‘Over-hopefulness and getting-on-ness’: Ruskin, Nature, and America

• Published in: Cahiers victoriens & édouardiens 2020-06, Vol.91 (91 Printemps)
• Main Author: Atwood, Sara
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: America; Carlyle (Thomas); Emerson (Ralph Waldo); Environment; Nature; Ruskin (John)
• ISSN: 0220-5610; 2271-6149
• DOI: 10.4000/cve.7411

Ruskin’s innate love of nature (‘the ruling passion of my life’ (5.365)) was strengthened by literary, artistic, and historical associations uniquely connected to the European cultural tradition. Such associations, he proposes in Modern Painters III ‘can be felt only by the modern European child . . . . [rising] eminently out of the contrast of the beautiful past with the frightful and monotonous present . . . . The instinct to which it appeals can hardly be felt in America, and every day that either beautifies our present architecture and dress, or overthrows a stone of medieval monument, contributes to weaken it in Europe’ (5.369). This is not the only passage in which Ruskin is critical of America; although he had American friends and admirers, he never visited the United States. As he pronounced in Fors, he ‘could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles’ (27.170). Ruskin distrusted America’s faith in democracy and was discouraged by its lack of long-established historical and cultural traditions and a corresponding delight in novelty. He was wary as well of American optimism, which seemed to him naïve and facile. Ruskin’s understanding of the natural world was connected by ‘all manner of strange intellectual chords and nerves with the pathos and history of this old English country of ours; and on the other side, with the history of the European mind from earliest mythology down to modern rationalism and ir-rationalism’ (36.533). The American vision of nature depended on leaving the past behind, shedding the very influences that Ruskin most valued. This essay shows that despite sharing with them a deep love of nature and sense of its spiritual power, there are fundamental and important differences between Ruskin’s understanding of the natural world and that of influential contemporary Americans such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir.