[ Ruskin / Fors Clavigera ]
John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) was one of the foremost social and art critics of the Victorian period in Britain, very much concerned with the deleterious effects of industrialization on both the natural world and the human psyche.
The following passage is excerpted from Fors Clavigera, a series of letters written by Ruskin to British laborers, published as a series of pamphlets in 1871 - 1872 and then in book form in 1873, in which Ruskin sought to heighten awareness of the possibility of moral content in labor. Ruskin strongly believed that the unfettered industrialism of his time was creating conditions of wage-slavery that led people to engage in meaningless, soulless work simply for economic gain. He felt that the timely publication of his letters would strike his cultural moment with the force (fors [Latin]) of a club (clava), thus prompting social change.
As an art critic Ruskin could be quite emphatic in his judgements; indeed, in Fors Clavigera Ruskin criticized a painting by James McNeil Whistler (of Whistler's Mother fame) so insultingly that Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, and won (though only a farthing, worth about 15 cents US in 2020; Whistler had spent so much on the lawsuit that he was financially compromised). Ruskin wasn't always correct, either; although at times he had high praise for Edwin Landseer, Ruskin criticized The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner in a review that, famously, contains several factual errors regarding the painting.
The passage below is Ruskin's commentary on a statue of a Newfoundland dog, Bashaw, the Faithful Friend of Man... by Matthew Coates Wyatt (which is treated separately in the "Fine Arts" section of The Cultured Newf); click on the thumbnail image below to open a new tab or window with more information on that statue. (This same Newfoundland was also painted by Sir Edwin Landseer in his 1827 painting commonly known as Off to the Rescue.)
The discussion of the statue is part of a point Ruskin is making about what he sees as the decline of intellectual and artistic rigor in his time: "it seems to be the appointed function of the nineteenth century to exhibit in all things the elect pattern of perfect Folly, for a warning to the farthest future" (85). Ruskin then explains that he has recently been to
the Kensington Museum; and there I saw the most perfectly and roundly ill-done thing which, as yet, in my whole life I ever saw produced by art. It had a tablet in front of it, bearing this inscription, —
"Statue in black and white marble, a Newfoundland Dog standing on a Serpent, which rests on a marble cushion, the pedestal ornamented with pietra dura fruits in relief. – English. Present Century. No. I."
It was so very right for me, the Kensington people having been good enough to number it "I.," the thing itself being almost incredible in its oneness; and, indeed, such a punctual accent over the iota of Miscreation, — so absolutely and exquisitely miscreant, that I am not myself capable of conceiving a Number two, or three, or any rivalship or association with it whatsoever. The extremity of its unvirtue consisted, observe, mainly in the quantity of instruction which was abused in it. It showed that the persons who produced it had seen everything, and practised everything; and misunderstood everything they saw, and misapplied everything they did. They had seen Roman work, and Florentine work, and Byzantine work, and Gothic work; and misunderstanding of everything had passed through them as the mud does through earthworms, and here at last was their worm-cast of a Production.
From Fors Clavigera, Vol I (London: George Allen, 1896)