Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Ruskin

Ruskin started writing Modern Painters in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner, who was criticized by the Establishment in the artistic circle. On the title pages of its five serial volumes published over seven­teen years, Ruskin quoted lines from poems on nature and truth in Wordsworth’s Excursion.

Wordsworth defines the purpose of poetry to be:

[T]o illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement. But speaking in less general language, it is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature.... [I]ts object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal.

For Wordsworth, poetry must be written in ‘the real language of men' about ‘the incidents of common life’. In terms of ‘association of ideas’ referred to here, feelings of sensations from the outside world are coordin­ated and directed by ideas of the inner perceptions of the poet in order to get to the truth of man and nature. Wordsworth asks: ‘What then does the Poet?’ His answer is:

[The Poet] is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love.... The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. (Wordsworth and Coleridge 2006 [1798], 249)

Ruskin’s key notion of ‘the entire human nature’ accepts Wordsworth’s idea of ‘the complex scene of ideas and sensations’ as the source of pleasure and sympathy caused by art.

Ruskin was generally admitted to be Carlyle’s disciple. Carlyle had no interest in art, and their intellectual friendship emerged solely from Ruskin’s awakening to social issues during the course of his writing on art and his sympathy with Carlyle’s scathing social criticism. Ruskin had gained a reputation as an art critic, but faced almost uniform hostility from the conservative circle of society after he converted to social criticism. As an honourable exception, Carlyle praised and encouraged him. Ruskin felt that Carlyle was the only sympathetic reader in the world; his loyalty to Carlyle was unquestioning.

Unlike Wordsworth and Ruskin, Carlyle had a clear contact with German thought through his study of Kant, Fichte, Goethe, and Schiller. His central theme was how to acquire the belief in the transcendental order which forms the basis for approaching the phenomenal world. The best work that represents his philosophical position is Sartor Resartus, in which, he argues, social rules and customs are, as it were, visible emblems or clothes that represent invisible spiritual ideas, so that it is necessary to get at the transcendental basis for perceiving the phenomenal world, including nature, man, and society.

Sartor Resartus contains many characteristic claims of Carlyle in the subsequent years, the essence of which is the insight that ‘Liberals, Economists, and Utilitarians’ (177) tear down and destroy the society. His prophetic concerns include: hatred towards free competition and utilitarian­ism, the maximization of capability instead of happiness, the moral values of labour, the religious foundation of society, misgivings about class disintegra­tion, advocacy of cooperation instead of competition, and the need for heroes. For Carlyle, a hero is a leader who discerns the spiritual reality of the age hidden behind material appearances and poses it as the problem which now confronts us. He is regarded as belonging to a wide range of ‘anti-rationalism, anti-empiricism, and anti-Enlightenment’ (Le Quesne 1998).

In view of the general periodization of British romanticism as 1785-1825, the romantic movement had already been started by Wordsworth and Coleridge a few decades before Carlyle’s writing activity. However, there is no evidence that Carlyle inherited some elements of the British romantic literary movement. He essentially depended on German philosophy. Ruskin comprehended romantic artistic thought from Wordsworth’s poetry and literary theory, on the one hand, and grasped romantic social thought from Carlyle’s social criticism, on the other. Ruskin himself evaded a reference to German philosophy. The skeleton of his romantic thought was constructed by the combination of Wordsworth and Carlyle, though he needed Turner to develop Wordsworth’s theory of poetry into the art of painting.

Ruskin wrote a short article, ‘German Philosophy’ (appendix to Modern Painters, vol. 3), in which he ridiculed statements such as ‘a finite realiza­tion of the infinite’ in German metaphysics as pure nonsense and not suited to the British people. He mentioned that those who want philosophy

not for show but for practical use are advised simply to read Plato, Bacon, Wordsworth, Carlyle, etc. (vol. 5, 424-6). This happens to reveal Ruskin's intellectual source and propensity.

1.3