Selected Writings

by John Ruskin, Dinah Birch (Editor)

John Ruskin was the most powerful and influential art critic and social commentator of the Victorian nineteenth century. A true polymath, he wrote about nature, art, architecture, politics, history, myth and much more. All of his work is characterized by a clarity of vision as unsettling and intense now as it was for his first readers.

This new selection includes wide-ranging extracts of Ruskin's texts, from the early 1840s to the late 1880s, as well as representative material from each of his major works. Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice, and Sesame and Lilies are juxtaposed with less familiar writing on science and myth. An authoritative introduction outlines Ruskin's life and thought, making it clear why his writing is still relevant today. This new edition also includes a selection of Ruskin's own illustrations.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Art, Classics, Philosophy, British Literature, Criticism

324 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1972

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

John Ruskin was an English writer, philosopher, art historian, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Ruskin was heavily engaged by the work of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc which he taught to all his pupils including William Morris, notably Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary, which he considered as "the only book of any value on architecture". Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J.M.W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taste is not only a part and an index of morality;—it is the ONLY morality.

John Ruskin can be said to be the John the Baptist of the religion of art, a herald of things to come. He was shortly followed by the great aesthetes, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Marcel Proust—who all read and were deeply influenced by his work. But Ruskin himself cannot be called an aesthete—at least, not in the sense that he considered aesthetic appreciate the central goal of life. For Ruskin, art provided not only aesthetic pleasure but genuine moral instruction; great paintings could be read like psalms, and great buildings were sermons in stone.

In this, as in so many other ways, Ruskin can be jarring for the modern reader. Indeed, his ideas were jarring even back then. He made a profession of insistently, dogmatically, and unequivocally asserting opinions that, to most people, seem manifestly untrue. The most notorious of these opinions is thus summed up by him: “You can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstances.” Unethical people, therefore, could produce only base art. And if an entire age habitually produced shoddy paintings and buildings—as Ruskin believed of his own age—then there must obviously be something deeply wrong with that society.

Art and society were thus, for Ruskin, deeply intertwined. This is the bridge that connects his art and his social criticism. Art is never just for art’s sake; it has a didactic and a moral purpose. A work of art is great in proportion to the greatness of its ideas; and these ideas are not the products of an eccentric individual, but of a whole culture, evolving and refining itself through generations. Every great work that results from this evolution “is the embodiment of the Polity, Life, History, and Religious Faith of nations.” As such, these works have a vital social purpose; and it is the job of the art critic to explicate their moral significance. We see this most clearly in Ruskin’s major works on architecture, The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture, which are concerned, above all, with the ethical lessons inherent in gothic architecture.

For Ruskin, however, art was not only moral, but truthful. From this conviction came his youthful defense of J.W. Turner in his five-volume Modern Painters. Turner’s works, he thought, revealed a deep insight into the workings of nature; and since Ruskin was himself keenly sensitive to natural beauty, especially mountains, he became Turner’s champion. The job of the landscape painter, like that of the poet, is to record nature as faithfully as possible. Inferior painters and poets allow themselves to be overpowered by emotions, which lead them to personify or to distort nature: Ruskin called this the “pathetic fallacy.” But the truly great painter or poet, the Turners and Dantes, are always in complete control of themselves.

One can see why this was jarring. Most of us naturally distinguish whether something is good, beautiful, or true; but Ruskin insisted that these qualities were inextricable. Art could not be great if it was immoral or if it was untrue. Indeed, for Ruskin, you might say that these qualities were not separable at all; having any of them without having all three was inconceivable. But their existence was not dependent on solitary, virtuous geniuses. To the contrary: the ability to understand nature only exists in developed cultures; moral systems are the products of peoples; and great art can only exist within a school and a tradition. Society was therefore deeply important for Ruskin, being the wellspring of everything he admired and sought.

The later half of his life was, as a result, spent in social reform. Specifically, Ruskin set himself up as the enemy of industrial capitalism. Gothic art was great because each workman was an artist; but in mass-production the workers are reduced to machines. The division of labor is, as he said, really the division of souls, allowing for efficiency but stunting human growth. The ethic of enlightened selfishness could never inspire any great works, since the highest ethical value is selflessness. The environmental destruction wrought by industrialism was not only a crime against future generations but a crime against ourselves, since we were destroying the truth and beauty of nature, which is one of the vital sources of happiness.

This is the quickest summary I can give this selection of Ruskin's work, whose volumes fill many shells and touch on many different disciplines. There are many reasons to dismiss Ruskin’s ideas. The relationship of beauty to truth and to goodness is obviously more complicated than he insisted. Murderers, rapists, and thieves have been great painters. Honorable men have built ugly houses. And what is the truth of a symphony? But for me it is a relief to find someone who finds beauty so socially vital.

I have spent far too long in concrete landscapes, surrounded by endless rows of identical houses, each one ugly in itself and uglier en masse. The effect that such thoughtless dreariness has on my mood—in contrast with the great enlivening freshness I feel when in a lovely city—has convinced me that architectural beauty is not merely an added frill or an extra perk, but is a positive social good. And it is difficult to dismiss Ruskin’s ideas on architecture, society, and the economy when one goes from a modern suburb to a well-preserved medieval town. How is it that finer houses were built by peasants? How is it that the most wealthy society in history can produce only the most mindless repetition, vast labyrinths of stupidity, destroying whole landscapes in the process?

Ruskin is the prophet of this phenomenon, and thus valuable now more than ever. But apart from this, Ruskin is worth reading just for the quality of his writing. His early style, flowery and involuted, gave way to a clearer strain later in life. But throughout his career his prose is rich with observation and abounding in memorable phrases. Even if one disagrees with all of his conclusions, it is impossible to read him without some stimulating thought.

[Davis Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to a severely underrated thinker. I already know he's become one of my "heart" writers after just this basic selection—I have always lamented that there are so few writers besides Roger Scruton who make aesthetics such a core component of their thought. Ruskin is an expressive admirer and critic of sunsets, gardens, cathedrals, paintings, poetry, birds, countrysides, and cityscapes; and a withering opponent of ugliness, industrialization, apathy, efficiency, and modernity in general. He is also quite proto-Chestertonian in his witty, florid prose, and in his anticipation of postliberal "distributism." Not everything in this collection is equally great, but you should certainly read the Modern Painters selections, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, The Queen of the Air, The Work of Iron, Lectures on Art, and The Eagle's Nest.

[C. B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is difficult for me to rate or review. I find lots of Ruskin's ideas very attractive, and others, unattractive. This selection — as far as I can tell — does a good job of running the whole gamut; but I fear that I got a lot more out of Kenneth Clark's introductions than I did from the selections. I don't know... I think I just prefer to read actual works by authors than to have passages selected and arranged. Anyway, I found some charming and interesting quotes; moreover, Clark mentions in passing that Aratra Pentelici — Ruskin's series of lectures on sculpture — is one of the few readable books he wrote on art (the rest being sprawling multi-volume works of varying quality and minimal cohesion). I have a beautiful old copy of it on my shelf, so I hope to read that soon.

[Eric]

I've always wondered where to start with Ruskin. An anthology edited by Kenneth Clark seems a good place. What was Proust's favorite Ruskin work?

[Todd Denning · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rate this book 5 Stars only because it would be ridiculous to rate Ruskin’s prose anything else. But, it is far from perfect.

At times biblical, at others outdated and convoluted, Ruskin’s writings are unavoidably alluring and persuasive. Undoubtedly they have the power to change our perceptions of the world around us, drawing focus with the most beautiful writing to aspects of life which all too often pass us by. His actual writing style is so impressive it makes the most tedious political tirade melt into perfect reading.

However! They are still tirades… thus, I recommend readers carefully choose the passages they read unless they have a real dedicated curiosity of his works. As said, many of his writings are interesting only in a historical window into the politics and economics of his era rather than anything overwhelmingly illuminating.

Overall I would definitely recommend specific passages to curious readers and the book as a whole to those dedicated enjoyers of Ruskin…

[Laurine]

I am going to DNF this, and will need to decide whether to read the complete works of Ruskin because selected texts leave me wanting more, or ditch him entirely because of how problematic he was.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think people ought to read this on the basis of Ruskin's writing alone. He is extremely eloquent, his writing is informative and is beautiful to read. Truly I think he did master the English language and I suppose that's what you expect from an art critic as Ruskin is. His illustrations are also very lovely.

I don't agree entirely with the writings presented. I think there are flaws in his criticisms of the political economy - namely the fact his solution rests on the fact that man can be expected to be just, which ensures the rest of his argument doesn't really stand up. But on his thoughts on art, architecture, botany, and the environment - I think he has a point, and the arguments he makes aren't exactly untrue. His points on restoration - that by restoring something you essentially ruin it - is a view I had not previously thought but can see the logic behind. I think on the whole this selection is well done and in future I will read more of Ruskin's work - and since that is the purpose of such collections, I guess it deserves the rating I have given.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got distracted by the biographical details of his life. These made it difficult for me to be completely involved in his ideas.

If a person is so clearly not able to navigate the complexities of living a responsible social life, even with total and unquestioned material support and comfort, can they be trusted to investigate and comment on universal truths? I have to ponder this question.

By what right does a person set themselves up as a judge and critic of others? What kind of arrogance and self-delusion does that require?

History and canon suggest few other scholars have raised these questions. I need to look more closely at this before I draw firm conclusions, but I'm sufficiently skeptical of Ruskin's personal integrity that I don't really want to spend any more time with him than this.

[Kbrooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once in a while the modern reader will encounter a few howlers—I scrawled "yuck" and "ugh" in the margins a few times—but overall Ruskin just makes deeply humane sense. Not to mention that his essay "On the Pathetic Fallacy" boasts the greatest footnote (re: objects & subjects and delivered in a parody of German philosophical prose) ever written in the English language. If you want to spend an evening talking and thinking about art and material culture in the company of an erudite, opinionated, and quick-witted man with exquisite manners, Mr. Ruskin comes highly recommended.

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange man, great writer. Makes the mundane interesting.

[ReadsandThings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruskin is, on the whole, nearly impossible to review - particularly after only reading a selection of his writings such as this one. I feel like you'd need a much larger insight into his work, and also what effects it had on the world he lived in, together with a deeper knowledge of his biography, than I have.
It is almost impossible to overstate his importance for the Victorian period, be it in the arts, in education or in social questions. As someone who has long been very fond of the Victorians, reading Ruskin was one of those things I had long meant to do.
This edition offers a sampling of various texts in chronological order of writing, spanning a good part of the spectrum he dealt with.

Then there's the question of literary value - and he was certainly a skilled writer who penned large amounts of prose very easily, and it's all very beautiful. It's also all very Victorian dense, if you know what I mean; and I found that I had to read him in the mornings, or I'd just tune out and read without understanding. It's easy to get lost in the cadence of his writing without taking in the meaning.

In terms of content, there is much that is amazingly modern, and many of his positions still read fresh and relevant; and then you come across passages where he scoffs at Darwin, or describes at length the effects of a kind of "plague-cloud" that he believes to have seen over England since the 1860s, and the reader is jostled back into her knowledge of how old these texts really are - almost 200 (!) years in some instances. (Am I the only one who thinks of the Victorian age as 100 years ago? When we're really nearing the 200th birthday of Victoria's reign).

The young Ruskin is very much carried away with his own cleverness, running away with his ideas in the face of the establishment like every teenager who ever lived, and some notes included by the older Ruskin upon re-reading indicate that he chuckled at his younger self, too. The older Ruskin is very settled in his views, and some are more quaint than his earlier ideas. Upon the whole, I think I prefer the young Ruskin over the old one; as is often the case.

A note on the edition if you're thinking about getting this one or the Penguin: I have both, and the contents are nearly identical, with some exceptions; I'd go with whichever you prefer in terms of annotation etc.

[Gille Liath · Rating 3 out of 5]

'No writer has suffered so great a fall in his reputation'. And I’m not sure Ruskin is for me either(in spite of my instinct to react against the reaction against him). Editor Kenneth Clark (not the Tory politician) says that some of his descriptions are ‘amazing performances’. But I don’t want a description – eg of a waterfall – to be a ‘performance’. That is just where tastes have changed. And when someone is looking to write such descriptions, in order to make their writing stand out they become guilty of all kinds of fanciful notions – for example, that streams in Scotland sound different to those in other similar regions of Britain. This is just nonsense.

He was ‘made up of contradictions’. That is said in every biographical sketch, and it is probably true, because it is probably true of every person – or would be, except that they are not really contradictions, just difference qualities evident at different times.

The biggest problem though Ruskin's preferred subjects: Nature, Art and ‘political economy’. The first, I believe, is simply not a suitable subject for prose, except incidentally when the main subject is something else – long descriptions of nature, not serving any dramatic or emotional purpose, are intolerable. The second, I am willing to believe, has as much validity as the parallel subject of music (ie some, in the hands of a very skilled and perceptive writer), but it has much less interest for me personally. The third cannot really outlive its own context and time. If, as I gather, Ruskin is a Reformer, he is likely to spend a lot of time trying to convince us of things that we now take for granted. If he is a Conservative, he can have even less to say to us now.

Curiously the book is made of up very short excerpts. Possibly this is to protect both editor and reader from the effects of his protracted oratory, but any author worth reading needs at least a little more room to develop his themes. The editor actually allows himself more room in his section introductions than he gives to his subject. Also strangely I can’t find anything from his best-known work, Sesame and Lilies – so it’s hard to know whether it’s worth giving that a go.

[Marco Baroni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruskin was something like the Harari of the Victorian era: a hugely popular essayist unafraid to write on an impressively wide range of topics, from Turner’s painting to Venetian Gothic, from political economy to the “woman question”, and even publishing treatises on geology, botany, and the philosophy of science (all sampled in this anthology). Unlike Harari, though, Ruskin generally seems to know what he’s talking about, and his views are always original or at least entertaining.

In the best British tradition, his prose is plain, his argumentation crystal-clear and full of common sense. Ironically, his style often reminds me of that of his arch-nemesis, John Stuart Mill. It’s a pity that, over the last century, Ruskin’s work has fallen out of fashion. I can see why–it doesn’t easily fit into the dominant intellectual currents of the 20th century, such as Marxism or liberalism, and some of what he wrote (e.g., on women and British colonialism) is indeed quite problematic. Still, just as he managed–despite being an art critic with an obsessive fascination for the Middle Ages–to profoundly influence the roots of modernism, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Marcel Proust, much of the political thinking of this staunch monarchist (who, however, believed that no monarch after Agamemnon had lived up to the role) holds up remarkably well and even feels strikingly modern in our late-capitalist age.

He writes beautifully, for example, about the dignity of manual labor, the effects of mass-produced cheap goods and financial speculation on the working class, and even climate change and ecology (he resigned from Oxford in 1885 in protest against vivisection!). More than anything, Ruskin must have been quite a character, and reading him is a joy. He doesn’t just speculate that the Industrial Revolution was changing the weather–he offers a detailed, almost obsessive account of the differences between the storm clouds of his youth and those of his old age. He’s hilarious when mocking the convoluted style of the German philosophers of his time. And he really, really, really hated the newly introduced vaporetti (small public steamboats) in Venice–good thing he didn’t live to see cruise ships sailing down the Canal Grande!

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a great introduction by Dinah Birch. With that said, I'm not sure how much I liked reading a sequence of short extracts from much longer works. It felt a bit all over the place. In terms of formatting, I think each piece should have been preceded by a brief explanation of what the editor thinks is useful about it, because otherwise you go from reading book chapters, to inaugural lectures, to letters with little comprehension of what the editor is hoping to express with the choice of extract.

Another problem I had was that a lot of the extracts featured Ruskin repeating himself. For example, an idea he discussed in a part of Modern Painters will be repeated at length in an extract of a lecture later in the book. Now, maybe Ruskin did repeat himself so often that this is unavoidable, but it comes across as carelessness in such a short book of selected writings.

Overall, I'm glad I read Ruskin, even if he does become more and more windy and dogmatic as he got older. Some of his comments on painting are quite helpful, and his critique of industrialism and his environmentalism are eerily prophetic.

[lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was asked to read 3 essays from this for uni. I wanted to document it so I’ve added it to my Goodreads, despite not reading them all. I don’t really enjoy essays, and find critics tend to have a very dull writing style. Although I did engage with Ruskin a little, I did find that his essays could get boring very fast. He often went on tangents, and that’s when I found myself getting bored. If he stuck to his original arguments, I would have enjoyed them a lot better.

I chose not to read the other essays because, like I said, I’m not a fan of this style of writing. I doubt I’ll pick it up again, except for writing an essay maybe, so I’ll add it to my DNF shelf.

[Sula]

Not sure how to rate this one. As a collection I think it is good, although I would have like some more in the Nature and Poetic Descriptions sections as Ruskin excels in these. The content itself is very varied. Some are beautiful, some ahead of his time and still relevant today, whereas others are less comprehensible and are dated.

[Erin]

DNF at page 187, after 294 days. I just cannot take it anymore. This book is haunting me. Apologies to my art history professor who first introduced me to Ruskin.

[conor · Rating 3 out of 5]

ruskin sure had lots of thoughts! some good! some bad! some strange! worth reading more closely at some later date probably

[Dylan Rock · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent selection of John Ruskin vast literary output.

[lara · Rating 3 out of 5]

victorian critics be saying things so definitively. like man i think it depends

[enara · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be honest, I thought the essays would be about literature, so I didn't find what I was looking for in the book. Most of the essays are about nature, some nice, others extremely verbose.

[Quiver · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ruskin’s eloquent circumlocutions had me both marvelling and not fully paying attention. His erudition is admirable; his insights are worthwhile whenever relevant (as universal truths, as historical milestones, as curiosities), but the modern, general interest reader will have to work at picking them out.

In short, I took away the following about Ruskin: he celebrates Turner and reveres Gothic architecture; he’s unabashed (and correctly so) about contradicting himself; he proposes what must have been a progressive education for women in his day but seems sexists today; he excels at ekphrasis, lyrical descriptions of weather, and discerning observation in most matters.

Here are some of my favourite excerpts, though they hardly do justice to the variety of his ideas and the level of detail included in his discussions.

In the observations on the nature of Gothic, he gets the idea to “read architecture“:

The idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our mind for a moment.

A little later he beautifully describes the essence of the Gothic spirit:

The vital principle is not the love of Knowledge, but the love of Change. It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knows and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied.

The quote about self-contradiction and walking the sides of a polygon comes in his inaugural address to the Cambridge School of Art, in 1858:

Perhaps some of my hearers this evening may occasionally have heard it stated of me that I am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do so. I never met with a question yet, of any importance, which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times.

Finally in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, Ruskin shows us how writing about weather doesn’t have to be pedestrian or supernatural to paint fascinating images:

The most terrific and horrible thunderstorm, this morning, I ever remember. It waked me at six, or a little before—then rolling incessantly, like railway luggage trains, quite ghastly in its mockery of them—the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog, like smoke; scarcely raining at all, but increasing to heavier rollings, with flashes quivering vaguely through all the air, and at last terrific double streams of reddish-violet fire, not forked or zigzag, but rippled rivulets—two at the same instant some twenty to thirty degrees apart, and lasting on the eye at least half a second, with grand artillery-peals following; not rattling crashes, or irregular cracklings, but delivered volleys. It lasted an hour, then passed off, clearing a little, without rain to speak of—not a glimpse of blue,—and now, half-past seven, seems settling down again into Manchester devil’s darkness.

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My old 2014 review: Once you have fought your way through convoluted language to the meaning behind the words — it's rewarding. Only for those with patience, and a desire to contemplate some deep truths despite a highly opinionated exposition.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

The selected writings of John Ruskin are a view into a mind which seemingly turns into every facet of life. No ones writes Turner better than Ruskin in Modern Painters, as he spends pages pouring over something as delicate as Turner's clouds or skies, visually capturing, commenting on and fusing with lines from Wordsworth, Keats or Milton, in a way that captures the modern painter entirely. In Unto This Last, Ruskin's writing becomes a proto-socialist manifesto, turning his keen eye to the landscape of political economy, and just as astutely as his observations of Turner's landscapes. The Sevens Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice prove there is no art form untouchable to Ruskin, but it is The Two Paths which impressed me the most. In this extract, Ruskin details seemingly every aspect in the essence of iron, moving from its occurrence in nature, to its aesthetic value in art, and even its economic usage in the plough of the labourer, as the material is dissected in Ruskin's all-seeing manner: covering nature, art and economics in a single bound. The writings continue this arc of leaving no stone unturned, as the selection includes further writings on myth, literary theory, ornithology, biography, botany, climatology, and more.

[Derek]

Victorian Spaces, week five.

[Meg Merriet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Ruskin, even if he is a paternalistic old crackpot. His essays both expand my perspective of the world and teach me how to draw better.

[Dr Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good on nineteenth century art.