Ruskin and wealth

Ruskin, Study of Oak leaves, 1879

Stuart Eagles’ book After Ruskin (2011) is on a vital topic: Ruskin was one of the great Victorian prophets, and his influence on subsequent British life was vast. A famous poll of Labour MPs in the 1920s, by W T Stead, asked them to list the book that had influenced them most as a Labour politician. There were more votes for Ruskin than for the Bible, or for any other writer; and the most mentioned book was Unto This Last.

If that isn’t influence, I don’t know what is; and yet Stuart Eagles’ book has in my view a very skewed view of that influence, which is reflected in the chapter arrangement. Just one of the book’s six chapters is concerned with Ruskin’s influence on politics. The remaining chapters are devoted to initiatives that certainly came after Ruskin, but which in terms of influence had perhaps less influence overall, when put together, than Ruskin on the British Labour Party. Few people today would even know there is a Ruskin Society, or a Guild of St George. Almost nobody outside Ruskin scholars has heard of John Howard Whitehouse, who Eagles claims is the pre-eminent 20th-century Ruskinian. If that were the case, it wouldn’t say much for Ruskin’s influence.

Ruskin’s writing seems to exert a strange hypnotic influence on the people who study him. Tim Hilton wrote a two-volume Life of Ruskin. Book One was 279 pages, while Book Two appeared 15 years later and had no fewer than 596 pages. Hilton seems to have become progressively more immersed in Ruskin during his mammoth project. By the end of the biography, Hilton states “I do not believe that Ruskin wrote too much … and I occasionally lament, as he did himself, the absence of books he projected but never issued.” [from the Foreword to Book Two]. Eagles, by the end of his book After Ruskin, has taken to calling Ruskin “The Master” in the text (many of the sources he quotes from use the same title). Moreover, Eagles drifts into idolatry in attempting to make sense of Ruskin’s text. His view seems to be that, in the absence of any other evidence, we should assume that whatever actions Ruskin did were the correct ones.

For example, take the celebrated phrase “There is no wealth but life”. It occurs at the end of Unto This Last:

THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

It sounds impressive, but on closer examination the meaning starts to dissolve. “Life” includes love, joy and admiration. Why admiration? A rich country has happy human beings; OK, so the “wealth” of life is happiness. But then the argument progresses from happiness to being influential. The third and last sentence seems to define Ruskin’s own life rather than simply to define happiness. The best person is someone who is influential. And not just influential, but influential by his or her possessions. Why? Can’t I just be happy as a workman? It is a very special kind of happiness to influence by your possessions, but Ruskin giving away his prized Turner watercolours to the University museums fits that description very well. For the rest of us, who don’t own any Turners, perhaps our wealth (and happiness) will of necessity be of a lower order.

Mr Eagles repeats the “no wealth but life” phrase several times during his book. Unfortunately, his gloss of the meaning is circular and removes what little meaning the phrase had originally:

Ruskin’s was a human language that celebrated, above all, life itself. He did not merely argue the case that “There is no Wealth but Life”, his words and style of writing were themselves the very language of life. [p208]

It is as if Ruskin’s words exerted a hypnotic effect on the writer. The closing lines of Eagles’ book are: 

Ruskin’s life was wealth as he himself defined it. He was among the richest in England because, having perfected the function of his own life to the utmost, he had always the widest helpful influence, both personal and, by means of his possessions, over the lives of others. [p272]

Quite what it means to perfect the function of one’s own life I do not know. I certainly don’t think Ruskin would make any such claim for his own life.

In the context of this rather vague definition of wealth, Ruskin addresses the workers, in one of the most celebrated passages in Fors Clavigera, on the subject of wealth:

The wealth of the world is yours … Whose fault is it, you clothmakers, that any English child is in rags? Whose fault is it, you shoemakers, that the street harlots mince in high-heeled shoes, while your own babes paddle barefoot in the street slime? … Primarily, of course, it is your clergymen’s and masters’ fault; but also in this your own, that you never educate any of your children with the earnest object of enabling them to see their way out of this, not by rising above their father’s business, but by setting in order what was amiss in it. [Fors Clavigera, Letter 89, September 1880]

Workers are to find wealth, in other words, not by rising above their station, or by earning more money, but by “setting in order what was amiss” with their father’s occupation. There is no denying the venom behind the words; it is a masterpiece of oratory. But perhaps here is the ultimate challenge posed by Ruskin. If we don’t have a vast private income and the world’s best collection of Turner, then how exactly should we set in order what is amiss? Dig the roads of Hinksey? Found a Ruskinian boarding school, as John Howard Whitehouse did, and amass the world’s biggest collection of Ruskiniana? Perhaps one answer lies in the simple yet astonishing Ruskin watercolour shown above. That is a kind of wealth, although not measured, or even considered, in Unto This Last.