Ruskin

Abstract

These first sentences of The Stones of Venice (1851–2) read almost like a challenge thrown out by Ruskin to Gibbon. Ruskin was always contemptuous of the earlier writer, whose style he described to Carlyle as being ‘like the most tasteless water-gruel, with a handful of Epsom salts strewed in for flowers, and served with the airs of being turtle,’¹ and their tastes and interests were completely opposite. Gibbon’s beloved classical Rome was to Ruskin a heap of rubbish:

The Capitol is a melancholy rubbishy square of average Palladian — modern; the Forum, a good group of smashed columns, just what, if it were got up, as it might easily be, at Virginia Water, we should call a piece of humbug — the kind of thing that one is sick to death of in ‘compositions’; the Coliseum I have always considered a public nuisance, like Jim Crow [a popular negro song]; and the rest of the ruins are mere mountains of shattered, shapeless bricks, covering miles of ground with a Babylon-like weight of red tiles.²

Venice, on the other hand, which Gibbon had found the least attractive city in Italy, was to Ruskin ‘the Paradise of cities.’³ Between the two men lay the treatments of Italy we have been considering, with which Ruskin was intimately acquainted.

Since first the dominion of man was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.