“The deep damnation of self-righteousness. The slavish devotion of Ruskin’s disciples irritated D. But Forster’s tongue-in-cheek remark also acknowledged the spell Ruskin once cast over people of culture-or, at the very least, people who wanted to be considered culturally sophisticated. © Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum, USA / Bridgeman Imagesįorster was being wry when he mentioned Lucy’s predicament-that she didn’t know what to think until Ruskin had told her what to think. is the only morality. Tell me what you like,” Ruskin asserted, “And I’ll tell you what you are.”Īn 1877 study of a sprig of a Myrtle tree by Ruskin. His mother had once longed for him to be a bishop, and as an arbiter of his society’s standards, Ruskin, in his own way, came close. Reverently read and reflexively quoted, his pronouncements on everything from painting to poetry to private capital rang among his fans with an almost scriptural authority.
Given his relative obscurity today, it’s hard for contemporary readers to grasp how famous Ruskin once was. In Ruskin’s heyday, just about every educated Victorian knew who he was.īorn in 1819 to a wealthy merchant and an overbearing mother, Ruskin was an English writer on art, nature, literature, and political economy who dominated cultural thought throughout Britain-and, to some degree, the Western world-in the second half of the nineteenth century. The man in question, John Ruskin, had died eight years earlier, in 1900, but his memory was still fresh in popular culture. Ruskin” might be lost on many modern readers, although Forster obviously felt no obligation to explain it when he wrote his story. Forster’s celebrated 1908 novel, A Room with a View. Ruskin” is Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of E. The woman unsure of her own reaction to a lovely church without consulting “Mr. There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. “She walked about disdainfully,” we learn, “unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date. She doesn’t have her Baedeker, a popular travel guide, and is feeling lost without it. Near the dawn of the twentieth century, a young Englishwoman named Lucy is visiting an ancient church in Florence, unsure of what she is looking at, or how, exactly, to see it. He was refined, very famous, and eccentric. A woodcut of Ruskin made by John Bryden, published in 1898.
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