic, critic of painting, critic of the natural world. So we've talked about his home and the influence of the evangelical Scottish Presbyterianism through his mother.

But his father did, and the deeper background of the suicide and so on. But his father did become a man of some wealth and was a patron of the arts, interested in and took the young boy around Europe in ways that were happening in cultural ways that were happening to very few people. Yes, I think from that point of view is education was unusual. As you say, there was prosperity, there was money, books came into the house, pictures came into the house, that habit of collecting, which again became very important to Ruskin's mature years, was formed early within the household's habit of investing in.

investing intellectually and, of course, financially in pictures. And they did, as you say, travel at a time when that wasn't necessarily a custom in the kind of community that he was growing up in. Keith Hanley, Ruskin's collected works, 39 volumes and the diaries as well, and he wrote poetry from a very young age, wrote an essay on Turner. I think when he was 16, was it? But the first really important book is Modern Painters, the first volume, and that was published in 1843, was it? Now, why was that so important? Well, it was an enormous contribution for a young man of 24. He calls himself on the title page,

a graduate of Oxford University, rather disarmingly. And in one sense, taking up from what Dinah was saying, it's a happy marriage of the input, if you like, of his mother's evangelical discourse and his father's art connoisseurship. But that amounts to something much more in the cultural intervention that he set himself. It was, in fact, an assault, if you like, on the art establishment.

He wished to turn upside down the tradition that had privileged the great 17th century picturesque painters of Italy and Holland, Claude Lorenne, Salvatore Rosa and Pussin. And instead of these established reputations, he wanted to rank in the forefront of the modern British imagination contemporary painters, British painters, moreover, from the end of the 18th century and in his own day, the sort of painters for whom his father could pay 50 guineas at the Old Watercolour Society and bring home as triumphs, domestic triumphs.

So there was an enormous assault on the establishment. There was also the assault on Sir Joshua Reynolds' discourses which prevailed at the Royal Academy as the rules by which art was practiced and criticized. All that was going on. And of course, this was the book where he eventually was able to roll on his great cultural hero, Turner. Those who had criticized Turner,

thereby promoting this book in the first place, thought that Ruskin's idolatry of Turner in modern painters was absurd. But those who also could read the news, style of the passionate, intricate kind of language, enabling them to see more in paintings, to have more and more meanings to redeem from the painted image. They were heralding a new voice, and that included, of course, a lot of great contemporary writers, words with himself, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, Tennyson, they all to some extent thought this was a very, very serious new book.

talking about a phenomenal entry into the literary world doing all the things and more, but certainly you've suggested enough. Now we can't deal with all of that at this moment, but can we isolate, if we may, Turner, a painter whom his father could buy it the Watercolour Society for, in his terms, as a wine merchant, a very, very reasonable amount of money, and so very available and new and so on. And Ruskin put him straight in the great cannon, didn't he? Put him in the canon with Leonardo and Rafael and then held his ground.

on that. What, on what, what was the, if you can give us one of the basic arguments that he made for doing that, which was an audacious and perhaps many would have thought a completely foolhardy thing to do. Yes, well, it was a slow build-up. It wasn't, you know, love at first sight, although as you say, the book was first, this is modern painters, volume one, was first conceived as a pamphlet, which is going to be entitled Turner and the ancients. It took Ruskin some time to adjust to exactly what Turner had to offer. When he was 13, he got a momentous gift of Samuel Rogers' volume, a sub-bironic poem called Italy. But what was really important were the vignettes, which Turner, amongst other artists had contributed to illustrate that poem. And these were state-of-the-art in terms of visual technology.

There were steel engravings. They could replicate natural effects, even metabolic effects, with a great delicacy and exactitude. And Ruskin was just overwhelmed by them. He imitated them, he tried to copy them, and he tried to emulate them. It wasn't until he was 17 that he first saw three paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy. One of them was Juliet and her nurse. And this was the first time that Turner was really offended in Ruskin's. eyes. He wrote an essay in that defense, but Turner preferred for it not to be published. In the early

1840s, again, the critical knives came out for Turner, saying that his canvases were full of chocolate, kitchen stuff, current jelly. Ruskin could see, however, that not only could he see, but he could actually explain that all this extraordinary paintwork was in. fact a replication of a very sensitive and extraordinary visual apprehension of the created universe. Now, to Ruskin, this was not just an extraordinary painterly technique. It was also a revelation of the divine creation. And of course, Ruskin could match that in his own prose style. He could go in as a phrase in his description of Turner, which is the perpetual newness of infinity.

He could go on and on and on, recuperating meaning, recuperating mark and marks on the canvas, almost inexhaustibly. So he saw it as a precise vision, not a precise representation of nature, but through that he also saw a spiritual view of the world which dovetailed into his evangelical background. Severn Kalini, a later essay in 1851 on the nature of the Gothic. Now this was a huge platform for the rest of Ruskin's life. Can you tell us what it was about the Gothic that most afired his imagination

and made him wish to use it in so many ways, not only as an hard critic, but he used it when he commented on society, when he commented on other people, when he commented on the present day, the past and so on. The Gothic became itself, but also an enormous metaphor, isn't it? Yes. Well, Ruskin always read our people. really for its spiritual and moral revelation of the health of the society that produced it. And so what he's talking about in the famous chapter on the nature of Gothic is really the way in which the society of the Middle Ages is a Christian society.

He reads Gothic as the preeminently Christian form. And one in which what he saw as the defamation introduced by the Renaissance and the revival of classical styles had not yet set in. So he writes in great detail about Gothic architecture, and what he admires about it is actually sometimes its irregularity or its imperfection. It's expressive of the individual craftsman's engagement with the material, a sign that the individual craftsman was given some autonomy to do this. It's also at the same time a communal art.

It's not something that is done for purely personal gain. It's often, for example, in the great ecclesiastical architecture. It's an expression of some large-scale cooperative endeavor fired by piety and the desire to erect some kind of monument to the love of God. So in Gothic architecture, and it's interesting, this chapter occurs in the book, the Stones of Venice, where there is a great deal of very detailed description of Venetian architecture, though actually in this chapter there isn't. This is rather a general manifesto for Gothic. And when he does talk about individual buildings as examples of Gothic building, it's more often in his work the buildings of Northern Europe, actually, than Venice, French cathedrals and so on.

But what he singles out in this manifesto is that Gothic art has the properties of energy and what he calls at one point savagery, a kind of untutored rawness which he admired. The contrast he makes all the way through is with what then supersedes it, which is after the Renaissance, the revival of classical forms. Now, here what Ruskin really isolates is the way in which the regularity and the geometrical shapes of classical architecture express a certain coldness as he sees it, a certain desire for control. he calls it at one point a haughty, aristocratic style of architecture, rather than, not just the irregularity that I mentioned, but rather than the attempt to work with natural forms that he sees in Gothic, the forms of tracery and so on

that pick up on leaves and other natural objects, and in the classical form, to replace that with this rather arid, rather regular set of architectural styles, which in the end he reads in that book as indicating the fall from a healthy civilization. And in that respect, Venice is a warning, a warning to later societies, especially England. But he's saying, isn't he, in the Addesion the Gothic, and he says later, the way a society makes its architecture tells us everything we need to know about society. And inside the Gothic we can see a society which is true to nature,

which has serious spiritual purpose, which is connected and not alienated. I think that's a word he brought in, wasn't it? Yes. Yeah, and not alienated. And there it's all there. And therefore, the superiority is not just to do with how beautiful it is, but it's to do with the spirit in which it was built

and what those who were building it and making it, even carving things behind turrets where they would never ever be seen by anyone, just because they were so full of it and full of the delight. in doing it, the light in the craft, delight in the project, delight in the whole idea. And he extended that later, didn't he, as this is a way to look at our society compared to that. You've already mentioned with classicism, but he takes it on further.

Yes. Well, that's right. I mean, he sees the loss of Gothic as actually a loss of something deeply spiritual in Western society, and its replacement by what he regarded as the pagan ethos. of classicism, going back to the pagan ethos of the ancient world. So, although we're talking about architecture here, we're always talking about really the informing moral basis of these societies. And the extent to which the craftsman is genuinely a craftsman,

has some respect for the nature of his materials, has some skill, is not merely a cog in a machine, is not merely replicating the same action over and over again, but is able to diversify and create something. Is for Ruskin an index of how far that society, the society that has that kind of architecture, is itself a spiritually healthy one? Dan, can we just bring this section to a close with.

We've heard two massive statements from Ruskin by these two big, the modern painters and the Gothic. He did say something I think which is very, striking, but he followed it through. He said, the teaching of art is the teaching of all things. Yes, and I think that's crucial to the nature of his thought, and indeed the nature of the impact of that thought. I mean, to pick up a word that Stefan's just used, connection, connectedness, what Ruskin will never accept is that different aspects of human thought, emotion, aspiration, are separate. He always wanted to make his readers understand that,

separation is, as he put it, a kind of deathfulness, vitality, that creativity that Stefan was talking about had to do with making associations between different kinds of experience and understanding. So that when you read Ruskin, from first to last, from the very early text right through to the final autobiography, what you see is a mind that is connecting, associating and drawing in to its orbit and your orbit as a reader, such a diverse range of experiences and different forms of knowledge so that he will write about natural form, about history, about music, about literature, about mythology,

about every department of human knowledge. But it isn't just that he's a polymath, though he certainly is that. What he will emphasize is that the springs and roots of those different, different forms of human knowledge are not distinct and separate. They're the same roots. Keith, Henley, how strong was the influence of the Romantic poets and Ruskin's own move up to the Lake District? They were crucial.

They were recurrent presences, particularly Wordsworth, Byron and Scott. Diner has already talked about the childhood visits and the teenage visits to the North. It was the Romantic North. in the picturesque painting, and also, of course, in the literary presences of those great writers in the Lake District and, of course, Scott, particularly in Scotland. It's a kind of hyperborean north, a kind of mythic north beyond the north wind, the other north, not the dark satanic hills of southern Lancashire,

but this very aesthetic north that Ruskin cultivates as an alternative model of the nation. Wordsworth, preeminently the excursion, for the Victorians it was always the excursion. You can only know by a few tissue of references that he ever read Wordsworth's prelude, which, of course, in the 20th century became the leading text. On the title page of each volume of modern painters is the epigraph from the excursion, which talks about Wordsworth's, what Ruskin described as his reverence for nature, the idea that you don't superimpose man-made ideas and consider. instructions on nature, but you learn from nature.

The other great text by Wordsworth was, of course, his guide to the lakes, which was absolutely fundamental in Ruskin's architectural thinking. In his earliest essays on the poetry of architecture, he talks about the Westmanland cottage, the organic tie between the human construct and the natural setting, something which is a stone can become a building block. this continuity, this interrelatedness, to use the term we've been just looking at, was fundamental and it was based in a wordsworthy and a view of naturalism. As Ruskin lived through his life and saw that the great nation that he wished his contemporary Britain to become was one that he felt was in moral decline, So I think he felt that Wordsworth had promised him a sort of romantic optimism.

Certainly by the early 1880s when he wrote fiction fair and foul, he's reinstated Byron and Scott as his great romantic idol, Scott for the happy feudalism of that other Scotland. Byron, residual Calvinism and satire, more addressing the sense of the fallen civilization. But before we get to that, Stefan Gleini, and this last Ruskin wrote in 1862, and that's where he takes the ideas smack into society with a huge indictment of Victorian capitalism.

What did he dislike so much about it? I think dislike is almost too weak a verb, really, for his reaction. It was one of deep revulsion and indignation, and it's against what he sees as the degradation of human life that it's now brought about. Unto this last is actually principally about the theory of political. economic theory, which he takes as the informing ideas that justify the Industrial Society of the mid-19th century. And what he's focusing on in that is the way in which that theory and the society built on it work from the premise of the separate isolated individual in competition with other separate isolated individuals.

And that on that basis it then tries to reason about what will produce most wealth, greatest riches. Ruskin attacks this fundamentally by denying that the isolated individual is ever the proper starting point and also denying the very conception of riches that political economy is working with, mere as it were financial gain. And he tries to, through the critique of political economy, work out a rival conception of what it would be to have a society which was properly cooperative in which the determination of the cost of things bore some relation to the need for them and the labour that had gone into them and in which this constant striving,

the great goddess of getting on, as he later called it, had been dethroned and replaced by something that would be not egalitarian at all because he was not egalitarian, if anything hierarchical, but something which would be modelled more, as he argued in this book, on the household, where there would be cooperation, common need, but a fairly clear hierarchy

of who actually laid down the goals for the group. And in that respect, he was offering a complete and thoroughgoing critique of lessy fair capitalism. Diana Burch, his essay in the Cornhill Review, edited by Thackeray, was perceived to be so violent and got such a violent reaction that Thackeray didn't want any more from him. So can you just give us some idea of why these ideas hurt the readers of the Cornwall Review so much? It was a sense of shock, I think, rather than injury as such.

I mean, certainly people were taken aback by the demands that were being made on them. I mean, I think one of the things that's very striking in Antislaas, and indeed throughout Ruskin's writings on political economy in the 1860s, is that sense of personal immediacy in the writing, that Ruskin makes moral claims on you as a reader, that you need to respond as an individual, humanly, emotionally and morally, to the arguments that he's putting over.

And I think people hadn't encountered that before. It is, of course, very much part of Ruskin's intellectual purpose, as Stefan's just indicated, that that should be so, that the pursuit of political economy could not be reduced simply to a formal, logical or political exercise. And I think, too, something else that drives Ruskin's thought forward, perhaps was a shock at the time, less of a shock now,

is that sense of connectedness, the links between different areas of thought. You can't talk about political economy, you're really talking about commercial economy because you're not taking into account people's lives and people's natures. And it overfavours the middle classes, and so it's unjust and so on and so forth.

I mean, he was right at the heart of that, wasn't he? Yes, very much so. But as Stefan mentioned, Keith, referred to, we have this man who's promoting modern art and promoting, just risking a phrase, I mean, a modern look at the economy at the time. And yet his ideas of society are the word feudalism was brought in a play by Stefan there.

So what's the dynamic there? Well, neo-fudalism did provide an alternative model. I mean, he'd learned from Saudi and from Pugin and particularly from Carlisle's past and present, the idea that you could revisit the Middle Ages to look at a different kind of society, a more holistic and interconnected society. He's often described as a Tory radical.

He called himself discrepanely a communist and a Tory throughout his writings. But what he said was, I am the sternest kind of socialist and the sternest kind of Tory. And I think that's code for a Carlisleian. He did believe in a hierarchical and a authoritarian society, but he put a human face on Carlisle's doctrine of work. He made it more a matter of really getting a life for the Victorian worker,

imagining what it would be like to have a creative individuality. But there is a diaspora because it's not just on that side, as famously the founders of the Independent Labour Party ascribed to Ruskin, along with Carlisle, an immense amount of influence on... They said Ruskin was the man who had most influenced them. That's right. F.W. Jowett, what made me a socialist, Keir Hardie's, the formation of his social altruism. They all derived it from Carlisle, Ruskin and Morris.

And Ruskin figures very largely in their pantheon. Can I just go back, Steph, I actually come back to something you raised and it's gone around the table, bringing it back to you. Ruskin was contemporary of Marxist, but it seems he hadn't read him. and yet, as has been pointed out by Keith, he was claimed by the early Labour working class MPs and by an awful lot of working people as the great influence on their lives.

So can you give that a bit more play? Yes, it's one of the very intriguing things about Ruskin, I think, the way he can be taken up and was taken up by people of very different political persuasions who found themselves fired by the imaginative power of his writing and didn't always share his actual proposals. Above all, I think, in the late Victorian period, the great force of Ruskin's writing was his condemnation of the ugliness, the shoddiness and the dehumanising power of industrialism. So in particular, I think, for a working class and the champions of a working class who felt there had been a great historic wrong done by the Industrial Revolution, which in some sense needed correction.

In thinking about the kind of impact that Ruskin had and the nature of his influence on working men and others who are reading him, we might be in some danger here of making him sound far too abstract and philosophical as a writer. Of course he was driven by ideas and we've thought about the range of ideas that does drive him. But the experience of reading Ruskin often doesn't have that kind of impact on us. He's a very material writer. There's a particularity and a specificity about the sort of imaginative experience that he gives us.

He writes about things. He writes about stones and flowers, buildings, hills, clouds. So that you come at these big ideas through the immediate felt experience of living in the world. And I think that that's one of the things, reasons for his being so attractive to working communities, those who had not necessarily had the training or the intellectual discipline in processing an abstract idea. If you come at an idea through looking at a leaf, through looking at a stone, it's that much more accessible to you.

So from that point of view, Ruskin is always enormously attractive to self-taught people. Yes, I think you're so right about that. And we mustn't forget the Working Men's College, where he actually operated. Just as you described, no, that was later on when he became a slave professor. This was from the 1850s, Working Men's College founded by Furnival and Farnival and Fonnelly. And he himself and he brought pre-Raphaelite painters into it, particularly Rosetti, for the first time was exposed to real working men. And that sort of, in a way, master working man relationship, the social cohesion, which was theoretical,

was actually lived through in his relationship with some of his protégés. And he had lifelong relationships with them. They worked for him. They did work at his behest. His later publisher, George Allen, came as a joiner, became a crack engraver, and then ended up as his publisher. So it was a socializing experience, and it brought him very much into contact with,

as you are saying, those who, he didn't want to, he didn't want to better them, as it were, economically. He wanted them to have fuller lives. One of the things that is striking, reading up for this program about Ruskin, is the range of people he influenced. That's striking enough, but the quality of people he influenced. Gandhi was changed, he said,

and turned into an activist by reading until the last Proust, and utterly one of the greatest novelists, was deeply influenced by Ruskin, and infatuated with him. And Tolstoy said, after when Ruskin's death, John Ruskin was one of the most remarkable men, not only of England and our time, but all countries and all times.

So can you give us some idea of how that international influence mushroomed and why you think it was so powerful with just those three for a start? Well, that word you've just used, infatuation, I think, is an interesting one. I do think that Ruskin's immediate and personal appeal to readers means that he inspires in those who look at him carefully a sense of connection and loyalty, a sense that you really have entered someone else's mind and had your life, as Stefan's just said, challenged and changed,

that gave him an impact and appeal that transcended, as it were, cultural limitations so that Proust, as you say, in Tolstoy and Gandhi and hundreds and hundreds of others, felt that Ruskin was writing to them and for them. But I think it's also true that the multiplicity of Ruskin's thought, and indeed subject material, meant that there was a hook available for almost everyone. There's a Ruskin for everyone.

Seffat, can I ask you, we've talked about the influence and, of course, those who followed him. What about these enemies at the time at the late 19th century? I mean, a mind like that was Boundary created great. We know he created greater. What were they after him for? Well, when unto this last came out, one of the reviews described it as being like preached to death by a mad governess. And I think partly, just as we've talked about the very direct address to the reader,

we've also got to recognise that for those who find that unsympathetic, there is a constant preachily tone here. There's an upbraiding of his audience. and when that was combined with, as it seemed to quite a lot of leading Victorian intellectuals, an ignorance of how society really worked, that his critique of political economy wasn't based really on an proper understanding of economics, then it seemed as if what they had on their hands was a slightly fanatic or marginal figure. So I think there was that reaction to him. And also, of course, he himself could constantly disdainting. disappoint his followers. That's the other thing we've talked about. We talked about his great appeal, but also he had this great ability to antagonize and alienate his followers. So when we're thinking of the various Victorian intellectuals, I mean, he himself so much, as I think Keith said earlier, draws on somebody like Carlisle and we see a strand there of Victorian moralism. But all that strain running down from utilitarians, all that strain of more literary-based

social criticism in someone like Matthew Arnold, finds something, I think, rather excessive in Ruskin, something over the top and unreliable. There's the Ruskin of Brandwood up in the Lake District as well, Keith Hanley. Now, he spent a lot of his money on schemes, putting things into practice that he believed in. How many of those things had influence or were portents of the future

or were interesting in terms of developing his ideas. Can you give us some specifics, though? Sure. Well, this was the last phase of his life, really, retirement to Brantwood. But there in that valley, which he known since boyhood, it became a laboratory for all these interconnected ideas. He's geologizing, his botanizing. And on a toy-like level, he could experiment with waterworks and gardening.

All his guns were thematic. They were designed off to Dante or had some other purpose. A piece of earth that he segregated off at the back of Brantwood, which he called the Moorland Garden, was to experiment with farming techniques that could regain that for agricultural purposes to feed the world. But it was all on a diminished, rather playful level. We've talked about his great status as a. a paternalist, these great Victorian sages. It was a rather precarious construction that they inhabited. And here he was able to relax.

He was able to think about wallpaper and baking and some of those unmanly activities that problematized perhaps some of those structures behind that kind of paternalism. But you see, all the time he is trying to orchestrate his particular sense of a total universe. and on that diminished level, of course, he was visited by people, the local community, participated in that. And I have to say it's a project which goes forward to the present day,

where Brantwood is operated very much in those Ruskinian terms, doing ecological experiments and thinking how the land can be used for communal purposes. I think, you know, it's eccentric. the fate of precocity is often not to mature in a way. Ruskin was fallible in lots of those poses he put on. I'm not too sure they weren't more guileful than perhaps we just heard. I'm not too sure he didn't play up and ham it up a bit and get away with quite a lot.

Berating Bradford millionaires about their immorality was a hard act to pull off. So I'm not too sure that he wasn't more knowing in some ways about some of those postures. Can I just bring in down. here about three things which might be said if you could address this briefly I'm sorry about that but

have harmed his reputation one was the fact that he hated the paintings of Whistler and there was a great court case which bankrupted Whistler even though Wistler got a farthing in damages and as it won so having brought

on as it were the great modernist of his earlier day Turner he was against who turned out to be a great and that damaged his reputation The second was the incident of the non-consumation of his marriage, which became a sort of joke because he discovered that his wife had pubic hair and he wasn't prepared for this. And that's the explanation given. I've always suspected that's a bit too, yeah, good, I'm glad you're shaking her. I've always thought that was a bit too smirky in English.

And the third was the fact that he, in the last few years of his life, he went into deep depressions and a sort of insanity. So it's a lot to ask, but can you do something with those three and say how that might have affected his reputation? Those are all biographical questions and issues, and they have damaged his reputation. It's true. To begin with the Whistler case, I mean, I think it is a limitation, though also a strength in Ruskin's critical mind that his thought is so strongly bound up with his own experience and his own memory that as he became middle-aged and then old, he found it hard. to accommodate new developments in art and culture

because they weren't rooted in his own remembered experience. And I think that did make it difficult for him to respond to what Whistler was attempting. There were other reasons for his reaction against Whistler. It wasn't a trivial dismissal of Whistler's arts. And some of the things that Whistler was attempting in his manipulation of colour and form were, I think, not part of what Ruskin wanted to value. Nevertheless, I think that Ruskin was uncharacteristically blind to the values and virtues of what Whistler was doing.

And I think that that sense of a limitation in Ruskin's life, which is reflected in the lack of sexual experience and the failure to consummate the marriage, is another thing which, as you say, has limited his reputation. as you rightly suspect the pubic hair question and story has no foundation in fact it's something that people want to believe

it's like angels dancing on the head of a pin yeah it's a 20th century invention and it says something I think about 20th century culture that people have been so very ready to believe it so we can nail it once and for all I hope so that would be a blessing for all

I'll mind for six years yes that's holding on considering the difficulties that he handles a man Yes, yes. And it's still, I think, something of a mystery, quite what went wrong so radically with that marriage. And then the fact that he, in the old-fashioned, Therais went inside in the last few years. But can I ask you all go around the table for the final question? In 1990, there was a great British celebration of 100 years since Ruskin's birth and the press were enthusiastically involved and it was a big thing.

that's unlikely to happen for the second. It happened to very few people anyway, for goodness sakes, what we're talking about. But still, do you think his reputation has gone very far down as far as it's going to go and come up again? Can you just talk about his reputation now, Stap? Well, I think in terms of the curve of it, it did go down really from the 1940s,

the 1950s may have been the lowest point, and in the last couple of decades, I think it's come up somewhat again. I would be surprised if it ever comes up to the peak that it had in the early 20th century. Partly, perhaps, of course, no literary or intellectual figure might now get accorded that kind of attention than just too many other competing media and forms of celebrity possibly for that to be the case. But I think also what's really changed fundamentally across the course of the 20th century that has, I would not myself think that it's eliminated Ruskin's appeal, but I think it has restricted it in public terms is that the whole kind of kind of, kind of ethos that fed initially the labor movement, adult education and so on, that sense

that there was this great historic wrong to be remedied and the sense that it was to do with the shoddiness and the degrading quality of life in industrial society for better or worse, I think on the whole for worse, but for better or worse, that has become less prominent in our public debate, I think. And so the kind of indictments that Ruskin was offering, I think, has now lost a little of its appeal in that way. The other thing I think that is so crucial is go really all the way back to the beginning. Ruskin's writing, as we've heard, was suffused with religious imagery, with religious appeal. He had some of the cadence of the preacher, a constant biblical illusion.

And again, for better or worse, that is just much less part of our common culture now. And I think that itself also is rather limited Ruskin's current appeal. Keith, Keith, Keith, yes. Yes, well, I think within the parameters of those possibilities, actually. It's a more upbeat story from my position. I run an academic centre. We get students, a particularly mature students, who are thirsty

for the kind of cultural access which Ruskin still provides them with. And this is worldwide. I mean, we constantly have Japanese students who come to us. There is, as I say, Ruskin diaspora, and I think that comparatively speaking, Ruskin, in terms of debates

about access to traditional culture, is a rather needed party to present conversations. along those lines. Diana, finally. I think that what has marginalised Ruskin also makes him attractive. That sense of the kind of range

of subject material and approach, the visual approach to learning. The fact that so much of Ruskin's writing depends on what you see, and it is a training in looking, reading Ruskin, makes him more attractive as our own culture grows more visual.

But above all, something we've talked about repeatedly, that personal engagement that Ruskin still offers you as you read the great Ruskin text, you hear that voice, you have a sense of a mind in contact with your mind. That is still true. And I think that that's something that we are perhaps more inclined to value now. So that I think Ruskin does have an intellectual future,

though I think Stefan's right to suggest that it won't be like his intellectual past. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks, Dana Birch, Stefan Kalini and Keith Hanley. Next week I'll be discussing King Alfred the Great and the Battle of Eddington in 878, which was crucial for England and was crucial for the English language. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.