The White-Thorn Blossom

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The White-Thorn Blossom

Letter

Date: May 1, 1871

Source: Fors Clavigera, May 1, 1871.

About the Author: English writer, art and social critic, and Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford from 1867 to 1879, John Ruskin (1819–1900) was raised by a strict puritanical mother and a well-to-do sherry merchant father. He began to establish himself as, perhaps, the major art critic of the nineteenth century with the 1843 publication of the first volume of Modern Painters. Reacting against the ugliness, poverty, and environmental degradation associated with the industrial revolution in England, Ruskin spoke for an aesthetic of beauty, light, and vision. In 1851, he published "The Stones of Venice," an architectural study that grew out of his visits to that city. In "The Nature of Gothic," he constructed a critique of the nature of work in Venice, imagining how that city was built, which strongly contrasted with what he saw as the authoritarian, devitalized, and regimented nature of work in industrial England. In the 1860s, he began writing a series of pieces about political economy and work aimed at English workers. His political writing was marked by the same concern for beauty and appreciation for the natural environment and the integrity of the spirit which defined his art and architectural criticism.

INTRODUCTION

The writer in Victorian England, whether a writer of fiction or non-fiction, was often considered to be the shaper of morality and consciousness, an inspiring, even heroic figure who was supposed to serve as a guide and teacher. Consequently, writers often had the power to shape society itself and the course of history.

Examples abound, from the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill to the social criticism of Charles Dickens; from the moral psychology of George Eliot to the radical critique of the industrial revolution by Karl Marx; and from the ferocious sermons of Thomas Carlyle to the patient lectures of Matthew Arnold. None assumed more ceremoniously the mantle of wise man, teacher, and moral guide than Ruskin. After being appointed Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, he began to write a series of letters addressed to the working men of England. "The White-Thorn Blossom" is one of those letters. In it, Ruskin explores what he sees as the destruction of nature and the environment because of the abandonment of the ideals of beauty and majesty.

Ruskin argues that the debasement of the human spirit is a byproduct of the values and enterprises of the industrial revolution, and he offers an alternative vision—based on an appreciation of nature—of how society ought to be organized and how people ought to think and behave.

PRIMARY SOURCE

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls "Railroad Enterprise." You Enterprised a Railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the Gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you Fools Everywhere.

To talk at a distance, when you have nothing to say, though you were ever so near; to go fast from this place to that, with nothing to do either at one or the other: these are powers certainly. Much more, power of increased Production, if you, indeed, had got it, would be something to boast of. But are you so entirely sure that you have got it—that the mortal disease of plenty, and afflictive affluence of good things, are all you have to dread?…

There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one "knows how to live" till he has got them.

These are, Pure Air, Water, and Earth.

There are three Immaterial things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one knows how to live till he has got them also.

These are, Admiration, Hope, and Love.

Admiration—the power of discerning and taking delight in what is beautiful in visible Form, and lovely in human Character; and, necessarily, striving to produce what is beautiful in form, and to become what is lovely in character.

Hope—the recognition, by true Foresight, of better things to be reached hereafter, whether by ourselves or others; necessarily issuing in the straightforward and undisappointable effort to advance, according to our proper power, the gaining of them.

Love—both of family and neighbour, faithful, and satisfied.

These are the six chiefly useful things to be got by Political Economy, when it has become a science. I will briefly tell you what modern Political Economy—the great "savoir mourir"—is doing with them.

The first three, I said, are Pure Air, Water, and Earth.

Heaven gives you the main elements of these. You can destroy them at your pleasure, or increase, almost without limit, the available quantities of them.

You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any extent. You might easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of you. You, or your fellows, German and French, are at present vitiating it to the best of your power in every direction;—chiefly at this moment with corpses, and animal and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff into noxious gas. But everywhere, and all day long, you are vitiating it with foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you call towns, are little more than laboratories for the distillation into leaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease.

On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the trees which cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere,—is literally infinite. You might make every breath of air you draw, food.

Secondly, your power over the rain and river-waters of the earth is infinite. You can bring rain where you will, by planting wisely and tending carefully;—drought where you will, by ravage of woods and neglect of the soil. You might have the rivers of England as pure as the crystal of the rock;—beautiful in falls, in lakes, in living pools;—so full of fish that you might take them out with your hands instead of nets. Or you may do always as you have done now, turn every river of England into a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain; and even that falls dirty.

Then for the third, Earth, meant to be nourishing for you, and blossoming. You have learned, about it, that there is no such thing as a flower; and as far as your scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive and deathful, instead of blossoming and life-giving, Dust, can contrive, you have turned the Mother-Earth, Demeter, into the Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone—with the voice of your brother's blood crying out of it, in one wild harmony round all its murderous sphere.

SIGNIFICANCE

By his eloquent writings dedicated to preserving the beauty of the natural environment, and through his linking of a reverence for nature with individual spiritual well-being and a socially healthy society, Ruskin offered important rationales for defending the natural environment to social reformers who followed him and inspiration to those who wished to experiment in making utopian communities.

The young Mahatma (Mohandas) Gandhi's (1869–1948) philosophy was strongly shaped by reading Ruskin, and Ruskin's younger contemporary, William Morris (1834–1896). Morris, an English painter, weaver, designer, printer, furniture maker, and writer, founded his entire aesthetic and social philosophy on Ruskin's ideals of beauty and simple, non-industrial craftsmanship, in both his crafts work and in his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, a vision of an England run according to Ruskinian precepts.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries in the United States, several towns named Ruskin and designed to follow his principles, were created in Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia.

In the 1870s, Ruskin himself actively campaigned for his ideas. In 1876, he undertook to keep railroads from being built in the Lake District of England, and in the early 1870s he founded an organization he called the Guild of St. George. Through his writing, he recruited "Companions of St. George," who undertook to live on land that had been degraded by industrial neglect and abuse, and to transform that land into gardens through non-industrial, communal labor. In practical terms, the Guild must be judged a failure, but it succeeded in helping to keep Ruskin's vision alive. The Guild still survives, as does a Ruskin Trust, which maintains a museum of Ruskiniana in Conniston, where he lived in England's Lake District and where he is buried.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894–1901. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Lang, Michael H. Designing Utopia: John Ruskin's Urban Vision for Britain and America. Montréal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1999.