Page 24 - History 2020

were shocked. Political Economy, he thundered, had fostered individualism,

selfishness, greed, philistinism, squalor and ugliness. The division of labour, the basis
of the factory system, atomised work and degraded and dehumanised the worker.
The very soul of society had been mechanised. How terrible to contrast this with the
medieval worker on the Gothic cathedrals, freely expressing their spirituality and
artistic creativity on the stonework in carvings that faithfully mirrored the profusion
of God’s Creation, its curved leaves and soaring branches.

Now we may think that rests on flimsy historical foundations. Were medieval workers

really so free and creative? Yet Marx had identified a similar evil in factory
production: it “alienates” workers by separating them from the fruits of their labour.
Marx came to it via German philosophy; Ruskin by Victorian medievalism; the upshot
was the same: dehumanised workers. Ruskin now had an analysis which explained
everything that offended him about Victorian England: its poverty and squalor, its
selfishness and lack of faith, its ugliness and filth. The problem wasn’t aesthetic; it
was moral. Given its immoral foundations, how could industrial civilisation create

beautiful art?

It was Ruskin’s utter dedication to art that fired his sense of moral outrage against his
own society. It transformed him as a writer. Formerly an art critic who occasionally
commented on society, he became a fiercely partisan writer on society who
occasionally wrote about art. He became the Ruskin who was not just the darling of
the Victorian art world and its middle class fans, but the impassioned and profound
writer who was admired by Proust and Tolstoy and inspired Gandhi. Today few find

Ruskin an easy read. But few writers can come up with sentences like this: “the great
cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blasts, is
this: that we manufacture everything there except men.”

Ruskin had one further insight; he compared Venice to Britain. He believed that the
Renaissance had ruined medieval Venice as a great maritime and commercial power.

Humanism and classical art sapped its spirit and vitality; its art and architecture
became conventional. Three centuries late, another great maritime commercial
empire also suffered a moral and spiritual malaise which threatened its decline.
Ruskin was not the first to make the comparison: in Ruskin’s youth, Lord Byron had
written, “In the fall/Of Venice think of thine.”
We will explore this theme in later sessions when we look at the British Empire
But first, we must turn to William Morris, Ruskin’s disciple. Morris wrote of him, “The
books of John Ruskin were a sort of revelation. How deadly dull the world would have
been but for Ruskin! It was through him that I learned to give form to my discontent.”

Ruskin transcends party political labels or even ideas of left or right wing. He