'The Lie of the Land': Ruskm and the English Landscape Tradition Roy Wallace B.A. (Hons.), Simon Fraser University, 1972 M. Litt., University of Edinburgh, 1974 Diploma, University of British Columbia, 1977 M.A., New York University, 1985 THESIS SUBA&TTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF . DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of ENGLISH Q Rory Wallace 1994 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY November 1994 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL Name: Rory Wallace Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (English) Title of Thesis: 'The Lie of the Land': Ruskin and the English Landscape Tradition Examining Committee: Chair: David Stouck, Graduate Chair Mason Harris, Senior Supervisor English Department - Evan Alderson Dean of Arts ~$i~hDavis,'~~ternal External Examiner English Department - Jonathan Wisenthal, External Examiner English Department, University of British Columbia Date Approved: "Ji.. 4,/?f PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis, project or extended essay (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Title of Thesis/Project/Extended Essay Author: - (signature) (name) Abstract Ruskin's political writing has generally been construed as a later pursuit separate from his earlier work in aesthetics. Rather than attributing his radical politics to his deep religious conviction, his hndamentalist upbringing, or the influence of Thomas Carlyle and other social reformers, this thesis is an endeavour to ground the origin and expression of Ruskin's politics in the aesthetics of landscape which he and his readers shared. The way Ruskin's contemporaries read his commentaries on both art and politics was determined to a great degree by the long tradition of English landscape painting and poetry. Prior to Ruskin's time, the British admiration for European masters and aesthetics became hsed with national concepts of property and ownership to produce emblems of felicity and propriety that both rationalized and disguised inequitable social conditions. In turn, this ideology of ownership and the practice of aestheticizing the topography of Britain was disseminated to a much wider population through the popular cult of the picturesque. Ruskin was an avid follower of the picturesque as a young man, and few of his contemporaries had studied as many paintings as he by the time he started to write Modem Painters (1843)' an early work in which painting and politics merge. Despite iv contemporary critical theory which consistently endorsed the disengagement of art from political criticism, Ruskin took the landscape tradition which he shared with his readers and through it he discovered and articulated his deep disillusion at the state of industrialized Britain. The landscape Ruskin thus constructed constituted a social commentary that assimilated theology, morality and aesthetics into a powerfbl rhetoric that ifised both the painting and the actual landscape of Britain with political meaning. TABLE OF CONTENTS Approval Page ......................................... ii ... Abstract .............................................. "1 Table of Contents ....................................... v List of Illustrations ...................................... vi .. Preface ...............................................wl Chapter 1. Introduction .................................... 1 2. "Italian Light on English Walls". ....................17 3. Ruskin and the Picturesque ........................50 4. Land into Landscape: Aesthetic Theory ............. 34 5. A Matter of Taste: The Moral Landscape ........... .I11 6. Conclusion: "A goodly landscape". .................16 1 Illustrations ..........................................176 Bibliography. ........................................,186 List of Illustrations Figure 1.Envy ....................................................176 2 . "No Heart can thinke, to what strange ends" ...................... 177 3 . "Ere thou a fruithll-Cropp shalt see" ...........................178 4 . "The best, and fairest House, to mee" ........................... 179 5 . "When prosperous our Maires do growe" ....................... 180 6 . "He that delights to Plant and Set" ............................. 181 7 . "Our outward Hopes will take effect" ........................... 182 8 . Estate Landscape .......................................... 183 9 . Petworth: Sunset, Fighting Bucks ............................. 184 10. The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire ........................ 185 vii Preface To avoid a conhsion in terms I reserve the actual word "landscape" to denote any form of constructed representation, and endeavour to use words like "countryside," CC scene," "view," "land," "geography," or a similar term to denote the physical topography itself, which may in turn be transformed into a landscape by a painter, poet, or gardener. This thesis does not directly address issues of landscape gardening or landscape architecture largely because they do not figure prominently in Ruskin's work. They are fascinating areas of study but there is not space here to do them justice, except by allusion to their role in estate planning and in the development of the picturesque. John Dixon Hunt discusses Ruskin and the garden in Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). All footnote references to Ruskin's works are from the Library Edition of E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn The Works of John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1903- 12) unless otherwise indicated. For clarity in each note I have given the name of the specific work (e.g. Modem Painters III), the date of first publication, and abbreviated Cook and Wedderburn to "C & W' followed by the appropriate volume and page number. Chapter 1 Introduction One can't help admiring a speaker who can begin a lecture promising to discuss landscape and icthyology-and never mention fish again. There is something endearing about titles like The Ethics of Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Ciystallization. However, there is also something very intimidating about writing on such a prolific and diverse a thinker as John Ruskin. His influence was as great as it was brief. William Morris, Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi all acknowledged Ruskin's great political influence,' but by the turn of the century few people were actually reading his work any more. He did more than anyone else to create the reputation of Turner and shape the taste of a century, but the Impressionists may just as well not have existed so far as Ruskin was concerned. What can account for the brevity of Ruskin's reputation? I would suggest that the critical position Ruskin occupied was an uncomfortable one; he was caught in the interregnum between two traditions and could not accept, nor be accepted by, either. Gandhi said that Unto This Last "marked the turning point in my life." Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 69 in John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 196I), 132. 2 In the chapters that follow I will describe some of the forces and traditions that came together in the middle of the nineteenth century to make Ruskin among the most influential men of his time, and one of the most interesting. In fact, this is an investigation not so much of Ruskin himself as it is of the tradition of English landscape and John Ruskin's unique place within that tradition. Others who have written about Ruskin have shown the effect of Victorian religious morality, early economic theory, the suasive presence of great contemporary social reformers like Thomas Carlyle, and much else besides. I am concerned here with something less apparent at first, but something which helps account for the particular form of Ruskin's social criticism, and for some of the impact it had upon his readers: English landscape. The study of landscape is obviously central to Ruskin7swork, but I maintain that it acted as a pre-existent political language which he learned as a child, maskred as a young man, and articulated as a mature writer. I believe that Ruskin's place in the political tradition of landscape representation was shaped by the insatiable English taste for Italianate landscape which coincided with emerging perceptions of property and the nation, which I describe in Chapter 2. His condemnation of this tradition was so vehement in Modern Painters I(1843) that it is clear that he was rejecting more than a style of painting. It may come as some surprise, then, to see in chapter 3 how actively the young, pre-Modern Painters Ruskin pursued the picturesque, the popular aesthetic which disseminated much of the ideology of the previous landscape tradition. It is more surprising still that it was within the conventions of this picturesque that Ruskin began to clearly