Degrees of Darkness: Ruskin, Pater and Modernism

Abstract

By 1870, and the inaugural lectures delivered to the University as the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Ruskin was at the height of his career, aged 51. If Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice were behind him, the scale of their achievement was indicated by the creation of such a Professorship, and by the opportunity it afforded Ruskin to embed the study of visual art in the curriculum and education of gentlemen. And while the lectures are nothing if not didactic, their very certitudes register Ruskin’s consciousness of the cacophony of counter-arguments in a ‘darkness’ which was both a general condition of human knowledge and personal: the turmoil of his dissolved marriage (1853), break with evangelical faith (1858), and attachment to Rose La Touche were matched by his public arguments with England, first about art and then, from 1860, political economy. Mental instability, which haunted Ruskin’s earlier years, continued to be an important factor. I will argue that while Ruskin proved increasingly irascible towards ‘progress’ or modernity during his Oxford years, he nevertheless strengthened his legacy to modernism, reinforcing his orientation to form, in lectures to young gentlemen whom he taught to look carefully and to see. Walter Pater, already familiar with Ruskin’s work and then at Oxford as a young Fellow, was publishing his early essays at the time.