John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900 [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674436312, 9780674436305

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JOHN RUSKIN AND AESTHETIC THOUGHT IN AMERICA, 1840-1900

John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900 ROGER B. STEIN

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts 1967

© Copyright 1967 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London An earlier version of this manuscript was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Monograph Prize in the Humanities for i960. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-20883 Printed in the United States of America

To My Parents

PREFACE

This essay is at once a study of a reputation and a fragment of a yet unwritten history of aesthetic thought in nineteenth-century America. At the center stand the major early writings of John Ruskin: Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and The Stones of Venice. Until i960, on the centenary of the completion of Modern Painters, discussions of Ruslan were, with a few notable exceptions, largely biographical in nature; and despite a short essay by Francis Townsend on Ruskin's early reputation in America and repeated suggestions by Henry-Russell Hitchcock that Ruskin's works had been immensely popular in the United States, his impact on American thought was largely ignored. This situation has now changed. Ruskin's ideas are being disentangled from the welter of biographical data and re-examined in their own right, and Americanists are beginning to take him more seriously as an intellectual force on this side of the Atlantic. The time has come for a full-scale assessment of his reputation in the United States, and the following pages represent an attempt to fill that need. At the outset certain methodological qualifications are in order. This book is not a full-fledged study of Ruskin or of his writings. In my summaries of Ruskin's writings I make no pretense to originality, acknowledging instead my indebtedness to other Ruskin scholars. My actual subjects, however, the Americans of the nineteenth century who were Ruskin's avid readers, did understand Ruskin in such ways as to become interpreters of his works.

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PREFACE

They expressed interest only in certain aspects of his writings on art; they often distorted or misinterpreted his meaning. My purpose here is not to correct their misinterpretations or partial views but to understand why they reacted as they did. Their critical reaction to Ruskin is thus a tool for the understanding of American taste and the state of American critical theory. It is one relatively unexplored way of approaching certain larger issues of nineteenth-century American intellectual history: the meaning of nature, the role of religion in a changing society, and most important, the place of art in the new democracy. Furthermore, since my concern here is with the development of American aesthetic and critical thought in the nineteenth century, the focus of discussion is on Ruskin's early, more popular books on art rather than on his later, less popular writings on social theory. Admittedly, any mechanical division of Ruskin's career into an early period of theorizing about art and a later period of writing social theory is an oversimplification and to some extent a distortion of the fundamental importance of his work; for his interest in society was an important element in his early architectural criticism, and his later writings on social theory were in one sense an attempt to provide the kind of healthy environment in which art could flourish—where the artist could work in concord with a sympathetic audience. Though some Americans did move with Ruskin from art to social theory, my concern in this study is primarily with the development of American aesthetic thought. I am convinced that Ruskin's role in the development of American social thought is less central. Although he contributed to the discussion, he rarely guided it as he did so often in the realm of aesthetic thought. The full assessment of Ruskin's impact as social thinker in America is the task of the historian of Progressivism. Finally there is the challenge of Goethe, who said that that which is in the air and which the age demands may spring up in a hundred minds at once without any borrowing from one another. The idea of "influence" is at best a blunt critical tool.

PBEFACE

ix

Ideas have seldom been transported across the Atlantic intact. They encounter at the port of entry a new environment, both intellectual and physical, which they help to transform, but by which they are in turn transformed. That this is true of Ruskin seemed already clear in 1851, when the New York Literary World reviewed The Stones of Venice. In a notice on 10 May the reviewer wrote: That Ruskin's works mark an era in Art, few thoughtful men will be disposed to deny. Whether they have been agents in creating that era may, we think, be an object of discussion. Every reform has found its voice by which its needs and tendencies were made known to the world, though that voice may have had no other effect than to hasten in some slight degree the expression of those necessities. It has been my purpose to keep this statement in mind throughout the following pages. If at times I have inadvertently argued the case for my subject too strongly, it will at least counteract the neglect that he has suffered in the last fifty years. Once the case for Ruskin has been stated, his place in the total picture of the development of American aesthetic and critical thought can be evaluated more accurately. What seemed clear after only preliminary investigation was the unquestionable fact of Ruskin's enormous popularity in nineteenth-century America. In 1898 a writer in the Critic rated Ruskin as one of the four most famous living authors. Probably the only English authors whose works were more popular with American readers and publishers were novelists like Scott and Dickens. In the Appendix I have set down briefly some of the facts in the tangled history of the publication of Ruskin's works in the United States. Publishing history and popularity polls are only a quantitative index of importance. They do not tell us anything about the quality of the American response. Undoubtedly many Americans read Ruskin only because he was the fashion. My concern here

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PREFACE

is to examine the American interest in Ruskin at a somewhat different level: as an essential aspect of the history of ideas in America. Without being too inflexible, I have defined "aesthetic thought," "critical theory," or "taste" as that intellectual territory which lies between popular culture or fashion on the one hand and aesthetics or aesthetic theory on the other—considering aesthetics as the systematic philosophical discipline concerned with defining and analyzing the nature of beauty, of the work of art, and of the human response to both. Only in the 1890's, with the writings of Santayana and Henry Rutgers Marshall, did the United States produce any significant, sustained original contributions to aesthetic theory. And although the popularizers and vulgarizers of Ruskin—of whom Elbert Hubbard is perhaps the best known—were legion, none can be said to have contributed much to the life of the mind in America, whatever else they did. Thus, my emphasis here is on the articulate Emerson and Cabot, Strong and Norton, rather than on Kant, Hegel, and Aristotle, 01 the inarticulate Jonathans and Sophias. To account for Ruskin's popularity in America at this level is to ask three basic questions. First, why did Ruskin reach an American audience and, once they began to read his books, why did they respond with such enthusiasm? As the review in the Literary World suggests, the answer lies as much in the susceptibility of Americans to Ruskin's particular blend of art, nature, and morality as in the force or originality of his books. In the i84o's Americans were already concerned with problems of critical theory even though they had had little contact with works of art. The ground had been prepared by previous writers, either American or foreign, whose ideas had already been Americanized. Ruskin reaped the harvest because his resolution of the tensions in America concerning the role of art in its relation to nature and religion seemed to many Americans to be particularly satisfying. In my first two chapters I examine the climate of American opinion on matters of art on the eve of Ruskin's American debut

PREFACE

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and look at the first American reactions to Modern Painters as an index of his potential appeal in the United States. This leads to the second question. Granting that Americans were already searching for answers to the problems of art and art criticism, how did they respond to Ruskin's particular formulation of the issues and his particular answers? Ruskin's ideas helped to change the intellectual landscape, but both the unresolved issues in his theories of art and the cultural needs of the American people helped to transform Ruskin's ideas, to harness them to native purposes. Chapters III through VII tell the story of this absorption and transformation of Ruskin's ideas in the years up to 1865. The third question is an outgrowth of the second. It seems clear that at a certain point—varying with different people—a powerful reaction set in against Ruskin's art theories, the reverberations of which extend well into the twentieth century. Yet in accordance with the old law of physics, the force of the reaction was in proportion to the force with which he had acted upon the American mind. Ruskin could not merely be ignored or forgotten. He had to be proved wrong by his critics. Thus, the third question one must ask in gauging the impact of Ruskin on American ideas about art is, what was the nature of this reaction? Here again, though part of the answer may lie in the changing character of Ruskin's later writings, other and equally important shifts occurred in the critical attitudes of his American readers, causing them to turn against one whom they had earlier esteemed. In the last chapters I trace certain aspects of this change in American attitudes. My method is in its larger outlines chronological, though in its smaller divisions necessarily defined by topic because of the Protean nature of both Ruskin's writings and the aesthetic, national, and moral concerns of my American subjects. I have tried both to present a cross section of American opinion concerning Ruskin's ideas and to deal with a few groups and individuals

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PREFACE

whose contact with his writings seemed most significant, working from these points out to suggest the larger American context into which they fit. Even if one were to include the significant scholarship on some of our major literary figures, too little has been done to date for anyone to write a comprehensive history of American aesthetic and critical thought in the nineteenth century, though Lillian B. Miller's Patrons and Patriotism and Neil Harris's Artist in American Society focusing on the period 1790-1860, both of which were published after this study was completed, are significant contributions toward that history. If, in moving out from the impact of Ruskin toward that unwritten history, some other pieces of the larger puzzle have been put into place, this book will have served its purpose. Since my inquiry ranges eclectically across such a broad territory—from literature to science, from religion to aesthetics—the only meaningful grouping of sources is according to the chapters of the book itself. A bibliography would be so large and cumbersome as to be useless and would be unnecessarily repetitious of the full footnote citations. In lieu of a bibliography, I have tried to make my index serve as a guide to sources: to Ruskin's nineteenth-century commentators and reviewers and to the periodicals in which this commentary appeared, as well as to subject. My scholarly and financial indebtedness over the years runs, like the course of my narrative, from Boston to Seattle. The first and greatest of all is to the late Perry Miller, who opened up for me through his writings and teaching the excitement of "the life of the mind in America," guided my early training in innumerable ways large and small, and then most wisely left me to pursue that life in my own manner. For my assumptions regarding the shaping force of ideas in our national experience, as well as for numerous perspectives on that experience, my debt to him is a continuing one. Of others who read and criticized various versions of the entire manuscript, I wish to thank former teachers and colleagues Benjamin Rowland, Jr., Howard Mumford Jones, Charles Capen McLaughlin, Kermit Vanderbilt, and Lore Metz-

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ger. For helpful readings of particular sections I am grateful to George and Natalie Bluestone and Edward Bostetter. Susan Kirschner's clerical assistance eased the final stages of preparation. For the financial aid that makes possible such a venture as this, my thanks go to the Samuel S. Fels Foundation, which allowed me a year of concentrated research at a crucial stage; to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for its i960 Monograph Prize in the Humanities; and to the Graduate School of the University of Washington, for several grants in aid of research. To my wife Joan, who over the years has given a cold, critical eye to all stages of the manuscript and warm encouragement to its author, my debt is immeasurable. R. B. S. Seattle, Washington April 1967

CONTENTS

I. II.

The American Setting Modern Painters-. The First American Reaction (1847-1850)

III.

The Problem of Gothic (1849-1859)

IV.

Art, Nature, and Religion: The Reception of Ruskin (1851-1861)

V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X.

1 32 57 78

Ruskinism in America: The Crayon (1855-1861)

101

The Ruskinian as Art Historian

124

Civil War Interlude: The New Path

147

Ruskin and the Scientists

157

The Attack on Ruskin: Aesthetic Theory and Practice

186

The Defense of Ruskin: Art, Morality, and Aesthetic Education Epilogue

224 255

Appendix: The Publication of Ruskin s Works in the United States

263

Notes

267

Index

309

ILLUSTRATIONS

Following page 156 Thomas Cole, "The Architect's Dream" (1840). Courtesy of The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio; Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey. A striking image of the stylistic eclecticism of the decade just preceding the appearance of The Seven Lamps and The Stones of Venice, this symbolic canvas betrays its indebtedness in composition and theme to the third panel of Cole's "Course of Empire," "The Consummation." The dream could frame—for the moment, harmoniously—both the gothic in its natural setting and the classic in its imperial luxury, but as the dream became a reality, the image of decline and fall increasingly haunted the American imagination. Asher B. Durand, "Sketch from Nature" (n.d.). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Mrs. John Sylvester, 1936. Ruskin's "truth to nature" found sympathetic American expression in the work of Asher Durand, whose meticulous sketches are a visual equivalent of his Crayon "Letters on Landscape Painting" and, implicitly, a repudiation of the grandiose allegories of Thomas Cole. Peter B. Wight, National Academy of Design, New York (1862-1865). From Photographs of the New Building (New York, 1866). National Academy of Design, New York: detail of the

ILLUSTRATIONS

XVii

façade. From Photographs of the New Building ( New York, 1866). Built during Wight's association with the New Path Pre-Raphaelites, the "Doge's Palace" is the clearest case of Ruskin's impact upon American architectural practice. Wight's difficulty in finding craftsmen who could execute the gothic detail, to which Ruskin had devoted so much attention in The Stones of Venice, suggests the problem of trying to realize in a capitalist society the ideal of the happy craftsman of "The Nature of Gothic." Peter B. Wight, Street Hall, Yale University (1864). Courtesy of Yale University Archives. Yale's second art gallery was a thoroughgoing monument to Ruskin. Built by Wight, housing James Jackson Jarves' collection of Italian paintings, which were catalogued by another of the New Path group, Russell Sturgis, the building was dedicated by the Reverend James Mason Hoppin, who taught the history of art at Yale in Ruskinian cadences up to the close of the century. Thomas Moran, "Cliffs of Green River." From Picturesque America, ed. William Cullen Bryant (18721874)Moran's attempt to adapt Turner's effects and Ruskin's "truth to nature" to the needs of the American West was only moderately successful aesthetically. Engravings from his work popularized the new country for his generation; in retrospect, however, the two immense folios of Picturesque America seem to be more the tombstone of the older vision. John Ruskin. Engraving from Harper's Weekly, 26 July 1879. Though published only eight months after the Whistler-Rusldn law suit, Harpers illustrated essay on

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Ruskin ignored the issues presented there of the independent value of the aesthetic impulse and praised Ruskin instead as "a prophet of a new faith" who had "accomplished a revolution in thought." Louis Sullivan, Schlesinger Mayer (Carson, Pirie, & Scott) Department Store, Chicago (1899-1904): detail of the façade. Courtesy The Idea of Louis Sullivan by John Szarkowski. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. © Copyright 1956 by the University of Minnesota. To its twentieth-century audience Sullivan's architecture stands as a harbinger of the modern movement; yet his decorative forms are those of a generation that had grown up with the plates of The Stones of Venice. In speaking of "the dramatic force that shall make sublime our future architecture," he urged American architects in a voice that echoed Ruskin's: "We must turn again to Nature, and hearkening to her melodious voice, learn, as children learn, the accent of its rhythmic cadences." The bower surrounding the main entrance to his Schlesinger Mayer Department Store is a triumph of Ruskinian emphasis on natural decorative forms released from the literalism of the archaeological copyists and reinterpreted in a personal style for a new commercial civilization by the hand of a modern genius.

JOHN RUSKIN AND AESTHETIC THOUGHT IN AMERICA, 1840-1900

I ^ THE AMERICAN SETTING

Modern Painters, was published in England in 1843. It appeared after many years of controversy over the painting of Joseph Mallord William Turner. The book was the most extended defense of the painter yet to be written and the most sweeping in its denunciation of the accepted old masters of painting; however, it did not win for its author, "a Graduate of Oxford," any immediate wide public attention, though it did gain for Ruskin a certain notoriety in a limited circle. Ruskin's popularity in England grew only over a period of years.1 Add to this the fact that few Americans had even seen lithographs of Turner's work, let alone taken sides in the Turnerian controversy of England's artistic elite, and it becomes very understandable that Modern Painters should have attracted no attention in the United States before 1847. In this year the firm of Wiley and Putnam brought out the first American edition of the book. There was a handful of short reviews, on the whole enthusiastic, and the book was in many hands by the end of 1848. Hawthorne, Emerson, Andrew Jackson Downing, William James Stillman, to mention only a few, all had looked at the book by this time. Ruskin's fame spread rapidly in the years that immediately followed, so that by 1855 Ruskin could write to the editors of the newly founded Crayon that he felt he had a wider and more receptive audience in America than at home. Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1856 even felt it necessary to warn Americans against a wholesale acceptance of everyJOHN RUSKIN'S FIBST BOOK,

2

AESTHETIC THOUGHT IN AMERICA

thing that Ruskin wrote.2 Such a rapid growth in popularity requires explanation. A writer on art whose name was virtually unknown in 1847 had become a byword by 1855, and his popularity was to increase in the years that followed. How had this phenomenon occurred? Part of the answer lies, of course, in the specific message which Ruskin's writings transmitted, but of equal importance in any study of influence is the character of the receivers. Thus to understand the eagerness and enthusiasm with which Ruskin's writings were greeted in the United States, we must first consider the state of mind of that American audience on the eve of Ruskin's appearance. Although Americans of 1848 were not on the whole very concerned with either Turner's painting or the defense of his reputation—and even Ruskin's writings would not basically alter their indifference in this respect—they were concerned with the more basic question of the meaning of art and the role it was to play in American society. The United States of the 1840's was becoming increasingly art-conscious. Even a casual glance at the first book on American art, William Dunlap's History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834), indicates the growing number of American professional artists. The book was a compendium which was intended to "prove" America's progress in the arts. Along with this increase in the number of artists came a concomitant development of artistic facilities. Charles Willson Peale's abortive Columbianum of 1795 had been succeeded by the establishment of academies of art in New York and Philadelphia shortly after the turn of the century. After overcoming the difficulties of the initial years, the academies began to hold annual exhibits. The National Academy of Design was founded in 1826 and held the first of its annual exhibits in that year, and the first of the important annual art exhibits of the Boston Athenaeum took place the following year. Since familiarity with works of art was the only basis upon which American art criticism could be founded, these organizations played an important role.

THE A M E R I C A N SETTING

3

The years that followed saw an expansion of artistic facilities in the United States. Most important, of course, was the American Art-Union, founded as the Apollo Association in New York in 1839. Through its distribution of prints and annual lottery, its permanent gallery in New York, its various publications, and its system of organization, based on local "honorary secretaries" who were the cultural elite of small towns and large cities, the ArtUnion stimulated the interest in art of a wide American audience. James T. Flexner has calculated that between 1839 and 1851 the Art-Union's exhibition of American paintings attracted an attendance equal to about 5 7 ^ per cent of the population of New York City (by comparison with about i6}4 per cent visiting the Metropolitan Museum for the comparable period in the twentieth century). 3 In addition, informal groups of artists and critics, like the Sketch Club in New York, met to discuss art and eat oysters. Out of this particular group evolved, in 1847, the Century Club, for many decades a center of local artistic life. The semipublic ArtUnion soon found competitors in private galleries like the newly established New York branch of Goupil and Company. From 1849 on, the most recent German art could be examined and purchased at the Diisseldorf Gallery in New York. Dunlap believed that in the mid-twenties the Boston Athenaeum library had the only respectable collection of books on the fine arts in the Western Hemisphere. However, by the forties, for those who could not afford original works of art, the bookstores were filled with lithographs and prints, executed by such talented engravers as Asher B. Durand and James Smillie, and editions of the works of Cooper and Irving illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and J. W. Casilear. The collecting of prints of Italian painting had become extremely popular. "We were all petty collectors," Margaret Fuller recalled. In general it may be said that the tempo of American art life and the opportunities for seeing original works or reproductions had greatly increased, though this was still only a beginning.4

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AESTHETIC THOUGHT IN AMERICA

American artists were gaining a hearing at home, and familiarity with European art was also increasing. Unfortunately, the quality of the European painting shown in America was almost uniformly bad. Such models as Smibert's copy of Van Dyck's "Cardinal Bentivoglio," so inspiring to both Copley and John Trumbull,5 had been superseded by nineteenth-century copies or, even worse, outright forgeries. What the Italians called roba di mihrdo, forgeries or fifth-rate works by Italian artists foisted on gullible English travelers, were now purveyed to the increasing number of Americans who were traveling abroad. One account estimates about one thousand Americans coming to Italy each year by the mid-1840's and almost double that number visiting Florence by 1858.6 It is easy to scoff at the Philistinism of the Americans and their preference for new paintings over old ones. In a review of the writings of the painter Washington Allston in 1843, for example, William Gilmore Simms said that "we should prefer having a fresh picture from the easel of Allston or Fraser to any smoke-dried, stained and doubtfully darkened, panel that ever claimed to have been made glorious by the hands of Guido or Domenichino."7 However, Simms's impatient comment may also suggest that American gullibility had its limits and perhaps that new standards were beginning to emerge. In large part this new critical response can be traced to the increasing familiarity of Americans, artist and critic alike, with the artistic wealth of Europe. Perhaps more important was the changing character of their concern. In the first days of the infant republic the political meaning of Europe for America had been quite naturally most important. The French Revolution and the years of war that followed, including the United States's own involvement in the War of 1812, had accentuated this tendency. With the years of peace and the growing conviction that the American political experiment was a success, Americans could afford to be concerned with a wider range of cultural interests. The number of our representatives abroad was larger, and their inter-

THE AMERICAN SETTING

5

ests more diversified. The lonely hegira of Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley to Italy for artistic inspiration was a thing of the past. There were colonies of American artists in Rome, Florence, and London in 1840, and by the 1850's travelers' accounts devoted an increasing amount of space to the artistic side of Europe. With this widening exposure of artists and critics to Europe had come new problems. Recent writers have dispelled the myth that Washington Allston's late years in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, were barren ones because the American soil offered no nourishment to the European-trained artist. Yet there is still an important grain of truth in this myth. Allston's American years were certainly productive ones, but the painter lacked something during these years that was essential to his development: a critic in America who could understand and discuss his work in terms of its own language.8 There was no want of reviewers and critics for Allston's poems, essays, and his romance, Monaldi, but few Americans understood the language of Titian and the great Venetian colorists of the cinquecento. Allston was working within a European tradition of painting. He needed critics who understood this tradition, could comment shrewdly on his work in terms of it, and not merely be thankful that he was an American artist. Praise based on American citizenship was no substitute for an understanding of the artist's medium, its technical possibilities and historical heritage, and coherent aesthetic criteria by which to judge any particular work. American painting prior to the Revolution had been confined largely to portraiture. The Revolutionary struggle had encouraged the production of large historical canvases, glorifications of the national experience like Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence" or Benjamin West's "Conference of the American Commissioners of the Treaty of Peace with England." With the work of Thomas Cole in the 1820's a native landscape tradition, the so-called Hudson River School, began to emerge. Exposure to

6

AESTHETIC THOUGHT IN AMERICA

Europe and a wider range of subject matter had created new dimensions in American art, and as American painting began to come of age an adequate criticism was needed. The same is even more true of sculpture. American sculpture had arisen out of the woodcutter's art. It reached an early maturity and popularity, however, not by building on this tradition, but because Horatio Greenough and the many who followed him to Italy sat at the feet of Canova and Thorwaldsen and their followers, studied the antique in Italian museums, and learned to work in the neoclassic manner. Americans were very appreciative of this flowering of native genius, and they listed visits to the studios of their countrymen among the essentials of a European trip.9 When we try to discover their criteria of judgment, however, we are again faced with the gap between national pride and artistic sophistication. Portraiture presented no problem, for the criterion of "likeness" implied no previous background of experience with art. (Indeed, the work of the early period which has best stood the test of time was in this vein.) But when the sculptor turned from the actual to "the ideal," his American audience was ill-prepared to follow him. The scattering of casts from the antique, often poorly executed, which could be found in major American cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, was woefully inadequate to meet American needs. The relation between the vague criterion of "the ideal" and the marble works themselves was not at all clear. The result was that Americans' reports of their experience with classical or neoclassical sculpture at home and abroad contained almost nothing about the three-dimensional forms they saw. Instead they resorted to vague quasi-religious abstractions or incoherent ecstatic apostrophe. John Lothrop Motley, for example, felt that the "Apollo Belvedere" had more of the Godhead than any other work, the figure expanding "into life, into immortality while you are gazing."10 When North Carolinians in 1816 proposed to honor Washington's memory by a statue, Jefferson had assured them that no American was capable of executing such a

THE AMERICAN SETTING

7

work, and recommended Canova for the task. Americans were exceedingly pleased when the great master of ideal sculpture consented. He had done the new nation in search of culture a great honor. His very reputation and the sense of national pride precluded artistic criticism. Yet years later when Horatio Greenough sent back to the United States his half-nude, toga-draped ideal figure of Washington, most Americans were outraged. No one dared to challenge the great Canova's right to drape the figure of Washington; besides, few had seen the statue in Richmond before it was destroyed by fire. Greenoughs figure seemed to Americans too far from the actual image of the father of their country. The criterion of ideality was an extremely vague one, and Americans were constantly fluctuating between this undefined ideal and the simpler criterion of "likeness." In the case of Greenough's statue, apparently it was one thing to believe that the United States was the reincarnation of Greek democracy or the Roman republic, and quite another to carve this historical metaphor in marble.11 The case of "The Greek Slave" is further evidence of the feebleness of much American criticism in this era. When Hiram Powers' insipid figure of a naked and almost boneless woman crossed the Atlantic, Americans were willing to believe that this was not an actual person, but the incarnation of the idea of "The Greek Slave." The artist was an American, and the statue boosted the reputation of the United States in the arts when it was the rage of the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Americans were reassured by clergymen that the nudity was permissible in this case, and they went to praise the work. The few who looked carefully at the forms themselves raised questions, but they were shouted down by the sentimental nationalists who were all too quick to say that the statue was beyond criticism, thus relieving themselves of the necessity of asking whether the artistic means were adequate to the end envisioned. As with so many of the ideal works of the period—William Wetmore Story's "Cleopatra" is another typical example—literary judgments, based upon the ideal con-

8

AESTHETIC THOUGHT IN AMERICA

tent of the work (or even just its title), were substituted for a well-articulated theory which Americans could use to deal with the growing output of their sculptors.12 Architecture was by far the most sophisticated of American arts in 1840; for while painting and sculpture were the luxuries of American culture, building was a necessity. As a result a literature on building had existed since the eighteenth century. European publications were beginning to be read in the United States, and over sixty different books on architecture were published in America before 1840, most of which were in large part technical. Some of these, like Asher Benjamin's Practical House Carpenter, went through many editions. Architecture was the subject of frequent comment in American magazines after 1815. 13 The more sophisticated buildings of the pre-Revolutionary years had been colonial adaptations of the dominant European style. Thanks to Jefferson and his followers, American architecture had explored the analogies between Greek democracy and the new republic in a number of fruitful ways in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the Greek Revival became something of a national idiom. In the hands of its best proponents Greek Revival architecture was never a matter of mere imitation, but by 1840 increased American exposure to Europe and certain literary influences were changing the situation. American architectural sophistication took the form of a new consciousness of the historical "styles." Whereas the Classical Revival had once been a national idiom, now it was being judged in terms of its "correctness,"14 and other styles vied for priority, notably the Gothic. Once this stylistic self-consciousness took hold, new problems were created in American art criticism. Vernacular building was scorned. Decoration, which had formerly been a question of ornamenting the essential structure of a building in some pleasurable way, now became a subject of independent interest. It was considered often to be the key to style, the way to transform "building" into "architecture." The claims of the various styles had to be weighed and judged.

THE AMERICAN SETTING

9

The result was the often noted distinction, which can be traced through the rest of the nineteenth century, between building and architecture. "Building" was relegated to technicians, and "architecture" fully entered the province of art. It became perhaps the most important concern of the new art criticism. Exposure to Europe had created new problems or accentuated old ones for American art criticism. The growing number of American artists and greater opportunity here and abroad to see works of art had made the need for an adequate criticism a pressing one. American criticism in 1840 was not empty-handed, however. Certain criteria were already being advanced as ways of judging art, criteria which would have a marked effect on the American reception of John Ruskin's writings at the end of the decade. The first of these has already been suggested: the relation of art to national self-fulfillment. To a nation without experience with the visual arts, an American birthplace almost guaranteed to an artist an appreciative audience here. Thus the fact that Benjamin West had lived in England since before the Revolution, was president of the Royal Academy, and a friend of George III did not prevent Americans from coming in large numbers to see his "Christ Healing the Sick" when it was exhibited in Philadelphia; 15 for West had remained an American to them despite his residence abroad. The same is probably true of John Singleton Copley, whose political affiliations were more nebulous. In fact the most cultured minds of the Revolutionary generation were notably free of a narrow nationalism in the field of art.16 Most of these men still lived in the cosmopolitan world of the eighteenth century, and even independence could not destroy their perspective. The same cannot be said of the new generations of the nineteenth century. Having achieved political independence, the next task was to prove to the world that the United States could produce a culture. The new note had already been sounded in literature, most notably by Royall Tyler in the prologue to his comedy

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on the international theme, The Contrast (1787). The plea of the prologue is for critical chauvinism: "Glorious our fall, since in a noble cause. / The bold attempt alone demands applause." In the writings of the early national art critics one often detects the same shrill note. The truculent John Neal went to England in 1823-24 to write a series of articles for Blackwood's to prove that the new nation had artists to boast of. His comments were generally anecdotal and undiscriminating, but by mentioning many names he hoped to show the English that Americans were not culturally backward. Neal did criticize the tendency of portrait and landscape painters to copy one another rather than painting what they saw, "as if general nature had any thing to do with a portrait of an individual," but in 1829 few were willing to explore the implications of that remark.17 In the first important American book on art, Dunlap's History, the author was careful to note that the best artists in America, from the first century of colonization on, had been native artists. The American artist was not the pawn of a titled aristocracy. In republican America the laws were the only patrons. The artist was an independent citizen whose worth would speak for him. Behind these comments was Dunlap's implicit assumption that the "Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States" was inevitable, that Condorcet had been correct in his Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795; translated and published in Baltimore, 1802) that the development of culture followed quite naturally from political freedom.18 Other Americans were not so sure that progress was as automatic as it seemed to Dunlap. A new generation of European critics and commentators, like Alexis de Tocqueville, Mrs. Trollope, and Basil Hall, praised the success of the American political experiment but questioned whether this leveling tendency was compatible with the development of the highest culture. Was the lowest common denominator to be the measure of the arts, and a proliferation of insignificant pictures, plaster statues, and newspapers to be the highest expression of democratic culture?19

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It is in large part in response to this question that Americans of these decades discussed the role of art. In a simple sense every American painting, sculpture, or monument could be used as an assertion of the compatibility of culture and democracy. The speaker at the annual meeting of the American Art-Union in 1844 had only to turn to the offerings in the lottery and the list of members to deny that art was only the product of aristocracies. But a numerical count was not in itself enough, as Tocqueville had indicated. At the same meeting of the Art-Union, the Rev. H. W. Bellows put it this way: We want some interests that are larger than purse or party, on which men cannot take sides, or breed strifes, or become selfish. Such an interest is Art. And no nation needs its exalting, purifying, calming influences, more than ours. We need it to supplant the mean, utilitarian tastes, which threaten to make us a mere nation of shop-keepers. We need it to soften the harsh features of political zeal, and party strife, the other engrossing business of this people.20 The accusations of the foreign visitors had touched the most sensitive area of the American consciousness. Proud as they were of their commercial prowess, Americans did not wish to be stigmatized as petit-bourgeois, Philistine, a nation of Yankee pedlars. The interest in art suggested a solution to this dilemma. Americans would disdain materialism and pursue "the ideal." In the art criticism of this period, this impulse found expression most often in the distinctions between means and ends, between the artistic media and the goals of art, between technical accomplishment and artistic conception, between the ideal of utility and that of beauty. The most important discussions of this split occur in writings about architecture, quite simply because a building was created for use as well as for beauty. The distinction was also evident in discussions of painting and sculpture, when writers were often cautious about and sometimes suspicious of artistic "finish." The technical accomplishments of the American sculptor,

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a "Yankee stonecutter" in Horatio Greenough's phrase, with his pointing machines and special tools, his ability to balance an equestrian statue on two legs, and his crew of skilled Italian workmen, were often praised; but it was the success or failure of the sculptor's attempt to embody "the ideal" that was the focus of artistic criticism. Critics of painting were quick to warn the public that beyond a rudimentary skill at drawing, it was the painter's ideas that made the difference between a great artist and a commonplace one. The classic formulation of the opposition was in terms of architecture. Although architectural critics from Montgomery Schuyler to the present have repeatedly said that the separation of "building" from "architecture" was the fatal flaw in much of the construction in the nineteenth century,21 for most architects and critics of the time this was the strength of their claim to having created art. For behind this technical distinction lay a basic fear of materialism. The era between 1840 and i860 has been called the biggest building boom in our national history. It was a period of low labor costs because of the influx of new immigrant groups, especially the Irish. The technical innovations and developments in this period were of great importance: balloon-frame construction, préfabrication, elevators, the use of iron as a building material, and new methods of ventilation.22 No one doubted American technical ability, but Americans were as unwilling to make utility the primary canon of artistic judgment as they were to accept Benthamite Utilitarianism as their political philosophy. The development of the functionalist aesthetic in America—the belief that beauty is the natural result of the proper integration of the parts of a building and the honest employment of materials to fulfill the functional needs—is a story which has often been told.23 In the period with which we are concerned its greatest exponent was Horatio Greenough. In a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson which, as Emerson noted in English Traits, anticipated Ruskin by several years, Greenough said:

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Here is my theory of structure: A scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to functions and to site; an emphasis of features proportioned to their gradated importance in function; color and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied by strictly organic laws, having a distinct reason for each decision; the entire and immediate banishment of all make-shift and make-believe.24 Greenough had published his ideas as early as 1843 and developed them further in the nine years that remained of his short life. A building should develop from within outwards; the exterior shell should express the building's interior needs. Greenough denied the existence of "independent beauty," that any style was beautiful per se. Only that style which was organically related to the building's needs could be beautiful, and therefore beauty itself was relative. He attacked the misuse of the Greek style, though he had even less use for the Gothic. He condemned in general "adopting an outward shape for the sake of the eye or of association."25 Certain aspects of Greenough's theory—the attack on sham, the call for truth, and the concern with site—were upheld by other Americans and were advocated later by John Ruskin. But despite the appeal of Greenough's ideas to Emerson and a few others,26 the most important thing to be noted about his functionalist theory in this period is that it was ignored. Although his writings excite enthusiasm today from a generation brought up on Bauhaus principles, his contemporaries were basically unmoved by the most radical implications of his theory; for they sought not to glorify building necessities but to suppress them. The hope of art seemed to them to lie in man's ability to rise above the merely functional, the merely utilitarian, in his ability to transcend the material in order to find artistic fulfillment in "the ideal." Thus their constant emphasis on the distinction between the merely mechanical or physical building and the intellectual and spirit-

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ual, which was to be embodied in architecture: only by insisting on this distinction could the critics of American culture be silenced. The impulse to national self-justification had other effects on American art comment of the 1840's. One of these was the discussion of the role of tradition in art. The eighteenth-century artist or critic felt that he was part of a cosmopolitan culture and did not question his right to draw upon the inheritance of the Western world. With the establishment of independence, however, the problem of cultural self-justification was raised, and by 1840 it had divided Americans who were concerned with art roughly into two camps: those who felt that art in America should be stimulated only by our native resources, and those who felt and feared that to cut ourselves off from the European traditions of art was a form of cultural suicide. Typical of the former position was the manifesto that Asher Durand issued in the pages of the Crayon. He was speaking to young painters, but his remarks applied equally to art criticism: Go not abroad then in search of material for the exercise of your pencil, while the virgin charms of our native land have claims on your deepest affections. Many are the flowers in our untrodden wilds that have blushed too long unseen, and their original freshness will reward your research with a higher and purer satisfaction, than appertains to the display of the most brilliant exotic. The "lone and tranquil" lakes embosomed in ancient forests, that abound in our wild districts, the unshorn mountains surrounding them with their richly-textured covering, the ocean prairies of the West, and many other forms of Nature yet spared from the pollutions of civilization, afford a guarantee for a reputation of originality that you may elsewhere long seek and find not.27 Durand's statement was Wordsworthian in its appeal to the value of nature, and he even quoted from Wordsworth; but he went further than the English poet in transforming the love of nature

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into a national weapon. The emphasis on originality pervaded his statement. Europe was old and tradition-bound. It was a polluted civilization where originality could be found only in the exotic. By contrast, America was new; nature here was unspoiled, and preserved its pristine, prelapsarian innocence. Indeed, Durand seemed to be saying that this originality of the American setting almost guaranteed success to American art, if it would only fulfill its manifest destiny. In Durand's view, the ability to perceive American nature was the supreme prerequisite for an artist. Durand's views were echoed throughout the period by those who shared his nationalistic bias. In the funeral oration William Cullen Bryant delivered at the death of Thomas Cole, Bryant recalled his delight with Cole's early paintings which had given the critic "the opportunity of contemplating pictures which carried the eye over scenes of wild grandeur peculiar to our country, over our aerial mountain-tops with their mighty growth of forest never touched by the axe, along the banks of streams never deformed by culture, and into the depth of skies bright with the hues of our own climate."28 The rhetoric quickly becomes repetitious to twentieth-century ears, but the point remains: in their determination to make the special beauties of American nature their standard of judgment, the artist and critic were truly the "Kindred Spirits" that Durand said they were in his well-known painting of that title. While the critical nationalists exalted the supremacy of American nature, the other camp went to the opposite extreme and criticized nature for its failure to look like the paintings of Claude Lorrain. To these men the established traditions of French and Italian Baroque classicism in landscape, of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa, supplied the rules for artistic judgment. The critic demanded the well-differentiated three planes on the canvas, the blasted tree in the foreground, the high light in the middle ground, and so forth. Deviation from European tradition was deemed a fault by critics of this persuasion.

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Typical of this approach was Oliver Wendell Holmes's review of the Allston Exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum in 1839, which review appeared the following year in the North American Review, the stronghold of critical conservatism. Holmes had some familiarity with European art through his visits to galleries during his years of medical study abroad in 1833-1835 and through reading. He criticized Allston's work by reference to European prototypes, cited Joshua Reynolds as his critical guide, and asserted that it was to the old world "that we must look for the scale by which to measure any degree of excellence, that passes our ordinary standard of judgment." He condemned, by belittling it, the standard of American nature that the nationalists held up to art. For all the declamation about the sources of inspiration to be found in the grandeur of nature in our Western [i.e., American] world, and the influences to be exerted by our free institutions, they have hitherto impressed a tendency to the useful, rather than the beautiful, upon the national mind. The mountains and cataracts, which were to have made poets and painters, have been mined for anthracite and dammed for water powers.29 Holmes also was concerned about the danger of American materialism, but his way to find "the beautiful" was not through a nationalistic appeal. When he came to Allston's landscapes, it was not to the standard of nature that he compared them but to the work of Claude Lorrain. Holmes was pleased to be able to praise Allston highly, for he was as anxious as any American to see a flowering of native culture. In later years he would call Emerson's "American Scholar" address "our intellectual Declaration of Independence,"30 but he felt that such independence could only be truly based on the foundations of European culture. In this we can see the difficulty of describing American art criticism in this period in terms of any simple dichotomy, for the best minds of the period never saw the critical issues in such starkly opposed terms. Margaret Fuller, who was herself an

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American genius, certainly subscribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson's ideals as enunciated in the "American Scholar." Her review of the Allston Exhibition of 1839 appeared in the first issue of the Dial, the journal which was the transcendentalists' response to Emerson's cry for a new national culture. She wondered whether art in America was to be just another form of imitation of Europe or whether it could serve as a counterweight to the material aspirations, "the bustle and care of daily life." She warned Americans against mere repetition of the "technics of foreign connoisseurs, or . . . a servile reliance on the judgment of those, who assume to have been formed by a few hasty visits to the galleries of Europe."31 She did not assume the opposite, however: that art criticism in America could be only a barbaric yawp. Our "raw, uncultivated nature" was in itself insufficient to produce an adequate art criticism, competent to appreciate those finer manifestations of nature, which slow growths of ages and peculiar aspects of society have occasionally brought out, to testify to us what we may and should be . . . it is not blind faith that will educate us, that will open the depths and clear the eye of the mind, but an examination which cannot be too close, if made in the spirit of reverence and love.32 Margaret Fuller's statement is eloquent, but confusing. She was clearly opposed to following the patterns of European criticism in any imitative fashion. But the other extreme, criticism based upon no previous experience with art, was equally distasteful to her; for it was clear to the learned Margaret Fuller that the American Scholar's "unhandselled, savage nature" was inadequate to deal with art which was based on cultivated society and which had roots in history. Judgments of this kind she called "flippant." She refused in her comments on art to stand firmly on either side of the critical controversy because she was aware of the inadequacy of both; for how was the American critic to establish cul-

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tural independence from European tradition without basing his impressions only on his uncultivated perceptions, without becoming a cultural Philistine? Unadulterated nationalism, the American premise of originality, was ill-equipped to deal with the sophisticated forms of the fine arts. There was a further confusion in Margaret Fuller's statement, which was based upon her use of the word "nature." When she spoke of the inadequacy of "our raw, uncultivated nature" to appreciate art, she clearly was referring to human nature in its primitive perceptions; but when she went on in the same sentence to speak of the goal of criticism as the appreciation of "those finer manifestations of nature," the reference was not to the perceiver, or even, it would seem, solely to the work of art itself, but to the total context in which the work of art appears, to the external world. The confusion here is not merely one of rhetoric. It represents a crucial substantive shift. In her search for criteria by which to judge the work of art, Margaret Fuller had made external nature itself the aesthetic field. The critic's judgment of the work of art became a function of her judgment of the meaning of nature. This brings us to a consideration of another important area of critical discussion in the years immediately preceding the appearance of Ruskin's works in America. The meaning of nature and the way in which we perceive it had been a constant source of debate in the United States during the 1830's and 1840's. If nature was a battleground for the varying attitudes toward American nationalism and the European tradition, it also lay at the center of the discussion of perceptual theory. The nationalistic argument cannot finally be separated from its roots in perceptual theory. Emerson's "American Scholar" (1837) plea for a native poet is incomprehensible without an understanding of its epistemological origin in Nature (1836) and the neo-Kantians, and Holmes's comments on Allston cannot be understood without a

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recognition of their origin in eighteenth-century versions of John Locke. The literary dimensions of this controversy are well known. The roots of early nineteenth-century American critical thought lay in Locke and his descendants, the eighteenth-century Scottish Realists like Reid, Dugald Stewart, Blair, and Karnes. The theorists of associationism were warmly received, especially after 1 8 1 1 , when Francis Jeffrey's famous essay on Archibald Alison's associationist psychology appeared in the Edinburgh Review. Newer perspectives were opened by the proto-romantic theorists of that complex of ideas centering on the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque, a group which included, among others, Edmund Burke, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight. Finally came the gradual domestication of Wordsworth in America, at first hesitantly and then with a fullness of assent unmatched even in England. Yet when Emerson pushed Wordsworthian premises to an extreme formulation in 1836, cutting them off from their Lockian roots and grounding them more or less firmly in German idealism, he threatened the foundations of commonsensical Boston, with consequences that extended far beyond the Hub. New Yorkers fought out the battles of contending perceptual theories in the pages of the Knickerbocker and the Literary World and even to the South Seas where Melville's Ishmael, searching for the meaning of nature, gazed over the bow of the Pequod at the heads of the sperm and right whales which balanced the ship of life precariously between Locke and Kant.33 The significance of this struggle in terms of art criticism was equally profound, though it is less apparent and has attracted less attention. Since art criticism was the field John Ruskin was soon to enter, and subsequently to conquer, the issues bear review in some detail. The established neoclassical criticism was articulated by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1839 review of the Allston Exhibition. He directed his attention primarily to Allston's portraits and historical canvases, discussing them in literary terms.

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When he came to Allston's landscapes, his praise was high but cautious, for he felt that landscape painting was potentially dangerous. Searching for an example to make his point clear, Holmes singled out the English painter whose works had excited such mixed reactions among English critics. He warned his readers that "the best living English artist in this department, Turner, has doubtless been led away from the truth of nature, by following too ardently the seductive light of his own imagination." Turner's art seemed to Holmes to challenge the very foundations of traditional aesthetics.34 The positive criterion which Holmes invoked—the idea of truth to nature—had been a commonplace of art criticism for centuries. The premise of "general nature" had been of central importance to the great writers of the eighteenth century and to Joshua Reynolds in particular. It implied that there was a standard in the external world and in the world of man by which all things could be judged. Although no particular man or scene in the visible world might fulfill the ideal completely, the ideal was valid nevertheless. In the human realm, certain moral imperatives were the means by which the individual was urged to fulfill his ideal potential as a rational being. In the external world the ideal was defined in terms of the creator's or critic's rearranging and regrouping of what he actually saw into an harmonious relationship which was the perfection of type of which all actual scenes were but imperfect reflections. As Reynolds spoke of it in the Third Discourse, the first duty of the painter was to devote himself to the "long laborious comparison" of particular natural forms: By this means, he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike

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to any one object. This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the Artist calls the Ideal Beauty, is the great leading principle, by which works of genius are conducted. Although Reynolds emphasized that "the idea of that central form" ought to be derived from the study of nature itself, he acknowledged that this kind of study was "painful," and suggested to his listeners that the only method of shortening the road was to study works of art that express qualities "as they appear in general and more enlarged nature." In landscape painting he then mentioned specifically Claude Lorrain. Thus "truth to nature" was truth to that ideal relationship which Reynolds and others found so well embodied in the paintings of Claude and Poussin, rather than truth to any particular scene.36 Reynolds had never denied the importance of the imagination or even of individual genius, though especially in the earlier discourses he had tried to indicate how inspiration was to be channeled and controlled by reason and technique. In the Seventh Discourse he had gone so far as to deny that there was any real difference between genius, the creative imagination, and taste, the receptive and critical imagination. Taste for the Reynoldsian was not the idiosyncratic preference of an individual but a group of generally held norms, and the action of the imagination and the passions, which concerned themselves with that part of taste which belonged not to external forms but to the soul, was likewise based on invariable principles, "to be known and reasoned upon in the same manner, by an appeal to common sense deciding upon the common feelings of mankind . . . this appeal implies a general uniformity and agreement in the minds of men."36 Thus when Holmes attacked Turner for relying too much upon the idiosyncracies of his own imagination, he was merely repeating in terms of the painter what he had quoted from the Fifth Discourse earlier in the review, Reynolds' injunction against critics who "describe their own imaginations" and not what they

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see. "It is not invidiously, or with any assumption of superiority, that we make these remarks," Holmes declared, but "because the standard of general taste must be considered, before we can truly feel how lonely is the summit that genius toils so long to gain."37 Holmes accepted the Lockian epistemology which centered human understanding in individual perception rather than innate ideas. (As a physician, he was led by the inductive method to important experimental conclusions.) He could accept the emphasis the eighteenth-century followers of Locke from Addison to Burke, Reynolds, and beyond had placed on the imagination which sense impressions stimulated. But when the pleasures of the imagination became in Turner "the seductive light of his own imagination," Holmes balked—and his language suggests the moral judgment. Reynoldsian principles did not stretch that far. This was the grossest form of romantic egotism. It led to Byronism, to such extravagances as Emerson's "transparent eyeball" (a far cry from Lockian modes of perception), and, though Holmes did not know it, eleven years later it would lead mad Captain Ahab to a belief that nature, in the form of the white whale, was his nemesis. What Holmes instinctively perceived, though he was unwilling to admit it, was that the older canons of criticism were no longer adequate to explain the artistic practice of Turner. The genius of Turner had leapt beyond the bounds of both the Reynoldsian conceptions of general nature and their artistic embodiment in the canvases of Claude, Poussin, and the masters of ideal landscape. Holmes's reaction was an American echo of the pattern of response to Turner among the English academicians, followers of Reynolds who had rigidified the master's more flexible idealism into a set of hard and fast rules and had taken Reynolds' artistic examples, rather than the process of idealization, as their criteria. Claude's paintings rather than Claude's use of nature had become the guide. If an artist chose to deviate from the style of the old masters, the critical apparatus broke down. Individual genius was critically circumscribed.

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Holmes's comments on Turner are, of course, an exception. Few Americans in the years before Ruskin knew of Turner as more than a name. In fact the most striking single monument to American interest in Turner, the lavish two-volume folio Turner Gallery of engravings from his paintings, was not published until 1879. Of the few Americans in the years before 1843 who did know Turner's work, the response of Thomas Cole is perhaps most instructive. Cole visited Turner at his London studio in December of 1829 during his first trip abroad and was on the whole favorably impressed. In his notebook entry after the visit, he praised Turner's paintings for their poetry and their composition (for which he found Claudian precedents), for their sublimity and "powerful effect of chiaroscuro." He then generalized on his impressions, speaking of the relative amount of detail allowable in beautiful and sublime scenes, emphasizing the central importance of total effect, the impression of "the spirit of the entire scene upon the mind of the beholder." Detail was to be subordinated to that end. (Again Claude—now coupled with Gaspard Poussin and Rosa— was his authority.) Yet Cole was troubled by Turner's color. Chiaroscuro was one thing, but to allow color to dominate and to obliterate solid forms seemed to Cole dangerous. Citing Alison as his authority, he argued against too great a concern for "technicalities." The language of art must be kept subservient to the conception. Take away from painting that which affects the imagination, and speaks to the feelings, and the remainder is merely for sensual gratification, mere food for the gross eye . . . The conception and reproduction of truth and beauty are the first object of the poet; so should it be with the painter. He who has no such conceptions, no power of creation, is no real painter.38 By 1834, looking back on the trip in a letter to Dunlap, Cole was prepared to go even further. He pronounced Turner to be

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"the prince of evil spirits" for having perverted his talent, elevated means over ends, and made rocks look like sugar candy and the ground like jelly. "The standard by which I form my judgment is—beautiful nature," he announced; "if I am astray, it is on a path which I have taken for that of truth." The best exemplars of this standard were still Claude, Poussin, and Rosa, not just because they were the traditional masters, but because "they loved the beauty that they saw around them, and painted." Their principle was "truth."39 What is notable in Cole's 1834 expansion of his response to Turner is his seeming rejection of abstract notions of the sublime and beautiful. With the addition of "the picturesque," popularized by Gilpin and redefined by Price, these categories or genres had been the means by which the late eighteenth-century Lockians had expanded neoclassical notions of beauty. The young Cole had absorbed them as the accepted critical language of the day, but in 1834 it seemed less important to categorize Claude than to stress his direct reliance upon nature. Claude had worked simply and single-heartedly from a "keen perception of the beautiful of nature," and not from abstract ideals.40 In one sense Cole was rescuing Reynoldsian principles from their debasement and from those who, like Holmes, were chary of departure from tradition, preferring Claude to nature, or to put it more precisely in Lockian terms, preferring the effect of Claude's paintings of general nature to the unpredictable effect of nature itself—especially raw, American nature—upon the imagination of the perceiver. Yet the real source of Cole's ideas of the imagination were of more recent origin. It was to Wordsworth rather than Reynolds that Cole was most indebted for his conception of the role nature and the imagination play in the creation and perception of the work of art. The biography that his friend the Episcopalian minister Louis Noble put together shortly after Cole's death and dedicated to William Cullen Bryant is a remarkable document of the impact of Wordsworth upon the American imagination. Cole was born

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in rural Lancashire in 1801 but apprenticed to engravers in urban Chester and Liverpool. He had come with his family in 1819 to Philadelphia and thence to the comparative solitude of the wilderness in Steubenville, Ohio. According to Noble, the two years Cole spent in Ohio were the most crucial ones, not only because it was there he first met a painter and saw a book of engravings of the old masters, but also because it was there that he experienced a Wordsworthian conversion to nature. Finding himself in the solitude of the wilderness, "he fell back upon himself . . . and began sounding into the deeps, and winding through the mazes of his own affections and imagination." The movement into the self was then counterbalanced by an exploration of the beauty of external nature. Noble underlined the Wordsworthian genesis of the experience by quoting the early lines of "Tintern Abbey," that "nature then . . . to me was all in all." To Cole, following "the seductive light of his own imagination" was not dangerous and immoral, as Holmes believed it to be, leading to romantic egotism, the substitution of solipsism for genuine perception of the external world. On the contrary, the inward movement of the imagination led to the perception that natural forms were An appetite: a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye. In the case of Cole, "the tones and expressions of the outer world found answering tones and expressions in his soul." Realizing that he was a poet, he determined that his "mission upon earth, like that of every fine creative genius, was to make men see and feel, with respect to nature and the human heart, as he saw and felt himself." The conversion at Steubenville involved not only the finding of his "vocation" but also "the appropriate language by which he should most effectively speak his thoughts and feelings,

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and best accomplish his mission among men . . . the form and countenance, the colours, qualities and circumstances of visible nature."41 The passage is worth quoting at such length because it dramatizes the real distance between Cole and the traditional aesthetics of Reynolds and the post-Lockians. Despite his debts to Reynolds, Burke, and others, in his conception of nature and the imagination, Cole was far closer to the Concord of Emerson and Margaret Fuller than he was to the Boston of Holmes. The act of the imagination was not one of sorting sense perceptions, arranging and controlling them through rationality and a heavy reliance upon common sense and traditional taste. This, in transcendental terms, was the action of the Understanding, what the Germans denominated Verstand. The reciprocal relation between the ideas within the self and the world outside which Cole had found at Steubenville was more an approximation of Kantian or, more probably, Jacobian Vernunft, Reason, that higher intuitive perception which linked the things of the external world to the mind's innate conceptions of the Absolute.42 Particular nature was to be examined not for general ideas or for artistic material but for its inherent truth. That was to be Cole's "vocation," his calling in the traditional Christian sense. Painting was not merely a profession; it was at least potentially a holy "mission," and the grail was to be found in nature. Form, shape, and color would be the means by which Cole could translate the ecstatic vision in his soul into sensuous language. Thus the creation of a work of art involved finding symbols, what the transcendentalists called "correspondences," external visual signs of innate feelings. The criticism of a work of art followed logically from this. The critical act consisted of intuiting the correspondence between the phenomena imperfectly set forth on the canvas and the world of ideal beauty as it was innately conceived of by the human mind. The exercise of the understanding could be of only limited assistance in this process; for criti-

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cism, like creation, was not only a matter of intellectual discrimination but also of feeling. As Margaret Fuller said in her Allston review, the close examination of a work of art must be made "in the spirit of reverence and love." Finally, it was the appeal of the work of art to the human heart or soul (the terms were often used interchangeably) that was most important.43 This tendency toward a radical particularity, toward making the heart of the individual perceiver the dernier ressort of criticism, was accompanied by a tendency to see the individual as composed of faculties—physical, intellectual, and moral or spiritual—which corresponded to discrete "parts" of the individual— the hand, the head, and the heart or soul. Where the neoclassical critics tended to see the mind as organizing and regulating the potentially seductive powers of the imagination in order to produce one coherent judgment, these new romantic critics saw these faculties as separate and often in conflict. The totally integrated judgment existed, as Wordsworth had said, only in childhood when nature was "all in all," when man could hold "unconscious intercourse with beauty / Old as creation, drinking in a pure / Organic pleasure."44 For the adult critic to see into the life of things often involved permitting the emotional perception to overwhelm the other, to them lower, faculties of head and hand. They labeled the most perceptive judgments of this fundamentally irrational process "genius." However, emotion recollected in tranquillity was one thing and art criticism quite another. The problem still remained, for both creator and critic, of translating the ecstatic vision into sensuous language. It was clear to the romantic that hand or head must never be permitted to dominate the heart or soul. That, to Thomas Cole, had been the great crime of Turner: overconcern with the merely sensuous had made him "the prince of evil spirits." Yet in its extreme transcendental formulation this denunciation of the sensuous could eventuate in what was almost a contempt for the work of art once the universals behind it were perceived.

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At the end of his ambiguous parable of transcendental aesthetic theory, "The Artist of the Beautiful," Nathaniel Hawthorne seemed willing to sacrifice the work of art itself: When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality. 45 Clearly, most artists and critics were unwilling to commit such suicide, even in the name of a neo-Kantian "reality." Despite their reliance on the heart or soul as the final judge, they could not deny that artistic perception was, at least initially, a visual experience, and that they must deal with this experience. They challenged the materialistic premises of Lockian sensationist psychology in the understanding of art because it seemed to lead to overmuch concern with means, just as Emerson and Parker had attacked the Unitarians for materialism in religious doctrine. As a result they never reconciled their denial that knowledge comes only through the senses with the unquestionable fact that art was a visual experience. Emerson attempted to differentiate between that which the eye sees and that which is carried to the mind, as if there were a kind of screen between the eye and the mind which only let certain impressions through. In her review of Allston, Margaret Fuller spoke of the aim of art as the attempt to "open the depths and clear the eye of the mind," which was a further confusion of the processes of seeing with the idealistic goals of art.46 This weakness in the transcendental aesthetic was never successfully overcome, and opened the way for a full-scale attack on the romantic theory of art in later years. In the meantime, the transcendentalists tended to compensate for such a division between the eye and mind by emphasizing the organic nature of the work of art and the creative process. The work of art was to be organic, "esemplastic" as Coleridge said, rather than a com-

THE AMERICAN SETTING

ZQ

position of discrete elements arranged by the artist, and they drew their conception from the analogy with natural forms. Nature was to dictate the forms of art. One important ramification of the transcendentalist emphasis on the organic was the tendency to identify the critical act with the creative act. If artistic creation was an organic process and Emerson's poet the key to his aesthetic theory, then the task of the critic was to recreate this process mentally, to relive the artist's experience. Noble describes Cole's examination of works of art in Italy during his second trip as involving both analysis and synthesis. "So deeply was the dissecting faculty immersed in his imagination that the idea of an organic whole was simultaneous with the act of resolving a given work of art into its elemental parts . . . lighting on the place where the painter left with his pigments, he sped away through the point where he entered with his imagination. By thus taking position with the artist, he advanced with him, and, in a sense, reproduced his work. This was perfect study, and the ideal of criticism."47 Since nature was at the heart of the artist's experience, clearly the critic must also have a sensitivity to nature if he was to appreciate art. Art criticism was not the province of the connoisseur but of the individual who could perceive the beauty of nature. Thus Margaret Fuller felt a certain trepidation in discussing Allston's historical canvases, which were based on artistic tradition, and she tended to make essentially literary judgments of them. When she came to his landscapes, she spoke more confidently: "Here the painter is merged in his theme, and these pictures affect us as parts of nature, so absorbed are we in contemplating them, so difficult is it to remember them as pictures." The high point of Allston's art was his confrontation of nature. He achieved the beautiful by obliterating the line between art and nature. And further, "the soul of the painter is in these landscapes, but not his character. Is not that the highest art? Nature and the soul combined; the former freed from slight crudities or blemishes, the latter from its merely human aspect." The tran-

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scendental moment is achieved through the blending of nature and the soul, and this Margaret Fuller labeled "the highest art."48 For the Rev. Louis Noble, however, Margaret Fuller's question was not merely rhetorical. Noble bowed to no one in his own love of nature and his conviction as to its central importance to Thomas Cole, but nature worship was not enough. The attachment to nature must be clearly and unmistakably related to Deity. Pantheism must not be substituted for religion, and religion itself must be more than merely a sentiment derived from nature; it must become a "life."49 Noble shared with the transcendentalists the Wordsworthian conviction that nature was a reflection of God. For the Concord group that was enough. By identifying the forms of art with the forms of nature and nature itself with Deity, the transcendentalists made the criticism of art essentially a moral venture. To a group that feared that aesthetic discrimination—"taste" as the traditionalists understood the word—was a form of materialism, the equation of beauty with truth and with goodness was extremely important. As one student of the problem has said, speaking of Emerson, "it gave to the minister turned esthetic philosopher the comforting assurance of knowing that in the last analysis he was investigating Deity."50 Although Emerson and most of the other transcendentalists were only peripherally concerned with the fine arts, they were willing to accept the consequences of their love affair with nature. Emerson risked the charge of pantheism, "the latest form of infidelity," as Andrews Norton, Boston's "hard-headed Unitarian Pope," branded his "Divinity School Address." Noble, despite the attraction, was unwilling to make the break. The result is that his Life of Cole is more than a description of the painter's growing absorption in the aesthetic of nature, his abandoning of the traditional categories of the beautiful, sublime, and picturesque for the single criterion of "TRUTHFULNESS TO NATUBE."51 The book is almost a covert dialogue based upon the tension between Cole's tendency toward pantheism and Noble's shaky grasp on orthodox religious faith. Fortunately for

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Noble and his book, the tension was resolved at the end of Cole's life when Cole was admitted to membership in the Episcopal Church. He turned increasingly from painting grand natural allegories like "The Course of Empire," which Noble felt was at once magnificent but based on "innutritious morsels of natural religion,"52 to painting specifically Christian allegories like "The Cross and the World." The threatened conflict was resolved in Cole's life and Noble's biography, but it was to be a continually recurring theme in the years to come. Having achieved at the end of his Life of Cole a resolution of this tension, Noble repeated his final standard of art criticism: "judgment according to nature, and not according to past art, must determine. At that tribunal let Cole be arraigned and tried."53 If Cole's practice seems to modern eyes never to have fulfilled this ideal, the ideal itself remained, and the words "according to nature," in Greek "Kata Phusin," had already been adopted as a pseudonym by young John Ruskin in an initial venture into art criticism. It was, as Ruskin later said, the key to all his further work.

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MODERN PAINTERS: THE FIRST AMERICAN REACTION (1847-1850)

THE WRITINGS OF JOHN RUSKIN m a d e their initial A m e r i c a n ap-

pearance just as Thomas Cole's short but productive life closed in February of 1848. By the time Noble's biography appeared in 1853, the reputation of the English critic was spreading rapidly in the New World. Indeed, there are hints in the Life and Works of Thomas Cole that suggest that Noble too was drawing on Ruskin's assertions to support his almost exclusive reliance upon the canon of truthfulness to nature. Was he too one of those of whom Ruskin was speaking when Ruskin wrote the editors of the Crayon in 1855 that his American audience had a "heartier appreciation and better understanding of what I am and what I mean, than I have ever met in England"? 1 The conditions of American cultural life in the 1840's already suggest reasons for Americans' receptivity to the pronouncements of the bold young Englishman. The rapid development of art in America and Americans' exposure to art at home and abroad, coupled with a relative lack of sophistication in matters of aesthetic judgment, would make any critic who sounded authoritative worth listening to, especially when Americans' desperate need for artistic standards was reinforced by a national pride

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that demanded aesthetic, and not merely material, justification. W h e n pride in the American nation was coupled with—some went so far as to say expressed primarily through—pride in American nature, it becomes doubly clear w h y Americans should p a y special attention to a critic w h o based his criticism of art on the national shibboleth. The great American debate on nature and nationalism had developed a special religious urgency after Emerson flung his challenge to the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, but the argument could b e heard in one form or another from Boston to Charleston, from N e w York to Cincinnati, from the pulpit, the editorial page of newspapers and magazines, and the halls of Congress. T h e reception of Ruskin in America w o u l d ultimately depend upon how, specifically, his writings fitted into the national debate. The astonishingly rapid development of Ruskin's own ideas in the years up to 1848 already begins to suggest w h a t his role in shaping American thought might become. T h e transformation of his own thought in the first twenty-seven years of his life recapitulates in brief compass the larger and more gradual developments in British aesthetic theory, which were being given a special emphasis on the western shores of the Atlantic. Ruskin's first exposure to the world of art was through the neoclassical spectacles of his father, John James Ruskin. T h e elder Ruskin and his associates, including Ruskin's first drawing master, educated young John to believe that the neoclassical ideal of "general nature" was the criterion b y which to judge art, and that an actual scene was good insofar as it resembled the paintings of Poussin or Claude. Ruskin's first unpublished defense of Turner in 1836 reflected these views, if w e can believe the transcript that has come down to us. "Turner may b e mad," wrote the seventeen-year-old boy; "I daresay he is, inasmuch as highest genius is allied to madness; but not so stark mad as to profess to paint nature. H e paints from nature, and pretty far from it, too; and he would be sadly disappointed w h o looked in his pictures for a possible scene," 3

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The next important work of young Ruskin was the series of articles entitled "The Poetry of Architecture" which he published pseudonymously under the name of Kata Phusin. John Claudius Loudon, the leading landscape gardener of his time and indefatigable author and editor of many books, journals, and encyclopedias of the picturesque school of British aesthetic theory, printed Ruskin's contributions in his Architectural Magazine in 1837-38. The new note was sounded on the opening page: If we consider how much less the beauty and majesty of a building depend upon its pleasing certain prejudices of the eye, than upon its rousing certain trains of meditation in the mind, it will show in a moment how many intricate questions of feeling are involved in the raising of an edifice; it will convince us of the truth of a proposition, which might at first have appeared startling, that no man can be an architect, who is not a metaphysician. Ruskin condemned the wholesale reliance upon the neoclassical rules of architecture and the tyranny of any particular style, spoke slightingly of the dry mechanics of building, and announced that his concern was with the poetry of architecture. "Unity of feeling," he proclaimed, was the first principle of good taste, and he urged his readers "to cast away all general ideas; to look only for unison of feeling, and to pronounce everything wrong which is contrary to the humours of nature." Only after men felt where they were and had thrown the light and color of the imagination over their feelings could they then bring their judgment into play.3 "Taste," he averred in a later essay in the series, "is the child and the slave of memory; and beauty is tested, not by any fixed standard, but by the chances of association."4 Having made individual sensibility his criterion and association its handmaid, Ruskin went on to divide landscape categorically into blue, green, gray, and brown, and indicated what types of building were best suited to the landscape of each country or district. The English lake country (brown) he associated with one style of

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house, the Umbrian hills (blue) with another. In a fairly dogmatic way he thus applied a version of Archibald Alison's associationism in linking building styles to landscape foliage and to national attitudes, and labeled them beautiful, sublime, or picturesque as he went along. In this respect "The Poetry of Architecture" was a distinct development away from Reynoldsian neoclassicism. The late eighteenth-century British associationists like Alison had declared that beauty derived not so much from abstract harmonies of form, composition, or color as from the things that the human mind related through memory (which was remembered sensation) to the object seen, the emotional, intellectual (and hence also the historical) associations with which the mind from its experiences invested the object. Both associationism and Reynolds' neoclassic norms proceeded from the same empirical basis in Locke, but associationism as a perceptual theory focused on the nonrational action of the mind in connecting impressions. Locke himself had deplored such an irrational process, though he had acknowledged its importance; Hartley and his followers transformed it into a mechanistic rationalism; but Archibald Alison had rescued the idea from Hartleian necessitarianism, stressing implicitly the uniqueness of each aesthetic response and the sensibility of the individual perceiver. In its Alisonian version, associationism was a point of transition between the ideas of general nature of Reynolds and the radical particularity of Wordsworth and Byron.® Associationism had served an important function in American aesthetics, especially in architecture. It had been one important factor in stimulating the Greek Revival in the United States. Jefferson and others had tried through architectural forms to associate the new American democracy with that of ancient Greece. They wished to give the new country the sanction of history and tradition. But this approach contained certain dangers, both practical and theoretical. Although Alison, and Ruskin after him in "The Poetry of Architecture," tried to maintain in

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general the universality of moral associations and the shared quality of national associations, there was always the danger that these associations might become too individualized, and "taste" would no longer be a shared response. What seemed a natural association to one individual or one generation might seem arbitrary to the next. The result in practical terms might be merely anachronism: a Greek temple in a New England village. Later generations, who lacked the particular sense of the original association but continued to think of architecture in terms of "meaning" rather than as a particular organization of spaces and shapes, might protest the use of Greek in America. 6 Furthermore, the individualistic bias might lead to conflicting judgments. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his "Thoughts on Art" in the first number of the Dial, associated the Gothic with a grove of trees—the columns with the trunks, and the stained glass with the sun shining through the leaves. But could the historic meaning of Gothic be excluded from the associations? Where associationism might aid Americans in search of historical roots, it could also raise difficult questions regarding the United States's relation to history which would have serious consequences for American art. Ruskin's particular version of associationism, however, seems to have excited no comment in America, though the essays were probably read by Loudon's disciples in this country. Loudon himself singled them out for special praise in his review of the year's work, and the London Times found them the most remarkable series in the journal and the author to have "the mind of a poet as well as the eye and hand of an artist."7 On the surface, the principles Ruskin enunciated seemed to be quite in keeping with those of other British associationists and writers on the picturesque. In retrospect, however, one can detect a certain tension in the essays between, on the one hand, Ruskin's obvious indebtedness to Loudon, Alison, and Uvedale Price and, on the other, his landscape categories, immature and dogmatic though they were. There was, in the latter, a genuine attempt to make

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the vision of particular nature the standard of artistic judgment. Although the association of ideas was the means by which Ruskin developed his categories here, he seemed to be trying to approach nature directly through the sheer power of individual perception and feeling. This new direction became explicit with the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843. If the emphasis on feeling and particular nature in "The Poetry of Architecture" represents a partial deviation from the Reynoldsian ideal, as well as a certain heterodoxy within the picturesque tradition—one which would soon find its counterpart in the work of Andrew Jackson Downing in America—Modern Painters I is a reversal of Ruskin's father's ideas, because of its insistence that a painting must look like nature rather than nature like a painting. Ruskin professed to be basing his remarks on Locke's psychology, and he argued such things as the secondary importance of color in a Lockian way. 8 But it is clear, when he claimed that light must be understood in terms of poetry and religion, not optics,9 that the sensationist psychology was inadequate for what he was trying to say, and that other approaches were becoming more important to him. He also found inadequate the sublime, as Burke had distinguished this analytical category. The direction of his own thought can be seen in the Wordsworthian motto of the book. Associationist discrimination was giving way to nature worship, and the appeal to the "still small voice" was becoming important. 10 Ruskin undertook in this first volume to defend Turner as the greatest of all landscape painters. He claimed that Turner was better than Claude and the "ancients," that Turner was true to nature and Claude merely to tradition. He compared passages of landscape paintings with their actual counterparts in nature— trees, mountains, clouds—and found the "ancients" wanting. The young critic brashly toppled the established gods of painting from Parnassus one by one for their failure of "truth to nature"; Claude, Poussin, Salvator Rosa, and the seventeenth-century Dutch realists, whom he contemptuously labeled the "Van some-

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body's and Back somebody's." Only Turner seemed to have the meticulous sense of literal truth which was Ruskin's standard at this point. Yet truth to nature was not for Ruskin an end in itself. His literary master was Wordsworth, and he shared the poet's belief that God was immanent in nature; but he was not prepared to risk the dangers of unadulterated nature worship and pantheism. If he had, the impact of Ruskin in England and America might have been somewhat different. Ruskin's love of nature was in fact restrained by a strong Low-Church evangelical background. Oxford of the 1830's when Ruskin went up, was in a turmoil over the Tractarian controversy, yet he was apparently unmoved by it. He had a violent hatred of anything that smacked of the Church of Rome. His guide at Oxford had been not Pusey or Newman but the geologist-minister William Buckland, author of the sixth of the Bridgewater Treatises "on the Power and Wisdom and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation" entitled Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1836). 11 Thus Ruskin combined a love of particular nature with a desire both to make scientific discriminations and to see the relationship of the facts of nature to Deity. Fundamentally, Ruskin agreed with Emerson's assertion that "particular natural facts are signs of particular spiritual facts," though how he would have responded to the third of Emerson's principles, that "Nature is the symbol of spirit," remains questionable. Henry Ladd has pointed out that although Ruskin used the transcendental argument to make nature meaningful, he did not see nature as symbolic in the sense that Emerson and Coleridge did. Nature for Ruskin was metaphorical or allegorical rather than the basis of a symbolic vision. In terms of art, in any case, the failure to reproduce the natural facts accurately on the canvas seemed to Ruskin to be a form of blasphemy.12 His letters and journals of the two years immediately following the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters under-

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line the religious dimension of his thought. He defended his interest in art to a young ministerial friend on the grounds that it was better for him to preach the beauty of creation well than a system of salvation poorly; moreover, he insisted that "taste" as he conceived it was not merely a matter of the selfish pursuit of critical acumen but of teaching moral lessons. During his 1845 trip to Italy, he struggled to distinguish beauty as a moral quality from that power of association which had partly dominated the earlier "Poetry of Architecture."13 Thus by 1846, when the second volume of Modern Painters appeared in England, Ruskin was ready to state unequivocally his conviction that though association had its undoubted appeal, this appeal was not to be confused with beauty (the subject of this second volume), which was something altogether different.14 The impressions of beauty, he thundered, were not sensuous or intellectual, but moral. Art was not a recreation but a consideration of high seriousness.15 He then proceeded to erect this conviction into an elaborate intellectual construct. The faculty with which men perceived beauty in art was not the "aesthetic" faculty, he said, but the "theoretic" faculty. Going back to the Greek roots of the two words, Ruskin maintained that the "aesthetic" was the capacity for making only sensuous distinctions while the "theoretic" was the highest form of contemplation. He was convinced that beauty was not dependent upon mere sensuous perception; that was the error of the advocates of traditional "taste." The beauty of a painting consisted in more than a particular organization of line, mass, and color. The "theoretic" faculty, by contrast, included the observer's ability to make moral distinctions. Ruskin was convinced that beauty in art was ultimately a reflection of Divinity. He borrowed the term "theoria" from Aristotle because, as Katharine Gilbert has said, "he needed a word that should do two things: bind the enjoyment of art to the perception of external objects, and also fix the plane of that enjoyment on the highest level of human experience."16 The "theoretic faculty" was Ruskin's means of asserting that

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the moral value of a work of art was an inherent part of its beauty. The mind did not make separate sensuous and moral judgments and then weigh them by the neoclassic guide of reason. The theoretic was a "faculty"—that is, an irreducible part of the human mind itself; therefore men could not judge the beauty of a work of art without judging its moral value in the process. "Theoria" and "imagination" were basically two aspects of the experience of beauty: the former the highest level of the passive appreciative experience of the beholder, the latter the highest level of the active creative experience of the artist. Though he later rejected the term "theoria" as "pure pedantry,"17 the distinction he was drawing between mere sensuous apprehension and that comprehensive grasp which included moral judgment remained fundamental to his entire career. Ruskin then divided beauty into two main categories. "Typical Beauty" he defined as "that external quality of bodies . . . which, whether it occur in a stone, flower, beast, or in man, is absolutely identical, which . . . may be shown to be in some sort typical of the Divine attributes." "Vital Beauty" was "the appearance of felicitous fulfillment of function in living things, more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man."18 The first was concerned with such general concepts as infinity, repose, and symmetry; the second referred to beauty in organic creation. Yet both were fundamentally religious concepts as Ruskin used them. The general concepts of Typical Beauty were not simply the abstract, self-evident Renaissance ideals of harmony. The very name itself indicated that Ruskin was employing a typological approach which related the various qualities of beauty to aspects of the Divine will and the Divine plan. The same was basically true of Vital Beauty. Despite the Ianguage which sounds much like that of Horatio Greenough, "felicitous fulfillment of function" meant to Ruskin emphasizing "felicitous," the judgment of moral value, rather than merely the utilitarian or materialistic adaptation of parts to the whole for the sake of the individual organism. Though all functionalist

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arguments have a teleological dimension, Ruskin's conception of beauty required not only that the observer perceive the ordered nature of his teleological universe but also that he constantly refer back from the creation to the Creator, that the concern with telos never blind one to the generative force of Deity. Ruskin hated Benthamism, and he carefully redefined the word "utility" to mean use for God's purpose. 19 He often quoted the Bible as his authority on artistic questions, and his own style was distinctly biblical. In his Wordsworthian excursions into art and nature, Ruskin was quite literally committed to finding sermons in stones. With this necessarily brief outline of some of the major principles of the first volumes of Modern Painters, we can see the great potentialities they had for an American audience. For, in effect, Ruskin was shifting the criteria of artistic judgment from the sensuous, which was suspect and unfamiliar in America, to the moral; from pictures, which were still relatively difficult to see in America, to nature, which was abundant; from the wellestablished European aesthetic traditions of "taste" to the imaginative insight of the individual observer, as he perceived the moral order of the universe. In effect the critic could be the embodiment of Emerson's American Scholar, his poet-genius, drained of the dangerous overtones of pantheism. Ruskin's special way of harnessing the ecstatic perception of nature to clearly articulated religious criteria made it now possible for the American to respond to qualities in Turner's painting in ways that were impossible both to disciples of Reynolds like Oliver Wendell Holmes, with his sterile Claudian idealism, and to a Thomas Cole, with his fear of materialism and aestheticism. The fundamental importance of Ruskin's writing in America in these years before the Civil War was his identification of the interest in art with morality and religion as well as with the love of nature, his ability to build a loose but convincing system where art, religion, and nature were inextricably intertwined. Ruskin's American debut came in late July 1847 when the first American edition of Modern Painters I appeared under the im-

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print of Wiley and Putnam. None of the first American reviewers seems to have known the author's identity. (Emerson, who read Modern Painters in October 1847, on board ship bound for England, wrote home to his wife that "if any one wishes to know [it] was written by a young man named Ruskin.") The effusive lines young Walter Whitman dashed off for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 22 July 1847 indicate only that the first volume was just appearing, for Whitman's notice gives no evidence that he had read the book. Two days later a short notice appeared in the Literary World, and the American Review and the Knickerbocker followed suit in August and October, respectively.20 The reviewers were not particularly impressed by Ruskin's arguments for Turner; they all felt that the critic was too partisan in his defense of the painter. Yet they admitted that Americans did not know the artist's work well enough to judge. The Knickerbocker felt that it was adventurous of the publishers even to reprint the book in this country, in view of the primitive state of American interest in art. The reviewer then went on to predict that the book would create "a new era in art" by its praise of modern landscape painting over the old masters. Like the other reviewers, the writer in the Knickerbocker singled out Ruskin's descriptions of nature for special praise, and he indicated the range of the book's prospective American audience: "The work is one which will not only delight and instruct the artist, but the poet, the philosopher, and every lover of the works of GOD."21 In December the newly founded Massachusetts Quarterly Review, stronghold of the more scholarly of the transcendentalists, joined in praise of the book. The reviewer saw behind Ruskin's idea of truth to nature and his attack on idealized landscape painting a much larger issue. Nature, in the eyes of the transcendentalism was itself the source of ideas. To "idealize" landscape had usually meant to omit, to neglect parts of nature, and possibly even to falsify. Ruskin's value was that he realized that "to idealize ought to mean, to seize the idea common to a variety of details, and, sufficiently expressing it, to neglect what is mere

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repetition, accident, or imperfection." A longer discussion of Modern Painters was promised to the readers, but even this short review indicates that Ruskin was not only instructing Americans about the unfamiliar world of art; his book had also entered the larger American debate about the meaning of nature.22 Further proof that Ruskin was advancing into disputed territory in the United States came in January 1848, when the first long discussion of the book appeared in the North American Review, the bastion of the traditionalists. The reviewer, Franklin Dexter, was decidedly displeased with the book; for here was an unknown upstart attempting to call into question the established artistic guides. Ruskin had praised the unruly Turner and condemned the well-ordered Claude. He had hammered away at the Reynoldsian ideal of general nature, and the portent of his full-scale attack on Sir Joshua, which would come in the third volume of Modern Painters, was readily apparent to the reviewer.23 Dexter's response was a long defense of tradition and Reynolds against Ruskin's use of the criterion of nature. It seemed to Dexter that the book was especially dangerous for Americans. In Europe, "where the works of the old masters continually speak for themselves, such a book can do no lasting harm." Clearly, this was not the case in America where there existed little visual evidence to counteract Ruskin's charges. But the danger was far more serious than just this disagreement over a matter of paintings. As Dexter pointed out, Americans were already too prone to overlook the past, for "long past time seems to us to belong to the nations of the Old World, and the present to be more fitly represented by our own." Americans seemed to this Boston lawyer already too little respectful of transatlantic tradition and precedent, and Ruskin was encouraging this explosive tendency in American life through his volumes on art.24 The second basis of Dexter's objection to Modern Painters was Ruskin's criterion of "truth to nature," which seemed to the reviewer fundamentally fallacious. The purpose of art, he lectured

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his readers in familiar cadences, was not to put a gilt frame around nature but to select and combine from nature to make "one consistent ideal scene." The unity was that of art, not nature, in Dexter's opinion, for at the heart of his position lay his assertion that "art is nature, but it is something more and better than nature,—as much better as the work of a creative mind is better than the work of accident." Nature was, in the last analysis, an unreliable guide. Invoking Reynoldsian principles, he asserted that the artist should rely on "a general expression of the class, instead of the individual; and this, when it seeks the beautiful, is what is called the ideal." Dexter was dissatisfied with criticism based upon nature, "for resemblance to nature, though a fact, cannot be proved,—but is chiefly a question of pure taste." Nature was not a fixed point of reference in his critical scheme any more than it had been in Reynolds', and "taste" in this context seemed to mean little more than the personal preference of a discriminating observer.25 In short, Dexter's review was a full-scale attack on everything that Ruskin stood for. The North American, among the ablest spokesmen for the Scottish Realist philosophers, generally Unitarian in its religious position (though not, by this time, strictly sectarian), conservative in its thought, and looking to European tradition for its models, had little praise for this particular Englishman. Although in the first volume of Modern Painters Ruskin had drawn upon Locke on particular points, Dexter saw clearly that the basis of his thought was not in Locke but in that complex of romantic ideas about nature and the self against which, in its extreme transcendental form, the North American had been battling for years. Dexter noted that Ruskin quoted Locke on the secondary importance of color to show that greater truths (of form) must not be sacrificed to lesser ones (of color). To Dexter, Locke seemed to say that color was "not in the object, but in the eye. But of what importance is that?" he asked. The answer to Dexter's question is, of course, that it is of potentially great importance,

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since it leads to the most disturbing aesthetic and epistemological problem of romantic thought, one which Ruskin would consider in the third volume of Modern Painters: is the observer the objective recorder of external reality or the creator of a subjective inner reality? The classic American formulation of the problem, "The Whiteness of the Whale" chapter of Moby-Dick, was only three years in the future when Dexter tried to dismiss the question out of hand. The North American Review's attitude toward Ishmael's quest was clear enough. (The editors never bothered to review Melville's works.) "The painter," Dexter said sharply, "is concerned with the appearance of things, not with their philosophical essences." Yet Ruskin insisted upon making the discussion of art a metaphysical question.26 The years of controversy with the transcendentalists had already made clear to the North American the extreme danger of making nature—particular, wild American nature, not Reynolds' "general nature"—the standard of judgment. It meant the unleashing of all the forces of nationalism and "sublime" individualism and the further weakening of ties with Europe. In the editors' view, Ruskin seemed to be giving the Americans the right to judge art on an individual, even an anarchic, basis. Implicit in their concern was their desire for some stabilizing force in American life which would check rampant individualism, put Emerson in his place (and, by extension, keep Ahab loyal to the world of the shore). The interest in art, based upon traditional norms of the ideal and beauty, had always seemed to them such a bedrock, untouched by the tumultuous activity of daily life. Ruskin was touching issues far more important than the value of certain modern painters. The review ended on a question. Dexter admitted that technical ability was not itself sufficient recommendation for an artist. He must also have enthusiasm for his subject: "It was to faith that Christian art owed its glory; and in what has this generation faith?" 27 The religious ideal in art seemed to Dexter a thing of the past. The present lacked such an organizing principle. Dexter

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did go on to speak of landscape as a field of art open to all generations, and he praised Allston in much the same terms as had Oliver Wendell Holmes eight years earlier, comparing Allston to Claude. But he did not feel that this was an answer to his question about "faith." The North American really had no answer to this question. As spokesmen for Unitarianism, under the editorship of Francis Bowen, the editors were engaged in shifting the emphasis in religious thought from faith to rational understanding. As political conservatives they were clearly opposed to any of the extreme forms of cultural nationalism. But their appraisal was an honest one and since they too had no desire to be accused of being either materialists or aesthetes, they could not avoid raising the issue of the relation of art to faith. The echoes of Dexter's question would be heard for decades to come. Actually the position of the North American was that of a small but influential cultural elite, since most Americans were religious and were familiar with nature but lacked a corresponding familiarity with art. For the mass of Americans, Ruskin's importance was in incorporating the unfamiliar, art, within the framework of the familiar, religion and nature. For the small group who did know something about art, through trips to Europe and reading the works of the theorists of the neoclassic and the picturesque tradition, Ruskin's role was somewhat different. It would be necessary to persuade this group, who were already concerned with art and with the development of canons of aesthetic judgment, that "taste" was not a matter of the individual preferences of a cultivated few who understood European tradition and could make sensitive visual discriminations, but that it was firmly based upon absolute moral laws which had universal application. Art had been heretofore the province primarily of a small leisure class, but the situation was changing with the expansion of artistic facilities and the growth of popular interest in art, tentative though it was. The son of a Newburgh gardener might

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relish the exclusive society to which he had gained access through marriage into a wealthy old Dutch family, but Andrew Jackson Downing also perceived that his success story had potentialities for all Americans. The question of artistic taste was becoming increasingly a public one. If in his private life Downing was the "Hudson River Aesthete," as one writer has called him, he fulfilled what he felt was his responsibility to the nation through his writings. He asked his readers, at the end of his life, whether a young and progressive people shall develope ideas of beauty, harmony and moral significance in their daily lives; whether the arts shall be so understood and cultivated as to elevate and dignify the character; whether the country homes of a whole people shall embody such ideas of beauty and truth as shall elevate and purify its feelings . . . the real progress which a people makes in any of the fine arts, must depend on the public sensibility and the public taste. The development of Downing's aesthetic toward these views is instructive: it offers a graphic illustration of the shift from America's English neoclassic and associationist inheritance toward a romantic mode which, paralleling Ruskin's early development, emphasized moral feeling based upon individual perception; furthermore, it indicates the particular effect Ruskin could have on one already engaged, both theoretically and practically, in the cultivation of the arts, and carries our discussion into the field where Ruskin's ideas had their greatest initial impact—architecture.28 Downing was among the outspoken champions of the Gothic style in America in the 1840's. In his first architectural book, Cottage Residences (1842), he began by berating the multiplication of Greek Revival dwellings in the United States. Much as he approved of the republican associations which had influenced the spread of the Greek Revival style, and saw in the central fact that the United States was a nation of landholders potentialities for the spread of aesthetic awareness,29 still Downing

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"adapted to North America," as the title of one of his books has it, the theories he inherited from abroad. Thus in part his objections to the Greek Revival derived from his reading of essayists like Alison and Price, and of landscape gardeners like Humphry Repton, Loudon, and others of the picturesque tradition in England to whom the formalism, the mechanical symmetry, and especially the "unnatural" whiteness of classical building in a rural setting was anathema. Downing assisted materially through his work as a landscape gardener and architectural writer in domesticating these principles in America.30 Beyond this, his objection to the Greek Revival was that it had ceased to be a style, which he defined in relation to "true" taste, and had become merely a fashion. Indeed, he warned his readers against indiscriminate and inappropriate use of the Gothic as well; for behind his stylistic preference lay a set of aesthetic standards derived, not surprisingly, from nature. Born the son of a gardener, Downing, a youthful Wordsworthian lover of nature, was also early impressed by the economy of nature, the sense of structure in a leaf and the possible lessons which this taught. As a disciple of Repton, he came increasingly to believe that the landscape gardener's task was not to copy nature literally and certainly not to superimpose upon nature a formal alien order like the sterile geometrical French garden; it was rather that the gardener should put the existent elements of nature into an harmonious relationship through self-conscious art.31 Essentially, Downing's landscape ideal was in agreement with Franklin Dexter's view that "art is nature, but it is something more and better than nature,—as much better as the work of a creative mind is better than the work of accident."32 Yet the purpose of art was not, in Downing's view, to exalt man over nature. His hope was that through landscape gardening, the fanner and homeowner would learn to see a beauty in nature which they had previously taken for granted. Interest in landscape gardening had led Downing to a concern with the domestic architecture to be placed in his landscape set-

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tings, and his architectural books contain some of his most concise theoretical statements. In Cottage Residences he set forth three criteria of beauty: "Fitness being the beauty of utility; Expression of purpose, the beauty of propriety; and Expression of Style, the beauty of form and sentiment." The order was one of ascending importance, and Downing commented that architecture that went no further than fulfilling fitness and expression of purpose was "only a useful not a fine art. It is only building. The true artist breathes a life and soul, which is beauty, into the dead utilitarian materials."33 If Downing discriminated between building and architecture, he did not overlook the importance of the former. Even in his last book, The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), though he was careful to label the utilitarian aspects as "building," he stressed the importance of keeping the construction costs of a house within the financial means of the owner, the quality of the material used, proper workmanship, and convenience.34 In the earlier book he disposed of fitness, the beauty of utility, without difficulty. The principle seemed to him self-evident, though the possible applications were numerous. Expression of purpose, the beauty of propriety, concerned him little more than utility. He did pause, though, to explain that it referred to the "truthfulness of their expression." A church must look like a church, a barn like a bam. Architectural sham was to be condemned no matter under what style it hid. In this we can see one basis of Downing's attack on the Greek Revival style, which had been applied indiscriminately to all kinds of buildings, regardless of their purpose. "Truthfulness," the criterion which Ruskin would use one year later in judging the modern painters and which he would make the second of his seven lamps of architecture in 1849, was urged by Downing in 1842.35 Downing was of course not the only one in America making this point, but he was not prepared to push its implications as far as Samuel G. Ward, for example, who said in the Dial in 1843: "To adorn the needful, to add a frieze to life, this is Art."36

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Propriety, fulfillment of function, was necessary, but Downing was not willing to make the functionalist ideal of Horatio Greenough his own. He might agree with Greenough in denouncing sham in architectural decoration. The landscape gardener turned architectural critic had an even stronger sense than Greenough did of the importance of adapting a building to its site, for it was from Downing's interest in the grounds that he had turned to tell his readers what building would be best suited to each kind of surrounding, as had his masters in the picturesque tradition before him. Though there is no specific evidence, it is quite likely that Downing had read the young Ruskin's articles on "The Poetry of Architecture" in Loudon's short-lived journal, since he cited the Architectural Magazine in his own writings.37 Finally, both the young Ruskin and Downing would have approved of Greenough's invocation of the criterion of "nature" in judging architecture. This was as far as Downing would go. He was no more willing than most Americans to define beauty solely as "the promise of function," as Greenough did. This theoretical leap, which made the fulfillment of functional needs the primary criterion of aesthetic judgment, would not be made again until the end of the century. With the exception of a few lonely cries in the stylistic wilderness of the years to come, Americans like Downing would insist that important as utilitarian needs were, building was not architecture, and beauty was something quite different from utility. Thus, of Downing's three criteria in Cottage Residences, "Expression of Style, the beauty of form and sentiment" was "the highest in the scale." Different kinds of beauty appealed to different qualities in the human being. Fitness and expression of purpose appealed to our reason, said Downing; but the imagination derived pleasure "from beauty of form, and from the sentiment associated with certain modes of building long prevalent in any age or country."38 In its 1842 formulation, Downing developed his highest criterion of beauty along traditional lines, draw-

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ing upon Joshua Reynolds and Loudon for his abstract "inherent sources of beauty, common to all styles," those visual criteria of beauty of form like unity, uniformity, and symmetry, and upon the theories of Alison in his treatment of the wealth of sentiments and feelings that had become associated historically with particular styles—Greek or Gothic, "Italian" or Tudor. He noted in passing that the loftiest feelings associated with any architectural style were usually religious, though he did not develop this idea, since it seemed to him to be less relevant to problems of domestic architecture.39 In the years after 1842 there was a shift in Downing's thought, which can be traced in the several editions of his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening as well as in his architectural books. Downing's dependence upon neoclassic visual formalism, modified and expanded as it was by Alisonian associationism, declined. In its place grew what he called in 1844 "the sense of the Beautiful and the Perfect," which was "one of the highest attributes of our nature" and less a quality of the exterior world. In 1849, in the edition of Landscape Gardening in which Ruskin's name appears for the first time, the beautiful or the picturesque is now viewed by Downing as the imperfect manifestation of the idea in material form.40 By 1850, when The Architecture of Country Houses appeared, the newer shape of Downing's perceptual theory had begun to crystallize. Where the useful in architecture appealed to the senses of man, the beautiful appeals to a wholly different part of our nature; it requires another portion of our being to receive and enjoy it . . . The Beautiful is an original instinct of the sentiment of our nature. It is a worship by the heart, of a higher perfection manifested in material forms. Perception by the senses had been relegated to a secondary role. Resemblance to nature was not, as Dexter had claimed, a matter of pure taste, nor was nature for Downing an unreliable guide.

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On the contrary, beauty could be judged by the heart's ability to "see" through the exterior surface of the visible world and to perceive the divinity behind it. Downing went on: To see, or rather to feel how, in nature, matter is ennobled by being thus touched by a single thought of beauty, how it is almost deified by being made to shadow forth, even dimly, His attributes, constitutes the profound and thrilling satisfaction which we experience in contemplating the external works of God. To be keenly sensible of the power of even the imperfect reproduction of such ideas in the various fine arts . . . is to acknowledge the power of beauty over our feelings in another and more personal form. 41 Hesitantly, fitfully, and incompletely, Downing's criteria of judgment were changing. He corrected himself: "to see, or rather to feel"; he skirted the dangers of pantheism by saying that matter is almost deified; he began a sentence by being "keenly sensible" and ended by acknowledging "the power of beauty over our feelings." In this single paragraph one can see the struggle of contending perceptual theories, as the criteria of Lockian sensationism were overwhelmed by the claims of the heart, the imagination, and the feelings. Beauty resided not in the sensations produced by the art object itself but in the moral order of the universe as it was perceived intuitively by the human heart. Downing then went on to distinguish between two aspects of beauty. The first aspect he called "Absolute Beauty," and this "lies in the expression, in material forms, of those ideas of perfection which are universal in their application." The "inherent sources of beauty" of 1842 had now become material embodiments of universal ideas of perfection which were "divine in their origin." If we keep in mind Downing's reading of Ruskin in the years just before 1850, his enumeration of these ideas of beauty which he called "typical" takes on added meaning. "These typical ideas of beauty are PROPORTION, SYMMETRY, VARIETY, HARMONY, and UNITY. They may be called abstract ideas of beauty of

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form, and apply to all the arts, as well as to everything in nature." Downing's choice of qualities remained much as it had been earlier, and it differed slightly from that of Ruskin. What seems more important is that his justification of these qualities was changing. Downing's "Absolute Beauty" was becoming indistinguishable from Ruskin's "Typical Beauty." 42 In discussing the separate qualities, Downing drew heavily on Modern Painters II. He cited Ruskin on proportion, and he seemed to have lost his faith in the definite rules which had been the mainstay of the neoclassic critics. Proportion seemed to depend "mainly on the genius of the artist."43 His discussion of symmetry was partially a paraphrase of Ruskin's, and unity also, though an abstract ideal, was no longer primarily a visual one for Downing. It was "the predominance of one single feeling, one soul, one mind in every portion."44 The second aspect of beauty which Downing distinguished, "Relative Beauty," differed from Ruskin's "Vital Beauty" in little more than nomenclature. Ruskin had said, as Henry Ladd puts it, "that the qualities of "Vital Beauty' are objective only in the sense of existing 'in our relation to things,' not in the things themselves." He had objectified the relationship of sentiment to natural phenomena and created moral abstractions out of this objectification which he called Vital Beauty. Downing defined Relative Beauty thus: "Relative Beauty, in architecture, is the expression of elevated and refined ideas of man's life. In this art, its first and most powerful expressions are those of his public life, or his religious and intellectual nature." This, said Downing, was expressed in civil architecture. "Its secondary expression is confined to the manifestation of his social and moral feelings."45 And this carried Downing into a discussion of his particular field of interest. It is not to our purpose here to discuss at length Downing's ideas about domestic architecture, but his definition of the field bears quoting. It summarized the direction in which his thinking was moving, assisted by his reading of Ruskin. "Domestic architecture," he stated, "ought to be significant of the whole private

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life of man—his intelligence, his feelings, and his enjoyments . . . man's dwelling, in its most complete form, may be regarded as the type of his whole private life." Like Thoreau in Walden, and unlike Greenough, Downing in his functionalist theory was becoming more symbolic than plastic, more concerned with the emotional, intellectual, and moral needs than with the organization of shapes and spaces, the handling of which he left increasingly to his architectural associates like Alexander Jackson Davis and later Calvert Vaux. As Vaux himself pointed out, in a tribute to his late friend and partner, the keynote of Downing's teaching was the unity of the aesthetic and the moral, that indeed for Downing "his artistic perceptions were chiefly valued by him as handmaids to his higher and diviner views of life and beauty."49 Downing's changing conception of beauty is of great importance not only for an understanding of his own career but as an index of the crucial change that was taking place in English and American ideas about art. It has often been noted that the picturesque tradition and associationist theory represent a moment of balance in the history of critical theory between the empirical visual standards and comprehensive world view which characterized the neoclassic, and the radical split between matter and spirit and between the self and the world which characterized the romantic state of mind.47 When Burke attempted to differentiate and separate finally the aesthetic experience of beauty or sublimity from moral considerations, Alison and the non-Burkian theorists rushed to the defense of the older harmonies. Alison added to his Nature and Principles of Taste a concluding chapter "Of the Final Cause of this Constitution of our Nature," which combined the new romantic vocabulary of the ultimate dependence of the individual perception on the heart and soul with an attempt to root men's associations firmly in the perception of the divine plan. The non-Burkian picturesque theorists, and Downing after them, insisted, for their part, that their categories were neither dependent upon the whim of individual perception nor

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amoral, though the direction of moral reference tended to be vague and general. But by the fourth edition of Landscape Gardening, Downing had redefined the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque until they were not so much visual categories as visual embodiments of moral and metaphysical abstractions. When he said that in the picturesque "matter and spirit . . . appear to struggle for the full expression of their character with the material form" or that the picturesque is "a struggling of the idea with the substance or the condition of its being," 48 he sounds suspiciously transcendental, though he was trying desperately to frame his views within the terms of the older epistemology. The Lockian vocabulary was being strained beyond its limits: it could no longer accommodate the newer vision, and Ruskin, among the theorists of art, was bringing about its demise by urging his readers to give up both Alisonian associationism and the neat categories of the beautiful, sublime, and picturesque for a romantic typology of truth to nature as the highest and most precise expression of allegiance to the Divinity. Literary theory in America by 1850 had long since left behind the picturesque point of view of Washington Irving and the elder Richard Henry Dana, though it was still perpetuated in travel literature and innumerable gift books. The development of Downing's thought indicates that the picturesque ideal was giving way in American art theory as well. Downing's conversion from the picturesque aesthetic to the Ruskinian version of romantic metaphysics and epistemology was far from clear cut, and since he died tragically young, it is impossible to gauge whether he would have gone farther along this path. In this respect he is a transitional figure. Yet the implications of his statement about domestic architecture symbolizing the whole private life of man were prophetic: the criterion by which art was to be judged would be less the satisfaction of the visual sense than a moral conception of what man's life ought to

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be. By the end of his short career, Downing had implicitly accepted Ruskin's "startling" proposition that "no man can be an architect, who is not a metaphysician." Franklin Dexter and the North American Review to the contrary notwithstanding, Downing was now convinced that the perceiver was concerned with questions of philosophical essences, not merely with a common sense world of appearances. The development of Downing's aesthetic thus parallels the shift we have noted earlier in Ruskin's development from the first unpublished defense of Turner to "The Poetry of Architecture" to the first two volumes of Modern Painters. It was a shift from abstract visual criteria and a dependence upon associationism to quasi-theological abstractions, and Ruskin had been at least to some extent Downing's guide along the new paths. If Franklin Dexter's review in the North American indicates that among the small group of Americans who were knowledgeable about matters of art there could be a fairly coherent opposition to the principles of Ruskin, as they began to make themselves heard on this side of the Atlantic, the case of Downing indicates that some Americans were prepared to be receptive to those principles.

III ^

THE PROBLEM OF GOTHIC (1848-1859)

in the nineteenth century has always been a troublesome problem, to the intellectual historian especially; for the intellectual historian is concerned primarily with the reasons why men chose the modes of building they did and not with the description or cataloguing of the variety of these modes, more with the justification which the period offered for its architecture and less with the actual buildings themselves. The historian of architectural forms can always compare the building of the nineteenth century to earlier modes, and label the new building Classical Revival, Gothic Revival, Renaissance Revival, or even Romanesque, Rundbogensttl, Moorish, or "Oriental" Revival. If a building fits none of these categories, there is always the last resort of "Eclecticism." To the historian of ideas, all of these terms beg the fundamental question of how the nineteenth-century man related himself to these earlier historical modes, or why he picked eclectically from the past. T H E UNDERSTANDING O F ARCHITECTURAL S T Y L E

The American historian must consider an additional factor. Insofar as architectural style is a reflection of a country's history, the native architectural heritage of the United States is a short one indeed. With the exception of the Spanish (which is outside the mainstream of American architecture), the vernacular, a few

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scattered examples of Gothic like St. Luke's, Smithfield, Virginia, and some Dutch and Flemish buildings in the New York area, American architectural history begins with the Palladian or Georgian style. Though the colonies were founded during the Renaissance, colonial American architecture was never really touched by the High Renaissance, and the Gothic was entirely out of the American range of experience. 1 This fact becomes of central importance when we consider the ambivalent attitude of Americans toward history in the nineteenth century: their stress on American uniqueness at the same time that they were trying to relate themselves to the mainstream of Western tradition. Architects and critics of this period seemed little inclined to exploit their own colonial past, vernacular or Georgian. In an editorial in the Horticulturist in 1850, Downing wrote: "No one pretends that we have, as yet . . . a national architecture . . . unless our Yankee clapboard house be taken as a specimen." It is clear from the context that Downing did not consider the Yankee vernacular as a national "style" in the sense that he understood that term. It would be years before Americans would rediscover their own vernacular architecture and search for the native roots of an American style. Downing's writings clearly indicate that many Americans were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the Classical Revival as it had been developed here. For Downing's generation, the Classical Revival no longer carried the particular national association of Greek democracy with the United States which it had had for the followers of Thomas Jefferson.2 At the end of his career, when speaking of the architecture of the country villa, Downing went even further in his condemnation of historical associations. His conception of the villa was based upon the English country house, passed down by noble families through primogeniture. Yet given the nature of American society, to look back to this example would be "only a delusion to us. It belongs to the past, so far as we are concerned. It is no more to be re-animated in the republic of the new world

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than the simple faith in the Virgin, which built the mighty cathedrals of the middle ages. It could only be re-animated at the sacrifice of the happiness of millions of free citizens." Downing seemed to have had no particular desire to create any new, specifically American style in architecture. A glance at the plates of his books indicates that he used a variety of styles, with some adaptation of the Gothic predominating. Yet how was the Gothic to be justified? His historical sense told him that the Gothic cathedrals were built on the unity of art and public sentiment in the Middle Ages. Franklin Dexter had noted the same unity two years earlier. The fact that "it was to faith that Christian art owed its glory" led Dexter to the question: "In what has this generation faith?" Americans' sense of history militated against the use of the Gothic at the same time that, for other reasons, they wanted to use Gothic forms. The problem for the historian of ideas is to explain how nineteenth-century Americans could relate Catholic Gothic art to Protestant republican America. In the unraveling of this critical dilemma the works of John Ruskin played an important part.3 By 1849, the year that Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture appeared, a taste for the art of the Middle Ages was being encouraged in America on two grounds: first, it appealed to certain generally shared assumptions of the romantic imagination; second, it had a specific, limited—but important—historical appeal. Though the Gothic mode of building had never completely died in England, it gained new impetus in the late eighteenth century as one expression of the challenge to the dominant Renaissance and neoclassical ideas of harmony and order. With their emphasis on the pictorial and quaintly associational values of Gothic, the writings of English Gothicists like Horace Walpole and Batty Langley helped to foster this taste, as did the writers on the picturesque, who emphasized the values of irregularity, chiaroscuro, and architectural fancy, qualities which they found more prevalent in the Gothic than in the classical tradition. On the other hand, the taste for Gothic was also fed by the

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popularity during this period of Longinus' essay On the Sublime. The man consumed by a ruling passion, the overwhelming and terrible beauty of the Alps, the strange beauty of a dimly lit Gothic cathedral which seemed to reach heavenward, not through following the rules of Renaissance architecture, but by communicating to the perceiver an ecstatic perception, an almost mystical vision of the relation of heaven and earth—all of these seemed to the eighteenth-century man "sublime." He used the category with caution, though, for it was dangerous. It seemed to comprehend overwhelming power which the man of reason could not bring under control. Since the sublime could not be contained within the rational rules of beauty, it could be perceived only by the individual, and thus encouraged idiosyncratic judgment. It was in this sense that the increasing concern with the sublime was indicative of the breakdown of the neoclassical aesthetic. By the mid-nineteenth century the primary reliance upon such individual judgment rather than upon the traditional norms of "taste" had become a commonplace in literary criticism, if not yet in art criticism, and some version of the Gothic revival architecture which seemed to express the newer values was to be seen in everything from Downing's cottages to the new houses of Parliament. The enormous popularity of Sir Walter Scott's romances was surely another element in the development of a taste for Gothic, though this has perhaps been overemphasized. Finally, and perhaps most important in America, there was the link which the romantic imagination forged between the Gothic and nature. Many romantic writers felt that Gothic art was another assertion of the values of nature, the wild, and even the savage against those of civilization. The young Goethe in his well-known paean to Strasbourg Cathedral, the brothers Schlegel, and Americans like Ralph Waldo Emerson had linked the Gothic with nature. The very name "Gothic," which had been used as a term of opprobrium by Renaissance writers to stigmatize that art which failed to conform to classical standards, conveyed to the romantic

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imagination a praiseworthy savage origin. If Emerson's American Scholar was to come out of "unhandselled savage nature," perhaps his proper chrysalis was Gothic, of the Hudson River bracketed if not the Strasbourg variety.4 Yet as this suggests, there were problems involved in the romantics' love of Gothic, for Gothic did have historic roots in a mediaeval society which was both feudal and Catholic. For the Schlegels in Germany the path from romantic glorification of Gothic led back into the Catholic Church. But for most Americans this was clearly impossible, for our Protestant tradition was strongly anti-Catholic. From the seventeenth century on, most Americans had had an often violent hatred of anything that smacked of "Popery." In the 1840's and 1850's anti-Catholic sentiment was especially strong, as the Charlestown convent fire, anti-Irish feeling, and the nativist movement will call to mind. The American Catholic Church had too many other problems during this period to be particularly worried about protecting Gothic architecture as its historical heritage. In the absence of the Catholics, another small but influential group in the United States stepped into the breach. The Episcopalians provide us with an American analogue to the Schlegels in Germany. Separated from the Anglican Church by the Revolutionary War, they still maintained close ties with the mother Church, and it was not long before the first excitement of the Oxford movement crossed the water. 5 Among the American High-Church Episcopalians was a young man named George Templeton Strong (1820-1875), later a prominent vestryman in the church as well as lawyer, member of New York's social and cultural elite, United States Sanitary Commissioner during the Civil War, and, most important from the historian's perspective, the author of a rich and perceptive diary spanning the middle years of nineteenth-century New York. As a student at Columbia College, Strong had been impressed by a commencement speech on the influence of the Gothic race. He was elated by his first reading of the tracts of

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Keble, Pusey, and Newman, and shortly thereafter acknowledged his preference for Gothic over Greek. At the outset this was a romantic taste for "the barbarous black letter legends of those rude times." Soon he began to feel that an interest in Gothic was salutary, for it might lead one to an interest in the religious feelings and ideas behind the architectural forms. He and other Episcopalians began to follow the activities of the Cambridge Camden Society and the Oxford Ecclesiological Society, organizations that had been set up to encourage stricter ritual practices in the Church and to enforce the use of "proper" architectural forms to implement such practice. Their rules prescribed an archaeological adherence to the English Decorated Gothic, which they called "Middle-Pointed," as the correct architectural style; for it seemed to them to be the pure style of the English Church.6 American High-Church Episcopalians looked on approvingly, and in 1848 they organized their own group with similar goals, the New-York Ecclesiological Society. The first number of the society's journal, The Netv-York Ecclesiologist, appeared in October of that year, with pronouncements on the "incorrectness" of certain new churches. The editors took the builders of Trinity Church, New York, to task: "The style of this church is ThirdPointed or Perpendicular, against which we feel bound to protest; it is a style in which we find many symptoms of decline, and therefore not the one to be adopted in the present revival of Christian architecture." The plaster vaults, marked as stone, destroyed "the very basis of Christian architecture—truth and reality."7 Each of these statements contained an important criterion. The first referred to architecture in terms of rise and decline. As the Ecclesiologist used these terms they were not, strictly speaking, historical; they were analogical. The second statement referred to "truth and reality," the norms by which Ruskin was already judging painting and which he would apply to architecture one year later. The Ecclesiologist felt that the Gothic was its own particular

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province because it was historically linked to the Catholic Church. Anglicans and American Episcopalians claimed that they were the true inheritors of this tradition, purged of its Romanist "errors." An outraged cry went up in response to the Ecclesiologist from an architect in the Literary World who denied the exclusive claim of any Christian sect "to the invention, perfection, or sole right to use Gothic Architecture in its temples."8 Certainly the ecclesiologists in America did have history on their side. "Unitarian Gothic" was an historical contradiction, and traditionally, American evangelicalism was staunchly opposed to ritual and Romanism; though Richard Upjohn, a HighChurch Episcopalian, did ruffle tempers when he refused to design a Gothic church for a Boston Unitarian congregation because their doctrine was not properly suited to the use of Gothic. Yet even the Episcopalians could not present a united front, for the Low-Church wing was as solidly opposed to ecclesiology as were other American sects. The defection of the New York society's president Rev. John Murray Forbes and others to the Catholic Church seemed to confirm Low-Church suspicion of the Romeward direction of the American movement, as Newman's conversion had in England. If one excepted the Roman Catholic Church itself, the claims of the ecclesiologists to their historical inheritance were difficult to deny. Clearly, if Gothic was to be established as the style for all Christians, the specifically Catholic historical roots would have to be torn up, or at least hidden. If it was to be used with good conscience in America, Gothic had to be wrested from the Romanists and their fellow travelers by nonhistorical arguments. This the writer in the Literary World attempted to do, by saying that Gothic was the crystallization into form of the emotions, that it was the expression of the spirit of love, the dominance of the religious principle —in short, by appealing to certain general religious principles against the historical claims of the ecclesiologists.9 Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) appeared in the

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context of this discussion, and its reception highlights the way in which Gothic was domesticated in America. Modem Painters was attracting the attention of American readers, but the discussion of the book, like the volumes themselves, stretched out over years. Furthermore, Modern Painters was sui generis, and it was not immediately apparent who its audience was to be. Yet Wiley and Putnam evidently sensed the growing popularity of Ruskin, for The Seven Lamps was published almost simultaneously in England and America.10 The book was reviewed immediately and attracted considerable attention. It was, at least superficially, a book on architecture, by far the most popular of the fine arts in the United States. Americans had read English discussions as well as native ones, perused Britton's Antiquities as well as Downing's design books. Some had even read the books by the English Gothicist, A. W. N. Pugin. However, volumes like Pugin's Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843) were bound to have only a limited appeal, for the author demanded that his readers accept the Church of Rome along with his Gothic forms. Unlike Ruskin, Pugin was a practicing architect. His greatest talent as a practitioner was for creating decorative forms rather than complete buildings, but his significance is probably best measured by his theoretical contributions, many of which anticipate Ruskin. Most notable, perhaps, was his attack on the crassness of the nineteenth century when compared with the Middle Ages, so graphically portrayed in the beautiful plates of his Contrasts: or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (London, 1836). Although his books were known to American architects, they were not reprinted in the United States as Ruskin's were. As with Ruskin, Pugin's architectural ideas were closely related to his religious beliefs, but since he was one of that menacing group of Catholic converts—and the fact that the impetus behind his conversion seems to have been architectural rather than theological could

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only make matters worse in Protestant America—one suspects that his religious views cost him the leadership of the Gothic revival in America as in England. Ruskin's Protestant restatement and development of these architectural ideas thus gained the popular hearing Pugin had forfeited. 11 Thus Ruskin was more acceptable to the majority of Americans, for he addressed himself to the problems with which Americans were concerned and considerably advanced the discussion. The Seven Lamps, like "The Poetry of Architecture" before it, opened with the usual distinction between architecture and the materialistic concerns of building. 12 Unlike the familiar American builders' manuals, the new book treated architecture in terms of seven abstract categories or "lamps": Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience. Though Ruskin pinpointed his discussion with some shrewd observations on particular mediaeval buildings, the very organization of the book indicates that his method was abstract and moral rather than technical or historical. In the years immediately following, he continued his discussion of architecture in greater detail in the three volumes of The Stones of Venice. The first volume, which was published in England and America in 1851, dealt with the elements of architecture from foundation to cornice; the second and third volumes, published in England in 1853 but not until i860 in America, 13 sketched the historical change in architectural style in the island republic from its origins in the Byzantine to its final manifestation in the Baroque, which Ruskin called "degenerate Renaissance." But despite the prolonged discussion of architectural elements, Ruskin never really understood, nor cared to understand, architecture as an organization of shapes and spaces. His concern, like that of Pugin before him, was primarily with sculptural decoration and with the moral implications of style. For Ruskin the history of Venetian architecture was not one of change but of rise, culmination in the Gothic, and fall and degeneration in the Renaissance. In The Stones of Venice as well as in The

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Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin's stylistic standard was Gothic. In The Seven Lamps, Gothic was a fixed point by which to judge the nineteenth century; in The Stones of Venice it was the high point of historical development. In both, Gothic was primarily a complex of values, abstract moral principles relating to God and, especially in the famous chapter on "The Nature of Gothic" in volume two, to the social context of architecture. Ruskin's moral view of Gothic was Christian but not Catholic. In fact, denunciations of the Roman Church, of Pugin, and of the venal influence of Catholicism were scattered throughout these books.14 He was at this stage in his career as evangelical in his approach as any American could desire, and his architectural books were therefore of particular use to Americans. His praise of Gothic came at a high point in the American interest in the style. Unlike the ecclesiologists, Ruskin did not justify Gothic on historical grounds. His books confirmed American anti-Catholic prejudices at the same time that the general moral criteria he employed had a positive appeal to American Protestants. He corrected the romantic misapprehension that Gothic was derived from the forms of nature,15 but at the same time he judged the created art of the Gothic by reference to the forms of nature, reinforcing the American tendency toward nonhistorical artistic judgment. The New-York Ecclesiologist in 1850 accused Ruskin of confusing the art of architecture with the science of architecture. To the Ecclesiologist it was the system of building of the English Decorated that was viable, not the specific decorative forms.16 The tendency of Ruskin's architectural writings, however, was to play down questions of building and to speak in elevated terms about art. Reviews of The Seven Lamps began to appear as soon as the book was published. The Literary World excerpted long passages and praised the work highly in July of 1849, and its sentiments were echoed by the Eclectic Magazine, Holden's Dollar Magazine, and the Knickerbocker (which was still worried about the slow growth of American interest in art). 17 Wide popular atten-

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tion from the prospective art audience in America was assured when the book was reviewed at length by W. J. Hoppin in the Bulletin of the thriving American Art-Union. The Art-Union had reached its peak in 1849, with a membership of almost 19,000 and an estimated attendance at its gallery in New York of some 750,000. The Bulletin was sent automatically to the 625 "honorary secretaries," who solicited memberships in their local communities. Since this group was drawn from "divines, jurists, physicians, artists, merchants, men of letters"—the men in the community who were most likely to influence taste—it represents an important nucleus. In addition, the Bulletin was available on request, free to members and at six cents to nonmembers, by mail and at the gallery. (The aggregate of all the nine numbers of the Bulletin distributed in 1849 was 170,000.) In his review, Hoppin, who was at the time editor of the Bulletin, discussed and quoted from each of the seven "lamps." He ended by praising Ruskin most highly for his discussion of first principles. The subject of the Fine Arts is too often treated in a mean and trifling manner. Their connection with morals and religion, and the great interests of society is forgotten, and all inquiries concerning them limited to the investigation of their mechanical processes or their powers to tickle the senses. Let us honor, therefore, a writer who despises these grovelling views, and, in earnest and manly language, shows the relation between the exercise of the Arts and our most sacred duties, and most solemn aspirations. Ruskin seemed to have taken the discussion of architecture out of the hands of technicians or aesthetes and made it a moral concern of all men.18 Samuel Gilman Brown, the conservative Congregationalist minister and educator, was the reviewer for the North American Review. The North American was still concerned about "certain unaccountable heresies in the 'Modern Painters'" and was unwilling to concede too much to the dangerous Mr. Ruskin. For

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Brown, architecture was the "spontaneous product of a cultivated mind." He cautioned his readers about Ruskin's use of nature but conceded that the book's real importance was not technical but in "the refining and elevating influence it must exercise upon the public taste," especially in this young country. The minister carefully pointed out to his readers that the relationship between art and religion was not reciprocal. "Religion may not need the arts, but the arts need the exalting influence of religion." Whether his warning would be heeded only time would tell. 19 It was the lesson of "The Lamp of Memory" that disturbed Brown most. In this chapter Ruskin had emphasized, much as Downing had done, that associations with the home were an important moral principle of domestic architecture. Brown was concerned about the lack of such human associations, with all their conservative force, in a virgin land like the United States. The reviewer in the New Englander used the same point to sermonize Americans about their excessive mobility. The problem of architecture was, he agreed, moral and social. He urged Americans to use their "houses as homes instead of mere conveniences for eating and sleeping while engaged in the great work of making money." Americans were too involved in the present. It was thus that Ruskin's "Lamp of Memory" could serve a useful purpose here.20 The Southern Quarterly Review joined the New Englander in deploring the spread of the Greek Revival in America. T o both reviewers Ruskin's book seemed a healthy antidote to contemporary fashion in architecture. Yet Gothic to the southern journal did not mean a return to the past. It was "the architecture of occasion"—not a slavish imitation of a previous style but an architecture which arose from human needs. The lesson of Gothic as Ruskin preached it could be read in functionalist terms. The main point of instruction for Americans which the Southern Quarterly reviewer drew from Ruskin's architectural writings was that we should make "utility the first, and ornament the second object in building." 21

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Clearly, to Ruskin himself the meaning of Gothic did not lie in its supposed utilitarian building forms but in the peculiar conjunction of use with beauty and with social and spiritual purpose. As such, Gothic was a way of attacking the materialism and industrialism of the nineteenth century. It was on this point that the Massachusetts Quarterly Review took issue with Ruskin. Healthy criticism of the present was good (the Quarterly was engaged in such criticism itself), but one could not deny the present and retreat into a mediaeval past. The present needed railroads and mills, and perhaps "the ends attained by the noble architecture of antiquity are now attained in some other way." The reviewer did not deny Ruskin's claim that the artist should be religious, but need the architectural expression be Gothic? "We have better ways of expressing it." The review ended by recalling Ruskin to the present: "If there be any thing more foolish than mourning over what is dead, it is the attempt to revive it."22 The Christian Examiner, which had briefly noted the appearance of The Seven Lamps in 1849, returned to consider it in 1850 and criticized Boston buildings, with Ruskin as the yardstick. T. C. Clarke, the reviewer, acknowledged Ruskin's claim that Gothic was a beautiful style, but again raised the question of whether it was applicable to Protestants. The way out of this dilemma was, "instead of imitating minsters, and attempting to breathe life into the dry bones of a bygone age . . . to produce a new style which shall be modern and American."23 Although such a challenge appealed to the national aspiration of most Americans whose orientation was toward the future rather than the past, it was more easily issued than accepted; architects themselves were divided on the issue. Typical of this dilemma was the controversy that arose among members of the newly formed American Institute of Architects over the architectural potentialities of new materials. It began with a paper entitled "Cast Iron in Decorative Architecture" read before the Institute on 7 December 1858 by Henry Van Brunt, who was

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twenty-eight at the time and at the outset of his long career as architect and critic. Van Brunt was then in the famous atelier of Richard Morris Hunt in New York, and his interest in cast iron might well have stemmed from Hunt's teaching; for Hunt had worked with Henri Labrouste on the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, one of the finest early examples of the use of cast iron in architecture. Later, with William Ware, whom he had known in Hunt's atelier, Van Brunt employed cast iron in the new stacks of the Harvard College Library. Another obvious source of Van Brunt's interest in cast iron was the development of the office building on which builders like Thomas Bogardus were working at this time. Ruskin was indifferent to the first use of cast iron and openly hostile to the second.24 Van Brunt's paper opened with a condemnation of fossil architecture and asked if contemporary architecture was representative of the age. He questioned Ruskin's dictum that architecture should express "Sacrifice"—expenditure of energy and means over and above the merely utilitarian needs of a building through the workman's sheer love of his work—and said that this approach was out of touch with nineteenth-century life, where the ideal worker was the mechanic not the handicraftsman, where labor was a means and not an end, and where industrialization had made labor systematic and not the product of individual effort. "The principle of the 'Liberty of the Workman' no more belongs to our age than feudality. However lovely it may be with all its poetic and romantic associations in cathedral architecture, it is of another age, and we cannot and should not hope to revive it . . . Our new conditions demand new standards and new principles."25 Van Brunt attacked Ruskin on the grounds that his idea would make architecture a concern only of the wealthy. "Sacrifice," which implied costliness, would emphasize difference of social class, and architecture would become only a means of ostentation (what Thorstein Veblen would later label "conspicuous consumption," a "pecuniary canon of taste").26 At the end of his

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paper Van Brunt temporized somewhat, indicating to his fellow architects that what he said did not imply that they should begin all over again. Even though iron made possible lighter ground stories in building, one should not carry the abandonment of the old ideas about foundations too far. 27 Yet the revolutionary implications of the paper remained. At the next meeting, the successful Gothicist Leopold Eidlitz rose to the defense of Ruskin and the old principles against the attack of this newcomer to the profession. After discussing the real structural problems involved in the use of iron, Eidlitz went to the heart of the matter by invoking Ruskin against what he felt to be Van Brunt's materialistic view of the role of the worker and his relation to modern science. He could not deny the truth of Van Brunt's description of the facts of modern society any more than Ruskin could, but like Ruskin, he could deplore this situation and condemn the utilitarian definition of architecture as fitness for purpose: "I have always supposed that it is the high calling of the artist and of the architect, first and foremost, not to inquire what is expected of him and of his structures, but to decide for himself what ought to be their expression . . ." This alone might have been merely Eidlitz' professional pride, but he went on in the sentence thus: " . . . in order to possess the moral effect they should exercise upon the spectator . . . Every object in art must, to answer its purpose like objects of nature, possess its emotional and refining influences, and wherever they are lost, it forms a void on the face of God's creation which cannot possibly be compensated for in any other manner." Van Brunt's sin, in the eyes of this reader of Ruskin, was his failure to make the ideal, which was the reflection of God in the natural and moral world, govern his building. "Fitness for purpose" catered too much to the age's materialism; it did not elevate the individual or give him a nobler conception of social and moral responsibility. The debate closed with Richard Morris Hunt weakly defending Van Brunt. Despite what Hunt had learned about the new materials from Henri Labrouste, he was fast becoming an archi-

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tectural revivalist himself. In the years that immediately followed, Buskin's "architecture" would reign in conception, if not always in form; cast iron would be reserved primarily for filigree and for "building." 28 The architectural debate of 1859 continued well on into the post-Civil War era. New building needs (like the railroad station), new economic and social conditions (like the availability of a large, cheap, unskilled and semiskilled urban labor force and a concomitant decreasing number of skilled workers), and new materials (like iron and steel alloys or reinforced concrete) were opening up exciting vistas for American building, but most architects still were unwilling to capitulate completely to technology, and sought in the past for architectural models to satisfy their imaginative needs. At its worst the result was an eclecticism which sprinkled historical details over new buildings. Yet what Eidlitz had been calling for when he invoked Ruskinian principles was not gingerbread Gothic eclecticism—Ruskin himself later deplored that effect of his writings—but a coherent aesthetic that related the present to the past in terms of first principles. Carl Condit has suggested that the failure of eclecticism in the nineteenth century was in large part "its failure to achieve a stable system of values that could retain the inheritance of the past without doing violence to the achievements of the present." If Ruskin failed to understand sufficiently the potentialities of new materials, Eidlitz did not, and the Ruskinians at least presented a coherent view of the relation of art to aesthetic and social ideals, a view which was much more deeply humanistic in its premises than that of some of its nineteenth- and twentiethcentury functionalist detractors.29 What is important at this point, however, is how rapidly Ruskinian principles had permeated the architectural discussion of 1859, within a decade of the publication of Ruskin's books. Some critics and architects might complain that the Gothic was anachronistic as a style in the nineteenth century, that it ignored new materials and the conditions of American life. George Templeton

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Strong, who read The Seven Lamps as soon as it was published, registered his approval and communicated to the privacy of his diary his love of Gothic, but in the next breath he turned to berate himself and other cultivated men who devoted their time to such interests when the crying need of men was the relief of poverty. Yet Ruskin could answer the attacks of both the critics who felt that Gothic was inadequate to contemporary needs and those who were conscience-stricken about their love of Gothic. He rephrased the problem of Gothic by defining the Gothic style as the expression of a well-functioning religious society where the worker believed in what he was creating and enjoyed his work. Those, like Strong, who feared that the love of Gothic was a form of aestheticism, Ruskin reassured in "The Nature of Gothic," which indicated how beauty of architectural style was related to the health of the society in which it was found.30 By appealing to the ideals of men, Ruskin subordinated architectural questions to moral ones and thus broadened the base of the interest in art. Even if certain architects remained unconvinced, Ruskin helped to convince the majority of Americans, who basically cared little about the relative merits of cast iron versus Quincy granite or Gothic versus Greek, that architectural questions had an important bearing on their moral life. Clarence Cook, some of whose first critical essays had been tributes to the genius of his aesthetic instructor Andrew Jackson Downing (to whom he was related by marriage), passed from Downing to Ruskin in his 1855 appraisal of the architecture of New York. His article in the New York Quarterly contained a long, lyric paean to Ruskin, "the mystic lamp-lighter," whose Seven Lamps had done so much to illuminate architectural criticism, to take it out of the hands of dry and cold neoclassicists, and to center it in the love of nature and of God. Ruskin's weakness, in the eyes of this new but later powerful disciple, was in not defining the boundary lines of the Good and True and Beautiful with sufficient care. In seeing architectural deformity as a necessary corollary of moral depravity, "he assumes for an essential what is only an acci-

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dental." The Massachusetts Quarterly Review in 1849 had gone even further than Cook was prepared to go when it remonstrated against Ruskin s confusion of the laws governing art with the life of the artist, and said that the artist's moral life was different from his life as an artist, that " a r t . . . has nothing to do with Morals," but despite these demurrers the Graduate of Oxford was teaching the public otherwise. 31 The discussion of the dependence of art upon morality had been a crucial element in Modern Painters, and Ruskin's contribution to the debate over the meaning of Gothic in America was a particular application of the relationship of art to morality. The acceptance of his formulations of the problem of Gothic indicates how susceptible Americans were to one who would look at the problems of art from a moral, nonhistorical point of view. Once this view had been elaborated, it was applied to questions of religious art in general. Arguments that Ruskin had used in terms of Gothic were applied by others, often without direct reference to Ruskin, to the field of mediaeval painting, with which Americans were for the first time really becoming acquainted. The best example of this change in attitude can be seen among the American ecclesiologists. Even The New-York Ecclesiologist, which differed from Ruskin in its High-Church parochialism, bowed to his authority in its discussion of the artist's ideas of beauty: "That right emotion, true feeling and lofty thought, are all included in 'ideas of beauty,' is fully taught in Mod[ern] Painters, Vol. II." As this article indicates, even the Ecclesiologist was losing its parochial tone. The exclusiveness of English ecclesiology was proving a hindrance in America to some members of the society. "The Church" may have been synonymous with "The Establishment" in England, but in America the Episcopalians exercised no such domination over religious life. To mention that John Ruskin, from whose Stones of Venice the American ecclesiologists were quoting in 1853, was a Presbyterian, might make him suspect in England, where differences among High-Church, Low-Church, and Dissenters were important, in terms of class

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and religion. In sectarian America the epithet did not brand him in any distinctive way. 32 The American ecclesiologists were forced, in this sense, to broaden their appeal. The ardent nationalist George Duyckinck addressed his fellow members of the society on the subject of "Originality in Church Architecture." He wanted American architecture to be distinctively American: American plants in carved foliage, American symbolism, and so forth. Though a faithful Episcopalian all his life, Duyckinck felt that the goals of "Young America," that nationalist upsurge in New York of the 1840's and 1850's, were more compelling than the parochial appeal of ecclesiology.33 The ecclesiologists aspired to address a wider American audience. Morgan Dix, later rector of Trinity Church, pleaded eloquently in the early 1850's for the use of the fine arts in churches. An address which he delivered in 1855 indicates clearly that the new view of the Middle Ages for which Ruskin was arguing so passionately had important implications for Americans far beyond the limits of architecture alone. A debt is contracted, by every intelligent tourist, to those illustrious men, the CHRISTIAN painters, properly so called, the lights of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, who by the simplicity and purity of their conceptions and handling, rebuke the show and sensuality of later days and give us even now . . . unequalled specimens and models of sincere Devotional representation . . . The question is everyday presented more directly to the thoughtful of all creeds and opinions:—Ought Art, in the religious point of view, to be any longer regarded as a kind of forbidden fruit, of which men may not gather for the Lord's house? The answer to this question was obvious. Dix had rephrased the ecclesiological interpretation of the Middle Ages to make it appeal to all Christians and not just to his fellow High-Churchmen. He warned those Low-Church Episcopalians who opposed eccle-

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siology that if they continued in their objection, they would soon be left behind by "the denominations." As proof of this general change in sentiment toward religious art, he cited the Methodist National Magazine, which was warning its brethren that "a religion that renounces the beautiful, and true and tasteful in Nature and Art, is either mere affectation, or will one day drive its votaries to the hermit's cell or the monastery. True Religion, instead of making war upon Art and Science, is destined to promote and sanctify both and to make them tributary to her own advancement and the Glory of GOD."34 The point should be clear. The ministry was not only beginning to accept the interest in art but was beginning to want to claim art as its own particular province. The confident assertion of the Congregationalist minister Brown in 1851, that "religion may not need the arts, but the arts need the exalting influence of religion," was already being called into question by an Episcopalian echoing the implicit assumption of a Methodist: that religion needed art—moral, Christian art—if it was to continue to attract its congregations in the future. The Rev. George F. Magoun of Davenport, Iowa, was very leary of heavy expenditures for church architecture, but he still enthusiastically endorsed Ruskin in principle.35 Only the extreme sects had ever objected to landscape and portraiture, but now appreciation of even the graven images of mediaeval art was receiving the sanction and the encouragement of some of the ministry. Religious art of the Middle Ages had been drained of its specifically Catholic meaning. Mediaeval art was beginning to become known in America through books on art by Englishmen like Ruskin, Lord Lindsay, and Mrs. Jameson, Frenchmen like Rio and Montalembert, and Germans like Wackenroder and A. W. Schlegel, to mention only a few, as well as through the travel sketches of the increasing number of Americans who were making the grand tour of Europe. In 1855 Ruskin's disciple James Jackson Jarves would write the first book of art criticism by an American, devoting much of his discussion to trecento and quattrocento Italian painters. Shortly thereafter,

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Jarves sent to America the first large collection of painting by these artists to be seen in this country. Instead of raising the old cry of "Popery" when faced with Madonnas and Crucifixions, the American religious community was prepared morally, if not visually, to receive such works. The ministry was becoming increasingly anxious to make art the handmaid of faith. In part, such art was a cultural novelty which no longer seemed to bear the stigma of Catholicism; but there were also more impelling reasons why the conjunction of art and morality seemed valuable to the ministry and religious laymen, as the American reception of Rusldn's other volumes of the 1850s was making increasingly clear.

IV

ART, NATURE, AND RELIGION: THE RECEPTION OF RUSKIN (1851-1861)

1853 A L E X A N D E R MONTGOMERY began to publish in New York an American edition of the Illustrated Magazine of Art: Containing Selections from the Various Departments of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, History, Biography, Art-Industry, Manufactures, Scientific Inventions and Discoveries, Local and Domestic Scenes, Ornamental Works, etc. etc. As the title indicates, the journal was a potpourri of everything from discussions of "Eminent Masters" and the Pre-Raphaelites to New Zealand birds and animal magnetism, liberally sprinkled with line drawings of Powers' nudes, poor copies of Diirer woodcuts, engravings of the various processes involved in pencil-making, and muddy reproductions of landscape scenes. Though a far cry from the lavish twentieth-century magazines, it was another indication of the growing American audience for art. Almost buried beneath the clutter were articles berating Americans for delaying the progress of art. To the argument that "the circumstances of a new country are unfavourable to art," the journal retorted, "there is point in this remark only to the savage. A country cannot be long new, in the strict sense of the term, to a people armed with machinery. The artizan soon makes a pathway I N EARLY

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for the artist." The writer called for the birth of a new art in the United States, a "school of sentiment," nobler and freer than the art of the Old World: It will arise out of the warmth and repose that mark the style of some of our artists; and, unless marred in its early state by some illusive form of pantheism, or a deceptive sentiment that leads the artist himself to mistake the sense of beauty for the presence and recognition of a personal God, may prosperously attain its goal, and claim the noble palm. Religious faith is an essential element of true art. That the development of art was intimately involved with the religious faith of Americans was becoming a commonplace. True art, the Rev. Samuel Osgood told the American Art-Union in 1851, is the ally of religion. His address ended with the apothegm: "Art, the Interpreter of Nature; Nature, the Interpreter of God."1 It is clear that Ruskin's writings had helped to foster this conviction. The popularity of his early books had led John Wiley to publish in 1851 even the Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, Ruskin's tirade against the High-Church movement; but this went too far, and the Literary World called it (quite correctly) a "distempered polemic."2 Ruskin's pamphlet on Pre-Baphaelitism (1851) was better received. Reviewers admitted that Americans could not criticize Ruskin's specific comments since the paintings and painters were virtually unknown in America, but actually the reviewers were less interested in paintings than in Ruskin's general ideas. The North American Review was still vainly trying to preserve the battered Reynoldsian principles, and the reviewer, T. Chase, cautioned readers that the fact that Ruskin did not feel the exigencies of the time necessitated a defense of the value of rules and tradition did not mean that he underrated their importance. Chase went on to say that the soundness of Ruskin's doctrines was for the professional to judge. "The general reader will find much to awaken his deepest interest in Mr. Ruskin's

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writings,—many views of art which commend themselves, by their intrinsic excellence, to the judgments even of those who have no technical knowledge of the subject; and many general truths and principles, which, covering a wider province than that of the artist, are universal in their application." Ruskin might have made enemies as well as friends, said Chase, but none could doubt that he had provoked a spirited discussion of the great principles of art.3 This kind of enthusiasm for "general truths and principles" of art, coupled with only lukewarm praise of or even hostility to Ruskin's presentation, was echoed in the perfunctory reviews of The Stones of Venice in the Princeton Review and the Southern Literary Messenger. The latter complained that the first volume of The Stones of Venice was too technical and would appeal to few outside the architectural profession, and that Ruskin himself was an "inoffensive monomaniac." The Princeton Presbyterian felt that Ruskin was too one-sided in praising only the Southern Gothic, though he liked the "high moral and religious tone" of Ruskin's books. 4 The Literary World, which was perhaps the most enthusiastic in its praise of Ruskin, best summed up the particular character of Ruskin's appeal to his American audience of 1851 and the service he was doing them. His writings, the editors wrote, "mark an era in Art." Whether he was the cause or only gave voice to the new tendencies was a matter of discussion. He had helped to rescue art from the domination of the old masters. The Literary World predicted that art would play an important role in the future "as one of the chief of the means by which God displays to us His glory and attributes." To this reviewer, the value of Modem Painters was that it had helped to make clear that men should not worship God in art, as the Romanists did, nor should they deny that art has no relation to Deity, as the skeptics did. Despite the errors and imperfections in Ruskin's writings, he was leading men down the straight and narrow path between Roman-

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ism and skepticism into the new age where art and religion would flourish together.5 In the mid-fifties Ruskin's reputation was growing steadily. James Jackson Jarves' Ruskinian Art-Hints appeared in 1855. In the same year the earlier effort of the Illustrated Magazine of Art was put in the shade by the Crayon, an outstanding new journal of art committed to the advancement of Ruskin's ideas in America. Ruskin's most recent works were reprinted almost simultaneously by Wiley in America. A collection including the Edinburgh address of November 1855 and other lectures was issued in England and America early in 1856 and was immediately reviewed by Putnam's and the Princeton Review. The Putnam's review opened with a hearty invitation to Ruskin to come to lecture in America. The reviewer noted that although the ideas in Ruskin's new book had all been articulated in his earlier works, he found the fresh applications and examples useful. He remarked on a certain quixotic character in Ruskin's vehement attacks which had brought down on him the wrath of Blackwood's and others not sufficiently patient to penetrate to the core of Ruskin's principles. Yet despite his reservations, the reviewer felt that Ruskin was a "great critic," whose influence would undoubtedly be felt by the next generation. He claimed that over and above Ruskin's theories of art there was also much "among his criticisms, on the moralities of life, and the religious responsibilities of our nature, to place his writings among the most remarkable and profitable that the century has produced."6 The Presbyterian Rev. William Armstrong Dod, in a long essay in the Princeton Review, was of the opposite opinion. He attacked Ruskin's criterion of truth to nature, maintaining that art was the product of men's minds, not of the imitation of nature. Furthermore, he pointed to the weakness of Ruskin's approach to architecture and suggested that the fundamental aesthetic questions in architecture were not matters of detail and ornament —with which Ruskin had been too preoccupied—but rather of

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the organization of larger masses and shapes. Dod's second point of attack is certainly a valid one, from a modern perspective, and betokens a sophistication in dealing with the aesthetics of architecture from more than a pictorial view which would stand him in good stead as an occasional lecturer on architecture at Princeton from 1855 to 1859. His attack on Ruskin's mimetic theory raises certain questions, however, especially when we find it coupled with his assertion, toward the end of the essay, that architecture is the growth of men's religious spirit. For aside from the inherent vagueness of Ruskin's criterion of truth to nature, a vagueness which others had noted and which Ruskin himself would try to repair in the third volume of Modern Painters, issued just as Dod's review appeared, one suspects that to a Princeton reviewer there was more at stake.7 The militant Calvinists who ran the review and dominated the seminary, including the redoubtable Charles Hodge, D.D., the editor and theologian, had long been vigorous opponents of an intuitive reliance upon nature as a norm. In 1839 Hodge, along with J. W. Alexander and William Armstrong Dod's brother the mathematician Albert Baldwin, had thrown himself into the transcendentalist controversy in a violent attack on Emerson, by way of Victor Cousin, French interpreter of German idealism. An intellectual community that rested upon the theology of Jonathan Edwards and the empiricism of Edwards, John Locke, and the Scottish common sense philosophers was determined to keep the boundary between nature and the supernatural clear; it was no more prepared to accept Ruskin's bare reliance upon nature as an ethical and aesthetic norm in architecture and painting than it was prepared to believe, as the "Divinity School Address" argued, that a young minister should gather his inspiration from the meteor of the snow rather than the Gospel. Thus William A. Dod in 1856 spoke on behalf of the organizing and differentiating power of the human mind over the intuitive response to nature, for those "intellectual powers," as his colleagues had earlier phrased it, "which the immortal Locke endeavored to ascertain,

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and beyond which we float in the region of midnight."8 It was better, in other words, to acknowledge human limits and rely upon orthodox religious faith than to risk the dangers of the unchecked imagination and possibly find oneself in the ghoulhaunted woodland of Weir. It is possible for us to impute such a continuity of thought between Dod's fairly explicit objections to Ruskin's theory of art and the philosophical and religious assumptions of the Princeton Calvinists because the locus of values on matters of aesthetics in America of the 1850's was fundamentally a religious one. What makes Dod's review especially interesting is the degree to which it differed from the common American view of Ruskin in the mid-fifties. Apparently Dod's unbending faith and his fear of the excesses of nature worship led him to deny to Ruskin's writing that very "religious spirit" most Americans found to be the most satisfying quality in his work. In the history of American aesthetic thought, it is the ideas of Poe rather than those of Ruskin and his disciples that were revolutionary. Poe's bold pronouncement in the 1842 review of Longfellow's "Ballads," given final form in "The Poetic Principle" (1849), that the sole arbiter of poetry, the archetypal artistic mode, was Taste—"With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relation. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth"—challenged the basic assumptions of the romantic hierarchy of aesthetic values in America. Americans might be titillated by the world of Roderick Usher, but they were fairly clear that it was wicked, as was Usher's creator, and that Usher's aesthetic (or that of the narrator in the tale) was certainly—if they understood it at all—no model for them: If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose, out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the

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contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.9 "Usher" represented one of the extremes to which men were driven once Duty and Beauty had been separated; and it was against precisely this kind of extravagance that the Princeton pundits had reacted violently: Let us have any philosophy, however shallow, that leaves us in quiet possession of the Gospel, rather than the dark and hopeless bewilderment into which we are thrown by the deep metaphysics of M. Cousin . . . In the French imitation, no less than the German original, there is a perpetual self-delusion, practiced by the philosopher, who plays with words as a child with lettered cards, and combines what ought to be the symbols of thought, into expressions unmeaning and self-contradictory.10 The Princetonians' attempt to counteract Emersonian ideas of the imagination and to avoid the amorality of the Poesque leads fairly directly to Dod's statements that art was, contrary to Ruskin's assertions, a function of the discriminating mind, not the imitation of nature, and that architecture was a growth of men's religious spirit. These debates suggest again that the reception of Ruskin's aesthetic had become one more expression of the two central conflicts within the romantic imagination in America. In its extreme form, the first was a conflict between, on the one hand, the metaphysical dualism of the Calvinists and others whose religious orthodoxy demanded that the realms of matter and spirit be kept strictly separate and, on the other, the pantheism of the transcendentalists. Most Americans lived somewhere between these extremes. They indicted as "asceticism" a religious faith that threw them upon the Gospel alone and denigrated the material world which they experienced, especially one which cut them off from nature on which, as Americans, they put so much stress; yet they were unwilling to give up traditional Christian belief altogether and identify God with nature alone,

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to try to achieve that "original relation with the Universe" which Emerson had demanded in the opening phrases of 'Nature. How to bridge the gap between matter and spirit, to avoid the consequences of a metaphysical dualism without becoming unmitigated nature worshipers was their first dilemma. The second problem was epistemological: they were unwilling to believe that the only function of the human mind was to record and rearrange sense data from the external world, for that, they believed, would condemn them to materialism and bar them from spiritual insight. On the other hand, they feared that if the mind really had the unlimited capacities that Emerson's idea of the transparent eyeball suggested, it might equally fall into the very self-delusion against which the Princeton divines had warned, create the world it saw, and arrive at nightmare, or worse, the demonism of uncontrolled subjectivity. AH our major literary artists were struggling with these problems, suggesting various answers to the aesthetic dilemmas posed, none of which could be satisfactory to the religious community. Once the narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher" has allowed the "sense of unsufferable gloom" to pervade his spirit, clear perception (not to speak of religious insight) becomes impossible; he begins to invest the world with his morbid feelings, and arrives with Usher at a mad aesthetic which obliterates traditional ethical and metaphysical distinctions. If Poe's world, which was controlled by the "aesthetic faculty" in the limited, nonmoral Ruskinian sense of that term, was horrifying to all who took it seriously (save for a few other transvaluers of value like Baudelaire), Hawthorne's world was accepted by his contemporaries only because they resolutely ignored the anguish involved for the Artist of the Beautiful. Hawthorne, who wanted to write Trollopian tales of beef and ale, was driven by his own vision to writing the stories of Owens at war with the land, of Ethan Brands and Aylmers and Hester Prynnes, all in their way Poesque artistmanipulators who try to create a symbolic world out of thought and who must be punished, as Hawthorne punished himself in

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the "Custom House Sketch," for deviating from the commonsensical Trollopian balance between material and spiritual values. They are all too ascetic, spiritual aesthetes, "Outcasts of the Universe" like Wakefield, who allow their subjective perception to reshape the objective world in their own image. Melville was one of the few who saw beneath the genial exterior of Hawthorne to the blackness ten times black; for Melville too struggled with these dilemmas and could not find even the temporary respite that his friend did, perhaps, in a Phoebe Pyncheon or a Kenyon. In Moby-Dick the dualist Starbuck preserves his traditional religious faith and calls the quest for the white whale "vengeance on a dumb brute," while Ahab's belief in the unity of nature and spirit is a demonic Emersonianism. Ishmael, the author's surrogate, can only record epistemological nightmare. He talks, in "Loomings," about the artist who begins as Hudson River landscapist and ends as obsessive Narcissus; he faces the picture in the Spouter Inn like the narrator at the opening of "Usher"; and he finds the material world, so aptly embodied in the doubloon, or the world of nature, embodied in the white whale, to be only a mirror for subjectivity. Art is symbol without clear referent, as it was to be for Hawthorne in those late, unfinished works. Ishmael escapes at the end only to plunge into the nightmare world of Pierre, where a wildly mistaken Hudson River aesthetic which says that Saddle Meadows is Heaven on Earth, the ambiguities of a portrait, and a fateful trip to the gallery that has the copy of "Beatrice Cenci" all lead to moral holocaust. Melville's readers turned on him with a vengeance. Despite Benito Cereno's warning, most Americans in 1856 still continued to see art and nature with Amasa Delano's bland faith in nature and a benevolent Christian doctrine. Thus while our artists dramatized the moral consequences of an aesthetic that either divorced matter from spirit too completely or failed to keep the two sufficiently distinct, an aesthetic that depended too exclusively upon unharnessed subjectivity, most Americans were determined that their trips to the galleries not

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have the disastrous results of Pierre Glendenning's. It was not so much the guidebook information with which Ruskin supplied them that contributed to his growing popularity—they always maintained that that was his least important contribution—as it was the way he helped them to resolve the normative questions of the value of nature, religion, and art with what they felt to be a satisfying epistemology. Meanwhile, Ruskin himself had returned to the task of completing Modern Painters. The third and fourth volumes were published in England in 1856. John Wiley, who by now had issued several American editions of the earlier volumes, issued his American reprint of Modern Painters III in the same year. This volume, which was subtitled Of Many Things, did not pretend to have the systematic organization of the earlier parts. It opened with a long attack on Joshua Reynolds, "the grand style," and the concept of "general nature." Fundamentally, Ruskin had not abandoned the ideal of "truth to nature"; yet he had grown intellectually in the thirteen years since he had pronounced dogmatically in the first volume that "truth to nature" was a simply defined criterion by which to judge art. By 1856 his own treatment of the troublesome problem of the meaning of nature was considerably more sophisticated, as the well-known chapter twelve, "Of the Pathetic Fallacy," indicates. Truth to nature implied more than mere dry, factual accuracy; the imagination of the artist or perceiver was essential to the creation and understanding of great art. Yet violent, excessive, or morbid emotions (to which, of course, Ruskin himself was increasingly prone in these years) could destroy the perceiver's ability to see the truth of nature. Unless man's emotional responses were clearly tied to the facts of nature, a morbid sentimentality, which Ruskin now termed "the pathetic fallacy," would result. As one modern student of Ruskin has perceptively noted, Ruskin was attempting to find the continuity between man and the world, thus avoiding the dualism which alienates man from nature. His moral aesthetic was designed to bridge that gap:

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the perceiver must have noble (that is, moral) emotions, which he derived from the facts of nature but which were activated by his own imagination. Ruskin had insisted, here as well as in the long discussion in Modern Painters II, that the imagination was a necessary instrument in preventing the aesthetic experience from becoming mere scientific notation; yet he insisted that his purpose was the "steady pursuit of Naturalism as opposed to Idealism," devoting an appendix to a splenetic attack on "German Philosophy," and dismissing out of hand German philosophical distinctions, including that between the subjective and objective. 11 Furthermore, Ruskin's earlier, violent Protestant dogmatism had been softened both by personal experience and by his historical researches. As a result, the largest section of this new volume was devoted to a long exposition, based partly on artistic evidence and partly on the writings of Homer, Dante, and Sir Walter Scott, of the changing attitudes toward nature in the classical, mediaeval, and modern world. In large part, this increasingly relativistic view of man's perception of nature had grown out of Ruskin's researches in architecture and his new conviction that art must be examined in terms of its social background. His growing social orientation did not mean that he was abandoning his morale absolutism. Nature continued to be the source of moral value for Ruskin to the end of his career, but he was less and less able to examine moral issues apart from their social context. 12 The American reviews of the book indicate the continuing growth of Ruskin's popularity. "For insight, vigor, sincerity, and eloquence," said Putnam's, "he stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries." "Not a few men, now-a-days, artists as well as amateurs, allow his thinking to color all their own: there are some, indeed, who invest him with a species of infallibility." According to the Democratic Review, "'Modern Painters' is the most important Art-book of the century. It has revolutionized the taste of thousands: it will revolutionize the whole artistic world." Both of these writers invoked Goethe in their reviews. The writer

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in the Democratic Review ranked Ruskin with Goethe as a teacher for artists; the Putnam's reviewer criticized Ruskin for choosing Scott instead of Goethe as the representative writer of the age. Scott, he said, was a dead issue. It was useless to berate Sir Walter for his picturesque view of nature and of the Gothic. Goethe more accurately represented the age's complex attitude toward nature. The reviewer chided Ruskin for his wholesale condemnation of German philosophy (though he himself was distressed by its excesses), and he ended by contrasting Ruskin's philosophical looseness to Hegel's views on aesthetics. The same comparison with Hegel was made, somewhat more forcefully, by C. C. Everett a year later in the North American.13 The reviews indicate two things. The first was the acceptance of Ruskin's general approach to the problem of nature and art. For Everett, Ruskin's value was in finding a middle ground between "on the one side, a materialism which tends to check the development of our higher nature; and, on the other, a spiritualism which would cast aside all outward form." What was needed, said Everett, was "the mediation of beauty, by which spirit and matter are blended into a living unity; by which the material loses its grossness, and the spiritual its vagueness." Everett's statement paralleled what the Literary World had said six years earlier. It was a translation into secular terms of the plea of the Methodist writer in the National Magazine, who urged the mediation of "the beautiful, and true and tasteful in Nature and Art" in religious life in the hope that art might prevent religion from becoming either "affectation" or asceticism. Ruskin's importance seemed to he in the way in which he harmonized the divergent tendencies of the age.14 The reviewers did criticize Ruskin for his vagueness. They were still not convinced that he had ever made clear precisely what he meant when he said that the artist should be "true to nature"; but Ruskin's very ambiguity, while it might be distressing in particular, had this value for Americans: it seemed to avoid the twin dangers of materialism and German idealism.

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According to Everett, no other writer had "done so much to create a true appreciation of natural beauty, and an enthusiasm for it." To Everett, as to the reviewers of Pre-Raphaelitism earlier, this seemed more important than whether or not Ruskin's judgments of particular paintings were correct. Besides, his discussions were so clear that errors of this kind could be easily detected. His importance to Americans lay in the way in which he linked art to nature. Andrew Preston Peabody made the same point in an unsigned note on the Elements of Drawing, which Wiley published in 1857. He felt that Ruskin's stress on a clear perception of nature was the most valuable element in the book. Ruskin was not concerned with the mere mechanics of art.15 The second notable element in the 1856-57 reviews is the invocation of Hegel. The reviewer in Putnam's was generally cautious about German metaphysics, but he was clearly impressed by Hegel. Everett contrasted Ruskin's approach to Hegel's more systematic idealism. Some Americans, at least, were beginning to demand a more rigorous approach to the problems of aesthetic theory and art criticism than that offered by the writer of the sprawling Modern Painters. However, it must be emphasized that the demand for a systematic approach was confined to a few. Ruskin's philosophical vagueness was not a stumbling block to most Americans for whom the discussion of art was still a relatively new experience and of far less importance than Ruskin's devotion to nature and to a moral ideal. Henry Thoreau could hardly be called a typical American, but his encounter with the works of Ruskin may shed light on the character of Ruskin's appeal to Americans in the late 1850's. Thoreau had been a votary of nature ever since his youth. Unlike Emerson, he had the naturalist's ability to make minute discriminations among particular natural facts. He collected interesting botanical specimens and communicated with Agassiz at Harvard. Yet the investigation of nature was never an end in itself for Thoreau, but rather a way of building a bridge between the

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world of matter and the world of spirit. In his first published essay, "The Natural History of Massachusetts," he sought to find the spiritual correspondences in fauna listed in a Massachusetts state report. Walden was the supreme achievement of this method of making the particular facts of nature yield general spiritual truths. The attainment of such a balance between matter and spirit was extremely difficult, as no one knew better than Thoreau himself. Without a constant sensitivity on his part, as he said in 1852, nature could become dull and dry, scientific rather than transcendentally meaningful. It was the observer's perception which could transform this world of fact into a world of beauty. This led Thoreau to the conclusion that "the perception of beauty is a moral test."16 Among the writers whom Thoreau noted most frequently in his journal was William Gilpin, the eighteenth-century English minister and author of many books on the picturesque. Thoreau liked Gilpin's sensitivity to natural scenery, perhaps because he liked the artful manner in which Gilpin described nature; but he found Gilpin finally inadequate, for, like many of the writers of the picturesque tradition, Gilpin concentrated on surface values. His view was "aesthetic," in the limited sense that Ruskin used the term; he failed to see the moral dimension in natural phenomena. As Thoreau put it in his journal: "Gilpin talked as if there was some food for the soul in mere physical light and shadow, as if, without the suggestion of a moral, they could give man pleasure or painl"17 Thoreau must have had high expectations concerning Modern Painters, for his first reference to Ruskin in early October 1857 is one of disappointment. Apparently the book was recommended to him as an "out-of-door book," but he found that despite the close attention Ruskin gave to nature, "it appears to have been with an artist's and critic's design."18 Ruskin devoted too much attention to Turner to suit Thoreau. Three days later Thoreau was musing, "it has come to this,—

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that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature." Certainly Ruskin would have agreed with Thoreau in this, but the petulant man from Concord felt no kinship with the English critic. One reason may have been that Thoreau was basically uninterested in the theory of painting, as he had been uninterested in 1852 in Horatio Greenough's ideas on architecture. Another reason appeared later in October when Thoreau rejected Ruskin's specifically religious approach. For Thoreau, spirit was immanent in nature; this was itself sufficient revelation, and it was "not compatible with the belief in the peculiar revelation of the Bible which Ruskin entertains."19 Yet despite Thoreau's objections he went on reading other volumes, including the newly published Elements of Drawing, and thought well enough of Ruskin to recommend the second and third volumes of Modern Painters to his disciple H. G. O. Blake, declaring them to be "singularly good and encouraging, though not with out crudeness and bigotry. The themes in the volumes referred to are Infinity, Beauty, Imagination, Love of Nature, etc.,—all treated in a very living manner. I am rather surprised by them. It is remarkable that these things should be said with reference to painting chiefly, rather than literature." The comment is valuable in indicating the way in which Ruskin's works were becoming popular. Many of Ruskin's ideas were already current in America. The novelty of his works was that he applied familiar elements to the understanding of the visual arts. Thoreau himself may have declined to concern himself with the fine arts, preferring to cultivate his own garden more intensively, but many Americans less committed and less intransigent than Thoreau did follow Ruskin's lead. The result was an expansion of the cultural interests of the American people. 20 Another aspect of Thoreau's reluctance to acknowledge Ruskin's value was the strength of the former's own transcendental convictions. Thoreau's philosophical and literary strength lay in his refusal to let any religious creed stand between his perception

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of nature and his perception of nature's immanent spiritual significance. Yet there was an enormous risk involved in this transcendental venture. When the unifying perception broke down, he could be left with journals filled, as in his last years, with undigested natural facts. When inspiration failed, the transcendental visionary who rejected religion might find himself reduced to being the mere naturalist. Most Americans were not willing to take this risk. Some, like George Templeton Strong, felt that the urge to identify God with nature was positively dangerous. Strong had nothing but contempt for New England transcendentalism, but he realized that the tendency toward pantheism was not limited to this small group. It was a quality of the age itself. His reading of Modern Painters III had helped to clarify the issues for him. "How do you know," he asked in his diary, "that hillside and river and forest are entitled to awaken in you these emotions of joy and veneration?" Ruskin's account of the different attitudes toward nature in the classical, mediaeval, and modem world seemed to indicate to Strong that the relation between nature and the divine did not exist in the objects themselves but only in the mind of the perceiver who was a creature of his time. Strong admitted that the feeling of the divinity of nature could be genuine, but he went on to ask if the very reality of this feeling was not a sign of sentimentalism, what Ruskin was now calling the pathetic fallacy; was it not "a badge of unfruitfulness and of incapacity to bear fruit, and does it not stamp your nature as unable to do works of righteousness, and as substituting for efficient action the aesthetic contemplation of the works of God?" Here was the danger of nature worship, as Strong saw it. Without a religious framework it could become merely irresponsible aestheticism. Where Thoreau had seen religion as obstructing man in his attempt to achieve an insight into the divinity of nature, Strong felt that religion was an essential bulwark to prevent the love of nature from degenerating into moral irresponsibility.21 Furthermore, to Strong and his friends Ruskin was valuable

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not only for his perception of the issues at stake but also for the way in which he avoided the dangers of nature worship in his own writings. A week after the diary entry on Modern Painters III, Strong noted that his friend and former teacher at Columbia, Rev. Dr. John McVickar "talks to his classes about Ruskin, and does not hesitate to tell them that in 'the combination of aesthetic and spiritual perception and so on, 'Ruskin is the greatest man since Plato.'" It was to the Strongs and McVickars in America and not to the Thoreaus that Ruskin's writings were appealing most forcefully.22 By 1859 Ruskin's popularity was great enough to induce John Wiley to issue the first American anthology of selections from his writings. The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals, and Religion was followed by Precious Thoughts: Moral and Religious, Gathered from the Works of John Ruskin (1866) and Pearls for Young Ladies (1878). The first two, edited by the genteel Mrs. Louisa Caroline Tuthill, suggest the character of what Mrs. Tuthill and the publisher judged to be the public's interest in Ruskin in these years. In effect, her two anthologies distilled out of their specific artistic context the moral messages of Ruskin. In the first, she eliminated most of the discussion of Turner's paintings, explaining that there were few of Turner's works in this country, though engravings were available. She stressed Ruskin's love of nature and above all his deep religious sentiment. She even ranked him with Richard Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and Herbert (presumably Edward, Baron of Cherbury) as a Christian philosopher. "He has an ever-realizing sense of the presence of God; and acknowledges the divine presence . . . not as the God of Nature alone, but as the Almighty Father and Friend revealed in the life-giving Gospel of Jesus Christ." Apparently she or the publishers felt that there was still too much art and not enough morals and religion in the first anthology. Precious Thoughts repaired this "omission" by concentrating even more on the moral message in Ruskin's books on art.23

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As the new decade opened with the threat and then the reality of a Civil War which was to change the face of the nation, three ministers paused to assess the meaning and value of Ruskin's writings for Americans. According to Rev. Gilbert Haven, writing in the Methodist Quarterly Review in i860, Ruskin had opened the world of art to the world of readers. Haven declared that the ruling passion of the age was science, the dissection of nature. Another spirit was needed, one which would "worship her [nature] living" rather than "study her dead," as did the scientists. He felt that Ruskin was the perfect embodiment of the two tendencies: "He is at once the chemist and the artist. His eye is both that of the poet and the anatomist . . . In him more than in any other man of the age, these two contraries are balanced, and the resultant force sweeps his soul along the perfect orbit." He quoted extensively from Modern Painters II, which he called "by far the most profound and religious essay on this attractive yet indescribable theme that our language possesses."24 This soon brought Haven to his main point. Ruskin's writing, he said, was imbued with evangelical sentiment. By contrast to Ruskin, American writers like Longfellow had a show of religious sentiment but not of the Christian life. What was still worse, writers like Lowell and Holmes "toy with the religious sentiment." Ruskin seemed neither loose and vague nor cold and Unitarian in his religious conviction; certainly he was no pantheist. Haven had made this point clear earlier in i860 in a denunciatory sermon delivered on the occasion of Theodore Parkers death. He granted that Parker had excellent original qualities, among which was a love of nature; but Haven noted that Parker "lacked the subtile penetrative power of Emerson's perceptions of this outer world, the spiritual insights of Wordsworth, and above all the pious, Christian vision of Ruskin and Cowper." It was therefore the specifically religious character of Ruskin's writing that Haven exalted at the end of his article. Under Ruskin's tutelage "art becomes the handmaiden of religion and may be permitted

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to serve her in the adorning of the temple where God in Christ is seen and worshipped."25 In the first number of the Boston Review, the Congregationalists joined in the attack on "Nature Worship." There was no doubt of "the fascinating charm which this devout naturalism throws over much of our current literature. Its language is a fair counterfeit of genuine devotion." But it was not to be confused with real religion. Nature worship alone had produced the effusions of Margaret Fuller, but a truly Christian devotion had inspired the Congregationalist clergyman and theologian Horace Bushnell.26 Religious writing was not confined to theologians, as the Boston Review showed by publishing two articles on John Ruskin in 1861 and 1862. "We have never read an author not designedly devotional, through whose pages, like a clear watermark, the 'Glory to God in the highest' of the Bethlehem angels shines so unmistakably and habitually. And this in no monkish or conventional way." "The second volume of his 'Painters' reads almost like a book of theology." Ruskin's value was that he was devout without being Catholic and, equally important, that he was specifically Protestant and not just sentimental. "We have had enough of the devout poetry of the undevout devotees to excite a natural suspicion of what may be named an out-doors piety, although there is such a thing of rare and sterling value. But Ruskin's devoutness is not of the Tom Moore, or Byron, or (may we say it?) 'Autocrat' school." The crux of the matter was Ruskin's "thoroughly fixed religious convictions." This seemed to the Congregationalists to give a moral center, a stability, to the interest in art as well as to the interest in nature which they felt was sorely needed.27 "Out-doors piety" was a sweeping term; it applied to "The Chambered Nautilus" as well as to Walden, to Unitarian reflections as well as to transcendental visions, and Oliver Wendell Holmes was singled out for special attention here as in Haven's essay probably because of his genial and witty attacks on Cal-

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vinist theology, the most distressing of which began, harmlessly enough: "I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts, affections, dreams, aspirations, delusions,—Art in all its forms." Vague statements like this were no substitute for Christian belief, without which the human being would be left with only "the feu d'esprit of a transient excited moral sensibility." Sensibility without a fixed moral center could lead to the undermining of theology, to sentimentalism, and even to the self-indulgent immorality of Byron—not to mention his unspeakable American progeny, the aesthete Roderick Usher or blasphemous Ahab and Ethan Brand.28 The reviewer also singled out Ruskin's architectural works, and especially the discussion of the role of the worker. He said that Ruskin's intent, "never lost sight of, is to save our nineteenthcentury culture from the corruption and decay which overtook the European civilization of the fifteenth century" (and hence, by extension, to forestall the realization of the House of Usher in America). Though this problem had important consequences for national prosperity, it was not solely a secular matter, for the writer linked "the wrong industrial occupation of the laboring classes" with "the false education and enfeebled faith of all classes," as had Ruskin. Here, as in its discussion of the question of nature, the Boston Review believed Ruskin's peculiar importance to be his ability to link secular or material questions with religious ones, to see problems of industrial development as well as problems of nature worship fundamentally as issues to be resolved through religious faith. The Boston Review actually had little to say about Ruskin's interest in art. It is worth noting again how easy it was to abstract the moral and religious messages from the context of the discussion of art in which they were found. At the same time that Ruskin was teaching Americans how to approach questions of art, his works could also appeal to those uninterested in artistic matters but deeply concerned with the religious life of man.29 The Unitarian Christian Examiner çyaluated Ruskin's work in

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1861 in an article by the Rev. Loammi G. Ware entitled "The Place of 'Modern Painters' in Art-Literature." Ware had earlier called Ruskin "the art-critic and essayist of the times." Now he praised him at greater length, spoke of the affluence of his genius which Ware felt excused certain vagaries, defended his dogmatism, and said that the value of Modern Painters was not merely as a handbook or a fixed set of principles but as a philosophy of art in the broader sense of a search after truth. Ruskin's most important quality, in Ware's opinion, was his possession of "an enthusiasm alive, not only to whatever is lovely and sincere in art, but more and primarily to what always conditions that, to the beauty and truth, namely, in intellectual and moral life." The Unitarian tended to place more emphasis on the intellect, but Ware's conclusion was the same as that of the Methodist and Congregationalist: "Its intrinsic quality of spiritual insight is the prime characteristic of 'Modern Painters,' which makes it supreme in the literature of art . . . The religiousness of true art has been all along asserted." Ware was so convinced by Ruskin's linking of art with morality that he was willing to go so far as to say that the art-calling itself was a sacred one, for it was "the interpretation of the perfection of God's works." 30 These essays suggest the spectrum of religious opinion from evangelical and Calvinist to liberal which stood ready to support Ruskin and to preach his word to the American public. The effort these ministers expended to find confirmation of their separate creeds in the writings of Ruskin, chapter and verse, cannot help but seem fruitless to modern readers of Ruskin; but if it was a distortion of what Ruskin said, a series of Procrustean beds into which they fitted him, the distortion had a meaning. The United States in 1861 was a nation undergoing tremendous changes. The Civil War was a sign of this and a catalyzing force. The growth in national prosperity meant that many more Americans in the post-Civil War years would be making the grand tour of Europe, looking at Turners and Tintorettos with Ruskinian eyes, while their countrymen at home allowed Ruskin to

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shape their views on art. The revolution in American economic life which industrialization and increase in wealth were beginning to effect was a subject of concern among those who could see in 1861 what lay ahead. The quality of American religious life was already being affected, and the thoughtful were raising difficult questions. George Templeton Strong's reading of Thackeray disturbed him; Thackeray, he felt, analyzed society as a scientist would and then preached to the society in terms of its problems. As Strong saw it, Thackeray preached a modem version of the Sermon on the Mount while the church was busy discussing dry, episcopal and doctrinal points. The church had lost contact with the real needs of men "and thus an outsider has come in to do her work and to weaken men's loyalty to her throne." If Strong's concerns were a bit premature in 1856, this was because Thackeray's England had felt the impact of industrialism considerably earlier in the century: nevertheless Strong saw the portent.31 The Rev. H. W. Parker had attempted to right this imbalance in 1854 in the pages of the North American Review. His "Natural Theology of Art" was an attack on the nature worshipers because their creed that "God made the country, and men made the city" left out of account such civilized manifestations of man's life as the Crystal Palace. To see God as immanent only in nature meant that He exercised very little control in an urban civilization, and this to Parker was intolerable. It implied the loosening of religious control over an increasingly large segment of modern life. His response was the exposition of a "natural theology," a mid-nineteenth-century reinterpretation of Paley and the Bridgewater Treatise writers, which held in effect that art, the product of man's creativity, as well as nature, was to be traced back to its source in Divinity.32 Was this not precisely what Ruskin had been doing in his writings? Parker's essay was general in character, but it was susceptible to particular interpretation by the different sects. It is perhaps in this sense that the doctrinal exegeses of Rus-

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kin's works by the religious reviewers of the early 1860's must be understood. They were an attempt by the orthodox of various sects to incorporate the expanding cultural interests of the American people within a religious framework. The ministers allowed Ruskin to guide them in matters of art, but they were also determined to use him for their own purposes: to make Ruskin's views on the relationship of art to morality a means of keeping the growing American interest in art always subservient to the higher truths of religion; to use Ruskin's "orthodoxy" as a means of combating the latitudinarianism of the nature worshipers and sentimentalists; and finally, to use Ruskin's ideas on the nature of Gothic as a means of harnessing the potential materialism of science and incipient industrialism. The Graduate of Oxford was being called upon to help shape American life in the new age.

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RUSKINISM IN AMERICA: THE CRAYON (1855-1861)

Putnam's I N ITS 1856 REVIEW of Ruskin mentioned that there were "some, indeed, who invest him with a species of infallibility," it was in all probability referring to the Crayon, a new art journal which had made its debut in the first week of January 1855. Putnam's had had high hopes for the new magazine. The editors confessed in early 1855 that they were "tired of being kicked by Mr. Ruskin and his peers" and hoped the new journal would administer its doses of art in a somewhat more genteel fashion; but by the end of the first volume of the Crayon, Putnam's confessed that it was willing to overlook the excesses of the Crayon's Ruskinism because the quality of both the original articles and the selections from others' works was consistently high. "The editors," it said, "evince a profound knowledge of their spécialité, and a hearty, almost religious enthusiasm in their work." The Putnam's assessment is certainly correct on both counts, for the Crayon's coverage of artistic matters was not only the broadest, fullest, and often of the highest quality available in America before the Civil War; the new journal was also the most persistent and outspoken advocate of Ruskin s doctrines in America during these years. We must allow for a certain provincial naïveté in Putnam's attributing to the Crayon "profound WHEN

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knowledge," but it was quite literally correct in calling the enthusiasm "religious."1 The Crayons appearance in the 1850s has not been completely overlooked heretofore, but its significance has been underrated or misunderstood. To read through the eight volumes published before the outbreak of the Civil War brought about its demise is to perceive a remarkable consistency of point of view, especially when compared with an olla-podrida like the Illustrated Magazine of Art or the gift book annuals or bulletins of the various art unions. The founder and co-editor, William James Stillman, did a large share of the writing of the first three volumes himself, in some issues more than half. Although this led to his nervous collapse and withdrawal from the editorial staff, the journal continued to sound like essentially one voice, though speaking with different intonations at different times, and thus deserves treatment in terms of its consistency. The breakdown of this consistency in approach in i860 should also be understood as such: an important departure with important consequences.2 In the one study that has seemed to recognize the consistency, David Dickason's Daring Young Men, the Crayon has been mislabeled as an expression of Pre-Raphaelitism in America rather than as the advocate of Ruskin's ideas.3 This distorts the journal's significance in at least three important ways. First, Stillman read Modern Painters and met Ruskin long before he knew the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. Thus, chronologically, his interest in Ruskin predates his ties to the P. R. B. He only came to know Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others and their work well in 1859, after he had left the Crayon. In the second place, Ruskin was a much more significant intellectual force than the P. R. B. He addressed himself to a much wider variety of problems and over a longer time than did any of the Brothers. In America the Pre-Raphaelites were usually associated with Ruskin's name after the publication of his pamphlet in 1851, but the reverse was not necessarily the case. Ruskin's writings appealed to a much broader audience, one con-

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cerned not only with painting but also with nature, religion, and later, social theory. The Crayon did praise the Pre-Raphaelites, though with reservations from the beginning,4 and William Michael Rossetti did become their English correspondent, but the concerns of the journal extended far beyond the limited matter of one group of painters. The Crayon took its motto from Modern Painters. It was interested primarily in general problems of art appreciation and theoretical discussions of beauty and nature rather than the merely technical aspects of art.6 For such purposes certainly Ruskin was more appropriate than the Brothers. Ruskin had praised the Pre-Raphaelites as one group whom he felt were fulfilling the ideals of Modem Painters, but his writing had larger aims than merely finding a buying public for the PreRaphaelites. Finally, as others have pointed out, those most directly influenced by the P. R. B.—Stillman, C. H. Moore, and the two John Hills—are minor figures in the history of American art.6 By contrast, the ideas of the best American landscape painters of the period—Durand, Kensett, and others—sprang from the American Wordsworthian tradition, quite independent of the Brotherhood. They read Ruskin later, and he corroborated and reinforced already existing ideas rather than showing them a new path. The ease with which the English ideas were absorbed by the Crayon and turned to American uses should in itself suggest the basic fallacy of applying any mechanical theory of transatlantic "influence" to the study of either Ruskin or Pre-Raphaelitism in America. Thus to call the Crayon a Pre-Raphaelite journal and to confuse the roles of Ruskin and the British Brotherhood is to distort the picture and to miss the central importance of the American magazine; for the Crayons allegiance to the P. R. B. was never complete, but its sympathy with Ruskin's teaching remained constant during almost the entire length of the journal's career. The force behind the Crayons Ruskinism was William Stillman. In i860 he commented that "the first volume of 'Modern Painters' was, as everybody will remember, one of the sensation-

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books of the time, and fell upon the public opinion of the day like a thunderbolt from the clear sky." In later life Stillman recalled more somberly that it was as a young art student in Frederic Church's New York studio in the winter of 1848-49 that he "came across 'Modern Painters,' and, like many others, wise or otherwise, I received from it a stimulus to nature-worship, to which I was already too much inclined, which made ineffaceable the confusion in my mind between nature and art." Colored though the remark is by fifty years' experience since that important winter, the excitement of 1848 still shows through the chagrin of 1901. 7 Stillman met Ruskin in 1850, and personal contact deepened the tie between them. The ripeness of the young American for Ruskin's teaching is underlined by Stillman's comment on this encounter: "At the time Ruskin held very strong Calvinistic notions, and as I kept my Puritanism unshaken we had as many conversations on religion as on art, the two being then to me almost identical and to him closely related."8 At the very outset of the journal's career, the paradigm of American Ruskinism can be seen in the mind of the founder of the Crayon: a strong Protestant religious background and the tendency to identify art with religion; an American tendency toward nature worship which Ruskin reinforced by linking art criticism with the appreciation of nature. This complex of native and Ruskinian elements was to be reflected in the new journal of art. The nature worship of the Crayon and Ruskin had a common basis in the writings of Wordsworth, but nature worship had had different functions in America and England. In the case of Wordsworth, nature was the refuge for a disillusioned political liberal; for the younger Ruskin it was a refuge for the sensitive Englishman who was confused and horrified by the effects of the industrial revolution. But for the Crayon and its active supporters like William Cullen Bryant and Asher B. Durand, Wordsworthian nature worship was mixed with a positive strain of nationalism. The virgin land was

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not so much the refuge from American civilization as the very symbol of it. Nature was identified with American nationalism as it never could be in cultivated England. As a result there is a chauvinistic quality in the Crayons criticism which is lacking in Ruskin's. Ruslcin was content to find his landscape in the Loire Valley, the Vosges, or his beloved Alps, as well as in the lake country of England, but for the Crayon landscape meant American nature. It chided Church for using exotic palm tree settings in his paintings. Asher Durand issued his nationalist manifesto to American landscape painters in the pages of the Crayon. The editors were incensed when a fellow American Ruskinian, James Jackson Jarves, said, in Art-Hints, that the way for the painter to understand art was to know European painting. To know nature—presumably American nature—was enough, the Crayon retorted indignantly.9 Stillman believed that "the art-loving public was full of Ruskinian enthusiasm," as he himself was, and he set about to establish in his journal "an apostolate of art." When he went to Boston in 1854 to enlist aid for his new venture, he received an enthusiastic response from James Russell Lowell and his friends. Lowell gave him a new poem to print in the journal. Longfellow gave encouragement, though he never contributed, as Stillman apparently believed he would.10 More active support came from a young man named Charles Eliot Norton, son of the Unitarian divine and former Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature at Harvard. Young Norton had read Modern Painters and had idolized Ruskin from a distance at a party in London in 1850, though the two did not meet until 1855 or become friendly until the following year. 11 Meanwhile, Norton shared his enthusiasm for Ruskin with his friend Stillman and contributed articles to the Crayon, first on his early experiences in India and then on his new excitement about Italy and Italian art. The second was a series of letters to the Crayon in 1856, later incorporated in his Notes on Travel and Study in Italy.12 Several months earlier, when the journal had been threat-

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ened with financial failure, Norton had written to Lowell that the loss of the Crayon would be harder to sustain than the loss of any other American journal. By the time Norton's Italian letters began to appear, the financial situation of the journal had improved. By turning the Crayon from a weekly into a monthly, the editors kept it going until the outbreak of the Civil War. 13 Stillman found a partner, co-editor, and financial backer in John Durand, the son of Asher B. Durand. In later years John Durand, who had by that time become a disciple and translator of Hippolyte Taine, took a rather dim view of the success of the Crayon, but he did point out that in the 1850's Ruskin had "developed more interest in art in the United States than all other agencies put together." When Durand went on to explain the nature of the new interest in art, he made it clear that the Ruskinian enthusiasm extended far beyond technical criticism of particular paintings. Ruskin's "remarkable word-painting, the theological bent of his mind, his ascetic temperament, his eccentricities, his moral injunctions, furnishing both pulpit and press with material for sermons, news, and gossip about art. . . spread a knowledge of art among people who would not otherwise have given it a thought."14 In the light of this, Stillman's metaphor of establishing "an apostolate of art" was an accurate one, for in a very real sense the Crayon conceived of itself as Paul carrying the new gospel of art to Philistine America. As one writer in the Crayon would later phrase it: "It is not pretended that Art, by itself, will Christianize the world, or that it will be substituted for religious principles; but it does contend against a mercenary spirit, and will ever render the name of that country immortal, which most assiduously fosters and cherishes its growth."15 Thus the Crayon used the fact that it was beginning in the midst of a commercial depression to lecture its readers on the folly of laying up for themselves treasures upon earth, and urged instead the devotion to beauty. A review of the American translation of Winckelmann called forth the remark that "no more suitable companion can be found

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for the industrial and commercial spirit than that of Art, none more likely to keep it from licentiousness, none more likely to give it a moral scope and bearing." Andrew D. White, who had early been impressed by Ruskin's Seven Lamps, spoke in a lecture of the promise of art in the United States if Americans would only replace their present sacrifice for gaudy things with sacrifice for noble spires and fine bells. The "apostolate of art" would counteract the tendency toward materialism and commercialism, at the same time that it would provide another basis for national glorification.18 This attitude indicates that in certain ways the Americans of the Crayon were moving in a different direction from their English mentor. Their response to him was ambivalent. Brownlee Brown, in an article on Ruskin, praised him for his stern opposition "to the sordid and pretentious habits of a trading age," but in the next breath, echoing the Massachusetts Quarterly Review of eight years earlier, he chided Ruskin for being contemptuous of the present.17 Clearly there was a problem here. The root of the difficulty was that Ruskin's gospel of art was integrally related to his hatred of modem life, his reaction against the drastic alterations which large-scale industrialization was bringing about in English life and landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century. Ruskin's reaction was an exaggeration (due in part to the accelerated rate of change) of Wordsworth's sense of the opposition of city and country. This opposition had become one of the major elements in the romantic mentality. Asher Durand expressed it in his Crayon manifesto, where he contrasted the value of American nature to "the pollutions of civilization." Most Americans accepted the convention that God made the country, man made the city; leading literary intellectuals like Emerson and Thoreau gave the convention a metaphysical justification; and a few extremists like Melville in "Bartleby the Scrivener" were capable of transforming a metaphysical opposition into a deadly reality. But most Americans also took great pride in their nation's commercial and industrial

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prowess and sang the praises of what Leo Marx has called "the technological sublime." Despite their attacks on "the commercial spirit," most Americans were fundamentally sanguine. Where Ruskin tended to turn back toward the mediaeval ideal, Mrs. E. Vale Smith, in an article on "What Constitutes Christian Art," urged the religious artist to "place the present, practical vital thought of religion above the historical, the theoretical, or the past." The Crayon was convinced of the vitality of the present and even more of the promise of the future.18 In an editorial on "The Hope of Art," Stillman indicated how the religious impulse could be given artistic form in the new world. Praise for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was his point of departure, but he soon left them behind in his almost beatific vision of the manifest destiny, the westward course of artistic empire, which lay before Americans. If the artistic ideal of the Brotherhood, "following that westward course which reforms have always followed . . . finds an abiding place in the unoccupied artistic feeling of America, we may hope from the intensity and enthusiasm of the race, something as yet undreamed of."19 Stillman's statement of what he considered the vital principle of Pre-Raphaelite art is worth quoting at length. He began by defining the principle briefly as "reverence of Nature—the religion of Art." Out of this he developed the Crayons most coherent statement of the interrelation of art, religion, and nature. Reverence for nature, he pointed out, was not materialism. No man can revere Nature, save as he feels it to be only a form by which something higher than himself is manifested to him; and he whose only knowledge of the Divinity is obtained from His works, must worship Him as he knows Him, rising into the worshipping in spirit and in truth, as he attains to spiritual knowledge, the principle of reverence being always the same, only more entire, as the perception of the greatness of the Being revered is fuller. Reverence of Nature and consequent humility, is, then, we assert, the first requisite of a religious Art—and, in proportion as the artist grows in the perception

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of the spiritual meaning of Nature, and reads in her forms only Divine truth, he becomes more highly religious, so that without possessing the full knowledge of truth which constitutes Christianity, his Art will still be religious in the degree of his light. Once the intensity of conviction behind this statement is recognized, one must stop to note the carefulness of its presentation, for Stillman avoided the pitfalls of Emersonian or Thoreauvian transcendentalism. He never asserted that nature was a substitute for Christianity, that the perception of the immanence of the Creator in creation was itself sufficient revelation. His approach to nature was concurrent with, or supplementary to, orthodox Christianity; it did not seek to replace Christianity.20 It is this important fact that distinguished Stillman's attitude from the usual nature worship which was so disturbing to the ministry during these decades. In the same issue of the Crayon in which his statement appeared, Stillman printed a letter from the Rev. Samuel Osgood who asserted that the artist and the minister were kindred spirits and needed each other. He assured the Crayon that "if I may judge from my own personal friends, your journal has no heartier well-wishers than the educated clergymen of this country . . . We shall never know our priceless heritage until the eye of true Art teaches us to interpret the loveliness of nature." That the "priceless heritage" to which Osgood referred was both the national landscape and religious faith is clear enough if we recall his 1851 Art-Union address: "Art, the Interpreter of Nature; Nature, the Interpreter of God." 21 Stillman returned to the subject later in the year in his editorial on "The Revelation of Art." Speaking of the sisterhood of art and religion, he emphasized that though religion was complete unto itself, art needed religion. He drew the same distinction that Ruskin had drawn in contrasting the "theoretic" to the "aesthetic" faculty. "Divested of the central and vivifying element of Reverence, it [art] becomes merely aesthetic, and to be placed on a

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level with all pleasures of sense." This, in Stillman's view, was to be avoided at all costs.22 It is impossible to say precisely how Stillman's views had developed. Certainly in part they were the product of the nature worship and Calvinism of his youth. W e have his own word that Ruskin reinforced both these attitudes. His statement of 1855 displayed the same recognition of specifically religious values tempering the love of nature which critics were noting and praising in Ruskin s own writing. While it is clear that Ruskin did influence Stillman, what is more important is the similarity of their assumptions about the relation of art to nature and to the religious life, the fact that native American attitudes combined so readily with the teachings of Ruskin to form the views Stillman and others expounded in the Crayon. There were differences between the master and his American disciples, which stemmed mainly from the essentially optimistic view of both nature and civilization which cultural nationalism had fostered in the American Ruskinians. Even Charles Eliot Norton, who was later to be one of the most pessimistic of Ruskin's American disciples, shared the national optimism of Stillman in these years. Yet granting this qualification, the new journal of art was saturated with Ruskin and was an important force in disseminating the Englishman's ideas in America. The Crayon familiarized Americans with Ruskin's writings through extensive quotation and reprinting of large excerpts from his works. Starting with the issue of 7 February 1855, the Crayon printed serially his essays on "The Poetry of Architecture," resurrected from the pages of Loudon's Architectural Magazine.23 In July of the same year, it made available to the American public the text of Ruskin's study written to accompany the Arundel Society's expensive book of plates, Giotto and His Works at Padua!24, A lecture on "Education in Art," which was printed originally in the English Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science for 1858, appeared early the next year in the Crayon.25 Numerous and sometimes

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lengthy excerpts from the second and third volumes of The Stones of Venice (which had not yet been published in America) as well as from Modern Painters were scattered through the pages of the journal during its entire lifetime. The Ruskinism of the Crayon was not limited to citation from the master's works, however. The journal was filled with his ideas, his confusions, his approaches to problems, and his solutions of them. Like Ruskin, the Crayon was concerned primarily with painting and architecture; it devoted as little space to sculpture as Ruskin did in these years. Despite the fact that American sculpture had achieved early fame (and some notoriety) at home, the Crayon slighted it, unlike its rival, The Cosmopolitan Art Journal, which had appeared in 1856. This omission in the Crayons criticism reflects not only the doubtful competence of its editors to deal with sculpture but also the failure of its mentor Ruskin to provide aesthetic guidelines for the analysis of that more plastic art. Except for a few passages in The Seven Lamps and elsewhere, most of Ruskin's writing on sculpture came later. He did write one book on sculpture, Aratra Pentelici (1872), but it is weaker than his earlier works on art. This gap in Ruskin's art criticism may be attributed both to his possession to an abnormal degree of the Victorian sense of shame about the human body and to his failure to understand plastic values, a shortcoming also notable in his treatment of architecture, which he tended to view as decorative surface. However, this critical weakness of Ruskin, and the Crayon after him, was more of degree than of kind; the Cosmopolitan, literary organ of an art union which offered (twice!) in its annual lottery a replica of Powers' "Greek Slave," also had very little of aesthetic significance to say about sculpture, though it did at least serialize a translation of Lessing's Laocodn. With one or two exceptions, like Charles Callahan Perkins, it would be decades before Americans began to write intelligently about sculpture.26 On the positive side, the Crayon reflected Ruskin's concern with landscape rather than figure painting. Modern Painters had

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begun as a defense of the landscapes of Turner. Though Rusldn later turned to the trecento and quattrocento artists, he dwelt primarily on the general character or the landscape backgrounds of their paintings and not on their main subject matter, the Madonna and Child and the life of Christ. The Crayon followed Ruskin's lead by de-emphasizing figure art and condemning "literary painting." Pre-Raphaelites like Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown were painting pictures like "The Order of Release" or "The Awakening Conscience," the meaning of which resided not on the canvas itself but in the story of which the picture was, in a real sense, only an illustration. The perceiver's attitude toward the painting depended upon some extrinsic knowledge of the story, the often cloyingly sentimental anecdote which held the clue to meaning. Ruskin had liked the accurate portrayal of nature in their paintings, but at a deeper level he and the Crayon both attacked "literary painting." The Crayon echoed his attitudes in its preference for the roughest sketch of a leaf over the polished anecdotalism of the Diisseldorf School.27 In an era when men of the stature of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, as well as the American public at large, were entranced by Guido Reni's "Beatrice Cenci," the Crayon asserted that the painting was "a poor thing in any light . . . the expressionless face of an uninteresting woman" which was valued because of Shelley's play and not because the canvas had any intrinsic interest.28 Its allegiance to pure landscape also led the Crayon to condemn both the traditional picturesque vision and allegorical painting. The waning appeal of Gilpin, Price, and Loudon in America can be measured in Asher Durand's comment that "picturesqueness, and other externals" belong more "to the service of the tourist and historian than to that of the true landscape artist," who did not need domes and palaces and ruins. The work of the Creator was itself sufficient subject. The shift in emphasis is important: fifteen years earlier Durand's friend Thomas Cole had remarked on his return to America that "although American

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scenery was often so fine, we feel the want of associations such as cling to scenes in the old world. Simple action is not quite sufficient. We want human interest, incident, and action to render the effect of landscape complete." Now the Crayon was praising pure American landscape and, convinced of its intrinsic significance, condemned anything that adulterated the artist's vision of nature, whether it was Price's picturesque ruins or Alison's association of ideas. In the process, Cole's huge allegorical machines fell under the attack: the Crayon insisted that the truth conveyed by art must lie in the canvas and not in any rigid framework of ideas extrinsic to the work itself.29 In proclaiming that Ruskin's "truth to nature" was its standard, however, the Crayon of 1855 also took on the burden of Ruskin's confusions; for as we have noted before, there was in Modern Painters I a distinct difference, if not an outright contradiction, between Ruskin's assertion that the test of truth in landscape art was a literal fidelity to the particular truths of rock and leaf and his assertion that greatness in art was to be measured by the number and quality of the ideas involved. Modern Painters II and the later volumes had tried to deny this conflict by emphasizing the mediating role of the imagination, but the conflict existed nevertheless. In the Crayon these contrasting claims to "truth to nature" produced a theoretical jumble such as the statement that "the principles, by the guidance of which he [man] follows the Beautiful in the material—the Ideal of the Actual—are those by which he discovers the Beautiful in the spirit—the Ideal of the Immortal." In its gallant attempt to maintain the validity of both of Ruskin's criteria, the Crayon was forced to construct two "Ideals."30 In the first volume of the journal, Horace Vernet's painting was praised for its realism, its exact reproduction of the world of the present. In this process the artist's individuality was submerged. "Poetry, Sentiment, Philosophy, are alike overborne by this full flood of the perception of the Actual." Stillman, in reviewing an exhibition at Albany, said: "There is no reason why detail should

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not, in Art, and particularly in Sculpture, be carried to the nearest approach to Nature's finish, possible, and if it injure the effect of the whole, it is from the detail falling short of the perfect truth." The reviewer of the National Academy of Design exhibit also praised attention to detail, claiming that "it is as difficult to find the little facts of Nature when we set down to sketch, as it is to recall them in the studio, and this is the true artistic significance of the word invention—to find out, not to contrive." 31 Along with this the Crayon often emphasized the importance of painting simple nature accurately, rather than attempting the grandiose or the sublime. It attacked the art critic in the New York Times who said that American painters could not hope to rival their European brethren by confining themselves to portraiture or American landscapes, "by sitting in a wood and depicting the trees therein with painful minuteness." The Crayon had been convinced by Ruskin that this was precisely what the painter should do.32 Yet when the Times critic went on to say that "fidelity to external Nature is but mere mechanism of Art, if it be not accompanied with internal sentiment and poetry," the Crayon could not disagree. In a double review of Tennyson's Maud and Whitman's Leaves of Grass in January of 1856, the reviewer accused both poets of being irreligious: Tennyson from an excess of sentimentality, Whitman from an absence—indeed, an ignorance—of the ideal. Though the reviewer praised Whitman for his vigor of thought and intensity of perception—"he has felt the beauty of the material in full measure"—he felt that the fallacy of his poetry was in equating truth to nature with mere photographic realism: "According to Whitman's theory, the greatest poet is he who performs the office of camera to the world, merely reflecting what he sees—art is merely reproduction."33 For the Crayon the task was to find the ideal implicit in the real, to achieve that fidelity to fact which would mirror "the greatest number of the greatest ideas," as Ruskin had written of Turner. In the seventh of a series of "Letters on Landscape

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Painting," Durand echoed Ruskin's typical elevation of Turner over Claude. Yet Durand himself, in his excursion to the White Mountains, preferred the simplicity of beautiful nature to the sublime. As he had emphasized in the first of his "Letters," the simple truths of nature were the true religion of art. The best advice he could give at the outset was to "go forth and list / To Nature's teachings." 34 Durand basically saw no conflict between truth to nature as fidelity to fact and truth to nature as a form of moral idealism, Ruskin's "greatest number of the greatest ideas." "The term Realism signifies little else than a disciplinary stage of Idealism . . . and is misapplied when used in opposition to it, for the ideal is, in fact, nothing more than the perfection of the real." Although this assertion in the eighth of the "Letters" would seem at first to be but a restatement of Reynolds' Third Discourse, there was, as James T. Flexner has pointed out, a profound difference; for where the neoclassicist sought through the power of rational selection to refine out what was evil and therefore aesthetically displeasing, Durand had faith in the power of intuitive perception to reconcile reality and idealism. As Flexner puts it: "For him selection meant in effect intuitive synthesis which revealed all characteristic forms in the high and noble manifestations which he believed were inherent in whatever was real. Artistic progress was an even deeper penetration into the infinite goodness of the divine. Ultimate beauty combined perfect details into 'a perfect whole.' " 35 If Durand's aesthetic reconciliation was ultimately based upon the rather shaky grounds of religious faith, still his definition was to have a continuing appeal to Americans of the post-Civil War years, because this vague idealism allowed critics to judge art by high moral standards without completely denying the facts of particular nature or the events of everyday life. Echoes of it can be found in the writings of Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Dudley Warner, and even in William Dean Howells' Criticism and Fiction when Howells fell back on the older rhetoric to defend the new

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literary realism. He spoke in terms of holding one's ear "close to Nature's lips" to catch her accent, convinced for the time at least —and Howells is ambiguous—that the perfection of the real, "the simple, the natural, and the honest," is in itself the ideal. As he put it at one point: "In the whole range of fiction we know of no true picture of life—that is, of human nature—which is not also a masterpiece of literature, full of divine and natural beauty."36 Besides, the real enemy for the Ruskinians, and the bone of contention later between Howells and his friend Norton, was not adherence to fact so much as it was overconcentration on technique. A year after Durand's 1855 statement, Christopher Pearse Cranch contributed an article to the Crayon from Paris on "French Landscape" which attacked French painters for "Material Mechanism," that is, making too much of the artistic means: "The true medium is between the formless mysticism of the Idea, and idolatrous devotion to the Form. The artist must neither attempt, on the one hand, to soar above Nature, and lay claim to ideas not based on actual visible images; nor on the other hand, sink to the level of a vulgar and material, still less a mannered treatment."37 This too would be picked up and developed by critics in the post-Civil War era. The answer to the Ruskinian dilemma of the contrasting claims of fidelity to particular nature and to the ideal seemed to lie in some balance between the two. This in turn raised a further question: how and in what way was this balance to be achieved? Justin Winsor tried to answer this in "Man and Nature," in August 1855. He began by citing Dugald Stewart's conception of the reciprocal relation between the self and the external world and then went on to ask: "Is it not as true that Nature assumes toward us an aspect in accordance with our own feelings?" The focal point of the critical dilemma seemed to Winsor to be the critic or artist as perceiver. One year before Modern Painters III was published, Winsor was speaking of the relativity of our views of nature: for the Romans the Alps were a bulwark of defense, not objects of grandeur. It was this very contingent nature of the

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external world that created the problem: "We waver between materialism and transcendentalism."38 Later in his essay, Winsor suggested a possible way out of the dilemma: "The truest artist possesses a transmuting power, unenjoyed by the mere sensuous observer. He humanizes, as it were, what he sees. Aye, he sometimes endows it with something beyond the human, the actual divine."39 The task of the artist (and, presumably, of the observer who could reproduce the artist's vision), was to transform experience, to transcend the material world and to perceive divinity through it. To fail to do so was to be caught in the morass of materialism. The key to this approach to art was the theory of perception behind it. An editorial stated the Crayons views on this subject quite clearly, by distinguishing between two kinds of perception: "one external or scientific; the other vital or artistic, not inconsistent, but, by no means, involving each other." The first kind of vision produced "the scientific or actual, the perfection of which would be mere perfect imitation." The vision that was artistic or "vital"—the term recalls Ruskin's "vital beauty"—produced the "ideal, the highest individual attainment of which is, the fullest beauty conceivable by us." Where the first referred to the eye, the second referred to the mind.40 The most cogent statement of the Crayons perceptual theory was adumbrated by Stillman himself in his second and last year as editor. Like Winsor's essay, Stillman s series of articles was in its general outlines similar to what other romantic art theorists had been saying for some time. He spoke of the tripartite division of man's functions into the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual or moral, and he related these elements respectively to the hand, the head, and the heart. The ideal artist, according to Stillman, would combine all three aspects of human experience.41 He then disposed of the physical summarily, for the Crayon had always denigrated mere manual competence. Such competence, he had said the year before, must always be subordinate to the love of nature. "In proportion as Art tends to the imitative

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[that is, to the mechanical reproduction of the outer world], it is base though excellent." The intellectual could not be dismissed quite so quickly, for Stillman recognized its importance. He did emphasize, however, that beauty was not dependent upon the association of ideas.42 The Crayon's own view of this tripartite division had been clear from the outset. In response to a reader's question the editors answered: "We deprecate strict literary criticism. THE CRAYON is a journal of the heart." Like the transcendentalists before them, they called attention to German literature, through articles on Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, Lessing, Klopstock, Tieck, and others. Though they had moral reservations about some of these writers, the refrain that ran through all the articles was that the German writers always judged from the heart.43 Unlike the Calvinist orthodoxy of Princeton and Boston, the Crayon praised Victor Cousin, as had the transcendentalists. Stillman cited with approval Cousin's statement that, in contrast to the artificiality of reason, "spontaneous intuition is the true logic of nature." Yet finally the Crayon was not prepared to go to the extremes of the sublime transcendental egotists. As Brownlee Brown said in his article on Ruskin, the "lawless imagination" was in itself an insufficient guide for men.44 Something further was needed. Thus it was John Ruskin who provided the crucial link in Stillman's aesthetic, for in Ruskin's discussion of "typical beauty" Stillman saw "the first correct indication of the final cause of Beauty which we have found among the theorists, declaring that the quality which we term Beauty is the expression in matter, of the nature or attributes of God, the form in which . . . He manifests himself in his works."45 Ruskin's theocentrism was the keystone of the Crayons theory. Though ideal beauty in art could only be reached through the heart, through intuitive perception, the ultimate justification of this perceptual theory lay in its referring not back to the self but to God. Ruskin's theocentric approach diverted the Crayon, as it was "saving" others, from the

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troubled waters of pure subjectivity into which romantic theory so often threatened to be drawn. With the help of Ruskin, Narcissus would not drown in either the lurid Fuselian tarn before the House of Usher or the vortex that engulfed the Pequod. However, to assert abstractly that beauty was the expression of divinity in the world of matter did not resolve the problem for the artist or critic of how to reproduce or perceive this divine expression as it eventuated on the painted canvas in a collocation of forms, shapes, and colors. If the human mind was not a Lockian tabula rasa but intuited correspondences between natural fact and spiritual truth, still it was hard to deny that a painting began as a blank canvas and was built up through the exercise of visual means, and that criticism had to begin with retinal impressions. To meet this problem, Stillman, like Emerson (with whom he was to have some contact in the year or so that followed), tried to distinguish between what the eye sees and what it conveys to the mind. "Art," said another contributor, "is a representation not of what the eyes see, but of what the soul seeks." A third said the same of nature: "The contact of living man with nature does not take place in the eye-ball, but in the soul."46 All of these writers felt that if the observer "sees no longer from within," "his vision becomes mere sensation," and all tried to avoid this danger. Yet if in doing so they upheld Ruskin's "theoretic faculty" against the "aesthetic faculty," they all bypassed the issue of how the artist or art critic could do without a firm sensational basis. The fundamental confusion involved in their attempt to reconcile the transcendental perception of "typical beauty" in art and nature with the observer's inevitable dependence on the visual produced semantic horrors like that coined by J. G. B. Brown. In an article on the troublesome question of "Selection in Art," Brown's reference to "the retina of the soul" recalls Ruskin's own talk of "the intellectual lens and the moral retina" or Margaret Fuller, in her Allston review, speaking of "the eye of the mind."47 The point should be clear. By following the lead of Ruskin and

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the romantic theorists who attempted to avoid a materialistic position by relegating the technical elements of painting to a lower realm, and by condemning the physical basis of artistic perception as "mere sensation," the Crayon floundered on the shoals of an intuitive idealism which could not adequately explain the relation of the visual achievement on the canvas to God. The dualism of romantic critical theory, the split between the world of matter and that of spirit, remained; but the Crayon managed to avoid facing this difficulty, as had Ruskin, by making a priori assumptions about the relation of the Creator to the human creator and to his particular creation on the canvas. So long as other people shared these assumptions, either through a general transcendental conviction or a more specific religious faith, this weakness in the Crayons art theory would not be apparent. Ruskinians had linked art with nature, and subjected the two to many of the same critical considerations. Their insistence on the relation of art and nature to morality and to Deity gave their theory an apparent stability. It seemed to be objectively true because the assumptions upon which it rested were religious. The theory was, generally speaking, safe from attack on the grounds of its assumptions, for to attack it on these grounds would be to raise the cry of impiety or even blasphemy, and few but Melville were willing to risk that. Yet, ironically, Ruskin himself had given a name to the weapon with which his future enemies might defeat him. The pathetic fallacy could be used against the Ruskinians by those who might claim that the correspondence of art and nature to God existed only in the mind of the perceiver, that the connection to Deity was not inherent in the object of art itself. Then Ruskin, his disciples, and romantic art theory in general would be open to the charge of "sentimentalism." The beginnings of a shift in this direction can be seen in the last years of the Crayon, 1859-1861, after Stillman had left the staff. The impetus came from the same quarter that the Crayon had praised for its emphasis on the claims of the heart—Germany.

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Ruskin himself may have had little use for German philosophical distinctions, especially those between subjective and objective, yet these distinctions touched the weak points of his critical theory and that of the Crayon. When Hegel's writings began to attract attention in America, the Crayon, by this time edited by Durand alone, was not unprepared. The June 1859 issue carried the first of several translations from his Aesthetik.i8 The same number included a review of the National Academy of Design exhibit in which, for the first time in the Crayons history, the critic specifically invoked the authority of Hegel in judging the paintings. The review also contained the ambiguous statement that "feeling, which Art alone deals with, is a matter of organization, and Art is only a material expression of subtle and fleeting feeling." 49 If the statement was read in Ruskinian terms, it need not have excited comment, for "feeling" could be interpreted as just another name for the appeal to the heart. But if the statement implied that feeling was either so evanescent or so "ideal" that it could not be made to objectify on the canvas the relation between matter and spirit, it threatened the moral framework— indeed the very foundations—of the Ruskinian position. The same danger was inherent in Friedrich Schiller's essay, "Thoughts on the Use of the Vulgar and the Mean in Art," which appeared in the August i860 issue. In an earlier article, Schiller had been praised as a romantic writer on the basis of his poetry and plays, which were well known in America.50 In the essay translated in i860 as well as in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, which had been translated in America some fifteen years earlier, Schiller had made certain important distinctions: that duty and beauty were not the same and should not be confused; that the aesthetic impulse was the result of the "PlayImpulse" rather than one's moral conceptions; that a crime which might be condemned morally might still give aesthetic satisfaction. Schiller was far from denying the moral demands in human experience, but the distinction he had made undermined the

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Ruskinians' assumptions concerning the dependence of art upon morality.51 The swan song of Ruskinism in the Crayon came in an unsigned review of Modern Painters which appeared in the number for September i860. Summarizing the importance of the now completed five-volume work, the reviewer, possibly Durand himself, said that it was the scientific and descriptive portions of the book, Ruskin's treatment of specific aspects of mountains, clouds, and leaf forms, that constituted its contribution to art-literature. The reviewer also praised him as a writer, likening him to Wordsworth. Ruskin's ability to sharpen men's perception of nature seemed to be his most important quality to the Crayon of i860. Of his theories of beauty, by contrast, the reviewer said: "We fancy that all the systems of Beauty that have hitherto been elaborated will disappear like chaff before the wind when the researches now being made in psychology shall be matured and shaped into principles of rational application." The reviewer did not elaborate what researches he had in mind. Yet the force of the rejection of Ruskin remained. Once one failed to grant the moral premises, the rest of Ruskin's theorizing seemed to collapse of its own weight: "His analyses of moral and social matters must be taken for what they are worth; they are entertaining episodes, whatever value they possess in connection with art. His criticisms on works of art, and his graduation of artists, ancient and modern, is wholly arbitrary, and in no wise to be relied on." The Crayon under Stillman had looked upon Ruskin as the exponent of absolute moral value in art, the defender of truth against the capriciousness of the merely sensuous or intellectual approach. Ironically, in i860 the journal was printing a review which, in the name of some undefined psychological approach, condemned Ruskin's theory of art as itself arbitrary and capricious.52 Although this review in the Crayon was atypical, it was a premonition of things to come. Stillman's own i860 review of Modern Painters, which appeared in the new Atlantic Monthly, was still full of high praise for the master, though Stillman ac-

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knowledged that after the first blush of Ruskinian enthusiasm, his American audience had found the theoretical sections of Modern Painters difficult going. Yet the fact remained that the Crayon was ending its career just at the outset of a new era in the history of aesthetic theory. In England the older philosophical approach to aesthetics and to epistemology in general was being modified somewhat by the experiments in physiological psychology of Alexander Bain and later by those of his disciple, Thomas Sully. In the United States the physicist Ogden N. Rood was investigating the nature of our perception of color. The works of Charles Darwin would stimulate the development of physiological psychology in the years to come. As early as 1864, the first volume of Herbert Spencer's essays published in the United States included an essay on "Bain on the Emotions and the Will," where Spencer quoted Bain's statement that "the vast superstructure of true art has its foundation in human feeling, and in rendering account of this we are led to recognize the interesting group of aesthetic emotions." In the fourth (1866) and later editions of the Origin of Species, Darwin himself was to suggest that beauty was not an innate idea in the mind of man but was at least in part a function of natural selection. The more metaphysically oriented German treatises of the years to come, like Fechner's Vorschule der Aesthetik (1876), would be based on experimental findings, while the impact of Hegelian thought would have an even more significant, if rather different, effect on American aesthetic attitudes. The result, in the post-Civil War years, would be a recapitulation in the long run of the brief but significant history of the Crayon itself, and would eventually bring about a radical reversal of Americans' allegiance to the moral aesthetic of John Ruskin. 53

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1855 WHEN THE Crayon was singing the praises of art, Ruskin, and American nature, it published a review of the first booklength study of art (rather than a compilation of essays or travel notes) written by an American, James Jackson Jarves' Art-Hints: Architecture, Painting, Sculpture. Reviewer Stillman noted that in its historical aspects the book was heavily indebted to Ruskin, Rio, and Lord Lindsay. Critically, it was "little else than dilute adaptations of Ruskin."1 However, rather than being pleased to find a Ruskinian ally, the Crayon was indignant, for Jarves had differed from the master on certain points. Although he shared with the Crayon Ruskin s conviction that truth was "the paramount law of beauty," Jarves had gone on to suggest that "the accurate rendering of the likeness of any material landscape is of less consequence than the combination of particular features selected, as it were at random, from Nature, and grouped into one harmonious whole, provided the ideal landscape thus created excels the natural in those general truths which the artist wishes to express."2 Stillman called Jarves philosophically confused for thus hedging on the absolute supremacy of truth (and raising the ghost of that Reynoldsian idealism Ruskin was currently trying to put to rest). Equally heretical were certain slighting remarks Jarves made about Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, though here IN

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Stillman's indignation may have been more justified. Since Jarves lumped the Nazarene Overbeck with the Pre-Raphaelites and among the English group mentioned only Hunt by name, one suspects that in 1855 he really did not know their work except at second hand.3 Ruskin, in a letter of cautious praise and encouragement to Jarves, expressed his regret about the general tone of the Crayons review of Art-Hints but seconded its chastisement of Jarves for his comments on Turner, suggesting to him: "I think you are not so much wrong as shortsighted in nearly all you say about Turner." Jarves publicly recanted this apostasy nine years later in his third book of art criticism, The Art-Idea; though better informed in 1864 he was still chary of the Pre-Raphaelites' tendency to subvert noble art by making it subserve exact science through their too exclusive concentration on the literal facts of nature.4 What seems to have disturbed the Crayon most about Jarves' first art book, however, was the author's insistence that the American artist must understand European art. This to Stillman and his friends was not only unacceptable in Ruskinian terms; it was positively un-American. If the Crayon review shows, as Jarves' biographer Francis Steegmuller has suggested, that there is no more bitter rivalry than that among disciples, it also indicates that critics could start from the same inspiration in Ruskin and move in different directions. The differences between Jarves' Ruslanism and that of the Crayon are as instructive as their similarities.5 Like the Crayon, Jarves felt that the criticism of art began with the understanding of nature. He said in Art-Hints that "without an intimate knowledge of Nature we are incompetent to judge Art, because Art, correctly speaking, is but the mirror of Nature." His perceptual theory was basically the same as the Crayons, and Stillman was essentially correct in saying that the theoretical part of Art-Hints was a distillation of the ideas of Ruskin, whom Jarves met in 1855.6 Jarves cited Ruskin as his authority again and again.7 He used Ruskin's terminology: "the ideal or theoretic

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faculty," "typical beauty," "the imagination associative."8 He spoke of the secondary importance of color as Ruskin had; condemned opaque skies in landscape painting and damned the Dutch à la Ruskin;9 and he made the final gesture of homage by imitating Ruskin s style in a description of a storm and its aftermath, substituting Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which had been the height of his experience with nature, for Ruskin's Alps. Unfortunately, Ruskin was a great stylist and Jarves was not, and Ruskin tactfully urged Jarves to speak in his own voice.10 Armed with these Ruskinian weapons, Jarves proposed to explain the art of the European past to his fellow countrymen. Certainly he was not the first American to do so; however, Americans' interest in European art had grown rapidly in the past few years. John Neal, for example, who had tried to boost the reputation of American art and artists in the twenties, was now purchasing two paintings from Jarves, a small Claude and a supposed Titian. Neal was forced to defend the Titian's authenticity in a series of exchanges with the skeptical editors of the Crayon. The battle over the Titian was a lost cause—Ruskin himself wrote Jarves that the Titian was not genuine—but the larger struggle Jarves was engaged in to educate Americans was, as Neal realized, of the utmost importance, and he came to Jarves' assistance in a review of Art-Hints for the North American. Fifteen years earlier, he said, such a book would not have paid the cost of printing. (Actually as late as 1847 the Knickerbocker reviewer of Modern Painters I had commended Wiley and Putnam for their courage in publishing in America a book of art criticism. ) In the years since, Ruskin and others had radically altered this state of affairs, and Neal predicted that the new book would be eagerly sought. "And what is even yet more encouraging, our very newspapers are busying themselves, and warming up their millions of readers, by republishing portions of Ruskin, and Wallace, and opening their columns to well-written communications from our countrymen abroad . . . upon much that concerns the

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higher revelations of art." 11 The "Wallace" whom Neal mentioned was the lawyer, editor of legal case books, and writer of numerous articles on art and travel, Horace Binney Wallace (18171852). A selection of Wallace's posthumous writings which had just been published contained essays like "Art, An Emanation of Religious Affection" and loving descriptions of Gothic cathedrals which any Ruskinian would heartily approve of, as well as perceptive comments on the primacy of the symbolic over the imitative function of art, and indications of Comteian enthusiasm which pointed to the future. With evidence like this and the Jarves book under review, Neal could easily measure the growth in interest and sophistication that had taken place since he had written his enthusiastic puffs in Blackwood's over thirty years earlier. 12 Jarves was well prepared to speak of the "higher revelations," for he was convinced that "the rules of Art are absolute. They are moral laws implanted by God in the heart of Nature, and are independent of human frailty or invention." He categorically denounced both Schiller and what he termed the "Pietist view" which condemned all art as blasphemous. "Beauty does help us to perform our duties, and carries out a most beneficent design for our moral and intellectual being." Following Ruskin's lead in asserting that truth was the paramount law of beauty and therefore that falsehood was ugliness in art, he ignored rather than really grappled with Schiller's arguments to the contrary. 13 In part Jarves' religious outlook was shaped by the long American (and especially the New England) tradition of anti-Catholicism. If Ruskin's evangelical bigotry was appealing to Americans in the 1850's, Jarves' violent hatred of the Roman Church would be hardly less so. Priestcraft saw its worldly advantage, and under the specious pretense that their flocks would not appreciate the spirit of Christianity, shut out from their view "the Way, the Truth and the Life," assuring to themselves the power to open heaven by

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virtue of mummeries that have reduced religion throughout the Roman Catholic and Greek world . . . to an organized system of deceit and stage-effect.14 Such an attitude was easily accepted in the years when nativist candidates were sweeping Massachusetts elections and even creating a national impact on an openly anti-Catholic platform. Passages like this could be found in a multitude of American travelers' accounts of Italy, and inevitably colored books like those of Jarves or his young acquaintance Charles Eliot Norton. Norton's first venture into Italian life and art, Notes on Travel and Study in Italy (1859), was part of that flow of "well written communications from our countrymen abroad" to which Neal had referred. It contained passages that were as violently anti-Catholic as anything Jarves wrote, and Norton had been attracted to Know-Nothingism before the slavery issue had destroyed it. 15 The link between Jarves and Norton was based on more than their anti-Catholicism and New England nativism. Jarves and Norton traveled by boat together to Europe in late 1855, just after the publication of Art-Hints. Since Norton shared Jarves' enthusiasm for Ruskin's writings, Jarves gave him a letter of introduction to the English critic whom he had only recently met himself.16 Jarves' personal ties to Ruskin then and in the years to come were never very close, maintained largely through mutual Florentine friends like the Brownings, but in the years that followed, Ruskin and Norton were to become the closest of friends. It is not surprising, therefore, that Norton's Notes resembles in important ways Jarves' early art books. The youthful Notes is organized as a travelogue and thus lacks the more direct aesthetic focus of either Art-Hints or the more mature Art Studies, yet this early work of Norton's shares with Jarves' a strong indebtedness to the aesthetic instruction of Ruskin, refracted in the case of both writers through American spectacles. Norton warned his readers in the preface that he would express himself strongly "in regard to some of the corrupt doctrines of the Roman Church

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and the methods of the Papal Government," because, he explained, "there are certain principles in religion and in government of universal application."17 Thus from particular abuses Norton too, like Jarves and their master Ruskin, was led to general principles. On the question of "universal" principles of government the two Americans were finally to differ sharply from Ruskin, but the concern with the "higher revelations of art" was central to all three, and the concern went far beyond their mutual anti-Catholicism. In fact, by the middle and late 1850's none of the three wanted to substitute a dogmatic Protestant sectarianism for the Catholicism they all feared. Ruskin, in 1858, had experienced a kind of religious unconversion in a little Waldensian chapel in Turin, a change, whether of kind or degree, which freed him for the future from his earlier evangelical bigotry. His published and private writings in these early years of Jarves' and Norton's acquaintance with him involved an attempt to steer a course away from pietism and bigotry on the one hand and the purely aesthetic approach to Italian art on the other.18 Norton in his Notes expressed some of the same ambivalent religious attitude. He spoke of "the confusion of ideas to which one not versed in the groundwork of his own faith is exposed when surrounded by the exhibitions of the prevalence and power of another . . . Multitudes of reported miracles are nothing more than misunderstood natural events, and many a good man has believed in miracles which were only the result of the morbid action of his own mind." 19 If the second sentence was penned by the son of Andrews Norton, author of The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels, the first indicates that the imaginative pull of a strong faith was a potential threat to the doubting Unitarian. Jarves presents in the extreme the problem of finding the higher revelations of early Italian art without reliance upon a specific creed; for he himself was a spiritualist and disliked all narrow sectarianism. His anxiety, like that of the rational Norton, was only deepened by the conversion to the Roman Church of

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Protestants who were swayed by "that spiritual elixir which every susceptible soul hungers and thirsts for," for some of these Americans had been moved by the paintings of the mediaeval Catholic mystics.20 Norton's greater rationality might save him from being converted by Fra Angelico, but for Jarves the threat that an aesthetic response might motivate a religious conversion was undoubtedly greater, since the line between mysticism and spiritualism could be perilously thin at times. Today Ruskin's attempt to talk to the spirit of Paolo Veronese may seem either laughable or pathetic, but the table-rapping craze, which swept up Ruskin and Mrs. Browning as well as Americans like Jarves and Longfellow, was obviously more than a fad. It indicated in an exaggerated way that for an increasing number of people theological questions seemed no longer important or even interesting. Men like Jarves, Ruskin, and even Norton (who though certainly no spiritualist was moving away from his father's Unitarianism toward agnosticism) were seeking a religion that cut across questions of creed, a religion of the heart. Most of Jarves' American readers were unwilling to go as far as he, and no one took up his suggestion that a nonsectarian "democratic church" be built in the new Central Park in New York, but the attitude behind this had a much wider appeal, as the reception of Ruskin in America was making increasingly evident. 21 The morality of art was not for Jarves a matter of creeds alone, any more than it was for the Crayon or Ruskin's other American advocates. Like the Rev. Gilbert Haven, Jarves stressed how necessary was the spiritual interest in art to counteract the scientific and materialistic bias of the age. When in his later books, from The Art-Idea of 1864 on, he focused more directly on the present and future of art, he would stress this problem even further: in what were by now familiar accents he deprecated the tendency to stress building over architecture and expressed his concern with the whole problem of democratic art and its exaltation of means over ends, of the actual over the ideal. 22 In 1855, though, the Crayon reviewer of Art-Hints was most an-

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noyed by Jarves' neglect of the United States and his insistence that European art was of vital importance to the American artist. The Crayon was oriented toward the present and future. It supported in general the principles of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, but largely on the grounds of their common stress on nature and not the Englishmen's appeal to the mediaeval past. By contrast, Jarves in Art-Hints and the more systematic Art Studies that followed it in 1861 focused on mediaeval and Renaissance Italy, for he was convinced that there was a message in the European past which Americans could ignore only at their peril. To Jarves the world of art was inextricably linked with Europe. He went to Europe knowing almost nothing about art, and the Louvre had been a revelation to him. In this respect Jarves was unlike Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, or Stillman, who had gone to Europe only after many of their ideas about art were well formed. (One recalls Bryant's sonnet "To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe," instructing the American to look at Europe "Till the tears shall dim thy sight, / But keep that earlier, wilder image bright.") On the other hand, the thirty-three-yearold Bostonian who "became oppressed, confused, uncertain, and feverish" by his first glimpses of the vastness of the Louvre was considerably removed from the young Henry James who also found himself "simply overwhelmed and bewildered" by the long halls and endless vistas of the great French treasure house. For James, the riot of sensations, that openness to aesthetic possibilities which seems to have been his almost preternaturally from birth, led him to see the Louvre "as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, of experience. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself most happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous Galerie d'Apollon." Crossing the bridge thus at the Louvre so early in life helped James to establish the "international theme," and to the end of his career he characteristically viewed the American's response to art through the perspective of Europe.23 For the older Jarves, however, the path from the first bewilder-

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ing revelations of the Louvre to the life of aesthetic commitment was more circumspect. He had come to Europe as a business agent for a Boston firm. Aesthetically he was just another American tourist. The spark that kindled his critical and historical interest in art, he tells us, was an incident which took place in Ruskin's beloved Venice. Jarves was examining the art and architecture of Palladio's Santa Maria della Salute when he saw a group of Americans rush through the church in five minutes. It was not the first time Americans had done this and certainly not the last. Only a few years later Charles Eliot Norton, who had just given up the life of a businessman himself, angrily chastised his fellow American travelers: We come abroad utterly ignorant of Art, and, with natural and national self-confidence, at once constitute ourselves judges and critics of paintings and statues. The audacity of our ignorance halts at nothing; and a five-minutes' visit to the Sistine Chapel qualifies us to decide on the powers of Michel Angelo. The majority of American travellers have yet to learn that some previous knowledge is to be acquired before one can be a judge even of the externals of Art; that it is not the eye alone that needs cultivation, but the heart and the intellect as well, by those who would understand and enjoy the works of the great masters.24 Norton's outburst led to little more at this point than his urging his fellow Americans not to be taken in by purveyors of bad copies or even forgeries of Salvator Rosa, Titian, and Murillo, and to consider the competent work of those American artists residing in Rome (a point which must have endeared him to the nationalistic Crayon). For Jarves, the experience of witnessing the American innocents abroad in the Salute had greater significance; indeed it gave shape to the challenge for the American student of art: Europe is a storehouse of Art, but its value and lessons are lost in a great measure upon the nations that gave it birth.

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Still those silent voices speak. Out of old churches, mouldering tombs, time-honored galleries, there go forth eternal principles of truth, if rightly studied able to guide the taste and warm the heart of young America, and urge her on in the race of reknown. I do not advocate blind copying of mind or the reception of laws, whether of taste or morality, without fully proving their spirit; but I do advocate, and would press home to the heart of every American who goes abroad, the necessity, if he would do his duty to his own country, of reading and interpreting to his countrymen, so far as in him lies, these sacred writings on the wall.25 This was the goal Jarves had set for himself and which he urged other Americans abroad to follow, not as a matter of choice, but as their national obligation, their moral duty to their country: to see what history could teach America, to look in the past for ideals for the future. Even in this first statement, Jarves was careful to say that he was not, like his mentor Ruskin, advocating any return to or revival of a particular period in the past. (By 1864 Jarves was specifically indicting Ruskin for turning his back on the modern world and advocating a return to the Middle Ages. 26 ) In these first books and in the collection of painting he was gathering for Americans, Jarves was seeking in the art of the past the meaning of history for the United States. Ruskin, in his study of Italy, provided the model for Jarves. The Stones of Venice had opened with the comparison of the three great sea powers: Tyre, of which "only the memory remains"; Venice, "the ruin"; and England, "which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction." The history of Venice had a moral which Ruskin stated at the outset and repeated throughout the three volumes: "The decline of her political prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual religion." All the evidence, historical, religious, economic, and artistic, was marshaled to prove this moral to Ruskin's satisfaction. The result was, in John Rosenberg's suggestive phrase, "a

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Christian epic, magnificent in scope, which in its final volume— The Fall—completes the chronicle of a Gothic paradise lost."27 For Americans this epic drama raised special questions, since from the earliest colonization there persisted the idea that the New World was really paradise regained. Indeed, the great Mr. Locke himself had said that "in the beginning all the world was America." Political independence seemed at once to confirm the edenic character of American life and to raise new questions of growth and development. Many Americans subscribed to some modification of the theory of inevitable progress in Condorcet's Progress of the Human Mind. The romantic revolution, emphasizing the primacy of the values of nature as opposed to or at least conflicting with those of civilization, had complicated the picture. Some Americans, like Thomas Cole, found inspiration in American nature while at the same time they were fascinated with the view presented in Volney's Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires ( 1791 ) of empires rising, flourishing, falling, and disappearing. For an American, Volney's book meant more than sic transit gloria mundi. Cole's series of paintings, "The Course of Empire," was an allegorical warning to Americans that a nation which began in wildness might move through pastoral simplicity to sensuous luxury and destruction, returning finally to wildness. In the last picture of the series, scattered ruins were the only evidence of earlier greatness. The problem which the series posed was whether a nation like the United States could become great without passing on to luxury and destruction.28 Cole's statement of the problem in his paintings was ideal and generalized, but the issue was clear none the less. As Cole phrased it in the motto to his Popular Description of the Series: "First freedom, and then glory; when that fails / Wealth, vice, corruption." Some twenty years later young Henry Adams would sit on the steps of the Ara Coeli in Rome where Gibbon had sat, and brood on the same question. As he put it: "Substitute the word America for the word Rome, and the question became

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personal." Thus when Ruskin placed the problem within a particular historical context through his study of Italian art in The Stones of Venice, some readers were bound to realize the relevance to the United States of what he was saying. The Literary World, which under the Duyckincks was so sensitive to questions of American destiny, was one of the first. Quoting Ruskin s opening threat that England also might suffer the fate of Tyre and Venice, the editors asked, pointedly: "Will America, for to us too is this warning given, profit more?"29 Jarves was convinced that Americans must profit from the lessons of history, and Ruskin's Stones of Venice thus became a kind of general model for Jarves' early Art-Hints and Art Studies. Though Ruskin, especially in the great chapter on "The Nature of Gothic," and Jarves, to a lesser extent, were driven to considerations of economics and the role of the workman in society,30 they looked at the problem of national destiny primarily through the perspective of the history of art. Ruskin was never sanguine to begin with. He quickly gave up hope for modern civilization and became, much to the distress of his American readers, the prophet of gloom. But world-weariness was extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an American. Jarves accepted the challenge which that question in the Literary World had presented: to find in the history of art a path to national fulfillment; to show Americans where Italian art and with it Italian civilization had failed, so that the new nation might profit from the mistakes of the old city-states; to write an optimistic last chapter for The Stones of Venice. Put another way, the question which Jarves posed was whether the history of European feudalism, monarchy, and aristocracy had any relevance at all to American democracy. As American writers had often pointed out, the great art of the past was the product of special privilege and aristocratic patronage, and behind some of the greatest European art lay the support of the hierarchical Catholic Church. The importance of this relationship of art to its background led John Neal, in his review of Art-Hints,

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to correct Jarves at one point. When Jarves seemed to imply that Greek art was the product of Greek democracy, Neal reminded him that a few architects and not the whole people had created Greek art.31 Jarves' task, therefore, was twofold. In the first place he had to reconcile a history which seemed to follow the pattern of rise and fall, "the course of empire," with his belief in American progress. In the second place he had to show the relation of an art which was Catholic and based on European forms of social organization to Protestant, democratic America. Jarves' task—indeed, as he felt, the task of the United States—was "to demonstrate that the cultivation of Art is compatible with freedom, and that, with the spread of taste and refinement, she loses neither vigor nor sincerity."32 The history of art, he claimed, must be read sympathetically but impartially. Thus it was wrong to present the facts from a classical bias, as Winckelmann did, from a Catholic view, as Rio, Montalembert, and others did, or as "a fanatical Protestant, to write under a holy horror of both." Instead he was trying to write a kind of nonsectarian Protestant art history. To do this, he claimed, one must understand the intent of the artists and the rules of expression, "more theological than aesthetic," by which they worked. Only in that way could one appreciate the nature of their achievement.33 If this seems to us today to indicate a willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the critic, to Jarves it implied nothing of the kind, for he felt that there was a continuity of ideas in the history of art. The chief value of art education "would be in teaching the principles and objects of art, its relation to history and civilization, and particularly its connection, in all times, with the religious and emotional sentiments, and its close affinity with the imaginative and creative faculties."34 "In judging of the past," he said, "we should not look back upon it from our point of view, but forward to it from its past, and so detect its progress." If the modern critic understood the intent of the artist and the context,

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he would not only be patient with their repetitive subject matter —Jarves, like Norton, was always a bit condescending toward the "primitives" whom he loved—but he would also perceive that "the mediaevalists, like ourselves in modern art, with the landscape and genre subjects, but gave free utterance to what was next their hearts."36 At the same time that he established this connecting link between the past and the present through the appeal to the heart, he also applied the romantic physiology of head, hand, and heart to the history of art, saying that the art of Greece was the expression of intellect, that of Rome the expression of fashion and sheer physical power, and that of the Middle Ages the expression of feeling.36 To this third period and its breakdown in the Renaissance, Jarves devoted his historical attention: it was imperative that his American audience understand why art had declined and what this decline could teach the new nation seeking to develop its own artistic potentialities while clinging fast to the dictates of the heart. The mediaeval art of Italy seemed to Jarves to be the purest expression of the religious ideal in art. He pardoned what he felt to be faulty execution in the work of Giotto, Sano di Pietro, Fra Angelico, and many others because these artists had faith. The Catholic Church at this period had inspired these men to religious faith rather than sectarian zeal. By contrast, the age of the Renaissance had given rise to a new sectarianism and had led to the degradation of art. The Reformation, which Jarves saw as the attempt to purify the religious spirit of its Roman corruption, had unfortunately led to "fanatical" or "Pietist" Protestantism, creating an opposition between art and religion. A great Protestant art still lay in the future. Catholic art had declined with the Renaissance and Reformation, as the corruption of the Church became manifest in artistic form. Jarves explained the greatness of Michelangelo, who, unlike Raphael and other artists, lived on into the era of the Reformation, by saying that "his matured views of religion . . . were what is understood among Protestants

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as 'evangelical,' though in conformity to the Roman ritual." Thus was the great Catholic master tamed and harmonized with Jarves' scheme.37 The main point of Jarves' discussion was to show his fellow countrymen, by careful and often perceptive analysis of numerous mediaeval painters who were all but unknown to most Americans, that the works of these artists were "Christian," part of the heritage of religious feeling of all men rather than the expression of the specifically repugnant Catholic dogma. His discussion of this began in Art-Hints and was continued in Art Studies (1861), a book intended to be a companion to his collection of early Italian paintings. Art Studies was dedicated to Charles Eliot Norton, whom Jarves recognized as an ally in the struggle to educate Americans about art. Norton came into the field later than Jarves, and he undoubtedly profited from talking to Jarves and from seeing his collection of paintings in 1857. He repaid this debt by encouraging his friend James Russell Lowell to print two excerpts from Art Studies in the new Atlantic Monthly prior to their publication in book form and by trying to secure the Jarves collection of paintings for the city of Boston.38 The pathetic story of Jarves' efforts to promote his collection in America has often been told. Jarves had high hopes that this collection, gathered to show graphically the historical and religious message he was trying to convey, would be sold to some public institution in America. When negotiations with the Boston Athenaeum failed, Norton tried to use his influence elsewhere and encouraged purchase of the collection by Yale University, which finally acquired the bulk of the collection, almost by default, in 1871. 39 What is important for our purposes is the reason why Jarves failed to convince Americans of the collection's value. Americans were not untouched by Ruskin's teachings and Jarves' writings, as Jarves' biographer has suggested.40 In fact, during the years the paintings were shuttling from place to place, Ruskin's popularity was at its peak. Nor did Americans seem to be

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troubled by the Catholic symbolism of the art, that it was the product of "Romanist superstition." What seems more likely is that American attitudes toward the collection reflected the particular character of the teaching of Ruskin and his American disciples. By concentrating on the ideas and the religious meaning of the paintings, these writers had not prepared Americans for the inevitable shock to their visual sense. Reviewers of Ruskins works had almost all praised the general ideas, the love of nature, the linking of art and morality in Ruskin's books, at the same time that most of these reviewers disclaimed much familiarity with the works of art he discussed. Furthermore, Ruskin and his disciples denigrated the "merely sensuous," and preferred the "theoretic" to the "aesthetic," the judgment of the heart over that of the head or hands, the ideal moral significance over the visual pleasure in the sensuous surface of the work of art. Jarves, like Ruskin before him, defined beauty teleologically in Art-Hints as fulfillment of the law of an object's being: "it is rather from its perfect adaptation to its purpose of existence, than to its outward shape and hue, that we establish its claim to Beauty." Given this criterion and the other Ruskinian canon of "truth to nature," it is understandable that Americans should have found themselves confused by the shapes and hues of the trecento and quattrocento masters. As Horace Binney Wallace had earlier commented: "The American reads of Art, and conjectures what it may be, with something of the wondering halfincredulous curiosity, with which he might hear of a new sense."41 Thus when Jarves confronted these Americans with a Taddeo Gaddi "Entombment" (attributed then to Giotto), a Sassetta "St. Anthony," or a Gentile da Fabriano "Madonna and Child," their curiosity turned to bewilderment. References to the earliest paintings in the collection as "pre-Giottesque ligneous daubs" 42 tend to confirm our suspicion that it was the sensuous surface of the work that was most troublesome to Americans. Ruskinian art criticism still left Americans bewildered by works of art.

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The paintings themselves are testimony that Jarves did have an acute aesthetic sensibility by modern standards, and an extraordinary one given mid-nineteenth-century worship of Raphael and Guido Reni. Like Ruskin and Norton, though, he turned away from the visual when explaining the meaning and value of Italian art to his contemporaries. The Ruskinian perspective encouraged the art historian and critic to justify aesthetic value not through specific visual description and analysis but in terms of some overarching rationale. Clearly for all three—Ruskin, Jarves, and Norton—the religious explanation, the drama of faith and loss of faith, was central to any understanding of the transition from the thirteenth and fourteenth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ruskin ranged across the whole field of art, Jarves worked out the pattern primarily in terms of painting, while Norton was beginning to find the same configuration in architecture, in the long central section of the Notes on the Cathedral of Orvieto: "The artist became a preacher of the Word. He might behold in his own day the influence of his works. He saw them studied, not by the cold and critical eye of connoisseurship, but by the tender heart of faith; their meaning was spelt out by rustics and told to the little children." When Norton went on to discuss the mosaics of San Marco in Venice, his text was a clear echo of Ruskin: "The decline of Art is to be dated from the time when artists began to work for purely wordly ends."43 There were differences between Norton and Jarves: unlike Jarves, for Norton "faithless pietism" did not await the Reformation; it could be found in fifteenth-century Florence. And for Norton it was Leonardo rather than Michelangelo who stood out against the fashionable corruption of Medicean Tuscany, for he had "learned to know the presence of God among the blue mountains that encircle Florence, and in the crowded market-place of the infidel city."44 But these were differences of detail rather than orientation. A more important difference is that between Ruskin and his two American disciples when they turned from religious expla-

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nations to political, social, and economic causes of the decay of art in the Renaissance. The Stones of Venice is in its totality a wholesale indictment of modern society. Insofar as Ruskin, in the peroration to the third volume, attacked the nineteenth century for providing work for the head and hand, but not the heart, and called instead for activity which engaged the whole man, body and soul, and for a criticism where the "beholding imagination" reproduced this integral process and the work of art was finally judged by its greatness of soul, Jarves and Norton heartily agreed. They could also accept in general Ruskin's development of these insights in the famous chapter in volume two on "The Nature of Gothic," with its penetrating discussion of the divorce of the artist-workman in the contemporary world from meaningful and fulfilling activity, by contrast to the mediaeval craftsman.45 But Ruskin had pushed these insights to their logical conclusion and arrived in the end at a frontal attack on the modern world: The simplest problems of social science are yet so little understood, as that doctrines of liberty and equality can be openly preached, and so successfully as to affect the whole body of the civilized world with apparently incurable disease. The final ruin of Venice, "the curse of the Cities of the Plain, 'Pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness,'" he also saw as the inevitable fate of modem laissez-faire capitalism and political liberalism.46 To these lengths neither Jarves nor Norton was prepared to go, for beneath their Ruskinism lay their faith in the promise of American life. Norton was convinced that commerce and free trade supported liberty, that liberty was essential to the development of literature and art, and that the Cathedral of Orvieto stood as an expression of popular will and faith, not of the power of ecclesiastics or feudal barons. It represented, "in a measure, the decline of feudalism, and the prevalence of the democratic

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element in society. No sooner did a city achieve its freedom than its people began to take thought for a cathedral." The problem, beginning to emerge for Norton in the Notes, was that Americans had achieved their freedom but seemed little inclined to erect new cathedrals. The search for answers to this dilemma would occupy much of Norton's energies during the remaining halfcentury of his life.47 Jarves too, at the same time that he was trying in his early books to drain mediaeval art of its specifically Catholic meaning to make it palatable to Protestant America, sought to transform Ruskin's tragic social vision into an optimistic affirmation of American democracy by examining the context of early art in Florence. He also later repeated the story, made familiar by Vasari, Mrs. Jameson, and a host of others, of how the completion of Cimabue's "Madonna Enthroned" had been the cause of great civic celebration, when the completed painting had been borne through the streets in a triumphal procession from the artist's studio to Santa Maria Novella. To Jarves this was a type not only of the mediaeval religious spirit but also of Florentine civic life.48 He described Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century as "a thoroughly earnest, democratic commonwealth, the political life-blood of which was interpenetrated with the spirit of labor and trade; thrifty and parsimonious in private, but lavish beyond modern conception, upon art and all that exalted its reputation and increased its glory." When the new forces of naturalism in art were felt in the fifteenth century, Italy entered a period "of intense intellectual activity. Society then was undergoing its Epic phase; solving by the vicissitudes of experience many important problems. Its artistic and intellectual progress in extent and rapidity may be compared to the material expansion and universal activity of America in the nineteenth century." Here lay the clue to the historical meaning of Italy for Americans. The greatness of Florence during the period of her artistic pre-eminence was that of a vigorous republic. The "boisterous freedom, deadly perils in maintaining it," the "devout

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feelings, stirring, high-toned individualism," which characterized the Tuscans, were the very qualities Jarves and most Americans attributed to the contemporary United States.49 The history of Italy seemed to prove to Jarves, as it did to Norton, that "art must be free if it would make progress. It takes root firmer in the hearts of the many than in the tastes of the few." Thus in their opinion the Medici were not the promoters and supporters of art but the villains of Florentine history, for they had transformed the democratic basis of art into a tyranny of ruling princes. "All that was noble and great in Art had its origin among the people, when democratic communities and free cities emulated each other's work and labored to honor God by their genius-directed handicraft." With the rule of the Medici had come "the decadence of patriotic sentiment . . . which . . . finally made of Tuscany the graveyard of genius and freedom."50 Thus to complete this rereading of Italian history, Jarves and Norton reshaped the images of the central figures to better fit them for their roles in this allegory for Americans. For Norton, Savonarola emerges at the end of the Notes as the last great expression of the age of faith. Though somewhat too much the "enthusiast" for the Unitarian Norton, still "beneath all the extravagances of his visionary and exalted eloquence lay a broad and deep foundation of truth. For a time, the fervid spirit of Savonarola lighted up the flames of repentance in the hearts of the fickle Florentines." (The rhetoric is almost worthy of Ruskin.) With his death came the death of art in Italy.51 In Jarves' books the pattern was even clearer: Savonarola was the man of true religious feeling who had attempted to purify life and art of their corruptions. "In Savonarola terminated the last grand systematized effort to place Art exclusively upon a Christian basis." Michelangelo, the artist for prince and pope, became the type of the democratic man. He was born a citizen—not a subject. His political sympathies were with the democratic puritans of Savonarola . . . He asserted his own dignity as an intellectual potentate and his

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moral rights as a man, without compromising his liberty of choice as an artist. Sovereign tyrants were compelled to respect the individual in him. Jarves had reread Italian history and made it as much a moral lesson for Americans as Ruskin's Venice was for the British Empire. He suppressed the Catholic meaning of Italian history and Italian art by emphasizing the intensity of general religious feeling rather than loyalty to the Church of Rome, remodeling the great Catholic figures into evangelicals and puritans. He denied that art had been stimulated by a privileged class and asserted that it had been a product of mediaeval Florentine democracy. The political lesson for Americans was unmistakable: so long as art remained in the hands of the people rather than as the plaything of a privileged merchant class, both art and democracy would flourish. The full cycle of the course of empire would only be realized if the democratic bases of art-culture were destroyed.52 Jarves returned to this point again in The Art-Idea. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, in a lecture of i860, had asserted that the art of the Italian schools was the product of government and not of the people, and Jarves felt it imperative to correct the influential minister, summarizing what he had been trying to prove in his earlier works: Democratic institutions had the upper hand in Italy, especially in Tuscany, at the epoch which Mr. Beecher denounces. Art decayed as soon as its patronage fell into aristocratic keeping. To be a noble in Florence in the days of the Giotteschi was as uncomfortable as to be a Secessionist at the North now. The art of Italy, from its revival in the twelfth century to its prime in the sixteenth, was emphatically the offspring of the feeling and taste of all classes of the people.53 However, in the years after 1861 Jarves' critical opinions did shift somewhat. There is a suggestion in The Art-Idea (1864) that Jarves' idea of progress had been influenced by the publica-

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tion of the Origin of Species five years earlier.54 In The Art-Idea and Art Thoughts (1870) he became more concerned with modern and especially American art. The scientific and materialistic tendencies of modern life reminded him of the fate of Rome, and, as in the earlier books, he recalled to Americans the ideal of the mediaeval spirit as a counterbalance to American materialism. His later books were much less overtly Ruskinian than either Art-Hints or Art Studies. In a sense, Rusldn—the Englishman, Gothic revivalist, pessimist, would-be benevolent dictator—had outlived his usefulness to Jarves and was ill-equipped to answer the specific problems of American art; but Jarves had to a great extent absorbed Rusldn's ideas and made them a part of his own. In a long footnote at the end of Art Studies, he admitted that American religious architecture was poor and that our shop fronts and houses were expensive but tawdry. Yet the future belonged to the United States. Progress might be gradual but it was inevitable: "By degrees, questioning, doubting, experimenting, and working, slowly throwing off the lees of the Past, we are ripening to a great Future, in which Religion, made lovely by Art, shall take her rightful place in our hearts as well as minds, and men shall again find more pleasure in dedicating buildings to the service of God than of their bodies."55 Ruskin had been unable, finally, to escape the grasp of history. The fate of Tyre and Venice seemed to him to indicate almost inevitable decline. Jarves, on the other hand, had the American's ambiguous response to history. The past was valuable. It had taught him certain lessons. But after history had been pilfered of its message, it was to be discarded; for America was the land of the future, and her destiny was to triumph over the past. This gave Jarves a flexibility which Ruskin altogether lacked. The American Civil War only confirmed Ruskin s suspicions of the evils of an industrial society,56 and Ruskin's response was to advocate the drastic alteration of social and political institutions. Only by attacking the roots of the system could the course of empire be changed. Jarves, on the other hand, remained san-

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guine. The growth of new fortunes after the war led him to write in a later book an open "Letter to Merchant Princes."57 He was hopeful to the end. The Vanderbilts and Holdens and Marquands might be taught to pattern themselves on Giovanni Ruccellai and thus might escape the fate of the Medici. The lessons of the past could be altered to fit the changing needs of the new era. The concluding footnote to Art Studies had contained a further vision of the role art was to play in the new America. Ruskin had taught Jarves that the great art of the past was dependent upon a healthy religious society. The relationship of art and religion seemed to Jarves to be reciprocal, and he was suggesting in 1861 that in the future "religion, made lovely by Art, shall take her rightful place in our hearts as well as minds." The vitality of art might help to bring about a revitalization of the American religious consciousness.

VII ^ CIVIL WAR INTERLUDE: THE NEW PATH

As THE C I V I L W A R BEGAN, Ruskin was reaching the height of his early popularity in America. "Art," said the Rev. H. W. Parker in 1862, "is, after all, the business of our century, and war but a passing incident." The statement is, to say the least, an undervaluation of the effect the Civil War would have upon American life, but it does indicate the high hopes that many shared for the future of art in the new world. Ruskin, like his friend Carlyle, and for many of the same reasons, was hostile toward the Union cause during the war. Both were undergoing severe personal turmoil and depression which warped their views; neither had much specific knowledge of the United States and tended to think about it in terms of Tory stereotypes; most important, the social philosophy of both was increasingly anti-democratic in these years. The year i860 saw the publication in Cornhill Magazine of Ruskin's first major social tract, Unto This Last. In 1862 and 1863 the lectures later gathered as Munera Pulveris (and dedicated to Carlyle) were running in Frazer's Magazine. In 1866 he delivered the famous lecture on "War," which distinguished between the older heroic strain and the capitalistic war for profit. The American conflict seemed to him a clear example of the latter type, as Renaissance Venice had been its breeding ground. All of these essays and lectures show him firmly turned

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against the American venture, and neither Charles Eliot Norton nor Ralph Waldo Emerson could convince his respective English correspondent, Ruskin and Carlyle, either that he should come to America to see for himself or even that there was an "ideal side" to the war. In fact the war brought something of a breach in both correspondences, though the breach was only temporary and was healed in the postwar years.1 Most important for our purposes and indicative of the hold of Ruskin upon his American audience is the fact that despite occasional references to Rusldn's anti-Union stand, his reputation in America did not suffer as a result of the war. On the contrary, new converts were joining the ranks. In New York City a study group of young men met at Waverly Place in the early sixties and organized the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art. They published an aggressive little journal called The New Path, beginning in May of 1863. Clarence Cook, who was then regular art critic for the New York Tribune, became the editor of the New Path. In a review for the Tribune of the National Academy of Design exhibition in May 1864, he commented extensively on the work of his fellow member of the society, Thomas Farrer.2 His concluding comments on Farrer suggest the typical pattern of Ruskinism in America: As it was Ruskin who moved Farrer—so it was Ruskin who moved us, and had excited us all with a new interest in art, with higher and more inspiring views of it, and had prepared us to greet eagerly whoever should first move in the new path he had pointed out. Then, again, it was the Nineteenth Century that moved Ruskin—he was the spokesman for many silent thinkers, and found an audience waiting for him with eagerness to devour his words, and ready to put them into act . . . Convincing words crept across the Atlantic, and waked us here, and we believed him; and then came these young men who determined to follow his teaching; and they have done so; and they are teaching, helping, moving others; and, so, the work goes on.8

THE NEW PATH

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Even though at this point the New Path announced its independence of the society, the principles set forth in the journal's second volume did not differ from those in the first, issued officially under the society's auspices.4 These self-appointed young reformers of American art, including, in addition to Cook and Farrer, the architects Peter B. Wight and Russell Sturgis, the geologist Clarence King, and the painter Charles Herbert Moore, proclaimed that Ruskin was their "leader," and in the pages of their journal they preached his doctrines and those of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The indebtedness of these "daring young men" to the P.R.B. is clear, as the group's historian has amply testified, but it is worth reminding ourselves, as Cook's statement suggests, that in America the line between the P.R.B. and Ruskin was extremely blurred. Both the American "Brothers" and their audience tended to identify the P.R.B. with the famous art critic whose writings had made their work known in this country. (Ironically, it was a sketch of Ruskin's that had been the hit of the first P.R.B. exhibition held in America in 1857.) Thus for our purposes, the New Path serves as an index of the exuberant Ruskinism of the 1860's, for the journal summarizes much of the appeal of Ruskin's ideas about art and indicates both the strengths and weaknesses of these ideas as they were being interpreted in America.6 The articles on architecture, written mostly by Sturgis, were perhaps the best in the journal; their message was familiar. They urged a return to the Gothic for inspiration and for viable models for contemporary architecture, and stressed that Gothic was not the exclusive property of Episcopalians, lovers of High-Church doctrine, ritual, and ceremony; its value lay in its "true and constructive building," in calling for "complete and faithful study of Nature for its decoration." Though Ruskin had attacked Paxton's London Crystal Palace, his American disciples applauded the New York copy, but for Ruskinian reasons: honesty in construction and use of materials. If in this respect the New Path emphasized the functionalist side of Ruskinian principles, it did not

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neglect the ideological. The design and execution of a church building "should have just as much to do, in its way, in instructing the minds and softening the hearts of men, as the minister has in his holy office." In their different ways, both architect and minister labor for "the Glory of God and the salvation of man."6 In one respect the New Path did reach beyond this familiar Ruskinian blend toward the future. In the year that Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was affronting the complacent Academie des Beaux Arts with the first of his famous Entretiens, the New Path was quoting at length from his work in progress, the Dictionnaire du Mobilier Français: "That which characterizes the furniture of the middle a g e " — we translate from page 360—"is not so much its richness as the taste and reason shown in the adoption of forms, the frank acknowledgment of destination, the infinite variety, the appearance of solidity, the true employment of material according to its nature." The citation points toward the future rational approach to the Gothic, but the New Path also found the great French theorist useful for his indictment of the poor taste of the present. Young Americans were prepared to agree with Viollet-le-Duc that in most ways the present was an advance over the past, in public duty, law, and justice, but progress had not spread to private artistic taste. As he instructed them—and the anti-Ruskinian view emerging is worth noting—"good taste consists in seeming to be that which we are, and not that which we desire to be.'"7 Yet if this seems to point in the direction of something that late nineteenth-century aesthetics would call "realism," the New Path used it primarily to attack the materialism and sham of the sixties. Witnessing the beginnings of the craze for French Renaissance mansions along Fifth Avenue, it declared that it would wage a relentless warfare against our merchant princes' taste for gaudy interior decoration and trashy styles. As it warned its readers, in language reminiscent of Jarves or Ruskin's "Nature

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of Gothic," the decline of architecture came with the Renaissance, when art became the luxury of the rich and not a function of the craftsman. American art would be great, said the New Path, when it appealed to all men.8 The same democratic note could be heard in the New Path's comments on painting. To the young men of this journal, the strength of Ruskin's appeal was to the masses and not to the connoisseurs. The connoisseurs were too firmly fixed in their devotion to such painters as Domenichino, Carlo Dolce, and Salvator Rosa. Even Ruskin could not change this. The hope of art in America, they claimed, lay not in any critical elite but in the people, who were free of the prejudices of the critical tradition. The thirteenth-century artist was not hampered by traditions. He worked in ignorance of everything but nature. "Now, these conditions of a childish simplicity and ignorance in matters of Art coupled with a strong and wide interest in such matters— albeit, unformed, untrained—and perception naturally direct and true, are no where to be found to-day as pure as they are in America!" To the New Path the American democracy was the hope of the future. Under the tutelage of Ruskin, Americans could be led away from decadent traditionalism down the "new path." 9 The journal's statements of 1863 were intended as an artistic emancipation proclamation. The connoisseurs might have supported the reputations of Domenichino, Carlo Dolce, and Salvator Rosa, but it was "the people," it said, who had acclaimed Giotto, Raphael, Veronese, and Gainsborough. Although no crowds were to be seen marching through the streets of New York bearing a modern counterpart of the Cimabue Madonna, the New Path's nationalistic faith was strong. It was reflected in one writer's regret that Allston's talents had been misdirected by exposure to Europe; he praised instead the meticulously realistic war pictures of Winslow Homer and the genre painting of Eastman Johnson. To the vast American public whose knowledge of art was very limited, to the young writers in the New Path who

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were unfamiliar with the wealth of European art of the past, upon which a philosophy of art might test its ideas, and to a nation which prided itself on its relation to nature and its freedom from tradition, Ruskin's dogmatic devotion to "truth to nature" had a compelling force. As a later, less charitable William J. Stillman phrased it, Ruskin "enabled ignorance of art to erect itself into a canon of criticism."10 Yet if this was a primary basis of Ruskin's appeal to Americans of the 1850's and 1860's, it was also the source of his downfall, for his appeal was based on Americans' love of nature and not their understanding of art. The more that Americans were exposed to art, the more the thoughtful among them would see the fallacies in his critical ideas, his ad hoc reasoning, and the vast gap between his acute aesthetic sensibility and his ability to explain rationally just why a particular work of art was beautiful. Ruskin might lead Hawthorne to Turner or Henry James to Tintoretto,11 but his "explanations" of the paintings were often woefully inadequate. The masses of whom the New Path spoke so highly might always like the criterion of "truth to nature," for it enabled them to link the unfamiliar world of art with familiar assumptions about nature and God through Ruskin's splendid word painting of nature or Turner landscapes. But it was already clear in the 1850s and would become increasingly clear in the post-Civil War years that, however appealing it was in religious terms, "truth to nature" was a blunt tool for the understanding of art. It explained away as much as it explained. As a result, an increasing number of art lovers would turn elsewhere for aesthetic guidance. Further evidence of Ruskin's effect on his American audience can be seen in the New Path's opposition to associationism and what it called the "German" method of criticism. The journal crossed swords with James Jackson Jarves over a painting by Inness. Jarves had said that in painting the thought should predominate and the forms would flow from it. The New Path called this "German" and urged quite the opposite. A year later in The

THE NEW PATH 153 Art-Idea, Jarves repeated his assertion that Inness' strength lay in his imagination and feeling. Though his technique was sometimes faulty, "unlike the generality of our landscape art, his does not hint a picture so much as a living realization of the affluence of nature." Yet having returned momentarily to "truth to nature," Jarves again plunged on into further talk about the emotional impact of Inness' paintings. "This overflow of sadness is almost epic in expression, and is heightened by his intense idealism of color." The tone of his landscapes "partakes of that fervid warmth with which we love to invest the heart's creations." In sum, Inness was "the Byron of our landscapists."12 But of course despite Jarves' invoking of truth to nature and his lurid imitation of Ruskin's descriptions of Turnerian color in Inness, this persistent desire to invest either the landscape or the painting with one's own emotions and associations was precisely what the New Path was objecting to. It advocated what it took to be adherence to Pre-Raphaelite principles, of exactness and fidelity of detail which was at the same time part of a larger whole (and not detail for its own sake), because it deplored the taste of the times for "weak sentimentalism and affected seriousness and false religious enthusiasm." Implicit in its call for artistic realism, truth to nature, was the same scorn for sentimental nature worship as a substitute for religion that the ministry had been expressing in these years. The New Path was convinced that its own approach avoided sentimentalism and reached for the deeper religious truths, the "genuine sensation of the transcendent loveliness and eloquent teaching of the Creator's work," and that this was the new path which both artist and public must walk in the coming years.13 Two months earlier, in an attempt to educate the public on the proper method of art criticism, the New Path reiterated its warning that "another great fault in criticism is to judge of a picture by the emotions and thoughts which it excites. The feelings which a work of art produces may serve to illustrate and explain some particular statement with regard to it, but ought never to be

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considered a sufficient test of its merits. The association of ideas is dependent upon the slightest circumstances."14 Ruskin had led the New Path away from Alison and from the picturesque tradition. He had scorned the German distinctions between subjective and objective, but as our examination of the Crayon has indicated, Ruskin's own claim to objectivity was the weak link in his theory of art. His belief in the objective existence of the connections he saw between nature and God and his indictment of romantic subjectivism as blasphemy may have been an important source of his popularity in America; but his treatment of the problem had by no means solved the underlying critical dilemma. The deeper one probed into the source of the aesthetic response, the more important became the question: was the aesthetic response an objective reflection of the work of art or (equally important in the case of Ruskinian art criticism) the world of nature, or was it the product of the observer's emotional and intellectual state? Ruskin left this central problem of the relation of the observer to the aesthetic field as a legacy to his American disciples in the post-Civil War period. Another aspect of Ruskin's critical approach which was discussed in the pages of the New Path was the relation of science to art. One writer confidently asserted that science and art were not only compatible but that scientific knowledge was very useful to the artist. Certainly this compatibility could be found in Ruskin's criticism, for his geological studies with Rev. William Buckland had led him to use his amateur knowledge of geology and meteorology in the criticism of art. Science and art, in Ruskin's view, were both approaches to nature. Yet in "A Heretic Squelched" another writer in the New Path cited Ruskin's statement in The Stones of Venice that the grand mistake of the Renaissance schools [of art] lay in supposing that Science and Art were the same things, and that to advance in the one was necessarily to perfect the other; whereas they are, in reality, things not only different, but so

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opposed, that to advance in one is, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, to retrograde in the other. Ruskin could be quoted on both sides of the issue. He had employed a teleological science in his own art criticism, but he deplored the scientific legacy of the Renaissance, especially in its nineteenth-century technological manifestations. In the age of Darwin and Tyndall, of Asa Gray and Willard Gibbs, such contradictory attitudes would not go unnoticed. The New Path had also quoted the passage in The Stones of Venice which followed the one above, where Ruskin went on to say that art deals with truths of essence, science with truths of aspect. This too would be a bone of contention among his American readers in the coming years. 15 Thus while the New Path is a summary of American Ruskinism at the time of its greatest flourishing in America, it is also an index of the weaknesses in Ruskin's approach which were to be subject to severe scrutiny in the decades that followed. The inability of the Ruskinian view to answer satisfactorily the questions it raised would ultimately lead to Ruskin's downfall as the arbiter of artistic matters in America. If we look ahead a generation from the vantage of the Civil War, it becomes apparent that by the 1880's the force of Ruskin's direct impact on American ideas about art had been spent. This is not to say, however, that his ideas had ceased to affect Americans. As Edward Everett Hale would remark in 1887, young artists might not be reading Ruskin's books, but "nine in ten of them would, perhaps, not be artists, had he not led the Englishspeaking race out of doors, in a sympathy with landscape painting and the work of true art, which has led to the new enthusiasm of our time for the arts of design." 16 Hale's claim is surely extravagant, but there is a certain justice in it. The younger generation of Americans may not have been enthusiastically reading Ruskin's books on art; but this new generation was being taught by men

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like Hale and Charles Eliot Norton who had read Ruskin as young men in the 1850's and 1860's. Some, like Loammi G. Ware, would carry Ruskin's ideas into the provinces more or less intact. Some, like John La Farge, rejected Ruskin outright in their later years. Between these two extremes stood an important group who found Ruskin's treatment of the relation of art, religion, and nature no longer satisfactory but who could not exorcise his teachings in any simple manner. Ruskin was the heritage of this generation and in the later lives of these men there is a recurrent internal dialogue between the Ruskinian doctrines of their early years and the new demands of post-Civil War intellectual life. To trace this pattern in the lives of these men will not only help us to assess the waning effects of Ruskin on American ideas about art but will also indicate the changing dimensions of American intellectual life in the new era.

Thomas Cole, "The Architect's Dream" Asher B. Durand, "Sketch from Nature"

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National Academy of Design, detail of the façade Peter B. Wight, National Academy of Design

Peter B. Wight, Street Hall, Yale University

Thomas Moran, "Cliffs of Green River"

John Ruskin Louis Sullivan, Schlesinger Mayer Department Store, detail of the façade

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New Path in 1865 over the relation of Ruskin's theories of art to science was by no means a new one. The relation of science to art or of science to poetry had troubled the romantic mind since the opening years of the nineteenth century. Only the most extreme partisans of either art or science maintained that there was any inherent opposition between the two, but the points of contact between them were a problem.1 Both science and art claimed allegiance to "nature," but in the years around the Civil War the idea of nature in its relation to both science and art was undergoing considerable change. T H E CONTROVERSY IN THE

Ruskin's conception of art as "truth to nature" was based upon certain assumptions about the physical universe which were generally accepted in the years before the Civil War. However, the rapid developments in men's understanding of the physical universe in the 1850's and thereafter substantially altered man's approach to nature. When the scientific premises upon which Ruskin's aesthetic theory was based were undermined, his claim to authority in America as a theorist of art was bound to be seriously affected, especially since his approach to art was based on a conception of the unity of nature, religion, and art. The eighteenth-century American had absorbed the Newtonian world view with relative ease. As the nineteenth century opened,

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new developments in science were made both comprehensible and positively pleasing through the writings of two very influential Europeans, one an Englishman and the other a German by birth, a cosmopolitan in spirit. It is difficult to realize today that the most popular philosopher in America in the first half of the nineteenth century was the Rev. William Paley, so eclipsed is his reputation, yet it was Paley who popularized the image of the clockmaker God and a clockmaker's universe in the opening pages of his Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). Through this book and his other writings, Paley's influence in the colleges and academies of the United States was pervasive. His point of view was even reflected in a multitude of children's books like Thomas Gallaudet's Youth's Book on Natural Theology.2 The work of Paley and his followers, including the writers of the Bridgewater Treatises, emphasized the unity of science and theology. Nature, whether it was examined in the shell of the lobster's tail, the structure of the human hand, or the fossil vegetables, reflected design. The natural world was seen teleologically and the existence of the Creator inferred from design. To see the pattern was to have "evidence" of the Creator. As Paley put it, there cannot be design without a designer; contrivance, without a contriver; order, without choice . . . Arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relations of instruments to a use, imply the presence of intelligence and mind. 3 Scientific discoveries thus confirmed theology. Investigation of the pattern of the natural world enabled man to know God through His works. As Henry Adams said, with characteristic hyperbole: "Every curate in England dabbled in geology and hunted for vestiges of Creation." There was a small group of scientists in England at this time, including the greatest names— Faraday, Young, Dalton (but no geologists)—who saw no rela-

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tion between science and religion, but many English scientists subscribed to the idea that science was witness to the divine plan for the universe, operating through fixed laws, while some saw God as directly participating and guiding the processes of nature toward benevolent ends.4 In America the blurring of science and cosmology was even greater, for less attention was given to theoretical science. However, observational botanical natural history based on morphology (rather than the later physiological botany based on experimentation) flourished, as did technology and other practical applications of science to the needs of the growing republic.5 As one scholar has noted, when the foremost chemist in America, Benjamin Silliman, was approached by William Beaumont for assistance in analyzing the chemistry of gastric juices, Silliman declared his inability to help and justified his ignorance by saying that "all kinds of aliment may dissolve with the equally mild and simple gastric fluid, but who can explain the proximate or even the ultimate cause, in any other way than by referring it to positive law of the Creator—often incomprehensible equally in his nature and his works." Meanwhile, most Americans pursued scientific study on the premise that they were accumulating evidence of design. Some, like Francis Wayland, might balk at the materialism of Paley's approach, but for most Americans some version of Paley's doctrine served to incorporate science within a comprehensive moral view.6 Where the Paleyites made explicit their static, atomistic view of the planned contrivance of the world machine, the popular writing of Alexander von Humboldt emphasized the role of human consciousness in the perception of the external world. Humboldt had been the friend of Thomas Jefferson and mentor of young Louis Agassiz. By the 1850's he had reached the height of his popularity, and American tourists abroad made his residence in Berlin a place of pilgrimage while their countrymen at home read the new, inexpensive English reprints of his works. In both the Ansichten der Natur and his great work, Kosmos, Humboldt

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set out to give a comprehensive history of the contemplation of the universe. Placing human consciousness at the center of his investigation of the natural world, Humboldt included in Kosmos sections on landscape painting and exotic gardening, for these had influenced men's awareness of nature as had the far off galaxies which he considered in the later volumes. In the ninety years of his life, Humboldt spanned the world of the enlightenment and the age of romanticism. He declared in the first volume of Kosmos that his method was one of "rational empiricism," but the second volume was essentially the venture of the egocentrically oriented romantic mind: "to consider the impressions reflected by the external senses on the feelings, and on the poetic imagination of mankind." He criticized Buffon for lacking "a harmonious mode of connecting the representations of nature with the expressions of awakened feelings; he is in fact deficient in almost all that flows from the mysterious analogy existing between the mental emotions of the mind and the phenomena of the perceptive world." By contrast, Humboldt lauded spokesmen for subjectivity, exploiters of romantic selfhood like Rousseau and Chateaubriand.7 Both Humboldt and his disciple Louis Agassiz rejected the extreme Naturphilosophie of Oken and Dollinger in Munich. As Agassiz wrote in a letter, Naturphilosophie represented "the exaggeration of religious fanaticism, borrowing fragments of science, imperfectly or not at all understood, and then making use of them to prescribe to scientific men what they are allowed to see or to find in Nature." But as he went on in the same letter to say, biological phenomena "are due, in their entirety . . . to the direct intervention of a creative power, acting freely and in an automatic way." Science, for Agassiz, was not a materialistic concern, even though he rejected the speculative formulation of the theologian-scientists.8 Agassiz's greatest theoretical work was behind him when he accepted an invitation to come to America—as it turned out,

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permanently—in 1846. Through his books, his lectures at Harvard to a generation that included Henry Adams and Clarence King, and his collecting activities, he was to become the great spokesman for science in the new world. In a report of his new Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, he used a striking simile which indicates how great were his hopes: Scientific investigation in our day should be inspired by a purpose as animating to the general sympathy, as was the religious zeal which built the Cathedral of Cologne or the Basilica of St. Peter's. The time is passed when men expressed their deepest convictions by these wonderful and beautiful religious edifices; but it is my hope to see, with the progress of intellectual culture, a structure arise among us which may be a temple of the revelations written in the material universe.9 Agassiz refused to force scientific facts into a theological strait jacket; however, behind his rejection of Darwinism lay his instinctive rebellion against a world where natural processes were not touched directly, even if automatically, by the hand of God. Darwinism threatened Agassiz's conviction that species began as thoughts in the mind of God, that the plan of the universe did not grow out of the necessary action of physical laws but was "the free conception of the Almighty Intellect, matured in his thought, before it was manifested in tangible external forms." His response was to make the scientific enterprise itself a religious venture, substituting the worship of the Creator as His ideal plan is perceived by the human mind in the physical universe for the older forms of worship of God within the great Catholic cathedrals of the past. (The strong Protestantism of Agassiz's Swiss background may also be in evidence here.) Agassiz would have agreed with the Rev. Gilbert Haven that science was the ruling passion of the age, but he denied Haven's contention that the scientist would only study nature dead and not also worship her living. It was twenty years now since Franklin Dexter pointed

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out that it was to faith that Christian art owed its glory and asked: "In what has this generation faith?" Agassiz was providing at least one answer. 10 The architectural metaphor of his 1868 museum report suggests this quite clearly. The museum was to be a new house of worship, a "temple of the revelations written in the material universe," and not a warehouse for materialists. He seemed further to be implying that while the structure of the great cathedrals expressed the older religious ideal, the new scientific temples demanded a new architecture. The architectural bareness of Agassiz's Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard was an expression of this. It is a building created for use, not for beauty. Charles Eliot Norton in 1859 had raised serious objections to this point of view and urged Americans to follow the example of the Ruskinian Oxford Museum, with its carved foliage, Gothic forms, and generally rich decorative exterior. In the years after 1868 the architectural battle between the Ruskinians who sought to enclose the newer scientific activities within Gothic forms and the scientist-educators who demanded more functional contemporary forms commensurate with "the progress of intellectual culture" would continue unabated. Ironically, Agassiz's scientific temple would be most forcefully defended by his Darwinian opponent Huxley. 11 Agassiz's position in the transformation of scientific attitudes and their aesthetic implications during the decade of the 1860's is thus pivotal. The disciple of Humboldt and Cuvier was too deeply the product of what Ernst Mayr has called the typological cast of mind to be able to divorce his experimental investigations from his idealistic premises about the way Divinity operates in the universe. Yet at the same time, the research in which he himself engaged, which he encouraged others to carry out, and which he gathered into the new Museum of Comparative Zoology would increasingly make his own idealistic premises untenable. 12 The work of Louis Agassiz represents one development of the Humboldtian view of nature. Another can be seen in the writings

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of that omnicompetent descendant of Vermont transcendentalism, George Perkins Marsh. Aside from his diplomatic ventures as United States minister abroad, his philological work as translator of the Scandinavian tongues and author of a book on the development of the English language, Marsh devoted much of his life to the question of man's relation to nature and to the way in which man's thought and action affect the physical universe. This eminently Humboldtian venture produced a classic in the field of ecology, Man and Nature (1864). He stated in the opening pages of this book: "Sight is a faculty; seeing, an art. The eye is a physical but not a self-acting apparatus, and in general it sees only what it seeks . . . Next to moral and religious doctrine, I know no more important practical lessons in this earthly life of ours . . . than those relating to the employment of the sense of vision in the study of nature." 13 Marsh had taken up this question of the effect of human consciousness upon the physical world in a review of Humboldt in the Christian Examiner in i860. The basic points of the essay were that modern man had knowledge and understanding of nature far in advance of ancient man's, that man was now out of harmony with nature, and that civilization was to be measured by man's ability to exercise his control over nature. Humboldt, he said, had done more than any other individual to heighten man's consciousness of nature and to make the artist her interpreter. 14 In i860 it was impossible to discuss the question without reference to "the most eloquent if not the soundest of artistical critics, [who] has made landscape-painting the subject of the profoundest study." Marsh questioned whether Ruskin had succeeded in establishing all his aesthetic theories, but "he has, at least, given us the strongest incentive and the best guide to the intelligent non-professional observation of nature which exists in any literature." Marsh the American democrat objected to what he felt to be an elitest strain in Ruskin—that beauty is only for the rich— and, more important, he objected to Ruskin's conviction that na-

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ture untouched by man was unworthy of study, that "wanting ancient memories, American landscape can have no present beauty, and that which God has created cannot acquire picturesque significance, or rightfully claim to excite human sympathies, till man has consecrated it by his doubtful virtues, his follies, or his crimes!" Ruskin's contention that an awareness of man's presence was essential to the appreciation of natural scenery was not, he said, "a mere misapplication of the principle of association; it is the error of an eye and a mind habituated to the observation of nature in countries where human action has tamed and modified the primitive outline." Marsh's statement was a nationalistic defense of wild America, but it also underlined the crucial role of the observer in the understanding of nature. A prejudiced viewer (like Ruskin) could seriously warp our understanding of the natural world. 15 Marsh's position wavered. He defined artistic genius as "the ability to conceive and divine the typical forms of Nature, to find the point to which her lines converge, but which they never actually attain." Yet he also felt that the greatest art was historical painting, for landscape painting was "but the portraiture of inanimate Nature, and as a moral teacher it can but repeat her lessons." Nature at one point seemed to him inanimate, at another point typical of the Divine. 16 The inconsistency was only apparent, however; for the difference between the views lay in man's consciousness. Behind Marsh's admiration for nature was his belief that man, not nature, was the repository of moral values. He likened the eye of childhood and Wordsworthian innocence to the mature perceptions of cultivated genius, for both could "guide us through paths that lead to the temple of Nature." 17 But man must realize that it is he who is divinely endowed, and not nature, and that consciousness is fulfilled finally not in the temple of nature but in a proper Christian church. Thus his chauvinistic chastisement of Ruskin for a misapplied associationism grew out of his conviction that

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the associations were extrinsic, something which consciousness added to the natural world; they were not inherent in nature. Since these distinctions between the qualities intrinsic to the physical universe and those which are a function of the perceiver's consciousness were often confused and only partially developed, Marsh must be considered as a transitional figure. Yet he did draw a distinct line between theology and nature. He vigorously denied that the pursuit of science led "to materialism in philosophy, to skepticism in religion, and to a too sensuous view of the mystery of human existence." Perhaps following Bushnell, Marsh said contemptuously of the Paleyites that "it is a poor Divinity which rests its claims to godhead on the instincts of the beaver or the sagacity of the ant."18 Religion and nature were not to be confused; the line between nature and the supernatural was ineradicable. He defended the purity of religion in the end of the early essay. In Man and Nature, Marsh concentrated on the way the earth was modified by human action, not transformed by human thought, and he larded his discussion with a wealth of ecological erudition. The boundaries of natural science, natural theology, and natural sympathy were being more firmly drawn. The Rev. H. W. Parker had attempted somewhat belatedly in 1854 to extend the older Paleyite view of nature to encompass new interests when he spoke in the North American Review of "A Natural Theology of Art." In i860, while Gilbert Haven enjoined Americans to worship nature living rather than merely study her dead, Arnold Guyot was preaching the same message to the American Geographical and Statistical Society, saying that "a science of the globe which excludes the spirit world represented by man, is a beautiful body without a soul." But the tide was running out on this view, and the older cosmology was becoming increasingly inadequate to explain the data gathered by the growing number of professional scientists.19 The implications of this scientific revolution for the develop-

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ment of aesthetic thought in America were far-reaching. While the Paleyite theology and the Humboldtian conception of human consciousness operating in the cosmos held sway in America, Ruskin's particular brand of art criticism, which combined elements of both, was secure. Ruskin's art dicta would not be questioned in terms of "truth to nature" so long as the world of mountain and tree was seen as a pattern reflecting Divinity and so long as man's emotional reactions, his subjective consciousness, was seen to be an integral part of the scientific study of nature. With the growth of scientific professionalism, however, Ruskin's authority as an interpreter of natural facts would collapse. The establishment of the Fisher chair at Harvard and the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in the 1840's were indications of the new turn in American science. Asa Gray, the first Fisher Professor, gave away his mineralogical cabinet in the realization that botany was enough for one man's lifetime. By the time Gray reviewed Ruskin's Proserpina, Studies of Wayside Flowers, in the Nation in 1875, he did not even bother to attack Ruskin for his errors, for he felt that Ruskin paraded his ignorance. There was no longer room for this kind of subjectivism in botany.20 Ruskin was passed on to such latter-day transcendental naturalists as John Muir, who could still speak of the "Scriptures of Nature" and chastise Ruskin, whom otherwise he valued highly, for his lack of faith and for daring to see evil in nature: "Ruskin, with all his well-bred amiability, is an infidel to Nature. You never can feel that there is the slightest union betwixt Nature and him . . . Christianity and mountainanity are streams from the same fountain." To see a mountain storm or an avalanche as evil, "mountain gloom" Ruskin had called it in the fourth volume of Modern Painters, was to lack faith in the scriptures of nature.21 Muir's Emersonian optimism was a late flowering of a spirit that was dying out of the American attitude. By the turn of the century, a fellow naturalist, John Burroughs, would write a careful essay discriminating among science, literary naturalism (which described the effect of the natural fact upon the observer), and

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sentimental anthropomorphism (which ascribed to the natural world itself the feelings of the observer).22 The judgments on the subjectivism of Rusldn's approach to nature did not await the turn of the century, however. By the 1880's his position as the expositor of nature had been almost completely undermined. When W. G. Collingwood's Life and Work of John Ruskin appeared, a disillusioned William J. Stillman in the Nation gave short shrift to Ruskin's theories of art, saying that they had produced "only a temporary fever of morbid intensity in nature-transcription which has less to do with art than it has with science, but more with the robust healthy love of outdoor nature than with either."23 Charles Waldstein, in a long article in Harper's Monthly on Ruskin's influence on modern thought, reprinted as a little book in 1893, discussed Ruskin's relation to science in more positive terms. He regretted that Ruskin's theological bent had led him into some of the fallacies of the extreme Paleyites, and declared that Ruskin did succumb at times to the "unhistoric and unscientific prejudice of mind, one of Bacon's idols, manifesting a desire to see facts in the order in which his personal moral consciousness would like them to have been." This tendency of Ruskin's to shape facts in terms of his point of view, rather than the opposite, actually retarded scientific investigation. He also took issue with Ruskin's claim that art dealt with truths of essence, science with truths of aspect, and asserted that the truth was quite the contrary. Science attempted to trace the inner constitution, causes of change, origin, future destiny of objects that lie below what can actually be perceived by the senses. Above all, the causes of existence and change are the province of science. Art, on the other hand, does above all, deal with the form and aspect of things. The point in dispute was the same passage of The Stones of Venice that had troubled the writers in the New Path twenty-four years earlier.24

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Having registered his objections, Waldstein then went on to say that Ruskin had opened up a whole new intellectual discipline which lay midway between science and art and overlapped both. Waldstein called it "the Phaenomenology of Nature." It was not science because it utilized only what the eye could see, relying on no mechanical devices; nor was "perception ancillary and subservient to the primarily scientific aims of discovering laws and controlling causality." The Phaenomenology of Nature was concerned with the keenest perception of the visible world, and when generalized from individual experience, discriminated in the name of "form and appearance as such, and not in any way primarily with the process of origin, growth, and development." When Ruskin strayed from this and confused his role with that of the scientist, he "tarnished his own pure metal, and . . . desecrated the shrine of true science, and . . . created an artificial antithesis between his own view of things and that of the professed and conscientious man of science." The result was to lower each in the eyes of the followers of the other.25 Waldstein's study was a signal attempt to "place" Ruskin in the development of nineteenth-century thought. By 1889 it was quite clear that Ruskin's point of view was not, in the new sense of the word, "scientific," and Waldstein took Ruskin to task for his amateur geologizing. Yet this did not mean that Ruskin as an interpreter of nature had nothing to offer the reader. The crux of the matter, as Waldstein realized, was the question of point of view. If Waldstein's invention of a new category to describe the Ruskinian approach to nature seems today finally unsatisfying, it nevertheless represents an effort to clarify Ruskin's historical role by attempting to discriminate among the different approaches to nature at the points where they seem to have the greatest similarity. Twenty-five years earlier it had been extremely difficult to make such distinctions, for the lines among science, art, and the Ruskinizing of nature were hazy indeed. For a man such as

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Clarence King, the scion of an old New England merchant family, nurtured on both Ruskin and laboratory science, the contending claims of the different points of view would provide a major intellectual struggle. King had prepared for college by acquiring the usual background in the classics. Then he broke with family tradition. Instead of entering Yale College as had his grandfather and uncle before him, King chose the new Sheffield Scientific School, enrolling in the fall of i860 in the two-year course in "Chemistry and Natural Science."26 His contemporaries in the college read Dugald Stewart, Hamilton on the Mind, Whewell's Elements of Morality, Bishop Butler, Paley's Natural Theology and View of the Evidences. King worked in the laboratory, heard lectures on geology and chemistry, and read Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences (rather than his Morality) as well as Mill's Logic on induction and James Dwight Dana's new textbook on geology. Except for the last two books, which those in the general course also read, the two programs were worlds apart. While students in the general course learned to see the world through the eyes of the Scottish common sense philosophers and Paley, King was being trained to view life through the microscope and test tube, through observation and experiment. His geological interests were reinforced by his reading in the works of the English glaciologist and physicist, John Tyndall.27 Yet this is not the whole story, for it was during King's Sheffield years that his interest in the works of John Ruskin began to develop. Shortly after graduation in 1862,28 King went to Harvard to hear Agassiz lecture on glaciology, and then settled in New York in the closing months of the year. Here his enthusiasm for Ruskin was reinforced by the other ardent young men whom he joined in forming the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art to advocate the doctrines of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. King was away on his first trip to the Far West from April 1863 to January 1865, and the part he played in the society's journal, the New Path, is not clear.29 It is clear, though,

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that the conflict over the relation of art to science on the part of two equally committed Ruskinians that had taken place in the pages of the New Path in late 1865 was one which Clarence King faced throughout his life, for he was never to be wholly free of the tension between his scientific bent and his Ruskinism. In one sense he was developing into a professional scientist through his training at Sheffield in the experimental method, his attendance at Agassiz's lectures on glaciology and later at Lyman's on astronomy, his reading in Dana, Tyndall, and others, and especially through his field work in California in 1863 and 1864. The conscious rejection of the standard classical education of Yale College for the professional training of a practicing geologist was to carry King to a place in the front ranks of American geologists of his time. However, devotion to science was not without its problems for a disciple of Ruskin. Beneath the thin veneer of Ruskin's geology in Modern Painters was an approach that differed radically from that of the practicing scientist: Ruskin stirred his reader not to identify some geological formation as of Jurassic origin but to sense the beauty, the grandeur, and the sublimity of the scene. He drove his reader inward toward an imaginative grasp of the visual impression and not further on in the description of the objective world. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ruskin should have provided problems, as well as inspiration, for the budding geologist. The inspiration which led Clarence King to a career in geology came both from early training and from his reading in Ruskin and Tyndall. According to King's biographer, the final spark was a letter to his teacher, George J. Brush, from one of the Sheffield School's first graduates, William Brewer of the California Geological Survey. The letter was, as Brewer later noted, "an enthusiastic account of our adventure, emphasizing not only the scientific interest, but also the sublime and majestic scenery connected with it." King, the future head of the U. S. Geological Survey, went west "saturated chiefly with Ruskin and Tyndall." He tra-

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veled with "a Bible, a Table of Logarithms, and a volume of Robertson's Sermons,"30 and he could be as biblical in his approach as his master Ruskin. "I have read in Revelations," he wrote in his journal during this trip, of the passing away of the earth and all the beauty and grandeur of it. I read too of a new heaven and a new earth, beautiful in type. Well then, if this is transitory, why study so hard into all t i e intricate mazes of fact, which will be swept away and known no more? I look for lessons. The primary lesson was that God "had scented all with design . . . that lessons were taught in Nature which were not elsewhere, not as important perhaps as the 'Law,' but still vital."31 It is clear, thus, that Clarence King had not been unaffected by the Paleyite instruction to his contemporaries at Yale College. The description of nature was not merely the search for the physical pattern of the earth's surface; it also gave evidence of design. His belief that the study of nature led to God emerged from his religious convictions; it was undoubtedly nurtured by his contact with Agassiz who was in the midst of the early controversy over The Origin of Species when King heard him in 1862. Agassiz had also just finished delivering his immensely popular Lowell Institute lectures on the "Methods of Study in Natural History." As Agassiz proclaimed: "Nature is the work of thought, the production of intelligence, carried out according to plan . . . In our study of natural objects we are approaching the thought of the Creator, reading his conceptions, interpreting a system that is his not ours."32 And these views in turn were further confirmed for King by Ruskin's aesthetic with its emphasis not only on accuracy of description, "truth to nature," but also on that "typical beauty" which envisioned natural facts as reflections of the attributes of the Divinity. This sense of the Divinity in nature demanded of King a particular approach to his work. He addressed himself thus in 1863: "Look at it [nature] then with gentleness and humble admiration

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. . . You, Clarence King, never dare to look or speak of nature save with respect and all the admiration you are capable of." To do otherwise, as Ruskin had made clear, was blasphemous. When King finally saw Mt. Shasta from a distance, he exclaimed: "What would Ruskin have said, if he had seen this\"3S In an effort to find repose and a perspective beyond the life of science, King developed the habit of climbing Mt. Bullion in the High Sierras. Apparently the young man's enthusiasm for "mountain gloom and mountain glory" was not shared by his superiors, who were suspicious of his frequent trips just for the views of distant peaks. Was he going to substitute "Ruskinistic dawdling" for the scientific task at hand?34 Brewer and his superior Josiah Whitney, head of the California Survey, need not have worried, for King's work proved to them that he was a geologist of promise, and he soon found support for his professional work in many quarters. Yet the problem was not merely one of the exuberant enthusiasm of a twenty-two year old. It persisted in the years when King was carrying on his greatest scientific work as head of the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. In 1869 he wrote of his "intense yearning" to complete his "analytical study of Nature and drink in the sympathetic side." The same man who exposed the diamond fraud of 1873 through his comprehensive knowledge of western geology could write that he was "convinced that science goes on and progresses at the expense of those absorbed in her pursuit. That men's souls are burned as fuel for the enginery of scientific progress. And that in this busy materialistic age the greatest danger is that of total absorption in our profession . . . We give ourselves to the Juggernaut of the intellect."85 King the geologist was devoted to his work. King the scientific organizer helped to create order out of the various surveys so that geological investigation might be most effectively pursued under a national U. S. Geological Survey, of which he was the first director, rather than carried out in the piecemeal, faction-ridden manner which had prevailed earlier. Yet this same Clarence King was a

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man who had fundamental doubts about the nature of his endeavor, questioning whether his intellectual effort was not destroying his capacity to see nature with the full emotional and imaginative capacities of the Ruskinian observer. The locus classicus of this tension in King's attitude was his Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, which appeared in book form first in 1872 and in a revised edition in 1874. (Most of it had previously appeared in 1871 as articles in the Atlantic Monthly.) Unlike the Survey Reports which he supervised or his own Systematic Geology (1878), Mountaineering gave him a chance to expand on the "sympathetic side" of nature as well as to tell of his scientific work. In a few chapters he deliberately fictionalized his material, telling a hair-raising story of pursuit and chase, a tall story of some picturesque Pike County chronic itinerants, and a tale of California vigilante justice; but his descriptions of his confrontations with nature were all "true," though radically different from geological notation. Mountaineering is a classic of travel literature in large part because King projected himself emotionally into his material, because the "juggernaut of the intellect" did give way to a sense of wonder in the face of nature. Like so many other writers on the West, King compared rock formations to Gothic architecture. Yet later in the book he cautioned against such an approach: "To goad one's imagination up to the point of perpetually seeing resemblances of everything else in the form of rocks, is the most vulgar vice of travellers. To refuse to see the architectural suggestions upon the Snake canon, however, is to administer a flat snub to one's fancy." Associationism as an approach to nature was wrong, yet the imagination (or "fancy," as he called it here) had important claims which must be satisfied.36 It was art as Ruskin had defined it which aided King in balancing the claims of nature and the imagination. He called at one point for a painter who would render the Sierras as Turner had the Alps. What he got instead—or rather contrived, for the incident was partially fictionalized—was "Hank G. Smith, Artist,"

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in whose dialect voice the ideals of Ruskin became the subject for burlesque.37 If the parody was a kind of ultimate tribute to the elegant critic's penetration even to the backwoods, King was also prepared to try his own hand at imitating the master seriously, by Ruskinizing his descriptions: Then, through a slumberous yet transparent atmosphere, you look down upon emerald freshness of green, upon arrowy rush of swollen river, and here and there, along pearly cliffs, as from the clouds, tumbles white silver dust of cataracts. The voice of full soft winds swells up over rustling leaves, and, pulsating, throbs like the beating of far-off surf. All stern sublimity, all geological terribleness, are veiled away behind magic curtains of cloud-shadow and broken light. Misty brightness, glow of cliff and sparkle of foam, wealth of beautiful details, the charm of pearl and emerald, cool gulfs of violet shade stretching back in deep recesses of the walls,—these are the features which lie under the June sky.38 The passage illustrates admirably the Ruskinian techniques of alliteration and word painting. It parallels many of Ruskin's descriptive passages on the Alps, like the often anthologized one from Modern Painters I of the falls of Schaffhausen,39 and it parallels equally vivid descriptions of the painting of Turner, whom Ruskin had taught King to appreciate. (Later King bought two Turner water colors from the English critic himself.) The essential element in the description is the evocation of atmosphere, the way in which light is filtered through clouds to fall upon various objects. As was true of Ruskin's writings and Turner's painting, King has here captured imaginatively the sense of landscape rather than merely giving a topographical description of natural phenomena. The passage is one of the triumphant moments of Ruskinism in King's writing. But as usual such an outburst had its antithesis in King the scientist. In the midst of a description he paused. "Can it be? I asked myself; has a student of geology so far forgotten his devo-

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tion to science? Am I really fallen to the level of a mere naturelover?" This in turn was succeeded by a description of King on Mt. Bullion, "silent hours (marked by the slow sun) passing sacredly by in presence of nature and of God."40 This pattern of alternation between nature worship and self-indictment, between Ruskinian dithyrambs and scientific self-doubts, persists throughout the book, bespeaking the uneasy marriage of the geologist and the Ruskinian nature lover. The conflict was carried over into the revised edition of the book. Subsequent exploration had shown King that he had been mistaken in thinking he was climbing Mt. Whitney when in fact he had been on a nearby lower peak, and he added a short section in later editions to correct his error of calculation. But the scientist revising his material in the light of subsequent data is soon transformed into the nature lover by the force of the contrast between, on the one hand, "the crushing juggernaut-car of modern life and the smothering struggle of civilization"—the violence of this persistent image is telling—and, on the other, "the pure, simple, strengthening joy of nature." This in turn is followed by a Ruskinian description where "savage rock-grandeur and splendid sunlight forever struggle for mastery of effect."41 The problem as it finally emerges is fundamentally an aesthetic one. King's geological training led him to anatomize nature topographically, but his impulses led him to describe not the facts of nature but their effect upon him as the observer, which was something quite different, as Ruskin himself had realized in the later volumes of Modern Painters. The struggle between the two points of view was not easy to resolve. "It is hard," said King, "not to invest these great dominating peaks with consciousness, difficult to realize that, sitting thus for ages in the presence of all nature can work, of light-magic and color-beauty, no inner spirit has kindled, nor throb of granite heart once responded, no Buddhistic nirvana-life even has brooded in eternal calm within these sphinx-like breasts of stone."42 The temptation was great to invest nature with mystic power, not to look at the geological facts but

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to seek in nature some mythic answer to the problems of existence, some escape from the world of fact. According to King, this mythmaking tendency was dying out of Alpine literature which, when it was not concerned with the tedious gymnastics of climbing, was almost invariably scientific. Only Ruskin seemed to him an exception to the modern tendency. Through his mood and emotion, he turned the "simple realities of nature" into illusion and into "the cloudy poetry of the writer." ("Cloudy," as King used it, was certainly ambiguous, for it described both the materials of Rusldn's poetry and the way in which he had obscured the simple facts.) Ruskins greatness, King believed, was his ability to project into nature his own emotional state—"Ruskin helps us to know himself, not the Alps" —but if this subjectivism did not enlighten one about the facts of nature, it appealed to something equally important: to the mythmaking faculty of all men, the "dim primeval spark which smoulders in all of us." It is in this sense that we must understand King's statement that "to follow a chapter of Ruskin's by one of Tyndall's is to bridge forty centuries and realize the full contrast of archaic and modern thought." For King the forty centuries existed within each individual in his subjective, mythmaking capacity as well as in historic time.43 King returned quite willingly at the end of this discussion to "the liberating power of modern culture which unfetters us from the more than iron bands of self-made myths . . . I saw the great peak only as it really is, a splendid mass of granite, 14,887 feet high, ice-chiselled and storm-tinted, a great monolith left standing amid the ruins of a bygone geological empire."44 The note in the revised edition which began with the romantic contrast between crushing, smothering civilization and the pristine simplicity of nature ends by glorifying the liberating force of modern knowledge. King had linked the romantic subjectivism of Ruskin with the primitive mythmaking faculty. Modern science had triumphed over this, and King could again see the peak of Mt. Whitney "as it really is." But clearly King's solution was not a

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final one, for the romantic, "archaic" desire to project one's consciousness into nature, to read nature emotionally, smouldered in all men. The supposed objectivity of science did not eliminate human emotions, the craving to see the world from the human point of view and even the desire to invest nature with human feelings, though the scientist might realize that this was the pathetic fallacy. King could discriminate between the point of view of the scientist qua scientist and that of the subjective nature lover, but in his own life he was constantly shifting from one to the other. In the volume of memoirs published after his death in 1901 King's friends undertook to characterize this mercurial personality, part scientist, part artist, and part unsuccessful businessman who had been caught in the speculative frenzy of the Gilded Age. Samuel F. Emmons spoke of his scientific acumen. John Hay mentioned his keen eye for art and how he had been warmly received by Ruskin in England. William Dean Howells said that "as an artist, as a realistic observer, every kind of life appealed to him for report." This was high praise from one who had devoted his own career to the promotion of critical realism in art. Howells regretted that King had written so little but praised Mountaineering highly. "In one glowing picture he has portrayed a sublime mood of nature, with all those varying moods of human nature which best give it relief. The picture is none the less striking for being of a panoramic virtue; that is the American virtue, as far as we have yet got at it in our literature." Howells recognized that the projection of human emotions was what gave life to King's descriptions of nature. The "panoramic virtue" which stamped the book as American was the organization of vision by a particular consciousness as it played over the vastness of the Far West.45 How much this virtue is to be attributed to the perceiving subject and how much to the natural scene as object is a question which criticism cannot finally solve, but it is worth noting that the West stimulated the imagination of other scientists who ven-

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tured into this territory. Wallace Stegner notes that John Wesley Powell, head of the United States Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region and King's successor as director of the combined U. S. Geological Survey, "at least in the years of the early eighteen-seventies was an unstable mixture of scientist and enthusiast, observer and adventurer, realist and romantic." Powell, who could quote long passages of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies from memory, made his report of the Exploration of the Colorado (1875), a work of great imaginative power, by heightening contrasts and compressing events to give dramatic unity to his narrative. Like King, Powell also had found a popular audience in the monthly magazines, and he had turned scientific fact into art by his imaginative reorganization of the western scene.46 The actual journey down the Colorado River had more than its share of unknown dangers and hair-raising escapes to sustain a vivid narrative. In the descriptive sections, especially in the meticulous chapters of the second half "On the Physical Features of the Valley of the Colorado," Powell detailed his geological findings regarding the shaping of the fantastic canyon region through erosion and faulting. Yet there are moments in the book when Powell cannot resist leaving behind both narrative of running the rapids and geologizing about escarpments, when his aim is to communicate a sense of the sublime or to give a lyric description of cloud movement in the canyons.47 At such moments Powell, like King on Mt. Bullion, ascends to a summit for a view: I climb so high that the men and boats are lost in the black depths below, and the dashing river is a rippling brook; and still there is more cañón above than below. All about me are interesting geological records. The book is open, and I can read as I run. All about me are grand views, for the clouds are playing again in the gorges. The intent is clear: Nature is a book to be "read" by the aes-

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thetic observer of the sublime and the picturesque. Unfortunately the moment cannot be sustained. He goes on: But somehow I think of the nine days' rations, and the bad river, and the lesson of the rocks, and the glory of the scene is but half seen.48 Like King's Mountaineering, the Exploration of the Colorado is a triumph of the "panoramic virtue," though for the most part Powell's geological task held in check his desire to mythologize his material, to turn nature writing into what John Burroughs would call sentimental anthropomorphism. Concerning the work of one of Powell's colleagues, the geologist Clarence Edward Dutton, Wallace Stegner has said: "He never quite made up his mind whether he was literary traveler or sober scientific analyst: the temptations were essentially equal. He escaped his dilemma by being both." Dutton's Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District (1882) is an important geological monograph which, in Stegner's words, "contains whole chapters as ebullient as the writings of John Muir, and deviates constantly into speculations so far from geological that they sound more like Ruskin than Lyell." The Ruskinizing tendency seems to have been endemic to the Western explorers when they sat down to explain what they had seen. The attempt to describe geological development led Powell and Dutton, as it had led Clarence King, into a lyricism where the perceiving consciousness of the observer played as large a part as the geological facts which it was the writer's task to describe.49 Twenty years after the United States government issued Powell's Exploration, he revised the book for a new edition entitled The Canyons of the Colorado (1895). At this point he called attention specifically to the writer's problem: "Realizing the difficulty of painting in word colors a land so strange, so wonderful, and so vast in its features, in the weakness of my descriptive powers I have sought refuge in graphic illustration, and for this purpose have gathered from the magazines and from

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various scientific reports an abundance of material." The more than 250 illustrations to the 1895 edition make even more apparent the central importance of a defining point of view. The work of Thomas Moran and William Henry Holmes is, each in its own way, the epitome of the "panoramic virtue." Holmes's finely etched washes meticulously define the immense reaches of the canyons with Ruskinian precision of geological detail; Moran, who tried in his work to emulate the light effects of his master Turner, suggests the older, more conventional romantic vision of the sublime.60 In this revision Powell was even more the word painter than he had been in 1875. Eliminating some of his earlier geological detail, he gave freer rein to his desire to define "grand views," like that from the Pink Cliffs of the Paunsagunt Plateau. For Powell, however, the final purpose was not Byronic egotism, inflation of the self. The new chapter on the Grand Canyon which closes the revised version makes this amply clear, for it ends with a peroration on the sublime. The glories and the beauties of form, color, and sound unite in the Grand Canyon—forms unrivaled even by the mountains, colors that vie with sunsets, and sounds that span the diapason from tempest to tinkling raindrop, from cataract to bubbling fountain. But more: it is a vast district of country . . . You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths. It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year's toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side of Paradise. It is as if, at the end, and despite his protest that only the painter could achieve this, Powell was seeking to fulfill Ruskin's original criterion of artistic significance: "The greatest picture is that

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which conveys to the mind of the spectator the greatest number of the greatest ideas." 51 Ruskin had always insisted that truth to nature, fidelity to the myriad facts of the natural world, was of primary importance. Modern Painters IV was his demonstration of the importance of the details of mountain geology, as the Exploration had been Powell's and Mountaineering, King's. But Modern Painters IV did not rest on its finely perceived detail; it culminated in the grand moral truths of the final chapters, "The Mountain Gloom" and "The Mountain Glory," for the Ruskinian aesthetic sought "vital beauty" and "typical beauty," the revelation of the higher spiritual significance of natural facts, greatness of the "ideas"— Locke's term for sense perceptions—not only in number and particularity but in their final spiritual value. Powell and King were artists in this Ruskinian sense: they had the imagination to grasp both fact and its sublime meaning, convinced—at least for the moment—that the two were one. What marks Powell's final statement as characteristically American is his identification of the earthly paradise with the American sublime, unsurpassed even by the Himalayas or Turner's Alps. Ruskin was still being called on to serve the American national purpose. It would be a mistake, of course, to say that the alternating attitudes of scientific description and Ruskinian nature worship during this period were only an American phenomenon, for there were English counterparts to the Americans we have been considering. Ruskin's writing, especially that fourth volume of Modern Painters, was one of the most important stimuli to the great vogue of mountaineering that swept Victorian England. Among the Victorian climbers two groups stood out above the rest: scientists, especially geologists, and ministers. That the former were attracted to the mountains should surprise no one, but the scientists' interests were not only professional. One commentator, Ronald Clark, suggests that a large number of them "came to study and stayed to worship"; he suggests further that the ministry was attracted for similar reasons. Both the forms of

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scientific investigation and the patterns of religious thought— especially within the Broad Church—in Victorian England left men without a sense of mystery, and the experience of the mountains helped to restore their capacity for wonder. 52 Though such a statement can not be conclusively proved, it is reflected in the writings of many of these men. In a book on his mountaineering experiences, Hours of Exercise in the Alps (1871), John Tyndall spoke of the experiments in glaciology which he conducted during his summer trips to Switzerland, but he also devoted passages to contemplation of the sublimity of nature and the idea of moral savagery which Mt. Cervin excited. He noted his own subjectivity and spoke of the important role of the imagination in the life of the scientist. At one point he said that "imagination is essential to the natural philosopher, but its matter must be facts; and its function the discernment of their connections."53 Yet it is obvious from other passages that Tyndall's imagination was often carried from the realm of fact to the pleasure of the mind which the formations of ice stimulated or the sense of religious awe which the mountain excited. In an essay on the relation of science to the imagination, Tyndall noted that in those periods in a scientist's life "when the stroke of action has ceased and the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed by . . . awe. Breaking contact with the hampering details of earth, it associates him with a power which gives fulness and tone to his existence, but which he can neither analyze nor comprehend." Where science reached its limits, the sense of awe took hold. If the desire to associate oneself with the power of the universe was strong enough, either through a specific religious need or through a nostalgia for the older cosmology in which nature represented an edenic innocence or the sublimity of God, the Ruskinian aesthetic was still available to bridge the gap between scientific fact and the older certainties.54 The young Henry James reviewed Tyndall's Hours of Exercise in 1871, and it was only natural that he should compare Tyndall's

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work with that of Ruskin. James felt that both writers were men of powerful imagination, but the difference between them was important: "In one we have the pursuit of the picturesque in nature tempered and animated by scientific curiosity; in the other, linked and combined with a sort of passionate sentimentality." Where Tyndall was "all concentration," Ruskin tended to be diffuse. Ruskin was more inspired, but he had the defects of his virtues in the tendency to be caught standing "oppressed and querulous among the swarming shapes and misty problems his magnificent imagination and his 'theological' sympathies have evoked." At the end of the essay, James warned his readers rather pontifically that nature was not the refuge the poets had imagined it to be. Its importance depended upon what the observer brought to it. The comparison of Tyndall with Ruskin had underlined for James what was to become a central aesthetic concern of his fiction as well as his criticism: the problem of point of view. 55 In the Tyndall review, James mentioned in passing the Mountaineering essays of Clarence King, which were currently appearing in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. In an early passage King had phrased the contrast between the scientific observer and the romantic observer in a suggestive way: I was delighted to ride thus alone, and expose myself, as one uncovers a sensitized photographic plate, to be influenced; for this is a respite from scientific work, when through months you hold yourself accountable for seeing everything, for analyzing, for instituting perpetual comparison, and as it were sharing in the administering of the physical world. No tongue can tell the relief to simply withdraw scientific observation, and let Nature impress you in the dear old way with all her mystery and glory, with those vague indescribable emotions which tremble between wonder and sympathy. 56 The contrast between the two attitudes toward nature is clear enough. The present is analytic, especially for the scientist.

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When King takes up the romantic point of view, he does so nostalgically, reading nature "in the dear old way," an indulgence to human frailty, a conscious lapse into a past age. The passage indicates how far the American mind had traveled since Bryant's "To a Waterfowl," Emerson's Nature, or Thoreau's "Natural History of Massachusetts," in each of which the author had attempted quite systematically to tan natural facts into myth; but it also indicates the persistent desire to return to the romantic point of view, as if to a Golden Age, the kind of simpler America which Henry James envisioned a few years later in his study of Hawthorne. Finally, one may note what appears to be a certain confusion of imagery in the passage. The sensitized photographic plate would have been a good image, taken from this new scientific form of art, to describe the material facts of nature—King's Mt. Whitney "as it really is"—registered objectively. Yet King has transformed the image of the photographic plate into a recorder of man's emotional response to nature. Was this merely poetic license on the part of the writer, or was it the sign of a fundamental confusion as to what is "real" and how it is to be apprehended? It is perhaps unfair to press King's statement too far, for the meaning of the contrast he was trying to draw between the scientific and the romantic points of view is clear enough in context. If one projects the question into the context of aesthetic controversy generally, however, the confusion of imagery bespeaks a much larger problem of point of view. The scientist by 1872 could be relatively clear in describing the bounds of his approach to the physical universe. But the point of view of the artist toward nature was by no means well defined. That he should be "true to nature," as Ruskin had urged, in describing with minute fidelity the particular truths of particular natural facts was becoming increasingly clear, as the development of realism— Huckleberry Finn's Mississippi River or Silas Lapham's Boston "as it really is"—was making apparent in literature as well as

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painting. But was he, as Ruslcin also urged, to be true to a much broader conception of nature which included its emotional, intellectual, and, most important, its spiritual significance? This much-debated question of the morality of art was a central legacy of John Ruskin to post-Civil War American aesthetic controversy.

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THE ATTACK ON RUSKIN: AESTHETIC THEORY AND PRACTICE

I F T H E SCIENTISTS' ASSAULT on Ruskin's assumptions undermined his position as an authority on the workings of the natural world, a more direct and frontal assault came from aestheticians and artists: from those critics who found Ruskin's theoretical formulations increasingly inadequate and those painters, architects, and writers who found his vision more a hindrance than a help in the practice of their calling. Not that the shift in Ruskin's reputation was abrupt or complete. Favorable notices of Ruskin's new books did continue to appear. Henry N. Day would summarize the debt of one generation to Ruskin when he gave Ruskin's moral theory of art the credit for "redeeming art from the low and most unworthy conceptions of it which Burke and Jeffrey have promulgated and made predominant in English literature;—the former resolving all beauty into sensuous impression, and the latter into mere accidental association." The Rev. H. W. Parker acknowledged Ruskin as his guide when he told readers in 1862 in the North American Review that "all ornament should be inspired by the study of Nature, and regulated by her immutable laws, though not always a literal copying of her forms," and that "bad taste is easily shamed out of counte-

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nance by holding up to it the mirror of nature." Yet in the same year that Parker's essay appeared, James Eliot Cabot was showing Ralph Waldo Emerson an essay he was writing on the relation of art to nature. Emerson was quick to realize that his young friend's effort was a major attack on the ideas of Ruskin. 1 Cabot's essay was published two years later in the Atlantic Monthly. His avowed task was to contradict the idea that art was concerned only with the imitation of nature. Ruskin seemed to Cabot to be the great contemporary spokesman for this point of view, though he admitted that Ruskin could be quoted on both sides of the question. The facts of nature, Cabot asserted, were not fixed. They were transcendental quantities, and the history of art was "the successive unfolding of a truer conception of Nature, only speaking here the language of form and color, instead of words." 2 In one sense, Cabot's essay can be seen as a phase of the stylistic war between classicists and gothicists. In place of Ruskin's mediaeval ideal, Cabot praised classic and Renaissance as the best standards of art. But his critique touched on the much more fundamental issue of the relation of art to nature. His conception of history as "unfolding" indicates Cabot's reading of Hegel, and this profoundly affected his ideas. Art and nature were adjusted to the dialectic: at one extreme was the exterior, "the material texture," of the work of art; at the other extreme the thought conveyed. True art could result only from the synthesis of the two, when idea and form became an indistinguishable unity. In this case only is our enjoyment strictly aesthetic, that is, attached to the bare perception of this particular thing; in the others, it is not this thing that prevails, but the physical or moral qualities, the class to which it belongs. It is true all these qualities play in and influence or even constitute the impression that particular works of Art make upon us . . . W e do not always care to distinguish the sources of the pleasure we feel; but for any criticism w e must quit these accidents and personalities, and

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attend solely to that in the work which is unique, peculiar to it, that in which it suggests nothing, and associates itself with nothing, but refuses to be classed or distributed. This may not be the most important aspect of the thing represented, nor the deepest interest that a picture can have; but here, strictly speaking, lies all the beauty of it.3 The attack on Ruskin and the mimetic theory turned into a significant redefinition of beauty in art. The task of the critic was not to relate the individual work to some extrinsic criterion, to his a priori assumptions, to historical associations; he must move from the unity of the created work outward. The work of art was an organic whole; its source was neither nature nor a preconceived set of moral values, neither the external world nor the ideal alone. One might judge the moral meaning of a picture or its fidelity to fact, but it was foolish "to preach morality to Art, or to require from the artist an inventory of the landscape."4 Cabot was drawing important distinctions between the creative act and the critical act, distinctions which romantic theorists, and Ruskin among them, had tended to blur. The creative act was, at its best, an organic impulse. The work of art was conceived as a unity of thought and form. The critic might examine the two separately afterward, but in doing so he was not examining the beauty of the work, its specifically artistic merit, but something quite different. By distinguishing between beauty and morality, Cabot challenged the most basic assumption of the Ruskinian aesthetic. He did not do this unknowingly, however. His theory of art was the direct result of his concept of history. Following Hegel's Aesthetik, Cabot did not see mediaeval art as organic, the embodiment of a unity of spirit and form, as it had seemed to Ruskin. Such a unity had been achieved only in classic art. The mediaeval mind had split the world of the ideal from the finite world and produced a false isolation of the spiritual from the material, of divinity from the universe. The mediaeval artist had

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accepted this dualism, and his hieratic art was the result. Since modern man no longer believed in the religion of the mediaeval church, he had to carry on his search in the natural world alone. The modern artist could rely upon no extrinsic set of religious ideals to convey his meaning. He had to say it all within the picture itself, even while modern science increased his sense of isolation by exposing only the chaff, the exuviae of things and not their inner connection, thus widening the gap between the material and the ideal. The dualism could be overcome not by superimposing some predetermined set of moral values—Christian or otherwise—upon the material world in general and the work of art in particular. Ruskin's teleological criticism was no solution. Men must learn to see the transcendental presence of divinity, "appearance, therefore, as transcendent, or Beauty." He concluded by elevating the role of the imagination.5 The overtones of Emersonian transcendentalism are certainly apparent in Cabot's essay, but he had gone much farther in his analysis of art and had engrafted numerous Hegelian elements. What finally emerges is a curious answer to the question Franklin Dexter posed in his 1848 review of Modern Painters. Cabot was saying that mediaeval art was built on a dualism, rather than a unity, and that for modern man art itself must be a new faith. Beauty defined in his terms was the embodiment of the unity of form and content, of the material and the spiritual. Art was thus "the truly popular philosophy," and implicit in this statement was the idea that art had seized upon the unity religion had lost.6 All the Hegelians were not as harsh with Ruskin as Cabot was. In fact when C. C. Everett, an earlier reviewer of Ruskin, discussed aesthetic questions in his Hegelian Science of Thought: A System of Logic, he singled out Ruskin for praise. The English critic seemed to him to have gone to the heart of nature in his descriptions, attempting to work outwards. (Everett had little to say about Ruskin's treatment of art.) Ruskin was able to put his readers into the same sympathetic relation with natural beauty which he himself experienced, an approach which seemed to

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reinforce Everett's conception of the critic's task: to "go to the heart of the work, to discover the central power of its life." Yet Everett was twisting Ruskin to Hegelian purposes. Ruskin would not have agreed with Everett's definition of beauty. The English critic did contend that the greatest art contained the greatest number of the greatest ideas, but this was not the same as the Hegelian definition of beauty as "the free play and manifestation of the idea." In Ruskin's definition the ideas stood outside of art as standards by which to measure the truth or beauty of any single work. For an Hegelian "the idea" was realized through art.7 The Hegelian point of view reached maturity in America in 1867 with the founding of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. A lengthy translation of a French exposition of Hegel's Aesthetik ran through the first three volumes of the journal, and the editor, William Torrey Harris, noted that almost a third of the space in the first volume was devoted to art.8 When Harris explained why so much emphasis had been placed on art, he made explicit what had been implicit in both Cabot and Everett's discussions. The sensuous content of art, he said, "acts most readily upon the incipient phases of culture, and its higher forms work with a genial effect in developing the spiritual faculties. Art is moreover a subject for free reflection, while Religion has not as yet become such among us." The discussion of aesthetics was a means of discussing spiritual questions. Under the cover of aesthetics, the Hegelians were trying to challenge indirectly men's sectarian allegiances. Their purpose was to free men from a materialistic conception of religion, from the bonds of successive material embodiments of the idea. Religion to the Hegelians was an essential step in man's quest for truth and for the idea. Hegelian aesthetics would assist in freeing men from the "enthrallment of the merely natural"—thus the Hegelians had little use for Ruskin's mimetic theory of truth to nature—and prepare men for that truth which was free from the material, philosophy. "That this first enfranchisement of the soul begins through the

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Phantasy is to be remembered in order rightly to understand the function of art in civilization." Hence art should neither be true to nature nor typical of the Divine. It was a series of material fantasies which progressively loosened men's hold on the "merely natural."9 The rise of Hegelian aesthetic theory underlined the weaknesses of Ruskin's particular kind of intuitive idealism. The questionable logic of his linking of art, nature, and religion became readily apparent. On the one hand, the Hegelians insisted that the created work of art was an organic unity of idea and form, and that the morality of the work or its truth to nature could not be singled out without destroying its beauty. On the other hand, they insisted that the idea was intrinsic and not a separable religious creed or vague evangelical faith. The objective idealism of the Hegelians was not a denial of the religious function of art. At the same time that they sought to extricate the work of art from Ruskin's religious dogmatism, they were insisting that art was a path to a religion transformed and purified, the religion of Hegelian philosophy. Hegelian thought exerted a profound influence on many phases of late nineteenth-century American life. Certain elements of the Hegelian aesthetic, especially the concern with historical development, would affect the thinking of art critics and art historians for some time to come, but such a rigidly dialectical approach as William Torrey Harris used in analyzing Raphael's "Transfiguration" and Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" necessitated a grounding in philosophy which few people had. 10 Apparently few seemed to feel that the results justified the effort. The significance of the Hegelians for our purpose is more general. In distinguishing between beauty and religious truth, between the aesthetic value of a work of art and its moral value, they helped to undermine the authority of Ruskin's theory of the relation of art to morality and to show that his conception of the work of art had not really bridged the gap between matter and spirit. In their own theorizing, they tried to overcome this dualism by

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stressing the organic nature of the work of art, that it was the dialectical synthesis of fact and idea, of form and content. Organicism as an approach had potentialities, which were independent of specifically Hegelian formulations, in its tendency to bridge the gap between concern for exalted ideas contained in art and concern for the artistic forms which would contain them. So much nineteenth-century criticism had focused on the former at the expense of the latter that an early story of Henry James entitled "The Madonna of the Future" (1873) seems like a credo of the new generation. The story is concerned with the failure of Theobald, an American expatriate painter in Florence who fritters away his life talking and thinking about the great Madonna he envisions and which he believes will rank with the spiritual creations of Raphael. Finally confronted with the reality of his life and that of his middle-aged model, the painter dies, leaving behind only "a canvas that was a mere dead blank, cracked and discolored by time." 11 The story is a parable of the triumph of the real over the ideal, a revision of Hawthorne's "Artist of the Beautiful." Theobald, like Owen Warland, is committed to a spiritual vision, to art as the expression of ideal conceptions which live within the mind of the artist and to which he must give material shape. He has all the theory of the true and the beautiful, of the conquest of vulgar actuality by the spiritualized ideal, but he is paralyzed as artist, as maker, and in the end has only his blank canvas to show for his idealism. Without going to the other extreme and saying that the artist should vulgarly exploit the sordidness and meretriciousness of life, James nevertheless seems to be saying, as Hawthorne only hints, that art conceived of as the conscious realization of the ideal leads to disaster; to elevate heart and mind over hand (and the story consciously works with this romantic physiology) is to be paralyzed as creator. The story's narrator implicitly enforces an opposite organic ideal: that idea cannot be separated from shaping form, and that it is better to

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shape imperfectly, fully committed to making, than to await the impulse of the ideal. Twentieth-century critics have tended to write off Ruskin's impact upon artists as either negligible or wholly deleterious. Neither judgment is accurate, though there is a measure of truth to both. In the final analysis, Ruskin's greatest influence was in the development of aesthetic theory; yet his impact upon the artists themselves is a significant element in the story of the domestication of Ruskin's writings in America. The visual monuments are worth at least passing attention, and the reasons why artists found him unsatisfactory are important in tracing the descending curve of his impact upon American thought and art.12 That Ruskin was read by artists in the eighteen fifties, sixties, and seventies is beyond question. Asher Durand, Frederic Church, in whose studio William Stillman read Modern Painters, the James brothers—for a short time William thought he would become a professional painter—John La Farge, Elihu Vedder, and Thomas Hotchlass among the painters, and architects from the older generation of Leopold Eidlitz and Calvert Vaux, through the middle generation of Henry Van Brunt, or Russell Sturgis and Peter B. Wight of the New Path group, to younger men like Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ralph Adams Cram, all were familiar with Ruskin's writings. Their reactions differed markedly, but for none was Ruskin a negligible quantity. He was too influential a figure to be ignored. One of the earliest and most violent attacks on Ruskin appeared even before the war in a book entitled Ernest Carroll; or, Artist-Life in Italy (1858) by the architect and painter Henry Greenough, younger brother of Horatio Greenough. In this romance, the American expatriate artists, partisans of Joshua Reynolds and the idea of "general nature" as Greenough and his circle were, condemn Ruskin's theories as valueless to the artist. They call him a sophistical lawyer juggling distinctions which

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do not exist or, even more appropriately, a metaphysically mad clergyman. The sequence ends when the artists burn Ruskin in effigy. The figure, complete with neckcloth, is "typical of the sanctimonious cant by means of which Ruskin imposes on bigoted old women, leading them to suppose that he is descanting learnedly on art, while he is only retailing bits worthy to figure in some country parson's sermon." 13 This reaction from the practicing artist to Ruskin's mixing of art and morality was to be echoed for decades to come. Insofar as Greenough was a spokesman for the idealism of Reynolds and the neoclassical tradition which he had absorbed from Washington Allston, from his brother and friends like Hiram Powers, and from Italian teachers at the Academy in Florence— where he studied along with Thomas Cole, Samuel F. B. Morse, and others—his was a lost cause, for by the i860 s Ruskin and other romantic theorists had succeeded in overthrowing the ideal of "general nature." Ruskin's fanatic insistence that the true artist must perceive with absolute accuracy the details of the natural world and transfer them with perfect fidelity to canvas was a lesson well learned—some later said too well—by this generation. The results could be seen in the meticulous linear realism of Asher Durand's forest studies or the more poetic proto-impressionism of George Inness' "Lackawanna Valley" or "Delaware Water Gap," as well as in the work of their plein-airist contemporaries abroad. In the last half of the century it was not to Reynolds that critics of Ruskin would appeal but to newer trends in art and different currents of thought. The inadequacy of Ruskin's canon of truth to nature to the painters (and, to a degree, to architects as well) was that it focused attention on perception and on the reproduction of detail but did not confront the problems of composition and organization. As Charles Waldstein pointed out in his 1889 essay, "truth to nature" raised as many questions as it solved. Art was not merely a matter of copying nature. "What makes it art is the human organization of the facts of nature." The artist could not

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avoid interpreting his material; the question was how was he to interpret it. Ruskin's own response to this had been that the imagination of the artist, activated by noble—that is, moral— emotions and guided by conceptions like "Typical Beauty" and "Vital Beauty," would prevent accuracy of vision from degenerating into scientific notation. It is in this respect that Greenough's savage denunciation anticipated, at least negatively, the later attack on Ruskin. To use Waldstein's phrasing: "The solution of the main problems of art is as little advanced by the introduction of theological considerations as the cause of biology or chemistry would be furthered by it." Art, said Waldstein, was concerned with truths of aspect and not with truths of essence as Ruskin had asserted.14 As a result, Ruskin was at best a troublesome teacher of artists. Driven compulsively from the splendid perceptions of his eye for natural detail toward the teleological, he was unable to guide artists in organizing visual images into coherent compositions. Nobility of soul was clearly not enough. The work of those whom he influenced directly tended to be, not surprisingly, competent and accurate in detail but lacking in compositional interest. Seldom sloppy in handling or too broad in effect, Ruskin's disciples erred on the side of the Pre-Raphaelite niggling detail. William Stillman and Charles Herbert Moore made painting excursions with Ruskin, to the Alps and Venice respectively. Stillman never really forgave Ruskin for that trip, for he claimed again and again in his later years that Ruskin had ruined his career as a painter by his dogmatic advice and overinsistence upon detail. There was an unbridgeable gap between the master's grand imaginative sensibility, which Stillman continued to admire, and his ability to give practical advice. Moore's experience was happier, and he found Ruskin's advice, especially on drawing, to be continually relevant. However, Moore's significance lies in his effectiveness as a teacher and writer on art and not as a painter of pleasant but undistinguished landscapes. More imaginatively ambitious painters like La Farge and Vedder fell under the spell

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of Ruskin's writings during their apprenticeship years, but both found him too limiting, and La Farge later repudiated Ruskin outright. 15 Recently, Ruskin's influence upon Winslow Homer has been argued, but in the absence of any written evidence that Homer particularly liked Ruskin's writings, it is difficult to accept Albert Ten Eyck Gardner's claim that Homer's early linear style was affected by Ruskin's writings or that the great late Homer seascapes were inspired by and are visual embodiments of Ruskin's lyric descriptions of water. Homer's attraction in his late years to wild nature can be traced to numerous possible sources, though Gardner's emphasis on Ruskin's domination of the Boston art world in which Homer developed and the inevitability of one's awareness of Ruskin in these years is certainly well taken. At Newport, Rhode Island, in 1858-59, while his older brother William studied with William Morris Hunt, young Henry James read and talked of Ruskin with his friend T. S. Perry and busied himself with the "conscientious copying of a leaf and very faithfully drew a little rock that jutted above the surface of Lily Pond." And we have already noted the impact of Ruskin and Turner upon the illustrators of western exploration. Turner's influence upon Thomas Moran was profound, and it was his card of introduction to Ruskin in London in the summer of 1882. Ruskin's appreciation of "the American Turner" was great, though Moran had to concede later that the critic was a "sentimentalist of a high order" and that "this was apt to cloud his reasoning faculties and make him an unsafe guide for young artists."16 Among the other minor disciples were Henry R. Newman (ca. 1843-1918), John W. Hill (1812-1879), and William Trost Richards (1833-1905). Richards was an extremely competent painter of meticulous landscapes, yet in the seascapes of his final years one can perceive a tension between the precision of his line and a conflicting desire to dissolve line in atmosphere, a tension which an artist with a coherent vision like Homer was able finally

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to resolve. Newman, an expatriate in Florence for most of his life, became friendly with Ruskin in the 1870's. Ruskin praised his drawings and bought some of his architectural and landscape studies for his own collection and that of the St. George's Guild. It was Newman who introduced Ruskin to Francesca Alexander (1837-1917), writer-translator-artist daughter of the American painter Francis Alexander. Ruskin became in the eighties especially fond of the cloyingly sentimental work of Francesca, and edited her Story of Ida ( 1883 ) and Roadside Songs of Tuscany (1884-85). These works had a wide appeal to gift-book audiences in England and America, for they combined a Pre-Raphaelite precision of technique, anecdotal subject matter, and a sentimental version of Ruskin's ideal of the happy craftsman, a relic of the age of faith amid the crassness of the nineteenth century.17 Ruskin's support of Francesca's work was in part motivated by his social commitments, since proceeds from the sale of her work went for the care of the poor. Nevertheless, his fulsome praise of her art was a notable lapse of taste, a failure of judgment which was as bad in one direction as his failure to appreciate the work of another American artist, James Abbot McNeill Whistler, was in the opposite direction. In both cases, the failure was in part a function of Ruskin's illness in these years; Ruskin's outburst in the Fors Clavigera against Whistler's "cockney impudence" was as much a pathetic expression of the man's fears and obsessions as it was the rational critic's attack on one who consciously violated the ideal of truth to nature. Yet Whistler's cry for the freedom of the artist from domination by critics or "littérateurs as he called them, who tried to enslave painting to any extrinsic norm was an extreme expression, emphasized by Whistler's talent for arrogant self-advertisement, of the cry of most mature painters of the period. Even if it were possible to discount the pathological element in Ruskin's responses, it is clear that as a critic of painting he belonged to an earlier era. His social concerns were overriding and the "theoretic" still dominated over the "merely

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aesthetic." His earlier championing of Turner did not lead him, as it should, to an openness to the experiments of contemporaries with strictly visual truth and with nature. Insofar as he cared about contemporary painting at all, he had become the conservative supporter of painters in the Turnerian tradition like Moran.18 Whistler's suit against Ruskin in 1878 was reported in the daily press in America as well as Europe. The evidence on American reactions, however, is not conclusively in favor of either party. Henry James's report of the events for the Nation was notably noncommittal and probably characteristic. Some chastisement of Ruskin for his critical bad manners was long overdue: "Mr. Ruskin's language quite transgresses the decencies of criticism, and he has been laying about him for some years past with such promiscuous violence that it gratifies one's sense of justice to see him brought up as a disorderly character. On the other hand, he is a chartered libertine—he has possessed himself by prescription of the function of a general scold." The ambiguity of James's remarks is even greater if one recalls that Ruskin's own writings during these years were largely jeremiads against the social order, rather than criticism of art. Nor was James willing to champion either Whistler's personal extravagance or his vaguely disturbing paintings (though James had nothing but admiration for Whistler's etchings). In the English court, Whistler had won a Pyrrhic victory; the American jury was hung.19 Among the few articles on Whistler which appeared in these years, William C. Brownell's in Scribner's Monthly in 1879 was the most ambitious. In it Brownell tried to clarify the confusion about Whistler, to differentiate him—as popular opinion had not—from the impressionists, to insist upon Whistler's sole allegiance to the pictorial, unrelated to anything else. To Brownell as to others, the battle between art as imitation of nature and art as idealization no longer seemed worth fighting. For the new art, new criteria of judgment were needed. Despite Ruskin's continued popularity among art lovers in America, the Whistler suit

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marks virtually the end of Ruskin's influence upon the American painter.20 Historians of nineteenth-century achitecture from Charles Lock Eastlake's History of the Gothic Revival (1872) to the present have all acknowledged the immense popularity of Ruskin's writings, but the particular character of his effect upon architecture is more problematic.21 The Seven Lamps and The Stones of Venice, by insisting that the validity of Gothic architecture depended upon both the ethical ideals which stood behind its construction and the organic inspiration behind its forms, had had an initial effect in America of removing the Gothic Revival from the control of the archaeological High-Church ecclesiologists on the one hand, and the legatees of Price on the Picturesque on the other. But the gap between the mediaeval spiritual universe and the modern materialistic multiverse (to borrow Henry Adams' term) created problems for the nineteenth-century architect. The fundamental organicism of Ruskin's theory lay less in the use of actual leaves for decorative detail, though he devoted an inordinate amount of space to it, than in his insistence upon an organic relation between architectural forms and social needs. It was this second aspect which had caused the controversy between Henry Van Brunt and Leopold Eidlitz in the 1859 meetings of the new American Institute of Architects: Eidlitz had defended Ruskin in the name of the ethical goals of architecture; Van Brunt had had to deny Ruskin at least in part in the name of nineteenth-century commercial needs and new ferrous building materials.22 Ruskin and Eidlitz may have failed to understand fully the possibilities of the new materials. However, the weakness of Ruskin's theory was not that he liked Gothic and disliked that Crystal Palace which has excited historians of modern functionalism, for he too deplored the use of Gothic fronts on London stores regardless of the material, which his writings had unin-

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tentionally inspired. He disowned these monstrous stepchildren because they resulted from a misreading of his theory. Architectural style for Ruskin was inseparable from the functions to which a society put buildings. The real weakness of Ruskin's architectural writings was related to the extraordinary acuteness of his visual sense: when he turned from the ethical ends of architecture he was too exclusively concerned with decorative surface and gave too little thought to the problems of plan and structure, of "building" as the nineteenth century understood that term, which must underlie any adequate architectural theory. Ironically, his theories suffered from the very picturesque approach which his ethical perspectives sought to undermine. Bridging the gap between Gothic as decorative means and Gothic as ethical end of an organic architecture became the central problem for his architectural audience in the post-Civil War years. As Ruskin himself left architecture behind in these years and attempted to radically alter its social context, the American architects struggled to relate his early writings to the needs of the new industrial era.23 In the 1860's Sturgis and Wight, architectural partners for a time, were exploring Ruskin's ideas with all the enthusiasm of disciples. Sturgis' Farnum Hall (1869), the first of his threebuilding complex at Yale, involved a modest and restrained handling of Gothic forms for contemporary use. Wight's Art Building (Street Hall, 1863-1866), which was to make New Haven a center of Ruskinian instruction, was more interesting in its massing of forms though, like his Mercantile Library, Brooklyn (1867), also more conspicuous in its insistence upon Italian Gothic detail. Of all the early work, the best known and most conspicuously Ruskinian in a decorative sense is the commission Wight won for the National Academy of Design (1862-1865), which resulted in a rather cramped, home-grown version of the Doge's Palace. (New Yorkers, who knew their Stones of Venice, called it colloquially by that name.) Wight's dogmatic Ruskinism led him to search for stonecarvers who would do the detail work in a free

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naturalistic manner, as Ruskin had urged the architects of the Oxford Museum to do, but he had to acknowledge at the time of the building's completion that the ideal in "The Nature of Gothic" of the happy craftsman inventing new decorative forms was difficult to fulfill in the burgeoning industrial economy of the United States, a point which Van Brunt had made seven years earlier in his controversy with Eidlitz.24 Wight and Sturgis were both asked to submit designs for the Memorial Hall which Harvard wished to build after the war. The competition was won by Van Brunt and his partner William Ware in 1866; however, the building which they erected between 1870 and 1878 was far less Ruskinian than Charles Eliot Norton, who was on the supervisory committee, wanted and probably less inspired by Ruskin than the designs submitted by Sturgis and Wight, if their buildings of the sixties are any index. Its strengths lie in the adaptation of the massive cruciform cathedral plan to a tripartite secular use of alumni hall, apsidial theater, and transeptal memorial lobby between, emphasized externally by the piling up, in a rather ungainly manner, of a cluster of tower and roofs. There are hints of Ruskin, Butterfield, or George Street in the use of colored tiling and stone which are still insufficient to break up the red brick (a concession, since an all stone exterior proved financially impossible).25 Looking back on the building from 1899, Van Brunt felt that the choice of Gothic forms had been inevitable in the 1860's and 1870's. It was a style which at the time we were persuaded was the only one having life and progressive power and peculiarly applicable to a large and somewhat irregular monument, which must have architectural dignity and importance but at a decided economy of cost. It would have seemed almost a work of anachronism to have developed this building in any other style. In this way with all its faults, it is a historical expression and is so far deserving of respect; for the Gothic revival of that time was a universal cult among all English-

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speaking people, and had reached the dignity of an intellectual if not a moral movement. It certainly was not capricious as some of the later experimental revivals have proved to be.26 This impression was shared by others, both retrospectively and at the time. Clarence Cook, commenting in the Galaxy in 1868 on the sudden growth of the architectural profession, assigned the following causes: "First, individual minds were powerfully stimulated by Ruskin. Then there came over seas a few strong, able, individual men who taught by word and work. Calvert Vaux, Leopold Eidlitz, Wrey Mould—there is a great debt of gratitude due these men. Then there was the general stimulus of competition and of intercourse, the enlarging effects of travel, photographs and books, our young, ambitious men sharing in the new-born enthusiasm of their contemporaries in England and France." Others would add to the list Pugin, William Burges, and Street, whose Brick and Marble in the Architecture of the Middle Ages in Italy (1855) gave more practical advice about building in the Italian Gothic manner.27 However, if Memorial Hall is less Ruskinian than it might have been, this was in part because Van Brunt had found a new source of inspiration, one that over the years dampened whatever enthusiasm for Ruskin he and others had had and changed the goals of the Gothic Revival in America. In the year that he won the competition, he published a two-part piece entitled "Architectural Reform" in the Nation. The first half was his tribute to Ruskin. Amidst the babble of revivalistic tongues, he said, Ruskin had accomplished a revolution in England. "For the first time in five centuries there exists in the mother country a theory of architecture which can be applied by architects to practice, and by the intelligent public to criticism." He differed from Ruskin in matters of detail and distrusted his seductive eloquence; nevertheless, he felt that Ruskin had been beneficial primarily through his emphasis on "the idea of truth of expression" (the second of Ruskin's "lamps"), rather than servile imita-

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tion.28 It is thus ironic that he and Ware were attacked by critics in the seventies for being falsely imitative in their use of wooden vaulting in Memorial Hall, in a manner reminiscent of the controversy in the 1840's over the plaster vaulting of Trinity Church, New York City.29 In the second half of his 1866 essay one reason for Van Brunt's later break with the lamp of truth becomes apparent, for he turned from the mother country to France (to which his own teacher, Richard Morris Hunt, was already directing Americans' attention) and the first volume of Viollet-le-Duc's Entretiens sur I'architecture (1863). His praise of Viollet-le-Duc's rational approach to design and to Gothic especially, was enthusiastic, and he concluded that though their aims and intentions were the same, Viollet-le-Duc was "far more valuable to art, because less visionary, less poetic, and less dogmatic" than Ruskin. Van Brunt's praise of Viollet-le-Duc is consistent with his debate with Eidlitz in the late fifties, for the French theorist was sympathetic to the use of the new metals in ways that neither Eidlitz nor Ruskin ever was.30 In the following years Van Brunt's impatience with Ruskin would increase. When he translated the 1863 volume of Violletle-Duc in 1875, he took the occasion to attack Ruskin for tyrannizing over American architecture with his literary aesthetics. By 1881, when Van Brunt reviewed Eidlitz' massive tome on The Nature and Function of Art, More Especially of Architecture, he pointed to Eidlitz' indebtedness to "the greatest writer of the century on the theory of architecture, M. Viollet-le-Duc." Eidlitz, he said, "accepts without hesitation and with all their consequences the purist dogmas of Pugin, Ruskin, and the other modern literary reformers of art, so far as they rest upon the practice of developing forms of art out of structural necessities, as in mediaeval monuments." The shift in emphasis here is a measure of the changing reputation of Ruskin among American architects. Ruskin was to be valued for supporting the newer structural functionalism which Viollet-le-Duc, Eidlitz, and, to a

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degree, Van Brunt were encouraging, and not for his ethical views or his emphasis on particular Gothic forms.31 Yet in the final analysis Van Brunt was not very pleased with Eidlitz' abstract speculations "which perplex the student and often make the argument too transcendental in thought and statement for the service of practical and busy men." Van Brunt had given up the search for a new and distinctive contemporary style, and had concluded that "modern architecture must inevitably be eclectic." Men like Ruskin, Pugin, and Eidlitz asked the architect to turn his back on all sources except the Gothic, and Viollet-le-Duc's rationalism, he said, had not proved very practicable. "What the modern student of architecture needs is a grammar, not an index expurgatorius." Having lost hold of both Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc's ethical and rational structural imperatives, Van Brunt in 1881 seemed willing to cast off into the sea of Beaux Arts eclecticism which relied almost exclusively upon tasteful manipulation of archaeological forms.32 He was by no means the first. In 1877 R. S. Peabody of the firm of Peabody and Stearns campaigned for the Queen Anne style as a domestic version of the classical—the morality of Gothic no longer had meaning for him—and attacked what he called "The Doctrinaire in Art." One tires of hearing people talk masterfully about principles of art, or give the law in decoration . . . There is no power of producing a work of art, either "high" or decorative, except in the native feeling and training of the artist, nor of judging them without a cultivated sense. Mr. Ruskin's precepts cannot answer everything . . . and Mr. Eastlake has the misfortune to have his name associated with more ugly furniture, we suppose, than the world ever saw before in equal time.33 Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc remained basic reading for architects during the 1870's while the Gothic still had authority (recall the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge). In his popular Hints on Household Taste, published in the United States in 1872, Charles Lock

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Eastlake preached Ruskinian principles of sincerity of construction and William Morris' handcraft ideals, inspired by "The Nature of Gothic." Nevertheless, Ruskin was fast losing his authority even among his former architectural disciples. Wight in 1884 said Ruskin was an amateur who knew little about structural problems, which were Wight's primary concern in these years, and Eidlitz, in his major theoretical work, found Ruskin as much an enemy as an ally. 34 Eidlitz' Nature and Function of Art is a central document for the understanding of American aesthetic thought in the last half of the nineteenth century. It is a difficult book and downright turgid and confused in parts because Eidlitz' ability to handle abstract speculation was limited. However, it deserved more patient consideration than Van Brunt was willing to give it, for it is finally a brave book, Eidlitz' massive attempt to reconcile the divergent tendencies of the age. Moving from the theory of art and aesthetics to the practical problems of the use of colored decoration, from the materialism of the church to the reconciliation of science and art, Eidlitz hoped to find in organicism a unifying principle which would reconcile his belief that architecture dealt with ideas and was a form of poetic knowledge with his realization that the material needs of his age were more prosaic; a principle which would reconcile the ethical premises of his early years when he had defended Ruskin against Van Brunt's attack with his current loyalty to the rational functionalism of Viollet-le-Duc. 35 The inspiration of John Ruskin is continually evident in what Van Brunt called the "transcendental" quality of Eidlitz' thought. It is apparent in his faith in the potentialities of Gothic modes, if handled creatively, to serve as inspiration to modern architects, in his praise of the mediaeval craftsman who combined mechanics and aesthetics rather than divorcing the two as the modern architect did, in his dislike of late Gothic and his feeling that the Renaissance brought about the downfall of true art,38 and in his antipathy to the use of iron.37 Yet despite this implicit indebted-

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ness, Eidlitz blamed Ruskin for many of the failures of contemporary architecture. Distressed by the separation which had occurred in the nineteenth century between building and architecture, Eidlitz believed that Ruskin was among the chief malefactors who justified the separation whereby the builder or engineer concerned himself with solving problems of technique and use of materials while the architect busied himself with exalted ideas and ransacked the past for forms which would convey these ideas. The result was that architecture had ceased to be a living art.38 Art, to Eidlitz, was a form of poetic or ideal knowledge springing from the imagination or the emotions. Common sense, positive knowledge which was the result of observation, was driving poetic knowledge out of the modern world. He vehemently denied that the purpose of art was only to produce a "pleasurable emotion," and that personal preference or "taste" was the only guide. It is quite evident here that Eidlitz' real enemies were the Beaux Arts practitioners and those like Peabody who were arguing for an eclectic use of bits of the archaeological past controlled only by the "native feeling and training of the artist" or the "cultivated sense." But Ruskin too fell under the attack: Ruskin's ethical dogmatism was illogical; he spoke in terms of eternal laws but was actually, said Eidlitz, only rationalizing his own preferences, his own "taste." Ruskin's idea that the artist should copy the forms of nature betrayed his fundamental failure to understand the nature of beauty. The work of art, like the work of nature, was a realized idea, and the organic ideal meant to Eidlitz not imitating natural forms but working according to the method of nature. Finally, Eidlitz attacked Ruskin for his essentially pictorial vision, for trying to turn architects, whose real task was to give aesthetic form to functional needs, into decorative sculptors and painters.39 The fallacy of Ruskin's ideas on architecture was that he had arbitrarily imposed his ideas about the health of mediaeval society and the intrinsic value of truth to nature upon architectural

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forms. "The author evidently imagines that a form, wherever found or whatever the function of the object which is cast in that form, if pleasing to us, may be recognized as a form typically beautiful, to be applied with aesthetical success and propriety to any other object, no matter what its function." By contrast, Eidlitz asserted and then went on to show how "form is beautiful only in the degree in which it is expressive of functions."40 Eidlitz' book is important from a number of points of view, not the least of which is its anticipation of the writings of Louis Sullivan. It is a ringing indictment of both Ruskin's idea of art as truth to nature and of Ruskin's flimsy teleology; but it would be a mistake to confuse Eidlitz' view with the materialistic functionalism of his twentieth-century descendants. Eidlitz was not trying to rid architecture of ideas or moral meaning, but to relate thought to form organically, rather than through a priori ethical assumptions imposed from without. Eidlitz' thought, with its amalgam of Ruskin and anti-Rusldnian structural functionalism, was a chief source for the ideas of the outstanding American architectural critic of the end of the century, Montgomery Schuyler. What Schuyler's recent biographers have made clear is that Schuyler too, for all his sensitivity to the new possibilities of architecture in these halcyon days— bridges, skyscrapers, and early Wright prairie houses—never broke free of his early Victorian aesthetic education. His essays on architects like Francis Kimball, Cady, Berg, and See, and Barney and Chapman record the indebtedness of that generation to the writings of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc, and even at the end of his career in his article on Frank Lloyd Wright, he intones the familiar Ruskinian chant that the Gothic was the most vital of all previous styles, that "the ideas underlying all real architecture have simply lapsed and been submerged" since the Renaissance, but "that they will reappear is as certain . . . for they are founded on Truth and Nature. Truth and Nature are two things that are never out of date, nor very long out of fashion."41 Eidlitz' thought reappears in a modified form in the work of

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Louis Sullivan, whose functionalism was also conceived not merely as a collocation of forms but as an "idea," related in fundamental ways to the health of the society in which it was to exist. Though removed a generation from Ruskin's direct influence, surely it is not merely fanciful to see the profusion of partly stylized naturalistic decoration which frames like a bower the door of the Schlesinger Mayer (Carson, Pirie, Scott) Building in Chicago or twines around the capitals of the Guaranty (Prudential) Building in Buffalo as Sullivan's revitalized version of the plates of The Stones of Venice,42 To move from Sullivan to Wright is to move into our own age, but it is not to leave Ruskin behind. On the contrary, far as Wright may have traveled from the specific forms of Ruskin's beloved Gothic, his belief in the organic vitality of Gothic and his views of the relation of architecture to society, of the dependence of a healthy architecture upon its relation to natural forms and a healthy society are a direct inheritance from those Ruskinian volumes he read as a young man. Long after the forms of Gothic had gone dead in the hands of Wright's contemporary Ralph Adams Cram, who carried the Gothic Revival back from its Ruskinian vitality to another form of the old elitist, High-Church ecclesiology, the heritage of Ruskin's thought lived on in the mind and art of America's greatest architectural genius. 43 To speak of Wright and Cram is to move to the outer limits of our story. Their achievement is a twentieth-century fact, though their training and the questions which they posed about the interrelation of art, nature, and morality were deeply rooted in late nineteenth-century modes of thought. (Cram was born in 1863, Wright in 1869.) Wright was able to shape the old elements of art, nature, and morality into a new architectural synthesis, to create in a sense the Madonna of the future, while Cram could only rearrange the old elements mechanically and produce merely anachronistic Cimabues or Duccios. Cram should

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have known the futility of his own venture, and would have, had he read Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, for which he wrote an introduction, and The Education of Henry Adams with more perception and less nostalgia; for what Adams had made patently clear in these books was that thirteenth-century unity was impossible in a twentieth-century multiverse and that the Madonna of the future was a dynamo. Yet even here the signs are misleading, for the despair of Adams' late work—which the generation of T. S. Eliot found so relevant in the second and third decades of the twentieth century — w a s itself the last testament of a generation whose youth belonged to the nineteenth century. As Adams wrote to Charles Milnes Gaskell in 1906: "I pardon nobody for bad Gothic and Venetian taste. Yet once I read Ruskin and admiredl W e even read Carlyle and followed! Lord, but we datel" 44 Adams' chagrin is that of the disillusioned enthusiast, for like other major literary artists of the last third of the nineteenth century, he had found that working out a new relation among art, nature, and morality inevitably required laying the ghosts of a Ruskinian youth. The importance of this should not be overlooked even in the case of a supreme craftsman like Henry James. By the end of his life, James could argue with H. G. Wells that "it is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance," that artistic forms give shape to chaotic experience, collecting the disparate elements and, through form, giving them a new life. T o James the work of art had an organic unity of its own. It was neither a literal facsimile of experience nor the superimposition of a preconceived framework of ideas and ideals upon experience. The critic's task was to assess how well the artist had achieved this organic unity. Yet in the work of his early exploratory years, one can see James struggling to find that critical point of view where fidelity to fact was balanced by a comprehensive conception, an idea, a moral meaning. James's baptism into the world of art may have taken place in the childhood revelation of the Galerie d'Apollon, but

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between that moment and the 1870's when he was writing art notes for the Atlantic Monthly under William Dean Howells' auspices, his critical sensibility was taking shape.45 His explicit training as a critic of the fine arts began in the late 1860's under the tutelage of Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced him to Ruskin and encouraged his younger friend to read Ruskin's books. James was unimpressed by Ruskin the man, but, as his early criticism shows, it was not easy to dismiss Ruskin the writer. His treatment of Ruskin's writings is testimony that the Ruskinian conception of art could not simply be ignored in this period, even by one as intensely concerned with the problems of craftsmanship as James. In an early review of P. G. Hamerton's Contemporary French Painters which appeared in 1868 in the North American Review, then under Norton's editorship, James said that Ruskin was a major force of his generation and the one that followed, and that his influence could be measured as much by his opponents as by his disciples and adherents. The difficulty was that Ruskin had not taught others how to judge art; he was the founder of no school of criticism. To the young James, who was himself in search of critical standards, this shortcoming was important.46 Throughout James's early criticism, there is a continuing exploration of the problem of critical point of view and a dissatisfaction with much criticism for its partiality. Thus Ruskin seemed to him too moralistic; he lacked a sense of form, and there was a vast gap between Ruskin's sensibility and his moralized explanations of art and nature. Hippolyte Taine, by contrast, had a meticulous sense of fact; his theory of race "makes incomparable observers," but Taine lacked a moral consciousness, and his theories suffered from their philosophical abstractness. In his review of Tyndall, James had drawn a similar comparison between Ruskin's "passionate sentimentality" and Tyndall's passion for the fact observed scientifically.47 In the early seventies, James praised Auguste Laugel, whose Parisian notes were appearing in the Nation, for having achieved

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a balance between the aesthetic and the moral point of view, and one year later he noted much the same of the writing of Emile Montegut, when he spoke of Montegut's "sense of the artist, the joy in material forms, and the conscience of the moralist, the care for spiritual meanings." James realized the vulnerability of such a balanced critical stance, for it was open to attack on both sides. "Painters will not care for his criticisms of pictures—they will call them too fantastic and far-fetched and literary; and moralists of the sterner sort will not care for his meditations—they will call him too aesthetic, too disinterested, too much tainted with that spirit to which the nature of a creed differs only in degree from that of the ornamental stonework of the church which commemorates it." The task of the critic, the observer par excellence, was to walk a tightrope between moralizing and aestheticism, to give due weight to the claims of the moral and the aesthetic without becoming the captive of either.48 As his own critical position developed, James grew increasingly irritated with Ruskin's moral narrow-mindedness. In an essay on "Recent Florence" in 1878, he contrasted his own pictorial sense of the Florentine landscape to the moral tirades of Ruskin's recent Mornings in Florence. In Ruskin's book "this idea of the value of a work of art being the amount of entertainment it yields is conspicuous by its absence." Ruskin talked of truth and error instead of the delight or the charm of Florence. At the end of his attack, which is a classic piece of drollery, James's urbane sarcasm at its best, he protests that contrary to Mr. Ruskin's assumptions, "we are not under theological government."49 Four years later James adopted the same tone in an essay on Venice. He said that the late prose of Ruskin was "pitched in the nursery-key, and might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess," but he then went on to speak of Ruskin's "splendid genius." "The narrow theological spirit, the moralism h. tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers." Ruskin's genius was his sensibility, his power to evoke a sense of place in a lush, if often form-

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less, prose. His shortcoming was his dogmatic moralizing. This had thrown Ruskin's point of view out of focus, distorted his critical vision, and made him an unsatisfactory guide to art and to life. 50 Certainly Ruskin was never a major force in shaping James's critical outlook, yet there is an interest in what James says about Ruskin which extends beyond the scattered references to him in the critical articles. It is easy to misunderstand James's delightful bantering tone in the essays on "Recent Florence" and "Venice" and to be taken in by his penchant for persiflage. But the bantering tone, the overinsistent pleading for the values merely of delight, of amusement, of charm, is at least in part a mask, an assumed urbanity of tone which resembles, not surprisingly, the urbanity of Nathaniel Hawthorne's prefaces. It covers his concern with a much more fundamental issue which was the subject of his fiction in these same years—the discovery of Europe by the American abroad. The American innocent, morally righteous, yet a passionate pilgrim to the sources of European culture, is a central figure in James's novels and stories, and the question in these works of fiction is how the American will respond to the complexities of Europe. Speaking of Hawthorne in 1872, James had said: "Exposed late in life to European influences, Mr. Hawthorne was but superficially affected by them—far less so than would be the case with a mind of the same temper growing up among us to-day. We seem to see him strolling through churches and galleries as the last pure American—attesting by his shy responses to dark canvas and cold marble his loyalty to a simpler and less encumbered civilization."51 For James, the pre-Civil War American had lived in a kind of Golden Age, which was irrevocably past. The new American's response to Europe and to European art was bound to be more complex. What he conceived to be the moral certainties of Hawthorne's generation were no longer possible to Americans. Contact with Europe by the younger generation was

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bound to upset or at least challenge the provincialities of the earlier age. In the light of this, James's seemingly casual attack on Ruskin takes on a greater significance. What he liked about Ruskin, his sensibility, was the quality which opened up the meaning of Europe to the American abroad, especially since the meaning of Europe in James's fiction is so often linked with or symbolized by European art. What James objected to in Ruskin were the very qualities which so often distinguished his American characters: "the narrow theological spirit, the moralism a tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies." The American moral sense is usually the Jamesian hero's chief asset, but it is also his chief liability. Europe subjects it to severe strain. He must learn to see the complexities of life without losing completely the moral sense. How then would Americans' Ruskinian conceptions of art, nurtured in the "simpler and less encumbered civilization," fare in the new age? "The Madonna of the Future" is a strong early statement of James's anti-idealistic view of the artist, though Theobald's failure is mitigated somewhat by our realization that the beauty of Italy is its past idealism, captured by the hands of Raphael, Michelangelo, Cellini, Mantegna, while the present is shabby and soiled. James suggests that the root of Theobald's idealism, and hence of his blindness to present realities, is to be found in his American origin. The narrator is vastly amused at times "to think that he was of our shrewd Yankee race; but, after all, there could be no better token of his American origin than this high aesthetic fever. The very heat of his devotion was a sign of conversion; those bom to European opportunity manage better to reconcile enthusiasm with comfort."52 In his first large-scale treatment of the artist, Roderick Hudson (1875), James explores the problem of balance between the aesthetic and the moral, between ideal conceptions and commonplace realities, between Europe and America, in a variety of

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ways. The simpler American attitude toward art is reflected in Leavenworth, the Midwestern patron of art, who confidently believes that "the office of art is second only to that of religion" and never doubts the compatibility of the two. It is reflected in Mary Garland who "had been brought up to think a great deal of nature' and nature's innocent laws." She finds that the effort to understand the meaning of European art "gave her a well-nigh tragic tension." Roderick himself remains artistically an innocent to the end, the "aboriginal American artist," convinced of his own Byronic genius. 53 His conception of the artist creating out of the depths of his inmost soul is given dramatic force through the contrast with Singleton, the modest copyist of natural scenery. Singleton in the Alps is truly the disciple of Ruskin, being "true to nature" in all its particularities. Roderick is a colossal failure, Singleton a very modest success. The novel has many facets, and not the least among them is James's exposure of the various attitudes toward art, no one of which receives the author's complete sympathy. The idea that art is "truth to nature" is too simple; the idea that art is second to religion is countered by Roderick's plea that the artist must be free from the bonds of conventional morality; and Roderick's death in the Alps is a kind of mock-heroic fall of the house of Hudson, testimony to the inadequacy of the older idea of the artist as romantic genius. It is in The American two years later that James exposed fully the dilemma of the American's response to art. From the opening scene in the Louvre, the meaning of Europe is entangled with the meaning of art. Art is linked symbolically with Europe and nature with America. Art is experience, and the protagonist Newman's praise of Mile Nioche's poor copy in the Louvre indicates that he is innocent. But art is also a sign of corruption in Europe. Urbain de Bellegarde is "an incarnation of the art of taking one's self seriously." He is "a great façade." The passion for art is grotesque in its corruption, as The Portrait of a Lady was to show four years later in the character of Gilbert Osmond. Even in terms of a sympathetic European character, Valentin de Belle-

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garde, art is linked with corruption. Valentin sees the duel which will bring about his death as "picturesque." His characterization of Mile Nioche as "a beautiful type" from the artistic point of view, elicits from Newman the response: "Heaven help us! how far the artistic point of view may take a man!"54 One of the problems of the novel is Newman's attempt to see just "how far the artistic point of view may take a man," and the most significant treatment of this question occurs in chapter five, the telescoped account of Newman's European travels. He tries to give himself over completely to enjoyment and to delight before the masterpieces of Europe, and the result is complete confusion, foreshadowing the end of the book. For Newman is not left alone merely to enjoy. He is badgered by the American conscience, in the shape of a Unitarian minister named Babcock from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Through Babcock, James deftly characterizes the American moral approach to art. In revising the novel in 1907, the author sharpened even further the outlines of Babcock's character and placed in Newman's baggage six volumes of Ruskin. Babcock did not need them, for Ruskin's view of art was already deeply ingrained. As an American, Babcock is morally suspicious of Europe, and yet he has "an exquisite sense of beauty" (1907 version: "what he called an intimate sense of the true beautiful life"). In the earlier version James says that he is "extremely devoted to culture'"; in the later version Babcock's moral criteria became even clearer. Here he is "extremely bent on putting his finger on the boundary-line, in the life of a School [of painting], between the sincere time and the insincere."55 The issue between Newman and Babcock comes to a focus in their difference over the merits of the painting of Bernardino Luini. At first Babcock is quite taken with Luini, but subsequent reflection leads him to believe that he has overestimated Luini. "I don't think that he is a painter of the first rank." What James had in mind by "rank" became clear in the revised version: "I don't think he's as true as he at first seems." When Newman re-

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sponds that he finds Luini enchanting, magnificent, that Luini impresses one as a beautiful woman would, the two American tourists must separate.56 Babcock explains the reason for the break in a letter to Newman. The minister is convinced that art must be judged upon moral grounds and that the history of art is one of moral rise and decline. One cannot simply derive pleasure from art. "I feel as if I must arrive at some conclusion and fix my belief on certain points. Art and life seem to me intensely serious things, and in our travels in Europe we should especially remember the immense seriousness of Art." Babcock's experience with Luini has convinced him of the moral danger of art. Art should help to fix one's belief. To be caught up with it is to be morally confused. In Babcock's view, art can either give one moral instruction or it can entice one into dilettantism, aestheticism, the savoring of sensations for their own sake. The moral alternatives, he feels, should be clear, and in his gentle but earnest way, he accuses Newman of having made the wrong moral choice.57 To complicate the decision further, Newman falls in with an English writer who accuses him of being too stern a moralist, of judging things 'like a Methodist."58 Newman's confusion is complete, and his response is to give up the question entirely. When the novel moves on to the central problem of Newman's relation to Madame de Cintré, it becomes clear that Newman has given up the moral question in art only to be confronted with it in more personal terms. At this point his own moral idealism comes clearly to the fore. European art and European life produce in Newman first delight and then confusion. He is unequipped, finally, to deal with either; at the end of the book he escapes with his integrity, but with little else. The short chapter on Newman's experience with art is one of James's most skillful early dramatizations of the conflict between art and morality as it appeared to the American of the post-Civil War years. As a piece of imaginative cultural history it is unsurpassed, for James has captured the dilemma of the American

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approach to art. Babcock's view of art is constricted; he uses art to reinforce his moral preconceptions. The problem which Luini poses is that the work of art has no clear-cut message. It has an imaginative life, a complexity, all its own. To expose one's self fully to the work of art is to be caught up in the complexity and to risk losing one's moral bearings. For the minister this is intolerable. In criticizing Ruskin, James had not denied to the work of art or, for that matter, to life, its moral dimension. Though he himself was committed to giving shape to life through form, James was never an aesthete in the usual sense; indeed, he caricatured the aesthete as Gabriel Nash in The Tragic Muse (1890), and his response to the Ruskin-Whistler lawsuit had been, as we have seen, ambiguous. He was never committed to art for art's sake or to "aesthetic idealism," as one critic has called it.59 At the heart of James's art always lies some fundamental moral issue, to which artistic form gives a shape. His objection to Ruskin was more limited. It was Ruskin's "theological spirit," the narrow dogmatism of his point of view which left out of account the complexities of art, which James disliked. James's heroes risk moral confusion in order to gain a richer sense of the complexities of life and art, but the Ruskinian approach to art was calculated to fix the boundaries of art within clearly defined moral limits. James's complex vision led him to plead the cause of art in order to free it from the moral provincialism of the Babcocks. In his criticism and in his fiction he tried to distinguish between the province of art and that of morality, as other critics of Ruskin were doing in these years. Though for vastly different reasons, he and the Hegelians agreed that Americans should not be under "theological government." The testimony of other major American writers of these years on the conflict between art and morality is equally clear. Hie broadest statement of the problem is Mark Twain's caricature, The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress (1869). The Quaker City steams out of New York harbor toward the Old

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World with pious intentions, if not exactly under theological government. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher is unavoidably detained at home, but the passengers are among the "select," though as it turns out there are unregenerates aboard, and the ultimate destination is the Holy Land. Excepting Mark Twain and his cohorts, the boat is filled with two-dimensional Babcocks. Twain was fully aware of both the moral assumptions with which the American abroad faced Europe and European art and the verbal conventions which the American invariably invoked to relate the things seen to those moral assumptions, yet in his preface to Innocents Abroad he explicitly disclaimed the role of preacher or pedagogue and offered honesty of vision in place of traditional wisdom, "impartial eyes" instead of the jaundiced and conventionalized vision which only would "show any one how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea" (the flat rhetoric reinforces his point). However, he had only partial success in fulfilling this early declaration of the realist's credo. As a negative statement of Twain's anti-idealism, Innocents Abroad is an hilarious success. The problem of the book is that for all the comic energy expended in exploding the vague moral idealism or the unfelt picturesque rhetoric of the pilgrims, Twain was unable at this point to suggest any really viable alternative. The innocent eye is not often hoaxed by guidebooks or ciceroni, but neither does it offer any other way of judging the value of what is perceived—that is, any other aesthetic criteria. For Twain, Ruskin himself was not the issue, though one might trace some of the lurid descriptions of sunsets or of the glory of Venice or the Venetian guide's remarks that the Renaissance was the decline of painting, all of which Twain parodies, back to sources in the English critic's writings. Twain's real target, though, was Ruskin's American audience. He would have agreed with Henry Greenough in condemning the "sanctimonious cant by means of which Ruskin imposes on bigoted old women"; what Innocents Abroad makes eminently clear is that Greenough had badly underestimated the number of bigoted old women in

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America who were traveling abroad filled with Ruskinian notions of the morality of art. For Twain's friend Howells the case was somewhat different. It was only natural that the young consul in Venice, newly married to a New England amateur painter, should set himself assiduously to work reading Ruskin. When he began to turn his own impressions of the island city into a book, Salmon Chase wrote to him: "If you do not give us a very charming book, we shall all be greatly disappointed. You must beat Ruskin."60 Howells freely followed Ruskin in preferring "the Democracy as it was before the Doge Pietro Gradenigo in the thirteenth century" to the later Venetian oligarchy, because Ruskin here seemed to confirm his own passionate republicanism. Aesthetically, Howells' Venetian Life (1866) is the work of a reluctant Ruskinian. As he later admitted with chagrin, he was the "helpless slave" of Ruskin's "over-ethicized criticism." It is clear in chapter eleven, "Churches and Pictures," that Ruskin was his guide and that to dissent from Ruskin would be almost heretical. He was suspicious of Ruskin's method, "by which he pretends to relate the aesthetic truths you perceive to certain civil and religious conditions," and could drolly poke fun at Ruskin's dogmatic moralizing, but finally Howells had little to substitute in 1866 for Ruskin and he threw up his hands finally at the impossibility of finding words adequate to define painting—always an easy out, though also an admission of failure to define an aesthetic stance —and devoted as much space in the chapter to the cats of Venice as he did to the Cathedral of San Marco.61 The record of Howells' early indebtedness to Ruskin's "overethicized criticism" exists not only in the text of Venetian Life but also in his 1907 preface to the book, with its Adamsian tone of "Lord, but we date," and in the novel Howells published twenty years after Venetian Life, Indian Summer (1886). In this novel we get retrospective glimpses of the Ruskinian young manhood of the protagonist Colville, whose life parallels reasonably closely that of his creator.62 The turn away from Ruskin as criti-

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cal authority came in the 1870's when Howells was fighting through to his own standards of critical realism. Howells' change is apparent in his discovery of Hippolyte Taine, in two short pieces on Taine which he wrote for the Atlantic in 1872. In the first, a review of the Van Laun translation of The History of English Literature and John Durand's translation of The Philosophy of Art in Greece, he was skeptical about the exclusive use of national character to explain creative genius, though he felt happier about Taine's method when applied to art than to poetry. "It is certain that it is safer to infer Greek art from Greek life, as M. Taine does, than to infer Greek character from Greek art, as Mr. Ruskin would prefer to do." In the end he praised Taine "for his valuable contributions to one portion of the science of art-history." The phrase is illuminating, for it suggests how much Howells was already the captive of the newer positivistic views of art. In the second piece, he expressed some disappointment that Taine's philosophical view of art as a product of race, moment, and milieu made him a poorer critic of art than Ruskin, but he nevertheless praised Taine as an unparalleled observer of the physical aspects of life. Despite his demurrers, Howells was joining the ranks of those writers and critics whom Taine would help to turn away from ideas of romantic genius, from moral theories of the ends of art and mimetic theories of truth to nature as the means to beauty, toward a theory of art which saw the work of the past as a function of its time and defined artistic value as the capacity to realistically reflect the substance of one's own age. 63 Edward Eggleston accepted the Tainian challenge in the preface to The Circuit Rider (1874). Henry James added his praise of the History to that of Howells in 1872, dubbing the book "A Comparative Survey of the English Mind in the leading Works of its Literature." 64 John Durand, in the 1865 preface to his translation of The Philosophy of Art, enumerated the merits of Taine's approach:

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Among others, it tends to emancipate the student of art, as well as the amateur, from metaphysical and visionary theories growing out of false theories and traditional misconceptions; he is not misled by an exclusive adherence to particular schools, masters, or epochs. It also tends to render criticism less capricious, and therefore less injurious; dictating no conventional standard of judgment, it promotes a spirit of charity towards all works . . . there is no attempt to do more than explain art according to natural laws. 65 Coming from the former editor and publisher of the Crayon this was a clear, if implicit, rejection of the theories of John Ruskin. By 1875 Durand had translated the rest of Taine's writings on art which Henry Holt published in two stout volumes: The Ideal in Art and the three particular studies of The Philosophy of Art, In Italy, In Greece, and In the Netherlands (this last Taine dedicated to Gustave Flaubert). Explicit comparisons with Ruskin were inevitable. John Burroughs in 1870 said that Taine was clearer, more consistent, and more cosmopolitan as a critic of art, but Ruskin displayed more genius in the presence of nature and in interpreting universal principles. In the following year, John F. Weir, first director of Yale's School of Fine Arts, offered Taine as a good counterbalance to Ruskin: "Mr. Ruskin affects the subjective, moral aspect, the influences, and motives of art; while M. Taine is more concerned with its objective phase, its sensuous, positive characteristics, and its physical causes and relations." When James himself had reviewed Taine's Italy, he had praised Taine for his powers of observation, and told the reader, "you can do your own moralizing and sentimentalizing: you can draw your own inferences and arrange your own creed." Thus did Taine help to free James, as he freed Howells and others, from "theological government," though Howells would turn back to Ruskin later in the 1880's for another and different look. 66

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Disentangling art from morality without submitting to aestheticism was a problem for James and, as the late 1880's and 1890s were to prove, even more so for Howells; the same can also be said for Henry Adams. In the same years that he was working directly as an historian, Adams placed at the center of his two Tainian novels, Democracy (1879) and Esther (1884), female characters who are tormented by the conflict between their moral sense and their attempt to understand and to be active protagonists of their own race, moment, and milieu. For Madelaine Lee, "Ruskin and Taine danced merrily through her mind, hand in hand with Darwin and Stuart Mill, Gustave Droz and Algernon Swinburne." Her intellectual confusion is compounded by the moral confusion of Washington politics. For Esther Dudley the aesthetic dilemma is more central. In the opening scene she and her friend the scientist George Strong (modeled on Clarence King) engage in acute aesthetic discriminations about the new Gothic church on Fifth Avenue, but the agnosticism of both makes them mere observers of the religious devotions to which the church is consecrated. When Esther falls in love with the minister Hazard, the conflict between her aesthetic attraction to religious art and her rational rejection of the theology produces an agonizing impasse, one which plagued her creator Adams throughout his later years.67 It is questionable whether Adams ever resolved the tension between his aesthetic attraction to mediaeval art and his Pascaban skepticism. The closest he came was the Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (first privately published in 1904), the last great monument of the Gothic Revival in America. Ruskin is never mentioned by name in the Chartres-, Adams' architectural authority is Viollet-le-Duc, and he had Huysmans' Cathédrale, Abbé Bulteau's monograph on Chartres, Emile Mâle, and a host of others upon whom to draw.68 But the approach itself, the attempt to infer the mediaeval character and spirit from Gothic art, rather than to infer Gothic art from the mediaeval character, to adopt Howells' language, is clearly a Ruskinian rather than a

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Tainian venture. By 1900 Adams had lost his faith in the capacity of science to resolve the ambiguities of metaphysics. Though in his last works he used the language of science, especially the popular jargon of the second law of thermodynamics, with even greater insistence, he did so as an artist gathering symbols to express his despair over a mechanistic multiverse hurtling toward disaster. Like Ruskin (who never lived to complete his own work on Chartres), Adams saw the cathedral as the expression of an animating faith which gave unity to the age, temporarily dissolved political and philosophical disagreements, and made the process of church building at one and the same time an aesthetic and a religious act. The darker notes, the hints of the precariousness of the balance between matter and spirit and of impending disaster, are Adams' version of the closing volume of The Stones of Venice. It is not merely that both writers saw flambouyant Gothic tracery as the beginning of the end; for both, this architectural fact betokened the much deeper loss of aesthetic and spiritual unity. It signaled the end of an era and thus was a harbinger of the horrors of that modern industrial capitalism of which both Adams and Ruskin had become such trenchant critics.69 Adams went on in the Education as Ruskin had gone on after The Stones of Venice to ask how modern man could live in a world where the value of work resided not in its spiritual significance and aesthetic form but exclusively in terms of power and the cash nexus. If Adams shared his friend James's belief that "we are not under theological government," this fact was for him not liberating but a measure of loss, of the burden of being a twentieth-century man.

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THE DEFENSE OF RUSKIN: ART, MORALITY, AND AESTHETIC EDUCATION

AT THE CENTER OF HIS Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams placed the Virgin Queen, at its periphery, his audience of "nieces." That the worship of the woman, Mariolatry, was the animating force behind a unified vision of art and religion during the thirteenth century is historically an arguable point; that women had become the chief guardians of both religious and aesthetic values in the American business society of 1900 is not, and Adams' book is finally as much a function of late nineteenthcentury longings and aspirations as it is a description of the mediaeval spirit and art. In the first place, his discussions of Abelard and even of St. Thomas Aquinas were a warning to his own generation that masculine theology did not meet man's spiritual needs. As Adams saw it, a religion of instinct and of love, symbolized in the worship of the Virgin Queen who was at once a source of spiritual and sexual love and power and of aesthetic inspiration, was desperately needed in his own time. Coming from a puritan manqué like Adams, the indictment of the churches for their failure to meet human needs had a special force. In the second place, the form of the Chartres as an aesthetic guidebook for young ladies had a special resonance at the

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end of the nineteenth century. The separation between business and culture, between "downtown" and "uptown," as Henry James spoke of it, was acute, and popular education both religious and aesthetic seemed inevitably directed toward women. (Howells' concern with the problem of a primarily female audience for modern fiction was well taken, however much it may strike a mixed reading audience today as prudishness.) Thus the Chartres is in an important sense the Education of the American Woman, as Adams' next book was to be the Education of the American Man.1 Evidence of this same split can be found in the audiences of Ruskin's later writings. Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps, and The Stones of Venice seem to be addressed to all his contemporaries, male and female. With the exception of a few like Henry Greenough who felt that these works were addressed by a minister to bigoted old women, the challenge of Ruskin's ideas was met with seriousness by all. However, from the sixties on there developed a split in his audience. His attacks on laissez-faire economic theory in Unto This Last or on ignoble military ideals in the lecture on "War" to the cadets at Woolwich or his appeal to workingmen in the Fors Clavigera series were masculine jeremiads expressed in comparatively lean prose, while his later writings on art and books, sometimes given first at schools for young ladies, his nieces in wishes, have an aura of cloying sentimentality. Whatever the sources of these appeals to young ladies may have been in Ruskin's disturbed psyche—these were the years of his infatuation with Rose La Touche—they also stand as an index of the changing nature of the reading audience in the late nineteenth century, as the division between male culture and female culture widened. The Ruskin anthologies published in America reflect this. Some, like Art and Life (1886), Science: A Ruskin Anthology (1891), or The Communism of John Ruskin (1892), drew largely from his later social thought; others, like Bits of Burnished Gold (1888) or Readings from Ruskin: Italy (1889), differed little

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from the sentimental gift books of purple prose which adorned Victorian parlors. Of all Ruslan's books the most popular, with its sentimental idolatry of women, was clearly Sesame and Lilies (1865), which went through more than thirty-five printings in the United States in the nineteenth century (and many more thereafter). Ruskin's appeal to his female audience certainly accounts for his popularity long after his ideas about the relation of art, religion, and nature had been discredited by his critics. 2 In the Chartres, Adams defined the issues of art and belief and of the aesthetic education of young women in an extraordinarily sophisticated, at times even arcane, manner. Just before the turn of the century, Harold Frederic had dramatized the issues closer to home in The Damnation

of Theron

Ware

(1896). In this

novel, the ugliness of provincial Methodism is pitted against the beauty of a sophisticated Catholicism. The Methodist minister Ware is weaned away from his aesthetically barren youth and thrust into the world of beauty in art by a passionate young Catholic aesthete named Celia Madden; at the same time his intellectual ignorance is threatened by Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar who argue in the language of the higher criticism in theology. Celia's Catholicism is less threatening to Ware than her sensuous devotion to the ideals of Walter Pater, Whistler, and the fin de siècle, the "late Milesian" world of her boudoir which Celia hopes will insulate her from the crass materialism and ugliness of contemporary life. The result for the innocent American Protestant, narrow in his intellectual and aesthetic horizons but Emersonian in his optimistic belief in nature, is disaster and damnation: he loses his own faith without ever reaching Celia's religion of beauty; in fact he mistakes, with some justification, her sensuous devotion to art for sexuality. Thus briefly sketched, Frederic's novel seems like melodrama. When it is placed against the background of the late nineteenthcentury ministerial response to the new challenge of art and the attempts of ministers and educators to make art subserve the needs of faith, The Damnation

of Theron Ware emerges as an

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extraordinarily perceptive and realistic dramatization of the nightmare vision of the period. Americans' exposure to art was increasing rapidly. The magazines, many of them illustrated, were devoting more space to art than they had before the war. Collections of painting and sculpture were multiplying; the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., were all incorporated in 1870, and private collectors were beginning the great ransacking of Europe. Travel abroad reached new heights. Appleton's Journal in 1873 quoted a Swiss economist to the effect that some 25,000 Americans were visiting Europe annually, and there were permanent colonies of Americans in all the chief cities of England and Italy as well as in many other cities, from Paris to St. Petersburg.3 Exposure to European art continued to be a heady experience for the passionate pilgrims from America. Young Lincoln Steffens wrote to his sister Laura from Berlin in 1889 that he had been finding Ruskin an extremely useful guide to the galleries. "He is the greatest art critic the world has ever produced . . . Without him I don't know what I should do, for I was without any sound taste and must have been led by popular verdict or, worse still, by my natural and unsound taste if it had not been for him." Several years later Isabella Stewart Gardner was literally following Ruskin's footsteps, scrambling up ladders in Venice to look at Carpaccios with her Ruskin volumes clutched in hand. The art-fever was high.4 As Henry James suggested through Babcock, Twain obliquely in Innocents Abroad, Frederic through Theron Ware, Adams through Esther's fiancé Hazard, and Howells in a number of novels, the group that was most disturbed about Americans' interest in art was the ministry. The Rev. James M. Hoppin of Yale put it this way in 1866: The indiscriminate visitation of the great galleries of Europe by our young people of both sexes, travelling abroad without

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educational or hardly moral supervision, has doubtless done great injury. Some works of European art that have gone through this country, originating from a corrupt mind and a debased French taste, have been the more pestilential because they possessed a certain kind of artistic beauty. But we nevertheless hold that these have been false works of art; that the best art, springing from a pure source, and built upon true artistic ideas, is never immoral in its tendencies. Nineteen years later a writer in the Episcopal Church Review was still worried about the American tourist abroad. "How much of sentimental borrowed moral rhapsody is expended by tourists over works whose influence and meaning are cruel or immodest, only because they are beautiful or picturesque." Unless art was controlled by morality, unless beauty was defined in terms of truth, the new interest in art could be positively dangerous to the American religious community. 5 The American ministry sought to meet the challenge which American enthusiasm for art had posed. "Aesthetic Religion" was the danger, according to the Rev. S. M. Campbell of Utica, New York. If the sensibilities were moved but the conscience was not, the result was sentiment or sentimentality but not religion. At this point "the ministry of the beautiful in worship is changed to a ministry for the worship of the beautiful." Art had its place in the religious life, but it must be a subordinate one. He warned that whenever Christian worship was made one of the fine arts, doctrine declined. 6 The different denominations continued to respond warmly to Ruskin during these decades. In 1873 the Rev. D. M. Hodge proclaimed Ruskin to be essentially a Universalist and hoped that the time would come when help of his might come from across the sea to put down "Mammonish greed" and to teach Americans the lessons of high art. Among the ministers of other liberal faiths, the Unitarian Loammi G. Ware continued to preach the doctrines of Ruskin in Boston and later in Burlington, Vermont,

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where he was a trustee of the University of Vermont's Park Gallery of Art. A review of a book on the art teaching of the primitive church gave Ware an opportunity to denounce Pugin, Roman Catholicism, and High-Church practices in general, "for, as Mr. Ruskin pointed out long ago, symbolism goes for worship, but personifying for idolatry."7 In the eyes of his friends, Ware's whole life was devoted to the reconciliation of the claim of duty with the claim of beauty. He preached the gospel of the beauty of holiness. According to an obituary of him in 1892 written by the Rev. Francis Tiffany, Ware was convinced that knowledge of art must be spread to the poor as well as to the rich. Art for him was a kind of spiritual communion, "not the mere ornament or frippery of life it is to so many, but a part of God's grace to mankind," and artists were "elect spirits." Ware had given inspired service to mankind in an age of materialism. "Religion is dying out in our churches, because it has no lyrical lift, no aroma of poetry, no wings of spiritual imagination, no vital communion with sublime natures." Art was necessary to buttress the faltering claims of religion in American life.8 Unitarians and Universalists were less concerned with doctrine than most American denominations, and their enthusiasm for art was considerably greater than that of the Rev. W. Strobel, Lutheran pastor of Rhinebeck, New York, who could see no clear answer to the question of whether art ever did any good for religion. Even Ruskin, he said, didn't seem to know. When Strobel read Victor Cousin's Lectures on the Beautiful, he was distressed by the author's rapture over the melodies in a church service. The question he posed was the same one posed by the opening scene of Henry Adams' Esther: "This is very beautiful, but the question to be solved is, was the moral equal to the aesthetic effect, or was the former paralyzed or overshadowed by the latter . . . was the worship spiritual or simply dramatic?"9 A writer in the Baptist Quarterly Review shared Strobel's concern. The earlier, simpler period in American life had passed. Art was now asserting itself in America as never before. Americans were

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not suffering from a lack of taste; in fact they had become "aesthetic overmuch." To this writer the triumph of aesthetics meant the triumph of the sensuous over the spiritual concept of worship. Yet neither of these men sought to banish art from the churches. What the United States needed, according to both, was not a Savonarola, but the characteristic American solution—education. Purification would come not through the bonfire but through spreading the knowledge of art in colleges and seminaries. Rusldn's books had helped both men to see the dangers of false art. Through education they hoped "to control the claims of art, and to turn to the highest service the growing love for the beautiful."10 The denominations differed among themselves as to the degree to which art was a danger or a support to religion, how much it should be harnessed and how much encouraged. What they seemed to agree on was that art was a force to be contended with and that John Rusldn was their ally in teaching men the morality of art. Perhaps the most outstanding partisan of Ruskin among the ministry of this period was the Congregationalist, Washington Gladden. In 1884 Gladden too took up the much discussed question of "Christianity and Aestheticism" in the Andover Review. He was acutely aware that he was a spiritual descendant of the seventeenth-century New England divines, but he stated bluntly that "the old Puritan doctrine, that art is sinful, has been roundly repudiated, as it ought to have been." The danger was that the reaction might go too far. He was thankful for Oscar Wilde's recent and highly publicized trip to America, for it had helped to make clear just what aestheticism was. In Gladdens view, there was no necessary conflict between the good and the beautiful, but he warned his readers from the experience of Greece that "when the ethical gave place to the aesthetical, the dry rot began to invade the national life." The late Milesian world of Celia Madden had no place in a healthy America.11 Two years later Gladden returned to the question of the re-

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lation of art to morality, emphasizing again that the periods during which art had become the supreme interest in human life had always been periods of national decadence. He illustrated his remarks with ample quotations from Ruskin s Queen of the Air. In this article, Gladdens attack was directed specifically at the advocates of realism in art. Without morality, without a conception of ideal righteousness, art was bankrupt. Indicting Hippolyte Taine and Henry James, whom he considered to be Taine's disciple, he said: "No subtler or more dangerous foe of civilization is now abroad than the moral indifferentism which infests so much of our art, and which accustoms us to look coolly and curiously on the plastic forms of human character, caring little, as Taine says, whether they are good or evil." By contrast, Gladden asserted that the function of art was service, and its end was not in itself but in leading men to higher ideals. This also he buttressed with quotations from Ruskin, exclaiming afterwards: "What a testimony is that from a great art-critic to the majesty and supremacy of the moral laws I"12 Gladdens attack on Tainian realism would be repeated again and again during the critical battles between realists and idealists in literature. In 1888 Charles Eliot Norton added his warning on the "powerful school of artists"—he had James and Flaubert in mind—who felt "that art and morality are absolutely independent, that the relation between the Beautiful and the Good is purely external, and that it is an impertinence to ask for anything in a work of art more than that it should be well executed." This was, of course, a distortion of James's argument in "The Art of Fiction" and elsewhere that "we must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it"; but the unwillingness of the realists to subject art to a particular creed and to submit to "theological government" continued to draw down upon James and his fellow artists the wrath of men like Gladden and Norton.13 Gladdens concern with the inroads of the doctrines of aestheticism and realism upon American religious life was in fact

AESTHETIC THOUGHT IN AMERICA

part of a larger concern with the church's failure to serve contemporary needs. His outstanding contribution lay in the development of the social gospel, the attempt of the churches to come to grips with the economic and social realities of urban, industrial America. Gladden was indebted to Ruskin's later writings on social theory and economics, as were others; for the path from a Ruskinian conception of art to social theories of Ruskinian inspiration was one which would be traversed by a host of Americans in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and well on into the twentieth. Yet before leaving Gladdens discussion of art, it is worth noting that in 1903 he was invited to deliver the William Belden Noble lectures at Harvard. He spoke of six "Witnesses of the Light" and on this list of worthies was "Ruskin, the Preacher." Ruskin's art criticism, said Gladden, was worthy of one who considered his function sacred. It is a trumpet call to all who devote their lives to any kind of art, summoning them to rise into newness and nobility of life, to cleanse themselves from selfishness and vanity and fit themselves to be first the beholders and then the heralds of the beauty of the Lord. The foundation of this art criticism is therefore in religion; you are brought back continually to the eternal realities which underlie all existence. Ruskin's conception of art was exalted by Gladden, as it had been by Loammi Ware before him, and invested with a kind of saving grace. 14 The question remains whether art could bear the religious burden which the ministry was heaping upon it. In 1888 Elizabeth Robins Pennell, wife of Joseph Pennell, the biographer of Whistler and artist friend of James and Howells, warned Americans that it could not. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly on "English Faith in Art," she attacked the moral interpretation of art and Ruskin in particular. The Ruskinians had assumed that art would enrich men's souls and give to the people a nobler con-

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ception of life. Her experience at English exhibits convinced her that the people preferred pictures with stories to paintings of ideal subjects—this was certainly true of her friend Howells, who liked the popular paintings of W. P. Frith—and that art amused them rather than spiritually enlightening them. With the failure of religion, she said, art had been advocated as the social cure-all; but she warned Americans that art could not give men faith they did not already have. "To think that art can in any way fulfill the functions of religion is to imagine vain things."15 Yet this was precisely the burden that the ministry was imposing upon art: to make art subservient to religion, to use art to give a "lyrical lift" to the declining influence of the church, to harness it to the social gospel. The ministry was trying to use Ruskin's theories of art to give to religion the authority it was rapidly ceasing to command on grounds of doctrine. The incursions of Darwinian thought and the wealth of other social institutions were eating away at the vitality of American religion from without while men like Russell Conwell, in his famous "Acres of Diamonds" sermon, were rotting it away from within. How many people Ruskin's theories of art kept within the fold and how many Ruskin indirectly lured away, by interesting them in art to the exclusion of theology, is impossible to gauge. Yet the very frequency of the ministry's recurrence to the problem of "aesthetic religion," their reiterated fear that if they were not vigilant the beauty of religion would turn into the religion of beauty, does not betoken much success. Despite the assistance of Ruskin's teachings, the ministry could not confine the American interest in art within religious bounds. In the meantime, the call for art education had been heeded. There had been scattered attempts at instruction in art and aesthetics in American universities before the Civil War, sometimes taught by ministers like William A. Dod, lecturer at Princeton, Joseph Torrey, professor of intellectual and moral philosophy and later president at the University of Vermont, or John Bascom,

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professor of rhetoric and oratory at Williams College, where he was Washington Gladdens most memorable teacher.18 After the war one of the earliest schools of art in the United States was founded at Yale. It had a distinctly Ruskinian cast: the school's building, dedicated in 1866, was the work of Peter B. Wight; in its galleries after 1868 hung the James Jackson Jarves collection of paintings, illustrating the rise and decline of Italian art, catalogued for Yale by another architect-alumnus of both Yale and the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, Russell Sturgis. The speaker at the dedication of the building was the Rev. James Mason Hoppin, one of the more vocal but now forgotten disciples of Ruskin in America. After graduation from Yale in 1840, Hoppin had studied law briefly before turning to the ministry. After years at the Union Theological and Andover seminaries, he went to Berlin where he sat at the feet of the noted church historian August Neander. He returned to this country to preach for several years at Salem, Massachusetts, until he was called to the chair of Homiletics and Pastoral Charge in the Yale Divinity School in 1864. James Mason was not the only Hoppin interested in art. His cousin William J. Hoppin had been a founder of the Century Association, for years a gathering place of artists and art-amateurs; he had also been editor of the Art-Union Bulletin in 1849 and author of its review of The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Another cousin, Augustus, was one of the most popular illustrators of books and magazines of the last third of the century, and still another, Thomas Frederick Hoppin, designed the chancel windows of Trinity Church, New York, and modeled the first piece of sculpture cast in bronze in the United States.17 During his first trip abroad in the 1850's as a theological student, James Hoppin had looked at works of art and at landscape, convincing himself that the love of nature was good, provided that it was founded in Christian faith and that nature was not worshiped for its own sake. When he returned to Europe in the sixties, it was as a reader of Ruskin. Like many another American

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reader of Ruskin, he went to the National Gallery to praise Turner, found himself confused and disturbed by the late canvases, and concluded that Ruskin was greater than Turner.18 Hoppin had written in 1865 on the "Principles of Art," citing Ruskin's authority both implicitly and explicitly in defense of the moral function of art. He denied Schiller's contention that the sense of beauty never furthered the performance of duty or strengthened the feeling of moral obligation. Yet at this early point in his career, he was concerned lest the love of the beautiful in nature be confused with real religion. Ruskin seemed to show him how art could be made to serve the higher truths of religion.19 A year later, at the dedication ceremonies of the new Yale art school, Hoppin outlined what he conceived to be the relation of art to education. "Art," he said, "has been heretofore in a great degree excluded from our system of education from the fear that, in the future as in the past, it may lead to a refined but degenerate civilization." The problem of "the course of empire," which had been fundamentally a theoretical one for Thomas Cole and for James Jackson Jarves in his early writings, had become a pressing one in the new industrialized America. Hoppin praised the practical character of the American people as one of their great strengths, but he feared that this might lead Americans to an ignoble and materialistic conception of life. The study of art would aid Americans "in this contest against the money-making and money-worshiping spirit. It would tend to free us from this gross bondage of materialism."20 The minister was not willing to concede to art completely the defense of higher principles, yet he made important concessions: The principle of Good Taste, or of fitness in all things, is not, it is true, the highest and strongest principle of action, but it may come in to aid, and to mold, and to restrain, together with deeper influences, and perhaps sometimes to take their place in cases where they do not operate . . . True aesthetic culture develops those feelings and those tendencies of mind

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that are thus favorable to virtue, and good manners, and even a higher faith. Hoppin went on to make cautionary remarks about the innate corruption of man, and said that men should not rely too much upon transcendental ideas of the innocence of nature. Art must be held under severe restraint and censorship. Yet the Calvinistic assumptions were vitiated by the high role that Hoppin had assigned to art; for if art and taste could become principles of conduct, moral imperatives, and even a means of achieving a higher faith, was this not undermining the central role of religious authority? Could this not lead to the very aestheticism which it was the ministry's purpose to avoid? So long as art was taught under the Ruskinian dispensation, this danger could be avoided. As Hoppin said: "True art does not lead to skepticism, but rather to reverence and truth. It finds beauty and goodness in all the works of God, even in the least of his works."21 In 1879 Hoppin resigned his chair at the Yale Divinity School and made what was for a Ruskinian a very natural transition: he became Professor of the History of Art at the Yale School of Fine Arts, where he remained until his retirement twenty years later. He contributed numerous articles on art to the journals of the period, some of which were collected in The Early Renaissance and other Essays on Art Subjects (1892). Five years later he wrote Greek Art on Greek Soil, and after his retirement he produced one more book on art, Great Epochs in Art History (1901). Hoppin's introductory address at the School of Fine Arts in 1879, "The Early Renaissance," began, in a sense, where Ruskin left off. He disagreed with Ruskin's condemnation of everything in architecture that was not Gothic and extended the historical boundaries of "true art," as Ruskin understood it, to include the period from 1420-1500. The shift was more than just an extension in historical time. Unlike Ruskin, who wanted men to return to the mediaeval ideal, Hoppin rejoiced in the Renaissance as a "declaration of independence"—the phrase was not accidental—

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a time when the modern world was freed from the bonds of convention in order to invent, to combine, to originate new forms which were still based "on the old eternal principles of beauty." The Renaissance was the beginning of the present, and Hoppin felt that despite the modern tendency toward license, it was undesirable as well as impossible to try to recapture the mediaeval spirit. The American minister had no desire to return to the past. Like Jarves before him, he looked to the promise of the future, for he felt that "art has been greatest under free governments." This in turn led him to the conclusion that die prospects of American art were bright.22 Though Hoppin's focus had shifted forward to Donatello, Ghiberti, and Massacio and back to classic Greek art, and his interest was in justifying free democratic art, his criteria of judgment remained essentially those of Ruskin. Art rejoiced in the new freedom of the Renaissance before it was corrupted by the power of the Medici and secular philosophy. The artists of the early Renaissance went back to the classic not to imitate but to learn the secret of antique art, and this secret was "that Art must ever come back to Nature for its starting-point." The Greek artist and his early Renaissance followers had seized upon the hidden laws of nature and thus achieved the ideal in a way that had never been equaled since. Thus there was no non sequitur when, in the midst of this discussion, Hoppin paused to praise Ruskin s sketches which had been exhibited in New York and Boston in 1879, for these sketches were contemporary embodiments of the ideal of truth to nature.23 In this and other essays, Hoppin went on to grapple with the problem of imitation and the relation of art to the mind. Ruskin, he said, had confused the realm of art with that of religion, ethics, metaphysics, political economy, and science. While Hoppin granted that art had much to do with these, he insisted that it must be clearly distinguished from them and judged by its own laws. The beauty of sculpture was "ideal speaking to the mind, rather than pictorial speaking to the eyes and sensibilities"; it

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must speak to man's soul and his intelligence, not just to his senses. Art did not consist in the imitation of natural objects but in the ability of the human mind to seize upon and reproduce the essence of nature. He agreed with Ruskin that the final source of art was the Divine, but he also sought in the theory of art as expression and in a quasi-Hegelian conception of the idea striving for representation, a means of relating nature, the human mind, and the Divine. 24 Hoppin's attempt to resolve the vagueness of Ruskin's theory, to judge art by its own laws, was not really successful. Despite the blend of Plato, Coleridge, Hegel, and others, his conception of beauty still remained vague. He pointedly sought to avoid solipsism, to guard against the theory that art exists solely in the mind, and he battled equally with the idea that art is merely literal imitation of nature. His solution, if it can be called such, was the one that so many critics, of literature as well as of art, adopted in this period—the assertion that there is an ideal which exists and by which the mind tempers and adjusts the real. Art must have both the real and the ideal. Without this combination it would "run into something analogous to that bold realism in literature which is threatening its finer life, or to that weakly subjective school of poets illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, charming as it is, but neither of them complete in itself." 25 Hoppin was unwilling to say that art consisted in imitation of particular natural facts, as Ruskin had sometimes insisted, for this seemed to him to lead to materialism. He did want to distinguish between religion and art, to judge art by its own laws. In a later book he even went so far as to say that "criticism, pure and simple, should be based on science, or exact scientific knowledge." But such a rigid definition, he realized, could also lead to a purely materialistic conception of art ( the kind that Taine had urged in his many books or Zola in the Roman Expérimental). The analytic approach must be counteracted, he insisted, in a phrase recalling Gilbert Haven's i860 plea to students of nature, by studying works of art not "as if they were dead, but as if they

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were living, in the spirit of love in which they were created, and that is the joyful and inspiring source of art."26 Despite his disagreements with Ruskin and his attempt to formulate a clearer conception of the field of art, Hoppin was careful to emphasize his own indebtedness to Ruskin. In the preface to The Early Renaissance he said that despite his criticism, he was glad to avow himself "a true disciple and an ardent admirer of that great teacher who has done more for the right understanding of Art than any living man, or artist." Ruskin had shown "that the deepest foundations of art are moral, that they lie below the fluctuating surface of sense, in faith and life." He had made men realize that art was not a luxury, an ornament to life, but that it had "a vital and eternal beauty belonging to divine things."27 By 1901, in his last book on art, Great Epochs in Art History, Hoppin had moved even further from Ruskin. His authorities on the Gothic were Louis Gonse, Charles H. Moore, and Viollet-leDuc, and in discussing Signorelli he cited the opinion of young Bernard Berenson. In a retrospect on Ruskin's influence, he acknowledged that Ruskin had been often illogical and sometimes incorrect. Yet Ruskin had looked deeper than the form, to the spirit that molds the form. In the final analysis, he said, Ruskin had discovered the spiritual law of beauty, not as a philosophy nor as a system of aesthetics, but as a faith.28 The shift in art historical instruction from ministerial beginnings to more "scientific" and formal analysis was one important pattern in the development of art education in late nineteenthcentury America. The fine arts at the University of Minnesota were first taught in 1877 by Gabriel Campbell, professor of the department of mental and moral philosophy, and as late as 1884 President McCosh taught aesthetics at Princeton, a holdover from the earlier years when college seniors were prepared for righteousness in their society by their minister-presidents. At other schools, aesthetics developed as a branch of rhetoric and oratory or homiletics: the Rev. John Bascom, whose Aesthetics (1862)

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was the first significant American attempt to write a textbook on taste to replace the more comprehensive but increasingly outmoded Scottish realism of Karnes's Elements of Criticism, followed this pattern. So did his successor at Williams College from 1874 to 1880, the Rev. George Lansing Raymond, who went to Princeton to the chair of oratory and aesthetic criticism (18801893); only after 1893 did Raymond teach exclusively and write extensively in the field of comparative aesthetics at Princeton (1893-1905) and at George Washington University (1905-1912). Hoppin, who turned from homiletics to aesthetics and art history, is to be numbered among these ministers in mufti. By the mideighties, some art instruction could be found in the curriculum of many colleges and universities. The most important support came from the well-established departments of classics, whose archaeological interests had been given impetus by the discoveries of Schliemann and others and the founding of the Archaeological Institute of America in the seventies. Aesthetics and the history of art, often taught within philosophy departments, helped to broaden the classical bias of the Greek and Roman specialists. In certain schools like Vassar, Washington University (St. Louis), Smith, and Wellesley, practical arts were the foundation of the program.29 But of all the art teachers in nineteenth-century America undoubtedly the most important, the best known, and the most influential was Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard. His name is inevitably linked with the history of Ruskin's American reputation. Norton was without doubt closer to Ruskin than any other American. The two had met in 1855 and, except for brief periods of strain during the Civil War and the Froude controversy in the mid-eighties, they maintained close ties, both personal and intellectual, from that time until Ruskin's death in 1900. Yet neither the older image of Norton as Ruskin's obedient disciple, a land of glorified litmus paper who absorbed ideas from abroad and changed color accordingly, nor Ruskin's contrary claim late in life that Norton had been his "tutor" gives one an adequate sense of

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the reciprocal nature of their friendship. Norton undoubtedly learned much from Ruskin, but he too, like so many Americans, came to see the limitations and difficulties in Ruskin's theory of art. His personal devotion to his aging and at times deranged friend should not be allowed to distort the facts of Norton's intellectual life.30 In the 1850's and 1860's Norton had been instrumental in furthering Ruskinian activities in America. His friendship with Wilham J. Stillman had led him to contribute to the Crayon. His recognition of the educational value of original works of art led to his efforts to secure an American home for the James Jackson Jarves collection. Jarves had given him a letter of introduction to Ruskin; in later years Norton in turn introduced others like Henry James to Ruskin and encouraged James to read The Stones of Venice. In the mid-sixties he urged the adoption of Russell Sturgis' plan for Memorial Hall at Harvard. By the time the winning design of Ware and Van Brunt was executed, however, Norton had returned to Italy to study the authentic Gothic at Venice, Florence, Siena, and elsewhere, to search the archives of those cities for clues to the background of church building, to steep himself even further in the literature and history of this period, and to discuss many of his findings with his friend Ruskin. After the death of Norton's wife in 1872, a near-shattering blow, Ruskin again urged Norton to join him: "Suppose we both give up our confounded countries? Let them go their own way in peace, and we will travel together, and abide where we will, and live B.C.—or in the 13th century."31 The temptation was great, but unlike Henry Adams, who wandered for years after his wife's suicide, Norton had already made another choice. After a season in London during which he was much with Ruskin and heard his lectures at Oxford, Norton resolutely turned homeward. The experience of his years abroad turned into a drive to educate Americans and to spread the gospel of art in the United States. In 1874 he began to teach the history of art at Harvard. Norton continued to serve Ruskin and Ruskin's cause in later

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years. Through correspondence and infrequent visits to Ruskin's Lake Country home at Coniston, he made a futile attempt to help preserve the shreds of Ruskin's sanity. In 1879, the year after the Whistler-Ruskin episode, he brought together a collection of Ruskin's drawings for exhibition in Boston and New York, the collection which so impressed Hoppin. In the early nineties he finally secured for Ruskin an American copyright and wrote introductions for the several volumes of this "Brantwood Edition" of Ruskin's works. 32 Norton's major importance in these years, though, was as a teacher. He corresponded with Ruskin about his plan of instruction and the Slade Professor at Oxford was in essential agreement with his American friend as to the moral purpose of art instruction. In their general outlines, Norton's plans were similar to those advocated by Hoppin at Yale in 1866. In the twenty-three years during which the history of art was Norton's domain at Harvard, he lectured on classic and mediaeval art. Like Hoppin, Norton was inclined to emphasize Greek art more than Ruskin did. Ruskin himself in these years was delivering his rather desultory lectures on Greek myths and Greek art, the Queen of the Air and Aratra Pentelici, but his chief talents lay elsewhere. Norton's lectures, which trained students to appreciate the glories of the Parthenon from foundation to cornice, reflected more accurately the archaeological bias of English and American art education, and Norton himself had been a founder of the Archaeological Institute of America in 1879 and the School for Classical Studies at Athens three years later. 33 The greater part of Norton's instruction in art history over the years, however, was devoted not to works of art but to their social, historical, and especially their literary context, and nowhere is this clearer than in his treatment of mediaeval art. Historical Studies of Church-Building in the Middle Ages (1880), which was a distillation of his years of study in Italy and his teaching, was a somewhat chastened and more scholarly version of the section on the Cathedral of Orvieto in his earlier Notes on

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Travel and Study in Italy. Buttressed now with documents from the archives of Siena, Florence, and Venice and with a wealth of reading in the history and literature of that period, the American Dantist repeated what was by now a familiar story—that mediaeval art was the embodiment of a healthy society and that the Renaissance had brought the downfall of art. Norton worked out the implications of "The Nature of Gothic" with a care and meticulous sense of scholarship of which Ruskin was altogether incapable, though also without Ruskin s fire and passion. The master himself was impressed by his friend's findings, though he raised questions from time to time. When Norton in an 1872 draft ascribed the fall of Siena wholly to the failure of religious faith, Ruskin asked him to qualify: "Should we not rather say, the failure of the qualities which render religious faith possible, and which, if it be taught, make it acceptable? How far religion made—how far destroyed—the Italians is now quite a hopelessly difficult question with me. My work will only be to give materials for its solution." In the final version, Norton considerably toned down his earlier assertion and recognized a variety of other causes, but in his reply to Ruskin he insisted that though it needed qualification in the particular case, his essential point had been correct: "So long as men have real faith (whether it take the form of love or religion) they can do anything." With the ebbing of that faith came the downfall of Italy. 34 He was prepared to carry Ruskin's idea to great lengths. At one point he went so far as to apply the ideal of the happy craftsman of "The Nature of Gothic" to the slaves who built the pyramids of Egypt. At another point there was an obvious conflict between his aesthetic sensibility and the dogmatism of his Ruskinian premises. He could not deny the beauty of Brunelleschi's dome on the Cathedral of Florence. Because, like Ruskin, he lacked a technical understanding of architecture, he relied upon Henry Van Brunt for an explanation of the constructive principles involved in the dome. Yet he realized that the dome led logically to the art of the Renaissance, and consistency de-

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manded that he finally condemn it. By breaking with the Gothic, Brunelleschi, he felt, had helped to bring about the degeneration of art in the Renaissance.35 There was a deeper problem underlying his conflicting attitudes toward the Florentine Duomo which is related both to Babcock's confusion over Luini in The American and to Franklin Dexter's earlier concern with the role of art in an age without faith. In the years since Notes on Travel and Study, Norton had become an agnostic. Unlike James Jackson Jarves, he had no use for the vague magico-religious melange of spiritualism; nor was he, on the other hand, an orthodox Christian like Hoppin, Loammi Ware, or Washington Gladden. The son of the rational Andrews Norton had little use for miracles whether in mediaeval or modern dress, and no dogma satisfied him. In a believing age picturae ecclesiarum could be libri laicorum, but there was no more question in Norton's mind than in the mind of his sometime Harvard colleague Henry Adams that this mediaeval unity of faith and art had broken down.36 The American religious community of the 1850's and 1860's had welcomed Ruskin's appeal to nature which avoided the dangers of Emersonian transcendentalism by linking nature and art directly to God. These men had absorbed enough of the romantic state of mind to find Sir Joshua Reynolds' ideas unpalatable, and they wished to use Ruskin's books as a conservative weapon to avoid the extremes of nature worship, to stop short of pantheism, and at the same time to refine the taste of the American people. Charles Norton did not share his father's outrage at Emerson's transcendentalism. He revered Emerson the man at the same time that he felt that Emerson's message belonged to an earlier, pre-Civil War America, the "simpler and less encumbered civilization" in which Henry James placed Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Norton's view, Emerson's optimism was noble but naive and his intuitionism intellectually inadequate.37 Norton's attitude toward Emerson was in part the response of a

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younger generation; in part it was a function of his own particular views, for Norton was philosophically a follower of John Stuart Mill. He had no more use for Hegelian idealism than he had for Emersonian transcendentalism.38 His allegiance to Ruskin diminished in the years after 1870, but it by no means completely disappeared. To admit that beauty was to be judged by utilitarian standards would defeat his purpose of making art a means of moral exhortation. He was thus profoundly disturbed by the conflict between his aesthetic and his philosophic views. In 1879 he wrote from Siena to his friend Chauncey Wright, an outspoken American utilitarian, for guidance. The combination of his agnosticism and his studies in Siena had convinced him that the mediaeval artist derived happiness from his work not through devout passion, as he had asserted in the earlier passage on Siena to which Ruskin had objected, but through "plain aesthetic joy." It was a delight in beauty mixed with the excitement of genuine scientific achievement. Norton then went on to speak of "the sense of beauty" (the phrase is worth noting; Santayana would use it with precision in 1896 as the title of his "Outlines of Aesthetic Theory"): "The sense of beauty is a part of human nature from which some of the purest, most refining and most elevating joys spring. It is wholly unscientific and for any direct result un-utilitarian. It seems to belong in the highest degree only to passionate natures, or to natures readily susceptible to passion. It is cultivable, and is connected with peculiarities of physical organization, and of race." Norton's letter contained two notable elements. The first was his attempt to sever beauty from religious devotion, to give it a value of its own, at the same time that he desired to attribute to this noncontingent beauty a spiritual value. The second was his indictment of the modern world where the devotion to utility had severely limited men's capacity for perceiving beauty.39 In response to Norton, Wright explained the apparent conflict between beauty and utility by distinguishing them as different

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categories of experience. The aesthetic sense, he said, was an end in itself; it was underived and had intrinsic value. The standard of utility, of the greatest good for the greatest number, was altogether different. It was a measure by which to judge the comparative importance of different elements in arriving at the good. The problem arose when men blurred this distinction. He accused "serious, moralizing art critics"—the reference to Ruskin was surely not lost on Norton—of lacking faith in the intrinsic value of beauty. By trying to add to the claims of beauty by giving it a moral value, they had abused the name of "truth." Truth was to be measured by the standard of clear sensuous perception. The idea of "imaginative truth" he condemned, for the imagination was the capacity of taking in truths from experience, not that of evolving them from within. Wright's real enemy was a priori thinking. His approach to the human mind was experimental and empirical. Alexander Bain had taught him that the aesthetic response was fundamentally a psychological one. Beauty should not be confused with morality, which was to be judged by the canon of utility. Aesthetic rank was intrinsic, but intrinsic rank was not to be confused with moral rank which was derivative and instrumental. This crucial difference Wright tried to make clear to Norton in distinguishing himself from the "intuitive moralist."40 Wright's letters are just one more instance of the gap that was growing in these years between those who turned the Ruskinian view of art into a means of subordinating art to religion and those who wanted to approach the problem of art criticism in psychological terms, divorcing it completely from moral concerns. Norton agreed with Wright that intuitive moralism or the intuitive idealism of Emerson was intellectually inadequate, but he was not prepared to divorce art completely from larger moral questions and call the aesthetic response purely or even fundamentally a psychological one. As a result, Norton placed more and more emphasis on the view that art was a function of society. Without relying on a religious sanction, he tried to use art, by

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relating it to the society in which it existed, to teach moral lessons. Norton thus presents us with a heightened and aggravated case of the estranged American Protestant, set adrift in the world of art. His response to this problem was correspondingly exaggerated. He saw the mediaeval cathedral—epitomized in Orvieto in his early study, in Siena in his later and more scholarly study— as the symbol of the politically healthy, religiously pure, and artistically flourishing society. Contemporary America he found corrupt and degenerate, the logical product of the Renaissance.41 In his teaching, his lecturing, and his writing, he continued to insist, as Ruskin had insisted in "The Nature of Gothic," that great art was the product of a moral society. For Norton, the failure of American art was a function of the moral failure of the United States in the Gilded Age. (Mark Twain's phrase suggests not only a fall from the grace of a pastoral Golden Age but also the snuffing out of the lamp of truth—though Ruskin himself had accepted gilding as in general an allowable convention.) The collection of Ruskin's drawings which he had put on exhibition were not only the "means by which to acquire exact knowledge of the facts of nature, or to obtain data from which to deduce a principle in art"; they also preserved "a record of the work of periods in which art gave better expression to the higher interests of life than at the present day." He told Hingham, Massachusetts, residents that the Old Ship Meeting House, now recognized as a gem of seventeenth-century vernacular architecture, was a great falling off from the age when men expressed their piety in building noble cathedrals.42 Norton's tirades against American bad taste in art became legendary. He was the subject of numerous quips, and in his own classroom a student parodied him, pretending to speak of the "hor-ri-ble vul-gar-ity of EVERYTHING." 43 Yet behind this caricature lies the dilemma of Norton's intellectual position. For what could he offer in the place of either his father's rational Christian "evidences" or Emerson's intuitionism to keep art responsible to

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the higher ethical goals of life? How could he avoid the accusation of a Babcock that he was only an artistic dilettante, the aesthetic proprietor of Shady Hill? Ruskin, who had long ago abandoned his earlier evangelical faith, had solved this problem by following the implications of "The Nature of Gothic" to their natural conclusion. He turned from art to attack the economic and social foundations of capitalism, and he tried to replace it with his own brand of feudal socialism. This Norton could not do, not only because he realized the impossibly Utopian nature of Ruskin's Guild of St. George, but also because all his conservative instincts led him to want to preserve the older Lockian liberalism of American society and its nineteenth-century laissez-faire corollary. His reform politics and his anti-imperialism were no more calculated to overturn the capitalist order than were those of his friends George W. Curtis and E. L. Godkin.44 Norton lacked the religious conviction of a James Hoppin who subordinated the love of art, finally, to spiritual goals. Yet he also protested when his friend William Dean Howells said in 1895 that "it is not noble to love the beautiful, or to live for it, or by it; and it may even not be refining," and that "the supreme art in literature had its highest effect in making me set art forever below humanity." Howells had read Ruskin on art, but like a number of other Americans he had been following Ruskin from art to social theory and to the belief that art could not thrive in a society the economic and social bases of which were rotten. As early as 1868 in a review of Time and Tide, a collection of Ruskin's letters to worldngmen, Howells had singled out for praise "one of his notions in political economy, namely, that civilization advances by the extinction of wants, and not by the creation of them," even though he felt that the commonwealth which Ruskin proposed as a substitute was absurd.45 By 1888, after his disillusionment with the Chicago Haymarket affair and recent reading of Tolstoi, Laurence Gronlund, Bellamy's Looking Backward, and other social tracts, Howells was

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declaring in the "Editor's Study" of Harper's that the idea of art for art's sake was dead (and this only three years after Whistler's "Ten O'Clock Lecture"). Art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does not make friends with Need it must perish. It perceives that to take itself from the many and leave them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few whom it can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error that kills. This has long been the burden of Rusldn's message; and if we can believe William Morris, the common people have heard him gladly, and have felt the truth of what he says. "They see the prophet in him rather than the fantastic rhetorician, as more superfine audiences do;" and the men and women who do the hard work of the world have learned from him and from Morris that they have a right to pleasure in their toil, and that when justice is done them they will have it.46 Howells was still trying to reconcile his commitment to literary realism with a higher idealism, but events had led him to believe that such a reconciliation would take place only in a Utopian future. In the present he could see too clearly the nightmare world of that Ruskin-reading anarchist, old Lindau in his Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). The result was Howells' socialism and his subordination of art, at least theoretically, to social needs. That far Norton was not prepared to go. In response to Howells' 1895 Tolstoian denigration of art, Norton wrote to him: Beauty seems to me the ultimate expression and warrant of goodness; there can be no ideal aim without it; and the better the ideal, whether shaped in visible form, or incapable of presentation to the dull senses, the more beautiful it is. There is no mysticism in this. It seems to me an ultimate and precious truth . . . Is not Art, properly understood, the expression of humanity? What you mean by it here, I presume, is the technical method which it is the aim of so-called artists to acquire, the "art" to which men devote themselves at the cost it may be

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of their humanity; but not the art of the great artists through whom Nature has uttered the voice of the world.47 At first glance Norton's attack seems to be out of proportion to the cause, for he agreed with Howells completely in condemning art for art's sake. He deplored Oscar Wilde's version of beauty, and he had no use for the cult of aestheticism in general.48 Yet Norton had felt called upon to lecture Howells at greater length. Beneath the chastisement of Howells, Norton was really defending himself from the accusation of aestheticism. He was trying to define his own critical position midway between aestheticism and the complete subordination of art to social ends, just as he had tried in his earlier exchange with Chauncey Wright to find a middle ground between a psychological approach to aesthetics and the complete subordination of art to moral ends. In trying to steer a difficult course between the old and the new currents of aesthetic thought Norton was doomed to fail. Despite his attempts to come to terms with the newer ideas, the lessons of the early Ruskin and the romantic point of view of his youth had been learned too well. In the end Norton fell back upon a concept of the creative imagination, as had his counterpart at Yale, James Hoppin. Beyond a certain point it is difficult to see wherein Norton differed from the intuitive moralist. He claimed that the imagination was the highest of faculties, telling his students that only through the imagination could they comprehend the greatest works of man in poetry and art. "It is only through the imagination that we come to the appreciation of beauty. Beauty is the end of all true life." At the same time, he broadened the implications of what he was saying. "If we enlarge the intellectual life, we enlarge the moral life also." "The imagination is the faculty which, beyond all others, helps man to find the truth." Particular examples made clear what Norton was trying to do. Titian's "Man with a Glove" and the "Venus de Milo" expressed the fullness of the imagination, all that life meant to the Venetians or the Greeks. Each work was an "excellent

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representation of the spirit of the race." By contrast, Millet's "L'Angelus" depended for its power merely upon its skill of execution: "It exhibits the incapacity of our times to appreciate the truly beautiful." Norton deplored Millet's vision of man; it did not seem to him to be sufficiently ideal, and no amount of technical skill could make up for the moral shortcomings of this vision. Despite Chauncey Wright's warnings, Norton's concept of the imagination caused him constantly to cross the boundary between beauty and truth, between art and morality, and to see them not as separate entities but as different aspects of the same thing.49 In his young manhood, when his friend Mrs. Gaskell had asked him to advise her daughter whether to become a professional artist, he had taken up the question on high theoretical grounds. The life of the true artist, he said, was not in conflict with the moral life, though the two had seemed to be in conflict at various moments in history. The world still awaited the ideal artist who would show through his work the real compatibility, indeed the real unity, of art and morality.60 Norton's failure to find such an artist in the nineteenth century turned him into a cantankerous, though often perceptive, critic of modern life and art; but even through the enveloping pessimism of his later years, there shines the hope that art might still lift man above the crass materialism of the Gilded Age. The publication of the Brantwood Edition of Rusldn's works in the early 1890's gave Norton the chance to review his attitude toward the work of his old friend. He said that "the growth of . . . interest in the Fine Arts, and of attention to them, during the past twenty or thirty years, has been largely due, in England and America to the influence of Mr. Ruskin's writings," and that ideas about art which had now become commonplaces had been originally advanced in Ruskin's books. At several points he gently chastised his friend for confusing art with religion and for his early exaggeration of an evangelical habit of mind.61 Yet he went on to say that "from the beginning Mr. Ruskin's deepest interest

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in nature and in art had never been that of the lover of beauty for its own sake but for the sake of its moral significance and of the lessons to be drawn from it. It was this interest which had given to his earlier writings their specific character, and had secured for them their widest popularity." It is significant that this statement came in the introduction to The Crown of Wild Olive. Unlike Howells, Norton was embarrassed by Ruskin's later social theory because he was in fundamental disagreement with its particular principles. As a result, in his introductions to these volumes he generally confined himself to vague praise of their high moral tone or to retrospective glances which related them to Ruskin's earlier work on art.52 His introduction to Ruskin's Lectures on Art (1870) can stand as a final statement of the way in which Norton tried to grapple with the relation of art to morality. He began by saying that the fine arts were the arts of expression and that artistic method was the right use of the means and materials of the particular art. And this right use depends on the poetic power of the imagination. For it is this power that sees and determines the forms of beauty which are the ends of the Fine Arts, and directs the intelligence in the attainment of that technical mastery which controls the resources of expression appropriate to each special art. Thus, in the Fine Arts the method is the essential thing, the thing expressed is secondary. And herein lies the distinction between art and morals, for in morals it is the thing done that is essential, and the method of doing that is secondary. Thus far Norton's plea for the creative imagination seemed to distinguish carefully between the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions of human experience and to support the freedom of the artist to pursue the end of beauty. But he could not stop here. In the next paragraph Norton was forced by his commitments to undo what the preceding paragraphs had done.

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Different as they are in this respect, there is still an indissoluble connection between the Fine Arts and morals. All the intellectual faculties, including the imagination, draw their motive force and take the direction of their use, unconsciously it may be, but yet of necessity, from the moral character. And the artistic method, even in its technical execution, partakes of and reveals the moral nature of the artist. The Fine Arts, therefore, if their work be correctly interpreted, are the most faithful and literal, because the unconscious and involuntary exponents of the ethical, no less of the intellectual, conditions and character of those by whom they are practiced. They are the ultimate expressions of the mental state of individuals and of nations. To the end, Norton's commitment to his earlier Ruskinian views of the indissoluble link between the fine arts and morals remained intact.63 At his retirement in 1898, his teaching of the history of art was taken over by Charles Herbert Moore, who had handled the drawing and watercolor classes at Harvard, using Rusldn's Elements of Drawing, since 1871. Moore in his later teaching and writing on mediaeval architecture passed from Ruskin to Violletle-Duc. He acknowledged, as had so many others, that Ruskin had been wrong in particular about the Gothic but that his general spirit was right.54 Meanwhile, from retirement Norton edited the letters which he had received from Ruskin, a reluctant and only partial acknowledgment to the world of the strong ties that bound the two—reluctant because Norton resented the intrusion of the public upon their personal relationship, and partial because the letters show only one side of the correspondence with any degree of fullness. He died quietly at Shady Hill in 1908. It remained for Henry James to write Norton's epitaph, to speak of the "interesting case" of the American mind which his friend had been,

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how for example a son of the Puritans the most intellectually transmuted, the most liberally emancipated and initiated possible, could still plead most for substance when proposing to plead for style, could still try to lose himself in the labyrinth of delight while keeping tight hold of the clue of duty, tangled even a little at his feet; could still address himself all consistently to the moral conscience while speaking as by his office for our imagination and our free curiosity.55 James's gentle but perceptive epitaph for Norton in 1908 might well stand also as the epitaph of the Ruskinian phase of aesthetic thought in America.

EPILOGUE

O N 20 JANUARY 1900 Ruskin was finally released from the alternating fits of madness and calm simplicity which had clouded the last twenty years of his life. The American press paid its respects in a rash of generally flowery, sentimental obituaries which almost invariably included a photograph of "the prophet of Coniston" with his long flowing beard and benign look. 1 The picture could easily have been mistaken for Ruskin's American contemporary Walt Whitman, also born in 1819, also at heart a radical, who had been decorously disposed of eight years earlier as "the Good Gray Poet." Ruskin had liked Whitman's poetry, though Whitman, except for his brief notice on Modern Painters when it first appeared in the United States, did not publicly return the compliment. The bearded image of Ruskin is as misleading as it is of Whitman. Ruskin said of Whitman to a friend in 1880: "The reason neither he . . . nor Emerson are read in England is . . . that they are deadly true—in the sense of rifles— against all our deadliest sins."2 In the twentieth century, poets and critics have rediscovered the truth of Ruskin's statement as to the radical nature of Whitman's achievement, but Ruskin has only recently begun to emerge from the heap of castoff eminent Victorians.

Yet the image of the bearded sage was only a half-truth even in 1900. As the apostle of truth to nature, the morality of art, and the mediaeval ideal, Ruskin had been fundamentally conservative, dedicated to the preservation of a society built upon religious idealism. The radicalism of his doctrine of truth to nature had lost most of its force in the urban civilization of 1900, and the shapers of aesthetic thought had left his critical ideals far behind by the time of his death, though his books would continue to be read in the schools well into the twentieth century.

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While Ruskinians like Hoppin tentatively praised certain masters of the early Renaissance without abandoning Ruskin's generalization that the Renaissance as a period had brought about the degeneration of "true art," other critics had discovered the Renaissance as a period of enormous vitality, a period in which the great wealth of the merchant princes would support and patronize the arts. Even Hoppin and James Jackson Jarves did not miss the analogies between that great age and late nineteenthcentury America. Hoppin only vaguely hoped that the age to come would be a new Renaissance, but McKim, Mead, and White and their followers almost single-handedly changed the taste of the nation at the Chicago Exposition; thereafter they and their imitators swamped the United States with neo-Renaissance monuments. Painters, aestheticians, and art critics had also turned from Ruskin. John La Farge, in an article on "Ruskin, Art and Truth," spoke in the new language. "Truth in art is the conception or memory of the feeling which replaces before me the creature that has charmed me; it is the impression I receive from this living unity before any analysis, before I can find terms of expression." La Farge denied that truth in art referred to any divinely ordained system. "Truth . . . cannot be absolutely disentangled from ourselves," and art dealt not with any such absolutes as truth or beauty, but with emotion. Six years earlier, Henry Rutgers Marshall had used the same insight in a more systematic way in his hedonic Pain, Pleasure and Aesthetics (1894). Dismissing Ruskin's aesthetic field as "that of religious ecstasy," Marshall, like Santayana, George Lansing Raymond, and the new generation of aestheticians, severed the consideration of art from moral questions and frankly treated the work of art as a material object, a complex of forms, and the observer's response to art as a psychological phenomenon.3 In the same year that Marshall's theoretical work was published, the first of young Bernard Berenson's books on the painters of the Italian Renaissance appeared. Berenson had re-

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ceived his first training in art under Charles Eliot Norton, but if his first book dealt with Ruskin's beloved Venetians, it was clearly not for Ruskinian reasons. As he said in the preface: Every generation has an innate sympathy with some epoch of the past wherein it seems to find itself foreshadowed. Science has of late revealed and given much, but its revelation and gifts are as nothing to the promise it holds out of constant acquisition and perpetual growth, of everlasting youth. We ourselves, because of our faith in science and the power of work, are instinctively in sympathy with the Renaissance . . . the spirit which animates us was anticipated by the spirit of the Renaissance, and more than anticipated. That spirit seems like the small rough model after which ours is being fashioned. Ruskin's moral and religious ideal had been abandoned. The age of science demanded an artistic analogy which was secular, which glorified "the power of work" and individual achievement. The values which Berenson sought in art were not "typical beauty" or "truth to nature" but "tactile values" and "life-enhancing qualities." They seemed to be criteria admirably suited to both the age they described and the age for which they were written. Though the echoes of Ruskin might still be heard occasionally among neophyte art lovers, James's claim that "we are not under theological government" had become a fact in American art criticism.4 Yet this is only part of the story of Ruskin's impact on American life, though it is where this study of his role in shaping the development of American aesthetic thought must break off. The obituaries of 1900 tried to sound the knell of Ruskin the social critic as well as Ruskin the art critic. They tried to ignore, or they patronized, or casually dismissed the writer of Unto This Last, The Crown of Wild Olive, and Munera Pulveris, Ruskin's outspoken attacks on modern capitalism. Leonard D. Abbot, in an article on "Ruskin as a Revolutionary," cautioned readers not to forget that Unto This Last was "a bombshell thrown into the

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camp of the orthodox and conservative political economists. It attacked the very basis on which political economy was supposed to rest." However, even Abbot could not look at the facts of Ruskin's later radicalism unflinchingly. At the end of the essay he too succumbed to vague eulogizing and reminiscences of Ruskin at home at Brantwood in the Lake Country, concluding: "And that is how I like to think of him—amid the flowers of his idealism, looking out with yearning eyes toward the birth of a new social order of brotherhood and beauty." 5 Such a vapid image of Ruskin as a social thinker is fundamentally false. That it was accepted by a large segment of Ruskin's American audience cannot be denied. The reasons why Americans diluted the image of the revolutionary Ruskin are important and deserve further investigation, for Ruskin's role in the development of American social thought in the turbulent decades at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was far from negligible. His searing attacks on laissezfaire capitalism were less frequently and less favorably reviewed than his writings on art, for they were a direct affront to the economic assumptions of the vast majority. Said the scholarly Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1888: "He has . . . most notably of all who have attacked it, overthrown and destroyed that figment of the orthodox imagination, the 'economic man.' " 6 In the face of strikes and riots, some timid Americans seemed to feel that it would be better to listen to Ruskin's chastisements than to risk Kropotlan's anarchism or revolutionary socialism. Nevertheless, despite the efforts of the majority to patronize or dismiss his social thought as a function of his illness or to tame it beyond all recognition by praising its high moral tone without listening carefully to its message, the insights of Ruskin did live on in the work of the generation of the Progressives. Ruskin was, of course, not alone in his social thought. His master Carlyle had harangued economic liberalism for a generation before; his contemporaries Tolstoi and, in America, Henry George, Edward Bellamy, and Laurence Gronlund were mounting similar attacks;

EPILOGUE

259

and his disciples William Morris and Patrick Geddes would also reach an American audience (Geddes was to pass Ruskin on to Lewis Mumford).7 Many Americans, though, looked to Ruskin as the most powerful spokesman of the moral and aesthetic side of Anglo-American social reform. Among the ministers of the social gospel like Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, Ruskin was always an inspiration. Around 1890 the Society of Christian Socialists had its brief day, attracting to the Church of the Carpenter in Boston Rev. W. D. P. Bliss, editor of The Communism of John Ruskin and other socialist publications, as well as William Dean Howells, Edward Everett Hale, Vida Scudder, and the Bellamy Nationalists. A number of Americans were inspired by Ruskin in England: Toynbee Hall in London was a Ruskinian breeding ground for a generation of social workers that included Robert Woods of Boston and Jane Addams of Chicago; Charles Beard taught at Ruskin Hall at Oxford before coming back to New York as a graduate student.8 The enthusiasm of social reformers for Ruskin was by no means limited to the Eastern seaboard. Jack London was discovering socialism in the Ruskin Club in San Francisco. Julius Wayland was first exposed to the Fors Clavigera letters by a literate shoemaker in Pueblo, Colorado, and was so captured by Ruskin that he edited a series of newspapers popularizing Ruskin's thought and in 1894, one year after the great Panic, launched the socialist Ruskin Co-operative Association in Tennessee. This Utopian venture, which collapsed with the return of prosperity in 1899, was at the lunatic fringe of American social thought. What is more important for the student of American history is that those whom we remember as the scholar-spokesmen at the center of Progressivism often came to their political vision from a Ruskinian aesthetic. Herbert Croly was an architectural critic before he launched the New Republic; Beard came back to Columbia University with a copy of Unto This Last in his pocket (and in Croly's journal in the mid-1930's informed Americans

260

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that the New Dealers' insights had all been articulated by Ruskin years before—when no one would listen).9 Vida Scudder, for many years a teacher at Wellesley, contributed in countless ways to the elucidation of Ruskin's message in America. And at the other end of the continent in Seattle, Vernon Louis Parrington lectured his students on the social insights of Ruskin and Carlyle as well as on American literature, and argued for the Gothic style in the architecture of the University of Washington. All of these men and women drew inspiration and guidance from the writings of John Ruskin in their attempt to reform and reshape American society, just as their forebearers had drawn inspiration from Ruskin in shaping the development of American aesthetic thought.

APPENDIX NOTES INDEX

APPENDIX

THE PUBLICATION OF RUSKIN'S WORKS IN THE UNITED STATES

WTTH Ruskin's principal nineteenth-century American publishers, the firm which is today John Wiley and Sons, reveals that full records of the era when they published Ruskin's works have been destroyed, and the records which have survived are faulty and incomplete. Given the fact that the data on American publishing in the nineteenth century are in general incomplete—with a few notable exceptions like the Ticknor and Fields records—the dimension of the Ruskin problem becomes clear. What follows is therefore only a brief sketch of some pertinent information uncovered in the course of investigation for this study.1 COBBESPONDENCE

Before 1847, when Wiley—I use this term generically to include the various incarnations of the firm as Wiley and Putnam, Wiley and Halsted, John Wiley and Son, and John Wiley and Sons—issued the first American reprint of Modern Painters I, John Ruskin's name and writings were virtually unknown to American readers. By 1855 Ruskin felt that he had a more significant audience in America than in England. By 1887 an article on the copyright question described Ruskin's American audience as "numbered by tens of thousands." A member of the Wiley firm said that though Ruskin's works were most popular on the Eastern seaboard, especially in Boston and New York, there had been a rapid extension of sales to the Central and Western states. He told an interviewer: "It pays us now to send a travelling agent especially to collect orders for Mr. Ruskin's works." By 1898 a writer in the Critic rated Ruskin with Twain, Tolstoi, and Zola as one of the four most famous living authors. Though many people only knew of Ruskin by name or as an almost legendary

264

AESTHETIC THOUGHT IN AMERICA

figure, obviously his popularity was based primarily upon his writings.2 Until 1891 Ruskin refused to authorize an American edition of his works. His practice was to supervise personally the issuing of his works in expensive editions, often profusely illustrated with his own sketches or with engravings of Turner and others. Though Wiley offered to pay Ruskin regular royalties on all of Ruskin's books he was issuing if he were accredited as Ruskin's official American publisher, the offer was refused. Thus all editions of Ruskin's works prior to the Brantwood Edition (18911893), which Charles Eliot Norton edited on Ruskin's behalf, must be classed as pirated.8 With few exceptions Wiley was the sole publisher of American editions of Ruskin's works up to 1884-85, after which time John Lovell (Lovell's Literary Series), John B. Alden (The Elzevir Library), Scribner's, Dana Estes, T. Y. Crowell, Ginn and Co., and other publishers all began to issue Ruskin reprints. Indeed, it can be said that before 1900 there were few American publishers who did not issue at least one title by Ruskin or a volume of selections from his works. Almost without exception the American editions were less expensive than the English editions. After 1847 the most significant gap in the American publication of Ruskin's works occurred after the publication of The Stones of Venice. Wiley's attempt to sell an expensive edition of Volume I had apparently failed.4 The English publishers were forced to issue a new edition of The Seven Lamps in 1880 in part because the inexpensive American editions were infiltrating the British market.5 A comparative price list compiled in 1887 of English and American editions of Ruskin's works indicates that English prices averaged almost three and one half times greater than American prices. In that year the only English edition of Modern Painters cost 6 Gn. ($30.66) while a complete American edition in two volumes could be purchased for as little as 8S/4 ($2.00).6 Furthermore, there were many more reprintings of Ruskin's

APPENDIX

265

works in America than in England. The Seven Lamps had only gone through two editions in England before 1880, but Wiley had reprinted the book with at least thirteen different dates of publication, though these may not all have been new printings. How large the American printings were is apparently an unanswerable question, but the frequency of the reprinting in itself indicates a continuous American demand. Of course it is also impossible to determine the number of Americans like George Templeton Strong who were reading the expensive English editions of Ruskin's works less than a month after they were published in England.7 The speed with which Ruskin's works were reprinted in America is another index of the demand for almost everything he wrote. Even if we leave out of account the numerous American publishers who began competing with the Wiley firm in the 1880's and 1890's for the "Ruskin market," the figures are impressive: of the forty-eight or so works which Wiley published, half were published within the same year as the authorized English edition. Ruskin sometimes issued his books in parts, one or two lectures or chapters at a time; after issuing with the last part a title page and table of contents, he would then issue the first complete bound edition. (Sometimes a month, sometimes years elapsed between parts.) Apparently the American demand —one might almost say impatience—was great enough to make it worthwhile for Wiley to publish at least six additional titles8 by Ruskin in parts, rather than to wait for the complete volume, which would have been simpler. Three of Ruskin's serial publications were actually published in book form in the United States before they were issued in hard cover in England,9 and in 1887 works which could be obtained only from secondhand booksellers in England were still going into new editions here.10 Thus even a brief and imperfect sketch indicates that we are dealing with an author whose popularity in America in the nineteenth century was of major importance.

NOTES CHAPTER I:

THE AMERICAN SETTING

1. The full title of the book was Modern Painters: Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting To all The Ancient Masters proved by examples of The True, the Beautiful, and the Intellectual, From the Works of Modern Artists, especially From those of J. M. W. Turner, Esq., R. A., By a Graduate of Oxford; Van Akin Burd, "Background to Modern Painters: The Tradition and the Turner Controversy," PMLA, LXXIV (June 1959), 254-267; Reginald H. Wilenski, John Ruskin: An Introduction to Further Study of His Life and Work (London, 1933), "Synoptic Tables," pp. 15-24, and appendix, "Ruskin's Position in the 'Fifties," pp. 369-383; but cf. the corrective view in J. D. Jump, "Ruskin's Reputation in the Eighteen-Fifties: The Evidence of the Three Principal Weeklies," PMLA, LXIII (June 1948), 678-685. 2. Ruskin to the Editors, Crayon, I (2 May 1855), 283; "Ruskin's Writings," Putnam's Monthly Magazine, VII (May 1856), 491. For a brief account of these early years, see Francis G. Townsend, "The American Estimate of Ruskin, 1847-1860," Philological Quarterly, XXXII (January 1953), 69-82. 3. Flexner, That Wilder Image: The Painting of America's Native School from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer (Boston, 1962), p. xi. 4. For a summary, see Flexner, That Wilder Image, pp. 103-137; Dunlap's remark is in his History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, ed. Frank W. Bayley and Charles Goodspeed, 3 vols. (Boston, 1918), III, 212; Margaret Fuller is quoted in Paul R. Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy, 1800-1860 (Cambridge, 1964), p. 200. 5. Henry W. Foote, JohnSmibert (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 13-14. 6. Baker, Fortunate Pilgrims, pp. 1-3, 20-21. 7. "The Writings of Washington Allston," Southern Quarterly Review, IV (October 1843), 375. Charles Fraser (1782-1860) was a talented miniaturist working in Charleston, South Carolina. Cf. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian NoteBooks, in Complete Works, ed. G. P. Lathrop, 1 2 vols. (Boston, 1883), X, 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 , 119-120.

268

NOTES TO PAGES

5-10

8. Edgar P. Richardson, Washington Allston: A Study of the Romantic Artist in America (Chicago, 1948), pp. 123-128. 9. Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, Yankee Stonecutters: The First American School of Sculpture, 1800-1850 (New York, 1945), pp. 5, 15, 48; see also, e.g., George S. Hillard, Six Months in Italy, 2 vols. (Boston, 1853), I, 178, II, 258, 264; William Ware, Sketches of European Capitals (Boston, 1851), pp. 130-145. 10. Quoted in Baker, Fortunate Pilgrims, p. 146, a good summary of Americans' reaction to classical sculpture in Italy. 1 1 . Gardner, Yankee Stonecutters, pp. 5-7, 40; Nathalia Wright, Horatio Greenough (Philadelphia, 1963), pp. 142-159. 12. Powers' Statue of the Greek Slave (New York, 1847) is a collection of reviews and comments by critics and ministers, typical of the nationalistic-moralistic criticism; specific visual criticism is notable by its absence. Cf. Gardner, Yankee Stonecutters, pp. 14, 31; Samuel A. Robertson and William H. Gerdts, "The Greek Slave," The Museum [Newark Museum], XVII (1965), nos. 1 and 2; Margaret F. Thorp, The Literary Sculptors (Durham, N.C., 1965). For the rare adverse opinions, see Gardner, Yankee Stonecutters, p. 31; Illustrated Magazine of Art [New York], III (1854), 210; James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea [1864], ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr. (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 212, 215-216. 13. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, American Architectural Books . . . Published in America before 1895, 4th ed. (Minneapolis, 1962); Talbot Hamlin, Greek Revival Architecture in America (New York, 1944), p. 320, and the selected annotated bibliography by Sarah H. J. Hamlin, appendix B: "Some Articles of Architectural Interest Published in American Periodicals prior to 1851," pp. 356-382. 14. Hamlin, Greek Revival, pp. 330-331. 15. James T. Flexner, America's Old Masters: First Artists of the New World (New York, 1939), p. 93; cf. Joel Barlow on West and Copley in his Columbiad. A Poem, with the Last Corrections of the Author (Washington, D.C., 1825), pp. 290-291 (bk. VIII, vss. 587616). 16. Allen Guttmann, "Copley, Peale, Trumbull: A Note on Loyalty," American Quarterly, XI (Summer 1959), 178-180; Jules D. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 86-87, 91-93, 255-257, 2 6 1 , 308, 340-341-

17. Observations on American Art: Selections from the Writings of John Neal (1793-1876), ed. Harold E. Dickson, Pennsylvania State College Studies no. 1 2 (State College, Pa., [1943]), pp. 46-49.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 0 - 1 3

269

18. Dunlap, History, I, 6, 10-11. 19. Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835], ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York, 1954), II, 53-54; Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans [1832], ed. Donald Smalley (New York, 1949), PP- 67, 326-329, 345-346, 394-395; Captain Basil Hall, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1829), II, 172-173. 20. American Art-Union for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in the United States, Transactions for the Year 1844 (New York, 1845), pp. 15, 10. 21. Schuyler, American Architecture and Other Writings, ed. William H. Jordy and Ralph Coe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1961), I, 96; Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 4th ed., enl. (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 179-181, 209216. 22. Carl Bode, The Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 18401861 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), pp. 38-39; Carl W. Condit, American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century (New York, i960), pp. 22-43. 23. Robert B. Shaffer, "Emerson and His Circle: Advocates of Functionalism," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, VII (July-December 1948), 17-20; Charles R. Metzger, Emerson and Greenough (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954); Theodore M. Brown, "Greenough, Paine, Emerson, and the Organic Aesthetic," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XIV (March 1956), 304-317; Edward R. De Zurko, Origins of Functionalist Theory (New York, 1957), pp. 199-230. 24. Emerson, The Complete Works, ed. E. W. Emerson, 1 2 vols. (Boston, 1903-04), V, 6. 25. Greenough, "American Architecture" [1843] in Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture, ed. Harold A. Small (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957), p. 61, a modem paperbound reprint of Greenough's essays. 26. The development of Emerson's aesthetic thought is marked by a gradual shift from his earlier metaphysical orientation to a greater concern with the more strictly architectural aspects of Greenough's theory: fitness to an end, absence of embellishment, and emphasis on utilitarian needs. Nathalia Wright, "Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horatio Greenough," Harvard Library Bulletin, XII (Winter 1958), 115-

270

NOTES TO PAGES 1 4 - 2 1

27. "Letters on Landscape Painting. Letter II," Crayon, I ( 1 7 January 1855), 34-35. 28. Quoted in Louis L. Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole [1853], ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge, 1964), p. 36. 29. "The Allston Exhibition," North American Review, L (April 1840), 358-359; cf. Wilbur R. Jacobs, "Francis Parkman's Oration 'Romance in America,'" American Historical Review, LXVIII (April 1963)» 696. 30. Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Men of Letters series (Boston, 1884), p. 1 1 5 . Maintaining the claims of the ideal against the actual was a continuous problem for Holmes; see Eleanor M. Tilton, "Holmes and His Critic Motley," American Literature, XXXVI (January 1965), 463-474. 3 1 . "A Record of Impressions Produced by the Exhibition of Mr. Allston's Pictures in the Summer of 1839," Dial, I (July 1840), 73. 32. Ibid., pp. 73-74. 33. Among the immense literature which touches on this subject, see especially William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835 (Philadelphia, 1936); Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., 1 9 6 1 ) ; Perry Miller, "Nature and the National Ego," in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 204-216, as well as Millers Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge, 1950), and The Raven and the Whale (New York, 1956). 34. North American Review, L, 379; for the English controversy, see Burd (cited n. 1 above). 35. Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino, Calif., 1959), pp. 44-45, 51-52; for a summary of this position, see Walter J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in EighteenthCentury England (Cambridge, 1946), pp. 79-92; cf. Holmes, North American Review, L, 379, where he makes this point alluding to Reynolds' Fourth Discourse (ed. Wark, pp. 69-70). 36. Discourses, p. 1 3 1 . The passage immediately following, which bases this uniformity of taste on the uniformity of men's minds as they receive all knowledge through the senses, is pure Locke, though one critic finds a nearer origin in Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in the "Introduction on Taste" which appeared in the 2nd edition of 1759 (See Enquiry, ed. J. T. Boulton [London, 1958], p. 17; Discourses, p. i32n). Part of the Seventh Discourse had been reprinted in the Boston

NOTES TO PAGES 22-Q1

2J1

Magazine, I (March 1784), 169-171. The Boston Magazine, the American Museum, and other early American periodicals were already reprinting Blair and others, as well as American versions of neoclassical aesthetics like Timothy Dwight's "Essay on Taste" in the 1780's and 1790s. (Helene E. Roberts, "American Art Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century," unpub. masters thesis University of Washington, 1961, pp. 4-6.) 37. North American Review, L, 360; cf. Reynolds, Discourses, p. 78. 38. Noble, Life and Works of Cole, pp. 81-83. 39. Dunlap, History, III, 153-156; Cole also cited an article in the English Metropolitan Magazine which corroborated his view: 'Turner's pictures may be fine, but they are not true" (ibid., p. 158). 40. Dunlap, History, III, 155; Noble, Life and Works of Cole, pp. xxix-xxxii. 41. Life and Works of Cole, pp. 10-12 (italics in original). 42. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Reason, The Understanding, and Time (Baltimore, 1961). 43. Dial, I, 74; for a general discussion of the transcendental aesthetic in America, see Vivian Hopkins, Spires of Form: A Study of Emersons Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, 1951). 44. "Tintern Abbey"; The Prelude, bk. I, vss. 562-564, Oxford Standard text. 45. Complete Works, II, 535-536; cf. Emerson, "Art" [1840], Complete Works, II, 363, where Emerson says that all pictures and statues are "monsters and cripples." 46. The controversy over epistemology in religious terms is traced in Miller (ed.), The Transcendentalists, esp. pp. 1-330; Hopkins, Spires of Form, pp. 36-37; Fuller, Dial, I, 74. 47. Life and Works of Cole, pp. 107-108. 48. Dial, I, 82; cf. Emerson, "Art" [1840], Complete Works, II, 365; Hopkins, Spires of Form, p. 148. 49. Life and Works of Cole, p. 58. 50. Metzger, Emerson and Greenough, p. 31. 51. Life and Works of Cole, pp. 308-310, 251, 299. 52. Ibid., p. 168. 53. Ibid., pp. 310-311.

2J2.

NOTES TO PAGES 32-38

CHAPTER II:

Modem Painters

1. Ruskin to the Editors, Crayon, I (2 May 1855), 283. 2. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, Library Edition, 39 vols. (London, 1903-1912), III, 637. This, the standard edition of Ruskin, will be cited hereinafter as Works. See also the perceptive essay by Van Akin Burd, "Ruskin s Defense of Turner: The Imitative Phase," Philological Quarterly, XXXVII (October 1958), 465-4833. Works, I, 5, 8, 18. 4. Works, I, 127. 5. For a concise statement of associationism, see Walter J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1946), pp. 93-128; for Alison in particular, see Walter J. Hippie, Jr., The Beautiful, The Sublime, and The Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, 111., 1957), pp. 158-181; for the Lockian background, see Ernest L. Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, i960), pp. 33-416. Oliver Larkin, Art and Life in America, rev. and enl. ed. (New York, i960), pp. 79-80; but cf. ibid., pp. 155-156, for the later classical revival; Talbot Hamlin, Greek Revival Architecture in America (New York, 1944), p. 36. Hamlin, "The Greek Revival in America and Some of its Critics," Art Bulletin, XXIV (September 1942), 250-254. 7. Ruskin, Works, I, xliii. 8. Works, III, 91-92, 141, 158-1599. Works, III, 303n. This particular point was eliminated in the third and subsequent editions, but the implication remained. 10. Works, III, 128-130. Nevertheless he admired Burke; see his comment in 1883, comparing Burke favorably to Alison (Works, IV, iogn). The motto of Modern Painters came from The Excursion, bk. IV, vss. 978-992. See also Ruskin, Works, III, 345. 11. For his family religious training, see Joan Evans, John Ruskin (London, 1954), pp. 26-27, 38-39, 81; for the influence of Buckland, Richard Whateley, and the theologian-scientists, see Henry Ladd, The Victorian Morality of Art: An Analysis of Ruskin's Aesthetic (New York, 1932), pp. 147-160. 12. Emerson, The Complete Works, ed. E. W. Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston, 1903-04), I, 25; Ladd, Victorian Morality of Art, pp. 188-

NOTES TO PAGES 39-48

273

189; cf. John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskiris Genius (New York, 1961), p. 20. 13. Works, III, 665-666, with which cf. IV, 49; Van Aldn Burd, "Ruskin's Quest for a Theory of the Imagination," Modern Language Quarterly, XVII (March 1956), 60-72. 14. Works, IV, 70. He had developed this point at even greater length in earlier stages of the writing of this volume (IV, 365-366). 15. Works, IV, 25-26, 35-36. 16. Works, IV, 42, 57, 60; Gilbert, "Ruskin's Relation to Aristotle," Philosophical Review, XLIX (January 1940), 58. 17. Works, V, 438n; Ladd, Victorian Morality of Art, p. 118. 18. Works, IV, 64. 19. Works, IV, 28-34; Ladd, Victorian Morality of Art, pp. 181-182. 20. Modern Painters, By a Graduate of Oxford, Parts I and II, ist American from 3rd London ed. (New York, 1847). Modern Painters II, ist American from ist London ed., appeared the following year (New York, 1848). Ruskin's authorship was not acknowledged on a title page either in the United States or in England until the publication of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York, 1939), III, 421; cf. The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, 10 vols. (Boston, 1909-1914), VII, 367. 21. Knickerbocker, XXX (October 1847), 346; see also Brooklyn Daily Eagle and King's County Democrat, 22 July 1847, 2:4; Literary World, I (24 July 1847), 591; American Review, VI (August 1847), 219-220. 22. Massachusetts Quarterly Review, I (December 1847), 132. 23. "Modem Painters," North American Review, LXVI (January 1848), 110-145; Ruskin, Works, III, 26-29, 1 5424. North American Review, LXVI, 1 1 2 . 25. Ibid., pp. 1 1 3 , 122, 127, 118. 26. Ibid., p. 128. 27. Ibid., p. 144. 28. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York, 1850), p. 1. Carl Carmer calls Downing the aesthete in The Hudson, Rivers of America series (New York, 1939), p. 230; cf. the contrasting view in Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York, 1954), pp. 21-36. 29. Cottage Residences, 2nd ed. (New York, 1844), pp. 20, 33, ii-iii; Country Houses, pp. 1-3; Downing, Rural Essays, ed. George W. Curtis (New York, 1853), pp. 205-206, 210. 30. Curtis, "Memoir," in Rural Essays, p. xxi; references to the

274

NOTES TO PAGES 4 8 - 5 1

theorists of the picturesque are scattered throughout Downing's writings, especially in A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America . . . in the first (New York, 1841) and later editions. 31. This emphasis was especially strong in the first edition of Landscape Gardening (pp. 33-35, 43, 53-55, 67)> though it still persisted in the last edition Downing supervised (4th ed. [New York, 1849], pp. 66-67, 75-76); Curtis, "Memoir," in Rural Essays, pp. xx, 206-207; Cottage Residences, pp. 18, 20, 32. 32. North American Review, LXVI, 122. 33. Cottage Residences, pp. 10, 25. Downing's discussion was by no means original. In its general outline and in many of its particulars, it was patterned on book IV of his friend John Claudius Loudon's Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture . . . , new ed. (London, 1839), pp. 1106-1124, which was itself much indebted to Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste. 34. Country Houses, p. 5; Cottage Residences, pp. 10-19. 35. Cottage Residences, pp. 19-20; cf. Landscape Gardening, ist ed. (New York, 1841), pp. 300-302. For others who shared Downing's view, see Antoinette F. Downing and Vincent J. Scully, Jr., The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640-1915 (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 128-129. 36. "Notes on Art and Architecture," Dial, IV (July 1843), 109; cf. [Henry R. Cleveland,] "American Architecture," North American Review, XLIII (October 1836), 366-367, 383; [Arthur D. Gilman,] "Architecture in the United States," North American Review, LVIII (April 1844), 438, 443, 450; Bishop Thomas Clark of Rhode Island would look back in later years on the lack of architecture of a really religious character in 1836, commenting that his own church had been mistaken for a bank (Clark, Reminiscences [New York, 1895], pp. 40-41)37. Cottage Residences, p. 27n. For Ruskin's other minor contributions to Loudon's journals and to Loudon's edition of Humphry Repton's Landscape Gardening, the edition which Downing used, see Ruskin, Works, I, 189-264. 38. Cottage Residences, p. 25; cf. Landscape Gardening (ist ed.), p. 1 3 and note quoting Alison on this issue. 39. Cottage Residences, pp. 26-34; cf. Loudon, Encyclopedia of . . . Architecture, p. 1106. 40. Landscape Gardening, 2nd ed. (New York, 1844), p. 10; 4th

NOTES TO PAGES 52-58

275

ed. (New York, 1849), p. 68. The reference to Ruskin (Modem Painters II, published in England in 1846) is on p. 6gn. It is probable that Downing read the 1848 American reprint by Wiley and Putnam, his own publisher. A full discussion of the changes in the various editions of Landscape Gardening will appear in the present writer's forthcoming edition of that work in the John Harvard Library, Harvard University Press. 41. Country Houses, pp. 8-9. 42. Ibid., p. 10. 43. Ibid., pp. 10, 12; in 1842, by contrast, he had cited Reynolds' statement that even genius operated within the rules (Cottage Residences, p. 28, citing the first of the Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark [San Marino, Calif., 1959], p. 17); cf. Ruskin's definition of "apparent proportion" in Modern Painters II, in Works, IV, 102-103. 44. Country Houses, pp. 14-16, 19; cf. Ruskin, Works, IV, 125-127. 45. Country Houses, p. 20; Ladd, Victorian Morality of Art, p. 192. 46. Country Houses, pp. 22, 38; Vaux, Villas and Cottages (New York, 1857), pp. v-vi. 47. Bate, From Classic to Romantic, pp. 128, 160-161; Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, Mich., i960), p. 155. 48. Landscape Gardening (4th ed.), p. 69.

CHAPTER III:

THE PROBLEM OF GOTHIC

1. The relationship of the American colonial experience to the Renaissance tradition has occasionally been discussed, most notably in Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years (New York, 1964); the importance of the absence of a feudal tradition in the United States has been brilliantly traced in Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955). The American "discovery" of the Renaissance in the last half of the nineteenth century has never been adequately treated, though some perceptive suggestions were made by Howard Mumford Jones in 'The Renaissance and American Origins," Ideas in America (Cambridge, 1944), pp. 140-151. Architectural historians have never really treated the boom of neo-Renaissance building in late nineteenth-century America in its relation to the "discovery" of the Renaissance as a period.

276

NOTES TO PAGES 58-65

2. Downing, "A Few Words on Rural Architecture," reprinted in Rural Essays, ed. G. W. Curtis (New York, 1853), p. 205. 3. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York, 1850), p. 269; cf. Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages, 2nd ed. (New York, 1864), p. 261; Dexter, "Modern Painters," North American Review, LXVI (January 1848), 144. 4. For England, see Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, new ed. (London, 1962); for the United States, see James Early's perceptive Romanticism and American Architecture (New York, 1965), esp. chaps, iv-v (published after this study was essentially completed, it covers some of the same ground from a slightly different perspective). 5. For a general study of the impact of the Tractarians on the American Episcopal Church, see George E. DeMille, The Catholic Movement in the American Episcopal Church, Church Historical Society Publications, no. 12, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, 1950), chap. iii. 6. The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and M. H. Thomas, 4 vols. (New York, 1952), I, 35, 1 0 1 , 1 1 5 , 238; for a fuller discussion of the English ecclesiologists, see Clark, Gothic Revival, chap, viii, and James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge, Eng., 1962). 7. "New Churches," Neto-York Ecclesiologist, I (October 1848), 35-36; cf. "Church Architecture in New-York," United States Magazine, and Democratic Review, n.s. XX (February 1847), 139-144: "Trinity is, on the whole, solid and truthful . . . This shabby-genteel sort of veneering is bad enough at all times, but nowhere does it so grate on the feelings, as in a house dedicated to Him who is truth itself" (p. 139). 8. "Gothic Church Architecture," Literary World, III (18 November 1848), 833. 9. Everard Upjohn, Richard Upjohn, Architect and Churchman (New York, 1939), pp. 81-87; DeMille, Catholic Movement, pp. 6769; Literary World, III, 832-833. 10. The first English edition was published on 10 May 1849. One of the first reviews of the American edition appeared in the Literary World on 28 July 1849. 1 1 . Clark, Gothic Revival, chap, vii; Francis G. Townsend, Ruskin and the Landscape Feeling: A Critical Analysis of His Thought During the Crucial Years of His Life, 1843-1856, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. XXXV, no. 3 (Urbana, 111., 1 9 5 1 ) , pp. 37-48;

NOTES TO PAGES 6 5 - 7 0

277

John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius (New York, 1961), pp. 49-63. 12. Ruskin, Works, VIII, 27-29. 13. This seven-year delay is best explained by the fact that the first volume was detailed and technical, and Wiley's edition, complete with the large plates of the English edition, expensive. As a result, it probably did not sell well. When Wiley finally did publish the complete Stones of Venice, 3 vols. (New York, i860), it was in a smaller format and without the full-page plates. This i860 edition, which was frequently reprinted, then had the price advantage which most of the American Ruskin reprints had over their expensive English counterparts. See Francis G. Townsend, "The American Estimate of Ruskin, 1847-1860," Philological Quarterly, XXXII (January 1953), 76; "The American Trade in 'Ruskins.' An Interview at Mr. Wiley's, New York," Pall Mall Gazette, LXVI, 1:2 and Appendix below. 14. For example, Works, IX, 436-440; VIII, 267 and note. 15. Works, VIII, 87; IX, 151, 226. 16. New-York Ecclesiologist, II (March 1850), 76-77. 17. Literary World, V (28 July 1849), 65-67; Eclectic Magazine, XVII (July 1849), 431; Holden's Dollar Magazine, IV (August 1849), 499; Knickerbocker, XXXIV (August 1849), 161. 18. Distribution figures from American Art-Union, Transactions for the Year 1849 (New York, 1850), pp. 24, 26, 34-35; Hoppin, Bulletin, II (September 1849), 21. 19. North American Review, LXXII (April 1851), 302, 294, 303, 3°520. Ibid., p. 313; Downing, Country Houses, p. 20; New Englander, VIII (August 1850), 433. 21. Southern Quarterly Review, XXVII (April 1855), 375, 381; cf. Edward R. De Zurko, Origins of Functionalist Theory (New York, 1957), PP- 44» 130-139, 14422. Massachusetts Quarterly Review, II (September 1849), 519520. 23. "Architects and Architecture," Christian Examiner, XLIX (September 1850), 286; and the earlier short note on The Seven Lamps, by Rufus Ellis, in XLVII (September 1849), 300-301. 24. For Van Brunt, see Talbot F. Hamlin, DAB, s.v. "Henry Van Brunt"; for Bogardus, see Turpin C. Bannister, "Bogardus Revisited," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XV (December

278

NOTES TO PAGES 7 0 - 7 5

1956), 12-22, and XVI (March 1957), 11-19; for Ruskin's opposition to cast iron, see Works, VIII, 60, 68-69, 85, 219. 25. "Cast Iron in Decorative Architecture," Crayon, VI (January 1859), 17. 26. This later form of the attack on Ruskin and especially on the Arts and Crafts movement is implicit in much of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class [1899] (New York, 1 9 3 1 ) , explicit on p. 162. 27. Crayon, VI, 19. 28. Eidlitz, "Cast Iron and Architecture," ibid., pp. 22, 23; Hunt, debate on Eidlitz' paper, ibid., p. 24; but cf. Hunt's later position in "The Church Architecture That We Need," American Architect and Building News, II (1 December 1877), 385. 29. Ruskin, Works, IX, 11, X, 459-460; Condit, American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century (New York, i960), p. 268—this entire section (pp. 265-273) is immensely suggestive; Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass, pp. 49, 63-68. 30. Strong, Diary, I, 354; II, 56-57,128. 31. Cook, New York Quarterly, IV (April 1855), 105-110 as quoted in John P. Simoni, "Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth Century America," unpub. diss. Ohio State University, 1952, pp. 168-173, the fullest account of Cook that exists; Massachusetts Quarterly Review, II, 51732. J[ohn] W. P[irrsson], "Church Architecture," New-York Ecclesiologist, I I (October 1849), i2n; ibid., V (December 1853), 187. One of Ruskin's biographers suggests that Ruskin's appeal was to the rising middle class. Since this group was primarily Low-Church and Evangelical, the religious factor may well be an important one in understanding his appeal in England, and especially since the similarity of religious backgrounds of Ruskin and his English audience was coupled with a similarity of class background (Ruskin himself came of a nouveau riche business family). Joan Evans, John Ruskin (London, 1954), pp. 413-414; Elie Hal6vy, The Age of Peel and Cobden, vol. IV of his History of the English People (New York, 1948), chap. vii. 33. Duyckinck's speech before the society is printed in New-York Ecclesiohgist, III (July 1 8 5 1 ) , 71-80; for his part in the "Young America" movement, see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (New York, 1956). It might also be noted that George Duyckinck and his brother Evert were co-editors and owners of the Literary World in November 1848, when the article denying the ecclesiologists' exclusive claim to the use of Gothic appeared. It was printed with their

NOTES TO PAGES 7 6 - 8 8

ZJQ

sanction if not their outright approval, for this article also was ammunition for the nationalists' cause. 34. Dix, "The Adaptation of Painting and Sculpture to the Adornment of Churches" (New York, 1856), in New-York Ecclesiological Society, Transactions for the Year 1855 (New York, 1857), pp. 45-46 and note. 35. "Architecture and Christian Principle," Congregationalist Quarterly, I (October 1859), 373-385.

CHAPTER IV:

ART, NATURE, AND RELIGION

1. "American Art," Illustrated Magazine of Art [New York], III (1854), 214, 216; New York Daily Times, 30 September 1851, p. 4. 2. "Ruskin on 'Sheepfolds,'" Literary World, VIII (3 May 1851), 356.

3. North American Review, LXXIV (January 1852), 253-254; cf. Literary World, IX (xi October 1851), 288; Illustrated Magazine of Art [New York], III, 419-420. 4. Southern Literary Messenger, XVII (July 1851), 455; Biblical Repository and Princeton Review, XXIII (July 1851), 564. 5. Literary World, VIII (10 May 1851), 374-375. 6. Putnam's Monthly Magazine, IV (August 1854), 231-232. 7. Biblical Repository and Princeton Review, XXVIII (July 1856), 461-493; the Massachusetts Quarterly Review had raised the issue of the fuzziness of Ruskin's "truth to nature" as early as 1849 ("The Seven Lamps of Architecture," II [September 1849], 518). 8. The heart of the Alexander-Dod-Hodge essay, "Transcendentalism of the Germans and of Cousin and Its Influence on Opinion in This Country," is reprinted with comment in The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 231-240, the quotation here is on p. 236. For biographical information on William Armstrong Dod, I am indebted to M. Halsey Thomas, University Archivist, Princeton. See Biographical Catalogue of the Princeton Theological Seminary, 1815-1932 (Princeton, 1933), pp. 136-137. 9. Poe, Works, ed. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry, 10 vols. (New York, 1894-95), VI, 12; I, 141. 10. Miller, Transcendentalists, pp. 236-237. 1 1 . Works, V, 184-185, 201-203, 424-426; Bertram Morris, "Rus-

280

NOTES TO PAGES 8 8 - 9 4

kin on the Pathetic Fallacy, Or on How a Moral Theory of Art May Fail," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XIV (December 1955), 248-266. 12. Francis G. Townsend, Ruskin and the Landscape Feeling: A Critical Analysis of His Thought During the Crucial Years of His Life, 1843-1856, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. XXXV, no. 3 (Urbana, Dl., 1951). 13. Putnam's Monthly Magazine, VII (May 1856), 490-491, 499, 496; United States Democratic Review, XXXVII (July 1856), 602; North American Review, LXXXIV (April 1857), 381-398. 14. North American Review, LXXXIV, 379; Morgan Dix, "The Adaptation of Painting and Sculpture to the Adornment of Churches" (New York, 1856), in New-York Ecclesiological Society, Transactions for the Year 1855 (New York, 1857), p. 46n. 15. North American Review, LXXXIV, 380; ibid., LXXXV (October 1857), 567. The Elements of Drawing was very popular in America, going through many editions in the United States even during the years when Ruskin withdrew it from circulation in England. For a modern critique of its central principles, see Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York, i960), pp. 296-329. 16. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, 20 vols. (Boston, 1906), X (Journal, IV), 126. 17. Ibid., XII (Journal, VI), 103. Thoreau's criticism of Gilpin and the picturesque tradition is in ibid., pp. 53-59; William D. Templeman reaches a different conclusion from the evidence in "Thoreau, Moralist of the Picturesque," PMLA XLVII (September 1932), 864889. 18. Writings, XVI (Journal, X), 69. 19. Ibid., pp. 80, 147; IX (Journal, III), 181-183. 20. Ibid., XVI (Journal, X), 210; The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York, 1958), P- 49721. The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and M. H. Thomas, 4 vols. (New York, 1952), II, 259. 22. Ibid. 23. Tuthill (ed.), The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals, and Religion, Selected from the Works of John Ruskin (New York, 1859), p. xxvi; Mrs. Tuthill was also the author of the History of Architecture from the Earliest Times (Philadelphia, 1848), a vapid compilation but notable as one of the earliest histories by an American.

NOTES TO PAGES 95"102

281

It was dedicated "to the ladies of the United States of America, the acknowledged arbiters of taste." 24. "John Ruskin," Methodist Quarterly Review, XLII (October 1860), 533-534, 536, 54i25. Ibid., pp. 548, 533; Haven, "The Character and Career of Theodore Parker. A Sermon Preached . . . June 10, i860," in Parkerism: Three Discourses Delivered on the Occasion of the Death of Theodore Parker (New York, i860), pp. 82-83. Haven always seems to have been less disturbed by Emerson than by other transcendentalists, perhaps because Emerson did not elevate his pantheism into a dogma, as Haven felt Parker did. 26. "Nature Worship; Its Roots and its Fruits," Boston Review, I (January 1861), 83, 87. 27. "Ruskin's Religious Suggestiveness," Boston Review, I (July 1861), 325, 324 (the transcendentalists are referred to a few pages later [p. 331] as "Emersonian Hindoos"); "Ruskin's Literary Spirit," ibid., II (September 1862), 494. 28. Ibid., I, 325; Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, in Works, 13 vols. (Boston, 1891), II, 103. The agitation over Holmes's religious views is discussed in The Autocrat's Miscellanies, ed. Albert Mordell (New York, 1959), 349"35529. Boston Review, II, 508-509, 512. 30. "The Place of 'Modern Painters' in Art-Literature," Christian Examiner, LXX (January 1861), 43, 46; cf. Ware's unsigned note on Ruskin's Two Paths in ibid., LXVII (November 1859), 43. 31. Strong, Diary, II, 262. 32. North American Review, LXXIX (July 1854), 1-30.

CHAPTER V:

RUSKINISM IN AMERICA: THE CRAYON

1. "Ruskin's Writings," Putnam's Monthly Magazine, VII (May 1856), 491; "Fine Arts," ibid., V (March 1855), 335"336; ibid., VI (September 1855), 320-321. 2. Helene E. Roberts, "American Art Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century," unpub. master's thesis University of Washington, 1961, pp. 51-67; William J. Stillman, The Autobiography of a Journalist, 2 vols. (Boston, 1901), I, 228. 3. David W. Dickason, The Daring Young Men: The Story of the American Pre-Raphaelites (Bloomington, Ind., 1953), pp. 47-64.

282

NOTES TO PAGES 103-106

William E. Fredeman, in his exhaustive Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study (Cambridge, 1965), notes that this confusion between Ruskin and the P.R.B. was a significant aspect of the misunderstanding of the P.R.B., especially in the United States (pp. 10-13, 264-265). 4. I (4 April 1855), 219-220. All subsequent references in this chapter not otherwise noted are to The Crayon: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts, and the Literature Related To Them, 8 vols. (New York, 1855-1861). 5. "Feeling and Talent," I (10 January 1855), 17; the Crayon took its motto from Ruskin, Works, IV, 161: "Whence, in fine, looking to the whole kingdom of organic nature, we find that our full receiving of its beauty depends first on the sensibility and then on the accuracy and touchstone faithfulness of the heart in its moral judgments." 6. For example, John I. H. Baur, review of The Daring Young Men, Art Bulletin, XXXVI (March 1954), 79-81. 7. "Modern Painters V," Atlantic Monthly, VI (August i860), 239; Stillman, Autobiography, I, 116. 8. Autobiography, I, 129. 9. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting. Letter II," I (17 January 1855), 34-35 (see above, Chapter I, pp. 14-15); "Art-Hints," II (15 August 1855), 101. 10. Stillman, Autobiography, I, 222, 223-227; most of the Harvard College Library set of the Crayon is the gift of Longfellow. Longfellow read Modern Painters and The Seven Lamps in 1849, and he subsequently became friendly with Ruskin. He wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in 1870: "I wish we had Ruskin here to lecture on art, and stir people up a little upon the subject" (Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadstoorth Longfellow, 3 vols. [Boston, 1891], III, 156; II, 163, 213). 11. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. De W. Howe, 2 vols. (Boston, 1913), I, 137, 365. 12. (Boston, 1859). Selections originally appeared in the Crayon, III (March-December 1856). 13. Norton to Lowell, 23 September 1855, in Letters of Charles Eliot 'Norton, I, 133-134. When Stillman went abroad in 1859, Norton recommended him as an artist of talent to his friend Mrs. Gaskell (Letters of Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Jane Whitehill [London, 1932], p. 42). 14. Durand, The Life and Times of A. B. Durand (New York, 1894), pp. 193-194-

NOTES TO PAGES I 0 6 - I I I

283

15. "The Relation between Geology and Landscape Painting," VI (August 1859), 255. 16. "Introductory," I ( 3 January 1 8 5 5 ) , 1 (presumably this initial article was written by Stillman, possibly in collaboration with Durand. Most of the articles in the Crayon were anonymous); "Histories of Art," IV (July 1 8 5 7 ) , 2 1 3 ; the report of White's lecture on "Cathedral Builders and Mediaeval Sculptors," taken from the New York Tribune, is in V (November 1 8 5 8 ) , 3 2 0 - 3 2 1 . For White's early interest

in Ruskin, see also Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White, 2 vols. (New York, 1905), I, 24, and The Diaries of Andrew D. White

(Ithaca, N.Y., 1959). P- 91 7 . "John Ruskin," IV (November

1857),

330-332;

cf. Massa-

chusetts Quarterly Review, II (September 1849), 5x9-520. 18.

I

(17

January

1855), 35;

VI (February

1 8 5 9 ) , 36;

Morton

White and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 21-53; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), chap. iv. 19.

II

(18

July

1855), 31.

20. Ibid. 21.

"Art in its Relation to American Life," II

(25

July

1855), 54;

New York Daily Times, 30 September 1851, p. 4. 22. II (28 November 1855), 335; cf. Ruskin, Works, IV, 35-36, 42. 2 3 . By 1 8 5 5 it can be assumed that this early work of 1 8 3 7 - 3 8 was generally unavailable. It was first published in book form by John Wiley in the United States in 1873 and was reprinted eleven times before 1895. The first English edition in book form did not appear until 1893. See Appendix below. 24. II ( 1 8 July 1 8 5 5 ) , 3 5 , and following issues. Here again it is worth noting the difference between the luxurious English edition of Ruskin's writings and the inexpensive American reprints. See Appendix below. 2 5 . VI (January 1 8 5 9 ) , 2 8 - 3 1 . It was not reprinted by Ruskin

until 1880 in A Joy Forever and Its Price on the Market.

26. On the tangled problem of Ruskin's psychological make-up, see

R. H. Wilenski, John Ruskin: An Introduction to Further Study of His Life and Work (London, 1 9 3 3 ) ; on the Cosmopolitan Art Association, see Carl Bode, The Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840-1861

(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1 9 5 9 ) , pp. 80-86, 96-103; and Roberts, "Art Periodicals," pp. 65-66; on Perkins, see Frederick W. Coburn, DAB, s.v. "Charles Callahan Perkins."

284

NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 2 - l l 8

27. Cf. their attack 011 Leutze in I (10 January 1855), 22, and I (17 January 1855), 44, with Ruskin, Works, I I I , 91. 28. I (11 April 1855), 235; for Hawthorne's interest in the "Beatrice Cenci," see Complete Works, ed. George P. Lathrop, 12 vols. (Boston, 1883), VI, 82-86, X, 89-90; for Melville, see Jay Leyda, The Melville Log, 2 vols. (New York, 1951), II, 556-557, and Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Henry Murray (New York, 1949), PP- 4 1 3 _ 4 1 4 and note, 502-503. 29. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting. Letter I I I , " I (31 January 1855), 6 6 J "Allegory in Art," I I I (April 1856), 114-115; Louis L. Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole [1853], ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 214-217. 30. Advertisement for vol. I I of the Crayon, in I (27 June 1855), 416, and later issues; cf. John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin s Genius (New York, 1961), pp. 14-18. 31. "Vernet's 'Brethren of Joseph,'" I (28 February 1855), 136; I (28 March 1855), 202, 203. 32. I (9 May 1855), 299. Henry Ladd notes that after Ruskin the term "sublime" dropped out of the vocabulary of British aesthetic theory (The Victorian Morality of Art: An Analysis of Ruskin's Aesthetic [New York, 1932], pp. 142-143). 33. I (9 May 1855), 299; "Studies Among the Leaves. The Assembly of Extremes," I I I (January 1856), 30-32. 34. I (2 May 1855), 274-275; I I (22 August 1855), 133; I (3 January 1855), 2. 35. I (6 June 1855), 354; Flexner, That Wilder Image: The Painting of America's Native School from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer (Boston, 1962), pp. 74-75. 36. For Norton and Howells, see Chapter X below; Warner, "Modern Fiction," Atlantic Monthly, L I (April 1883), 464-466; Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1892), pp. 14, 100. 37. I l l (June 1856), 184. 38. II (15 August 1855), 96. 39. Ibid. 40. "Perception," II ( 1 August 1855), 63. 41. I l l (January 1856), 1-2. The series of articles by Stillman was entitled "The Nature and Use of Beauty." 42. "Common Sense in Art," I (7 February 1855), 81; " T h e Limitations of Art," I (13 June 1855), 369; "Nature and Use of Beauty," I I I (February 1856), 33-36; I I I (March 1856), 65-67. 43. I (27 June 1855), 410; on the Germans, see, e.g., "Schiller," I I I (October 1856), 294, or "Klopstock," I V (January 1857), 8-9.

NOTES TO PAGES l l 8 - 1 2 3

285

44. Ill (April 1856), 97; IV (November 1857), 330. 45. Ill (May 1856), 129-130. 46. Stillman, "Nature and Use of Beauty," III (July 1856), 193; for Stillman and Emerson, see Ida G. Everson, "William J. Stillman: Emerson's 'Gallant Artist,'" New England Quarterly, XXXI (March 1958), 32-46; Brownlee Brown, "The End of Art," IV (February 1857), 42; J. G. B. Brown, "Selection in Art," IV (May 1857), 138. 47. IV (May 1857), 138; Ruskin, Works, IV, 36; Fuller, Dial, I (July 1840), 74. 48. Horatio Hubbell (trans.), "Aesthetics: Upon Aesthetics in General," VI (June 1859), 165-167, and following issues. 49. VI (June 1859), 190. 50. The reprinting of G. H. Lewes' English translation of "Gedanken iiber den Gebrauch des gemeinen und niedrigen in der Kunst" appeared in VII (August i860), 213-215; cf. "Schiller," III (October 1856), 293-297. 51. See The Aesthetic Letters, Essays and the Philosophical Letters of Schiller, trans., with an introd., John Weiss (Boston, 1845). In his introduction, Weiss noted that the "Play-Impulse" was a concept that was foreign to the sons of the Puritans (p. xxvi). He felt that both the subjectivism of Kant and the empiricism of Hume were injurious to men's religious faith. "There is a point between the two, and in a plane higher than both, an union of fact and idea, induction from, and anticipation of, Nature, a distinct appreciation of the respective capacities of Subject and Object, which is the only true starting-point for metaphysics and the only safe ground for science" (p. xx). Yet despite Weiss's pious hope, the subversive implications of Schiller's aesthetics remained (see, e.g., pp. 99-100, 140-141, 223). 52. VII (September i860), 270-271. 53. Stillman, "Modern Painters," Atlantic Monthly, VI (August i860), 239-242; Spencer, illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions (New York, 1864), pp. 300-324; Darwin, The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text, ed. Morse Peckham (Philadelphia, 1959), pp. 367-372, 736-737; Horace Kallen, Art and Freedom, 2 vols. (New York, 1942), I, 528, II, 563-581, 611-629; Katharine E. Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Aesthetics (New York, 1939), chap, xviii.

286 NOTES TO PAGES I24-HQ CHAPTER VI:

THE RUSKINIAN AS ART HISTORIAN

1. Crayon, II (15 August 1855), 101. 2. Art-Hints: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (London, 1855), pp. 8o, 143-144. 3. Ibid., pp. 386-387, 198-199. 4. Ruskin's letter is quoted in Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves (New Haven, 1951), pp. 152-153; The ArtIdea [1864], ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr. (Cambridge, i960), pp. 8-9, 137-139. 141-1445. Crayon, II, 101; Steegmuller, Jarves, p. 152. 6. Art-Hints, p. 98; Steegmuller, Jarves, pp. 139-141. 7. Art-Hints, pp. 8gff., 368, 386-387. 8. Ibid., pp. 18, 74-75, 71, 94. 9. Ibid., p. 1142., with which cf. Ruskin, Works, III, 158-162; ArtHints, p. 122. 10. Art-Hints, pp. 105-108; Steegmuller, Jarves, pp. 152-153. 1 1 . For the Titian controversy and Ruskin's letter to Jarves on the subject, see Steegmuller, Jarves, pp. 147-150, 153; [Neal], "Jarves's Art-Hints," North American Review, LXXXI (October 1855), 438; cf. Knickerbocker, XXX (October 1847), 346. 1 2 Art, Scenery and Philosophy in Europe, Being Fragments from the Port-Folio of the late Horace Binney Wallace, Esquire, of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1855). 13. Art-Hints, pp. 66, 73; cf. Wallace, Art, Scenery and Philosophy, pp. 14, 19-20, 34. 14. Art-Hints, p. 191; Italian Sights and Papal Principles (New York, 1856) was a further development in equally strong language of Jarves' anti-Catholicism. 15. Norton, Notes on Travel and Study in Italy (Boston, 1859), pp. 42, 79, 147, 204-218; Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. De W. Howe, 2 vols. (Boston, 1913), I, 116-117; for a summary of the attitudes of American travelers toward Italian religion, see Paul R. Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy, 1800-1860 (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 155-182. 16. Steegmuller, Jarves, p. 169. 17. Norton, Notes, pp. v, vi. 18. The precise character and extent of this change has been subject to considerable debate (see, e.g., R. H. Wilenski, John Ruskin: An Introduction to Further Study of His Life and Work [London,

NOTES TO PAGES 1 3 9 - 1 3 8

287

1933]» PP- 329-356; John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskins Genius [New York, 1961], pp. 34-41). 19. Norton, Notes, p. 42. 20. Jarves, Art Studies: The "Old Masters" of Italy; Painting (New York, 1861), pp. 229-230; for Jarves' spiritualism, see Steegmuller, Jarves, passim. 21. Art-Idea, pp. 249-250. 22. Art-Hints, pp. ix, 6; Art-Idea, pp. 9 2 , 1 1 2 - 1 1 3 , 222. 23. James, A Small Boy and Others, in Henry James: Autobiography, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York, 1956), pp. 195-196; Jarves' various reactions to the Louvre are summarized in Steegmuller, Jarves, pp. 105-108; cf. Henry Ward Beecher, Star Papers; or, Experiences of Art and Nature (New York, 1855), pp. 57-63. 24. Norton, Notes, p. 179. 25. Art-Hints, pp. 13-14. 26. Art-Idea, p. 118. 27. Ruskin, Works, IX, 17,23; Rosenberg, Darkening Glass, p. 87. 28. Edgar P. Richardson, Painting in America (New York, 1956), p. 167; Perry Miller, "Nature and the National Ego," in Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 212-214; Locke, Second Treatise on Government, chap, v, par. 49. 29. Louis L. Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole [1853], ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge, 1964), p. 168; The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1918), p. 92; "Ruskin's Stones of Venice," Literary World, VIII (10 May 1851), 375. 30. Stones of Venice II, chap, vi, in Works, X, 180-269; cf. Jarves, Art-Hints, pp. 211-212; Art-Idea, pp. 229, 234-235. 31. North American Review, LXXXI, 444. Since the review appeared in 1855, it is possible that Neal's remark was directed primarily not to Jarves but to those Southern political theorists who were trying to use the example of Greece to justify Negro servitude by saying that only a slave society could produce a high culture. 32. Art-Hints, p. 27. 33. Art Studies, pp. 59, 203; Art-Idea, p. 56. 34. Art Studies, p. 12. The statement was repeated almost verbatim in Art-Idea, p. 262. Its particular application was to Jarves' collection of paintings, which were to illustrate this principle. See Steegmuller, Jarves, p. 194. 35. Art Studies, pp. 119,203; cf. Norton, Notes, p. 133. 36. Art-Hints, p. 25. 37. Art Studies, pp. 71, 482-499, 436.

288

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138-143

38. Steegmuller, James, pp. 180, 186. 39. Steegmuller, Jarves, chaps, x-xvi; the best single statement of Jarves' aims concerning the collection is in a letter to Norton, 26 August 1859, quoted in ibid., pp. 170-175; see also pp. 180-181, 189-191, 230, 233, 248. 40. Ibid., p. 177. 41. Art-Hints, p. 65; Wallace, Art, Scenery and Philosophy, pp. 13-1442. Cited by Crayon, VI (December 1859), 381; the Crayon itself disliked the collection on nationalistic grounds, saying that the money would have been better spent on works of the present (ibid., VIII [January 1861], 2 1 ) . 43. Notes, pp. 142-143, 192; The Stones of Venice is cited on p. 189. 44. Notes, p. 317; cf. pp. 52-53, 63. 45. Ruskin, Works, XI, 200-204, 212-214, 220; cf. Norton, Notes, pp. 102-105, and Jarves, Art-Hints, pp. 35, 211-212, 262, 265. 46. Ruskin, Works, XI, 198, 195. 47. Notes, pp. 293-294, 105; see Kermit Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton: Apostle of Culture in a Democracy (Cambridge, 1959), esp. pp. 51-66. 48. Art-Idea, p. 157; cf. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Mrs. Jonathan Foster, 5 vols. (London, 1850), I, 41; to Mrs. Jameson, the enthusiasm which the painting aroused in the people was "naive" (Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters [1845] [Boston, 1892], p. 18); Ruskin quoted the Vasari passage in his 1874 Oxford Lectures, Works, XXIII, 202; and Frederick, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) painted the scene of the Madonna being carried through the streets of Florence. His painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855, for which see Ruskin's notes (Works, XIV, 26-27). 49. Art Studies, pp. 99, 246, 261. 50. Art-Hints, pp. 265, 262 (Ruskin's theories concerning the role of the workman in society come through clearly here); Art Studies, p. 261; cf. Norton, Notes, p. 317: "Lorenzo is called the patron of letters and of Art; but when letters and Art need a patron, it is because they have lost their own natural vigor." 51. Notes, pp. 319-320. The interest in Savonarola persisted in later years. Norton's friend Howells, in his novel of Italy, Indian Summer (1886), includes a disillusioned Unitarian minister who is

NOTES TO PAGES 144-149

289

trying to rediscover faith through antiquarian researches in Florence on Savonarola. 52. Art-Hints, p. 242; Art Studies, p. 417. 53. Art-Idea, p. 157. 54. Ibid., pp. 52-53. 55. Art Studies, p. 493n. 56. For example, Works, XVII, 246, 256. 57. Jarves, Italian Rambles, Studies of Life and Manners in New and Old Italy (New York, 1883), chap, xv; cf. Steegmuller, Jarves, pp. 274-288.

CHAPTER VII:

CIVIL WAR INTERLUDE: THE NEW PATH

1. [Parker], "Ornament in Nature and Art," North American Review, XCV (July 1862), 57; for Ruskin's health during these years, see R. H. Wilenski, John Ruskin: An Introduction to Further Study of His Life and Work (London, 1933), pp. 65-80; for his relations with Norton, see Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. De W. Howe, 2 vols. (Boston, 1913), I, 284-285, 288-289, 302-303, and Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, ed. C. E. Norton, 2 vols. (Boston, 1904), I, 116-158 passim; for the Emerson-Carlyle relations, see The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York, 1964), pp. 46-48, 535-548; for a rare reference to Ruskin's politics during the war, see the review of Sesame and Lilies, Christian Examiner, LXXIX (November 1865), 432-433-

2. Farrer (1838-1891), an English painter who had studied under Ruskin and come to America in i860, was one of the founders of the society (David W. Dickason, The Daring Young Men: The Story of the American Pre-Raphaelites [Bloomington, Ind., 1953], pp. 84-87). 3. New York Daily Tribune, 21 May 1864, p. 3, as quoted in John P. Simoni, "Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth Century America," unpub. diss. Ohio State University, 1952, p. 269. 4. The New Path was published monthly: vol. I (May 1863—April 1864); vol. II (May-July 1864 and April-December 1865). The announcement of the journal's independence appears in II (May 1864), 2. Unless otherwise noted, references in this chapter are to the New Path. 5. II (May 1864), 2; the fullest account of the society, the New

2gO

NOTES TO PAGES I 5 0 - I 5 5

Path, and its charter members and their relation to Ruskin is in Dickason, Daring Young Men, pp. 71-124; see also William E. Fredeman, Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 10-13, 264; for the 1857 exhibition, see Dickason, Daring Young Men, pp. 65-70. 6. "The Churches of Reservoir Square," I (January 1864), 1121 1 3 ; its points of reference were Ruskin's "Lamp of Beauty" and the Edinburgh lectures, as well as the writings of Gilbert Scott ("What Has Been Done and What Can Be Done," I [September 1863], 56). 7. "Our Furniture; What it Is and What it Should Be," II (May 1865), 7 1 ; II (July 1864), 48. 8. I (September 1863), 53; "A Letter to a Working Man," II (July 1865), 1 1 1 - 1 1 3 . 9. "Artists' Fund Society. Fourth Annual Exhibition," I (December 1863), 92; cf. the contrary view of the Philadelphia Legal Intelligencer, quoted in a notice of the press on the inside cover of the New Path, II (May 1865); "Introductory," I (May 1863), 2. 10. I (December 1863), 93, 95-98 (Veronese had become a favorite of Ruskin in the later volumes of Modern Painters; Gainsborough he had praised as an "immortal painter" and a precursor of Turner in the preface to the 2nd ed. of Modern Painters I, in Works, III, i8-ign); Stillman, "Ruskin as Expounded by a Ruskinian," Nation, LVII (31 August 1893), 160. 1 1 . Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New York, 1941), p. 614 and n. 478; Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843-18/0 (Philadelphia, 1953), pp. 301-302; cf. Charles Eliot Norton to Henry James, 23 March 1873, quoted in The Painter's Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James, ed. JohnL. Sweeney (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 21-22. 12. "Geo. Innes. The Sign of Promise.' Snedecor's Gallery," I (December 1863), 99-101; Jarves, The Art-Idea, ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr. (Cambridge, i960), pp. 195-196. 13. "The Essential Difference Between the True and the Popular Art Systems," II (July 1864), 33-34. 14. "Art Criticism," I (April 1864), 157. 15. "Science in its Relation to Art," II (November 1865), 169-172, and II (December 1865), 185-188; "A Heretic Squelched," II (December 1865), 195, quoted from The Stones of Venice III, in Works, XI, 47. 16. Hale, "Books that have Helped Me," Forum, III (March 1887), 35-36.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 5 7 - 1 6 0

CHAPTER VIII:

291

RUSKIN AND THE SCIENTISTS

1. See Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York, 1953), chap. xi. 2. Hartford, Conn., 1832. For the influence of Paley in America, see Wendell Glick, "Bishop Paley in America," New England Quarterly, XXVII (September 1954), 347-354, and W. M. Smallwood and M. S. C. Smallwood, Natural History and the American Mind (New York, 1941), pp. 226-229. 3. Paley, Natural Theology, stereotype ed. (Boston, 1849), pp. 10, 191; Sir Charles Bell, The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, As Evincing Design, Fourth Bridgewater Treatise, new ed. (Philadelphia, 1836); William Buckland, D.D., Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, Sixth Bridgewater Treatise, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1837), I, 392. These works were frequently reprinted in America; Louis Agassiz translated Buckland into German. 4. The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1918), p. 225; Charles C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (Cambridge, 1951)» PP- 35*39, 208-209. 5. I. Bernard Cohen, "Science in America: The Nineteenth Century," Paths of American Thought, ed. A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., and M. White (Boston, 1963), pp. 167-189; for a general survey of natural history, see Smallwood and Smallwood, Natural History and the American Mind, pp. 215-248; for an interesting example of the popular conflict, see Gerald D. Nash, "The Conflict Between Pure and Applied Science in Nineteenth-Centuiy Public Policy: The California State Geological Survey, 1860-1874," LIV (June 1963), 217-228. 6. Quoted in Paths of American Thought, p. 551; Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science (Boston, 1835), pp. ix, 37-38, 115-137. Under the banner of natural theology, Americans were actually being taught a form of moral utilitarianism which they would have rejected had it come directly from Jeremy Bentham or James Mill (Glick, New England Quarterly, XXVII, 351-354). 7. Helmut de Terra, Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt: 1769-1859 (New York, 1955), pp. 355-359» 363; Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Ott£, Bohn Scientific Library, 5 vols., I (London, 1849), 30; ibid., II (London, 1849), 370, 432. 8. Agassiz to Adam Sedgewick, June 1845, in Elizabeth C. Agassiz,

292

NOTES TO PAGES l 6 l - l 6 6

Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence, 2 vols. (Boston, 1885), I» 388-389; however, Agassiz did dedicate the first volume of his monumental Contributions to the Natural History, of the United States (Boston, 1857) in part to Ignatius Döllinger; for a fuller discussion of Agassiz's relation to Naturphilosophie, see Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago, i960), pp. 62-88 and passim. 9. Agassiz, Agassiz, II, 670-671. xo. Agassiz, Natural History, I, 9. 11. See Albert Bush-Brown, "'Get an Honest Bricklayer!': The Scientist's Answer to Ruskin," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XVI (March 1958), 348-356; for Norton's remarks, see his anonymous review of The Oxford Museum, a description of the English building by Henry W. Acland and Ruskin, Atlantic Monthly, IV (December 1859), 767-77012. Mayr, "Agassiz, Darwin, and Evolution," Harvard Library Bulletin, XIII (Spring 1959), 171-176; Lurie, Agassiz, p. viii. 13. Marsh, The Earth as Modified by Human Action; A New Edition of Man and Nature (New York, 1874), pp. 12-13; for Marsh's life, see David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (New York, 1958). 14. "The Study of Nature," Christian Examiner, LXVIII (January 1860), 33-44. 15. Ibid., pp. 46, 47, 48; cf. Modern Painters V, in Works, VII, 264, and Seven Lamps, in Works, VIII, 221-224. 16. Marsh, Christian Examiner, LXVIII, 50, 53. 17. Ibid., p. 54. 18. Ibid., pp. 57-58. The motto of Man and Nature was taken from Bushnell's Sermon on the Power of an Endless Life. For Bushnell's view of the limitations of natural theology, see his Nature and the Supernatural, 5th ed. (New York, i860), pp. 505-509; in this book Bushnell praised highly Agassiz's theory of species as special creations of the Divine mind (pp. 202-207). 19. Parker, North American Review, LXXIX (July 1854), 1-30; the Guyot address is quoted in William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863 (New Haven, 1959), p. 423 (see also pp. 20, 422). 20. Smallwood and Smallwood, Natural History and the American Mind, pp. 338, 351; A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810-1888 (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 114, 132-135; Charles S. Sargent (ed.), Scientific Papers of Asa Gray, 2 vols. (Boston, 1889), I, 199-204.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 6 6 - 1 7 3

293

2 1 . Muir to J. B. McChesney, 1 0 January 1873, quoted in William F. Bade, The Life and Letters of John Muir, vols. IX and X of The Writings of John Muir, Sierra ed., xo vols. (Boston, 1 9 2 3 ) , IX, 377, 378; ibid., X, 42; cf. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, 1 0 vols. (Boston, 1 9 0 9 - 1 9 1 4 ) , X, 422 [entry for summer 1873]. 22. Burroughs, "The Literary Treatment of Nature," Ways of Nature, in The Writings of John Burroughs, Riverby ed., 1 5 vols. (Boston, 1904-1909), XIV, 191-208. Burroughs spoke highly of Ruskin in several of the essays in Literary Values, in Writings, XII. 23. "Ruskin as Expounded by a Ruskinian," Nation, L V I I ( 3 1 August 1893), 159. 24. Waldstein, "The Work of John Ruskin. Its Influence upon Modern Thought and Life," Harper's Monthly, L X X V I I I (February 1889), 390, 393, 3 9 1 ; cf. earlier, Chapter VII, pp. 154-155. 25. Harper's Monthly, LXXVIII, 386, 399, 400. 26. Thurman Wilkins, Clarence King: A Biography (New York, i ^ S ) , pp. 7-32. My entire account of King is heavily indebted to this outstanding biography. 27. Wilkins, King, pp. 31-39; Catalogue of the Officers and Students in Yale College . . . 1861-62 (New Haven, 1 8 6 1 ) , pp. 48-49; Anson P. Stokes, Memorials of Eminent Yale Men, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1 9 1 4 ) , II, 77. 28. Stokes, Memorials, II, 76-77; Wilkins' date (King, p. 39) is incorrect. 29. Wilkins, King, pp. 43-46, 81-84. Wilkins does not identify any of the anonymous articles in the New Path as King's. 30. Ibid., pp. 42-43; Century Association, Clarence King Memoirs: The Helmet of Mambrino (New York, 1904), pp. 3 1 5 , 3 1 7 and note. 3 1 . Entry for 20 September 1863, quoted in Wilkins, King, pp. 44-4532. Quoted in Lurie, Agassiz, p. 307; the lectures were published first in the Atlantic Monthly and as a book in 1863. 33. Private Notes, 1863, quoted in Wilkins, King, p. 45; King Memoirs, p. 319. 34. Wilkins, King, p. 6 1 ; King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (Boston, 1 8 7 2 ) , pp. 180-181. 35. MS Miscellaneous Notes, 1869, and King to J. T. Gardiner, 1 5 February 1873, quoted in Wilkins, King, pp. 130, 174-175. 36. King, Mountaineering, pp. 80, 192; Wallace Stegner notes that all the reports of Western exploration fell back upon architectural

294

NOTES TO PAGES

174-181

imagery (Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West [Boston, 1954], p. 394, n. 1 5 ) . 37. King, Mountaineering, pp. 207-212, 2 2 1 . 38. Ibid., p. 1 3 3 ; for a similar Ruskinian passage, cf. ibid., pp. 188-189. 39. Works, III, 529-53 0 40. King, Mountaineering, pp. 178, 1 8 1 ; for an interesting parallel, cf. John Tyndall, Hours of Exercise in the Alps, Authorized ed. (New York, 1897), p. 106. 4 1 . King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, 4th ed. (Boston, 1 8 7 4 ) , pp. 283-284, 287; for other uses of the "juggernaut" image, see Mountaineering ( 1 8 7 2 ) , p. 223, and letter to J. T. Gardiner, 1 5 February 1873, cited above, n. 35. 42. King, Mountaineering ( 1 8 7 4 ) , p. 295. 43. Ibid., p. 296. 44. Ibid., p. 297. 45. King Memoirs, pp. 253-294, 127, 129, 154, 155-156. 46. Stegner, Hundredth Meridian, pp. 147, 1 4 9 - 1 5 1 ; William C. Darrah, Powell of the Colorado (Princeton, 1 9 5 1 ) , pp. 351-352. 47. Powell, Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries . . . . (Washington, 1 8 7 5 ) , pp. 5, 85-86. 48. Ibid., p. 89. 49. Stegner, Hundredth Meridian, pp. 164, 165; see the entire section on Dutton (ibid., pp. 164-173) for a perceptive analysis of the mixture of science and imagination in Dutton s writing, underlining the central importance of point of view. 50. Powell, Canyons of the Colorado, reprinted as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (New York, 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. iv-v, 328-331, 386, 389; Stegner, Hundredth Meridian, pp. 1 7 7 - 1 9 1 . Actually, Moran, on reading the early magazine version of the Exploration, had written to Powell, urging him to express more of his own sensations, of "the terrible and sublime feelings that are stirred within one, as he feels himself in the jaws of the monstrous chasms. It seems to me that the expression of these impressions and thoughts tend to realize the descriptions to the reader & are almost as necessary as the descriptions themselves" (letter of 1 9 December 1874, quoted in Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains [Norman, Okla., 1966], p. 89). 5 1 . Powell, Canyons of the Colorado ( 1 9 6 1 reprint), p. 397; Ruskin, Works, III, 92.

NOTES TO PAGES 182-192

295

52. Clark, The Victorian Mountaineers (London, 1953), pp. 20-21, 30-40. 53. Tyndall, Hours of Exercise, pp. 44-45, 81, 59, 67-68. 54. Ibid., pp. 207, 280; Tyndall, Essays on the Use and Limit of the Imagination in Science (London, 1870), p. 51. 55. "Tyndall's Hours of Exercise in the Alps" appeared originally in the Atlantic Monthly (November 1871), cited here from Henry James, Literary Reviews and Essays, ed. A. Mordell (New York, 1957), PP- 310, 313-31456. King, Mountaineering (1872), p. 126; cf. Tyndall, Hours of Exercise, p. 301. CHAPTER IX:

THE ATTACK ON RUSKIN: AESTHETIC THEORY AND PRACTICE

1. Day, "Ruskin's New Lectures on Art," New Englander, XXIX (October 1870), 664; Parker, "Ornament in Nature and Art," North American Review, XCV (July 1862), 74, 76; The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. R. L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York, 1939), V, 281. 2. Cabot, "On the Relation of Art to Nature" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in two parts: XIII (February 1864), 183-199, and XIII (March 1864), 313-329; see pp. 183-185. 3. Ibid., XIII, 318-319. 4. Ibid., p. 319. 5. Ibid., pp. 194, 195, 321, 326-328. 6. Ibid., p. 328. 7. Charles C. Everett, The Science of Thought: A System of Logic (Boston, 1869), pp. 229, 230, 233. 8. "Analytical and Critical Essay upon the Aesthetics of Hegel," trans, from the French of M. Ch. Benard by J. A. Martling, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, I (1867), 36-52, and later issues; and the editor's preface to vol. I; see also Horace Kallen, Art and Freedom, 2 vols. (New York, 1942), I, 523-524. 9. Editors preface, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, II (1868), v-vi. 10. Harris, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, I (1867), 53-57, and III (April 1869), 73-88. 11. The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 vols. (Philadelphia, 1962-1964), III, 47.

296

NOTES TO PAGES I 9 3 - I 9 7

12. A methodological note is in order: to trace the influence of a theory of art, even a dominating one like Ruskin's, upon the completed work of art is at best a risky venture, since no work of art is merely the sum total of the influences upon the artist, and even poor work is to a degree a function of its materials, which make demands and define possibilities for the creator. When the language of the theory is verbal and that of the work is paint, canvas, wood, stone, or metal, the difficulty is compounded. One falls of necessity back upon the verbal record. The case for Ruskin's impact upon painting and architecture rests, thus, upon a combination of the visual impact of works which seem to embody ideas Ruskin (among others) had articulated and evidence of the artists' explicit verbal concern with Ruskin's theories. 13. [Greenough], Ernest Carroll; or, Artist-Life in Italy (Boston, 1858), p. 135; see also pp. 130-13414. "The Work of John Ruskin. Its Influence Upon Modern Thought and Life," Harpers Monthly, LXXVIII (February 1889), 391, 389. 15. For Stillman, see his "Letter to the Editor," Nation, LVII (14 December 1893), 447; "John Ruskin," The Old Rome and the New and Other Studies (Boston, i8g8), pp. 98-100, 117-120, a volume which was dedicated to Charles Eliot Norton; The Autobiography of a Journalist, 2 vols. (Boston, 1 9 0 1 ) , I, 308-320; for Moore, see Frank J. Mather, Jr., Charles Herbert Moore, Landscape Fainter (Princeton, 1957); David H. Dickason, The Daring Young Men: The Story of the American Pre-Raphaelites (Bloomington, Ind., 1953), pp. 118-120; see also Elihu Vedder, The Digressions of V (Boston, 1 9 1 0 ) , pp. 418421; John La Farge, "Ruskin, Art and Truth," International Monthly, II (November 1900), 510-535. 16. Gardner, Winslow Homer, American Artist: His World and His Work (New York, 1 9 6 1 ) , chap, iii, "The Art World of 1840-70 in Boston and New York," pp. 63-87, and 1 1 3 , 209, 210; the quotation from Perry is cited in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years: 1843-1870 (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 144; Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains (Norman, Okla., 1966), pp. 37-40, 161-164. 17. On Hill, see Dickason, The Daring Young Men, pp. 259-267; for Richards, see Samuel Isham, The History of American Painting, new ed. with supp. chaps, by Royal Cortissoz (New York, 1943), pp. 243-244, and George W. Sheldon, American Painters (New York, 1879), pp. 52-53; on Newman, see Ruskin, Works, XXX, lxxii-lxxiv and pi. 32; on Francesca Alexander, see Ruskin, Works, XXXII, xviiixxxii and passim.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 9 8 - 2 0 3

297

18. See the two accounts by Henry James for the Nation, reprinted in J. L. Sweeney (ed.), The Painters Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 172-177. 19. Ibid., pp. 173-174; cf. Clara M. Kirk, W. D. Howelh and Art in His Time (New Brunswick, N. J., 1965), pp. 168-184. 20. Brownell, "Whistler in Painting and Etching," Scribner's Monthly, XVIII (August 1879), 481-495. 2 1 . Most twentieth-century historians have not faced the issue and prefer to talk only about the effect of architects and their buildings on one another. See, e.g., Eastlake, History of the Gothic Revival (London, 1872), pp. 264-280; Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, new Penguin ed. (1964), pp. 186-196; Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore, 1958), pp. 102, 106-107, 174-176, 191-194, 197. John Burchard and Albert Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America: A Social and Cultural History (Boston, 1 9 6 1 ) , passim, acknowledge Ruskin's role but tend to minimize its importance from the perspective of their own dogmatic modernism (see, e.g., pp. 2 1 , 1 1 2 , 172-175. 24i)22. See above, Chapter III, pp. 69-72. 23. William H. Jordy and Ralph Coe, in the most perceptive historical study of this period, the "Introduction" to their edition of Montgomery Schuyler, American Architecture and Other Writings, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1 9 6 1 ) , I, 1-89, point out that skepticism about ferrous metals made a certain sense before proper fireproofing was developed (pp. 29-30); Ruslan, Works, VIII, 1 1 7 ; IX, 1 1 ; X, 459-460. 24. Schuyler, American Architecture, I, 4-7; National Academy of Design, Photographs of the New Building, introduction and description by P. B. Wight (New York, 1866), pp. 9-10. 25. A full account of the history of the building is Robert B. Shaffer, "Ruskin, Norton, and Memorial Hall," Harvard Library Bulletin, III (Spring 1949), 213-231. 26. Quoted in ibid., p. 2 3 1 . 27. Cook, "A Corner Stone," Galaxy, V (January 1868), 150. Cook felt that despite these encouraging signs, American architecture was still poor. In the ensuing years, he came to feel that these very forces were responsible for the weakness in American architecture ("Architecture in America," North American Review, CXXXV [September 1882], 248-249; quoted in Shaffer, Harvard Library Bulletin, III, 230). 28. Nation, II (5 April 1866), 439.

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NOTES TO PAGES 2 0 3 - 2 0 8

29. American Architect and Building News, I ( 1 8 7 6 ) , 71, as cited in Vincent Scully, Jr., The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright (New Haven, 1955), p. 36. 30. Nation, II ( 1 2 April 1866), 470; Schuyler, American Architecture, I, 29-30, 33. 31. Discourses on Architecture, trans, and introd. Henry Van Brunt (Boston, 1875), viii; "Eidlitz's Nature of Art," Nation, X X X I I I (29 December 1881), 515. 32. Nation, XXXIII, 515, 5x6; Van Brunt, Greek Lines and Other Architectural Essays (Boston, 1893), pp. 224-225. Though Van Brunt became in his later years increasingly the partisan of the classical over the Gothic, he never completely shook off his early indoctrination in Ruskin. For his praise of the mediaeval workman over the modem mechanic, see Greek Lines, pp. 142-143, 210; for the moral impact of the Gothic Revival, see ibid., pp. 216; see also pp. 124-133, 156. 33. American Architect and Building News, II ( 1 8 7 7 ) , 267, quoted in Scully, The Shingle Style, p. 46. 34. Ibid., pp. 2gn, 36; the best discussion of Eastlake is Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York, 1954), pp. 100-108; P. B. Wight, The Development of New Phases of the Fine Arts in America (Chicago, 1884), pp. 9-10. 35. The best general discussion is by Jordy and Coe in Schuyler, American Architecture, I, 23-32. 36. The Nature and Function of Art, More Especially of Architecture (New York, 1881), pp. 34°"35i> 373"37437. Ibid., p. 314. 38. Ibid., pp. v-viii. 39. Ibid., pp. 13-14> 20, 27, 37-46, 51-54. 40. Ibid., p. 64n. 41. Schuyler, American Architecture, I, 67, 121-122, 125-126, 133134; II, 636. 42. See Donald D. Egbert, "The Idea of Organic Expression and American Architecture," Evolutionary Thought in America, ed. Stow Persons (New Haven, 1950), pp. 355-356. 43. The best discussion of Wright's debt to Ruskin is John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskins Genius (New York, 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. 71-78; for Cram's interest in Ruskin, see Cram, My Life in Architecture (Boston, 1936), pp. 9-12, 26, 30.

NOTES TO PAGES 20Q-215

299

44. Letters of Henry Adams, 1892-1918, ed. W. C. Ford (Boston, 1938), p. 468. 45. The comment to Wells can be found in Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of Their Friendship, their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and their Quarrel, ed. Leon Edel and G. N. Ray (Urbana, 111., 1958), p. 267; for a good general discussion, see René Wellek, "Henry James's Literary Theory and Criticism," American Literature, XXX (November 1958), 293-321, and Cornelia P. Kelley, The Early Development of Henry James, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XV, nos. 1-2 (Urbana, 1930). 46. Sweeney, The Painters Eye, pp. 17-18, 21-22, 33-34. 47. "Taine's Italy," Nation, VI ( 7 May 1868), reprinted in James, Literary Reviews and Essays, ed. A. Mordell (New York, 1957), p. 4g; "Tyndall's Hours of Exercise in the Alps," Atlantic Monthly, XXVIII (November 1871), in ibid., p. 310. 48. "Souvenirs de Bourgogne. Par Emile Montégut," 'Nation, XIX ( 2 3 July 1874), 62; "Laugel's Notes of Travel," Nation, XVI ( 2 7 February 1873), 152. 49. "Recent Florence," Atlantic Monthly, XLI (May 1878), 591; cf. the similar remark made by James's friend and fellow writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson, in her marginal jottings in Ruskin's books: "Poor little Ruskin! You should have been a priest in the days when the priest's word was law. How you would have knocked us about!" (Constance Fenimore Woolson, ed. Clare Benedict [London, n.d.], p. 89). 50. "Venice," Century Magazine, XXV (November 1882), 3; cf. James, "Du Maurier and London Society," ibid., XXVI (May 1883), 49-6551. Hawthorne's French and Italian Journals," Nation, XIV (14 March 1872), 173. 52. Complete Tales, III, 25. 53. Roderick Hudson (New York, 1907), pp. 193, 343-344, 32-3354. The American [1st English ed., 1879], ed. R. H. Pearce and M. J. Bruccoli (Boston, 1962), pp. 133 (italics mine), 244, 147-148; in the light of the contrast, it is worth noting that Madame de Cintré, who tries to bridge the gap between Europe and America, is linked symbolically with both through imagery of art and nature (pp. 117, 123, 130, 166-168, 283). 55. The American [1879], p. 65; The American (New York, 1907), p. 92.

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NOTES TO PAGES 2 l 6 - 2 2 2

56. The American [1879], P- 68; The American (1907), p. 96. 57. The American [1879], p. 69; in the revised version the last phrase became "the rightful, indeed the solemn, message of Art" ( T h e American [1907], p. 97). 58. The American [1879], p. 74. 59. Stuart Sherman, "The Aesthetic Idealism of Henry James," On Contemporary Literature (New York, 1 9 1 7 ) , pp. 226-255. 60. Quoted in James L. Woodress, Jr., Howelk and Italy (Durham, N.C., 1 9 5 2 ) , p. 52; Edwin H. Cady, The Road to Realism: The Early Years 1837-1885 of William Dean Howells (Syracuse, 1956), p. 1 0 1 . 6 1 . "The Author to the Reader," Venetian Life, rev. and enl. ed. (Boston, 1907), pp. xvii, 140; cf. Howells, "Eighty Years and After," Harper's Monthly, CXL (December 1 9 1 9 ) , cited in Kirk, Howells and Art in His Time, p. 3 1 , n.14. 62. Indian Summer, ed. W. M. Gibson (New York, 1 9 5 1 ) , pp. 4, 5, 5 1 ; cf. Howells, A Foregone Conclusion (Boston, 1 8 7 5 ) , p. 104, for the ironic comment of the artist-consul protagonist in Venice on "the good folks who get themselves up on Ruskin and try so honestly hard to have some little ideas about art." 63. "Recent Literature," Atlantic Monthly, XXIX (February 1 8 7 2 ) , 2 4 1 (italics mine); ibid., X X X (August 1 8 7 2 ) , 240-242, was his review of Taine's Notes on England, trans. W. F . Rae (New York, 1 8 7 2 ) . For Taine's own comments on Ruskin, see Notes, pp. 335-343. Taine had replaced Viollet-le-Duc at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. 64. For the early reception of Taine in America, see Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia, 1954), pp. 94-102; the James review in the Atlantic Monthly is reprinted in Mordell, Literary Reviews and Essays, pp. 61-67. 65. Taine, Lectures on Art, trans. John Durand, 2 vols. (New York, 1 8 7 5 ) , p. 12. 66. Burroughs, "More About Nature and the Poets," Appleton's Journal, IV ( 1 0 September 1870), 3 1 5 ; Weir, "Taine's Philosophy of Art in the Netherlands," New Englander, X X X (January 1 8 7 1 ) , 45; Mordell, Literary Reviews and Essays, p. 4g. 67. Democracy and Esther: Two Novels by Henry Adams, introd. Ernest Samuels (New York, 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. 7, 209-218. 68. See index to Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Boston, 1 9 3 3 ) ; Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Major Fhase (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 1 3 1 , 264-276; Brooks Adams, who undoubtedly influenced his brother's ideas about Gothic, also depended heavily on Viollet-le-Duc. See Arthur F . Beringause, Brooks Adams: A Biography (New York,

NOTES TO PAGES 22ß-22Q

3OI

1955), pp. 135-138; Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, introd. Charles Beard (New York, 1955), pp. 76, 81-82, 300, 305, 3°769. Samuels, Henry Adams: The Major Phase, pp. 261-265.

CHAPTER X:

T H E D E F E N S E OF RUSKIN

1. The reference to "nieces" is from the preface to Mont-SaintMichel and Chartres; Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Major Phase (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 284-289, 626-627, n - 46; James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, introd. R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), pp. 272-274; Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1891), pp. 147-150. 2. Unfortunately, no reliable figures exist as to the number of copies in each printing, but the continual demand is evident enough. After 1884 many publishers began to issue Ruskin anthologies to cash in on the market. 3. Quoted in Frank L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, III (Cambridge, 1938), 257; for other figures, see Christof Wegelin, "The Rise of the International Novel," PMLA, LXXVII (June 1962), 307. 4. The Letters of Lincoln Steffens, ed. Ella Winter and Granville Hicks, 2 vols. (New York, 1938), I, 10; in The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York, 1931), p. 131, Steffens gives a different version of his response to art, colored by the hindsight of later experience; Louise H. Tharp, Mrs. Jack (Boston, 1965), p. 102. 5. Hoppin, "The Relations of Art to Education," New Engländer, XXV (October 1866), 610; C. M. Butler, ' T h e Relation of Art to Morals and to Religion," Church Review, XLVI (July 1885), 179. 6. Boston Review, VI (January 1866), 90. 7. Hodge, "John Ruskin," Universalist Quarterly, XXX (January 1873), 5-17; L. G. W[are], "Art Teaching of [the] Early Church," Old and New, X (July 1874), 125. 8. Tiffany, "Rev. Loammi Goodenow Ware, L.H.D.," reprinted from the Christian Register (23 April 1891) in In Memory of Loammi Goodenow Ware (Burlington, Vt., 1892), pp. 50-51, 48, 52 (the "sublime natures" of whom he speaks are the artists themselves). 9. "Art in its Relation to Worship in the Lutheran Church," Quarterly Review of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, IX (April 1879), 169, 171; the same point was made by Rev. Gilbert Haven, who had

302

NOTES TO PAGES 2 3 0 - 2 3 5

praised Ruskin so highly in i860, when he attacked the Unitarian W. R. Alger, whose religious services in the Boston Music Hall in 1867 had, in Haven's eyes, suppressed the importance of doctrine (George Prentice, The Life of Gilbert Haven [New York, 1883], pp. 344-347). 10. T. Harwood Pattison, "The Relation of Art to Religion," Baptist Quarterly Review, VIII (July 1886), 325-328, 337. ix. Andover Review, I (January 1884), 18-19, 20; for Wilde's trip, see Lloyd Lewis and H. J. Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America (New York, 1936). 12. "The Relation of Art and Morality," British Foreign and Evangelical Review, XXXV (October 1886), 780-781, 788, 793, 794. 13. The Norton address is quoted in Kermit Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton: Apostle of Culture in a Democracy (Cambridge, 1959), p. 177. James's "Art of Fiction" (1884) is an extended plea against a narrow proscriptive view of the relation between art and morality, not a denial of the novelist's moral concern; for the passage quoted, see The Portable Henry James, ed. Morton D. Zabel (New York, 1 9 5 1 ) , pp. 406-407. 14. Gladden, Witnesses of the Light (Boston, 1903), p. 258. 15. "English Faith in Art," Atlantic Monthly, LXI (April 1888), 461; cf. Clara Kirk, W. D. Howells and Art in His Time (New Branswick, N.J., 1965), pp. 80-87, 151-160, 180. 16. Priscilla Hiss and Roberta Fansler, Research in Fine Arts in the Colleges and Universities of the United States (New York, 1934), pp. 3-10; Ernest S. Bates, DAB, s.v. "John Bascom"; Torrey was the author of a posthumously published treatise, A Theory of Fine Art (New York, 1874), which drew from many sources, including Ruskin, though it was largely Coleridgean in its conception of the imagination and Hegelian in its schematic presentation of the history and progress of the arts. 17. The best printed account is Henry H. Tweedy, DAB, s.v. "James Mason Hoppin"; for his cousins, see "Augustus Hoppin," National Cyclopedia of American Biography, IX (New York, 1899), 483; on the role of the Century Association, see Kirk, Howells and Art in His Time, pp. 253-268. 18. For the early trip, see Hoppin, Notes of a Theological Student (New York, 1854), esp. pp. 139-150; for the second trip and the comment on Turner, see Hoppin, Old England: Its Scenery, Art and People [1867], 3rd ed. (New York, 1872), pp. 43-45; cf. Gilbert Haven, The Pilgrim's Wallet; or, Scraps of Travel Gathered in Eng-

NOTES TO PAGES 2 3 5 - 2 4 2

303

land, France, and Germany (New York, 1866), pp. 193-195, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Note-Books, ed. Randall Stewart (New York, 1 9 4 1 ) , p. 614. 19. New Englander, XXIV (October 1865), 674-689. 20. New Englander, XXV, 605, 607. 2 1 . Ibid., pp. 609, 610, 612; cf. John Bascom, Aesthetics; or, The Science of Beauty (Boston, 1862), pp. 3, 5. 22. Hoppin, The Early Renaissance and Other Essays on Art Subjects (Boston, 1892), pp. 23, 54, 93, and the following: "Art may and will flourish in great beauty and strength in our land whenever we cease to be imitators of the Old World and trust to the inspiration of a free national spirit" (p. 55). 23. Ibid., pp. 48, 49-50. 24. Ibid., pp. 23, 31, 59, 70. 25. Ibid., pp. 62, 67. 26. Great Epochs in Art History (Boston, 1 9 0 1 ) , preface. 27. Early Renaissance, pp. iii-iv. 28. Great Epochs, preface, pp. 33, 196-202. 29. Hiss and Fansler, Research in Fine Arts, pp. 26-27 and passim; Edward A. Jewell, DAB, s.v. "George Lansing Raymond"; Bascom, Aesthetics, p. iii. 30. The two books upon which most earlier accounts have relied— invaluable as far as they go, since Norton burned most of his letters to Ruskin—are Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, ed. C. E. Norton, 2 vols. (Boston, 1904), cited hereafter as JR-CEN Letters, and Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. De W. Howe, 2 vols. (Boston, 1 9 1 3 ) , cited hereafter as Letters of CEN. Among more recent accounts are Robert B. Shaffer, "Charles Eliot Norton, and Architecture," unpub. diss. Harvard, 1 9 5 1 , and the excellent biography by Kermit Vanderbilt cited above (n. 1 3 ) . For Ruskin's statement of his indebtedness, see Praeterita, in Works, XXXV, 520; Ruskin's indebtedness to Norton is treated briefly in M. M. Marsden, "Discriminating Sympathy: Charles Eliot Norton's Unique Gift," New England Quarterly, XXXI (December 1958), 463-483; for the Froude controversy, see Vanderbilt, Norton, pp. 167-169. 3 1 . JR-CEN Letters, II, 72-73. 32. Notes on Drawings by Mr. Ruskin, Placed on Exhibit by Professor Norton . . . , ed. C. E. Norton (Cambridge, 1879); for his own comment on Whistler, see Letters of CEN, II, 345-346; introductions

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NOTES TO PAGES 2 4 2 - 2 5 1

to the Brantwood Edition of Ruskin's Works are dated 1890-1893, 22 vols. (New York, 1 8 9 1 - 1 8 9 3 ) . 33. The best record of Norton's teaching is the privately printed volume, The History of Ancient Art, Prepared by H. F. Brown and Wm. H. Wiggin, Jr., From. Lectures Delivered by Professor Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1 8 9 1 ) ; see also Vanderbilt, Norton, pp. 126129, 146-149. 34. JR-CEN Letters, II, 54-55; Norton, Historical Studies of Church-Building in the Middle Ages: Venice, Siena, Florence (New York, 1880), pp. 177-178; Letters of CEN, I, 450-451. 35. History of Ancient Art, p. 38; Shaffer, "Norton and Architecture," pp. 251-252; Church-Building, pp. 234-292. 36. Norton's agnosticism is most explicit in his letters to fellow agnostics like Leslie Stephen and Goldwin Smith: see Letters of CEN, passim. 37. Letters of CEN, I, 503-514. 38. Edward H. Madden, "Charles Eliot Norton on Art and Morals," Journal of the History of Ideas, XVIII (June 1957), 431-438; cf. Letters of CEN, I, 398-400, in which passage he compares Emerson to the utilitarians. 39. Quoted in Madden, Journal of the History of Ideas, XVIII, 434. 40. James B .Thayer, Letters of Chauncey Wright, With Some Account of His Life (Cambridge, 1878), pp. 193-202, 325-326, 369. 41. Vanderbilt, Norton, pp. 129-132, 186. 42. Notes on Drawings by Mr. Ruskin, p. 5; The Commemorative Services of the First Parish in Hingham on the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Building of its Meeting House (Hingham, Mass., 1882), P- 3 1 . 43. Vanderbilt, Norton, p. 138. 44. Ibid., passim. 45. Howells, My Literary Passions (New York, 1895), pp. 218, 258; Atlantic Monthly, XXI (May 1868), 640. 46. Harpers Monthly, LXXVIII (December 1888), 159; this became part of the final section of Criticism and Fiction, p. 184. 47. Letters of CEN, II, 230; this letter ought to be seen in the context of the Norton-Howells relationship, for which see Vanderbilt, Norton, pp. 150-158. 48. Letters of CEN, II, 133-134, 345-346. 49. History of Ancient Art, pp. 4-5, 6; cf. Shaffer, "Norton and Architecture," pp. 234-243.

NOTES TO PAGES 2 5 1 - 2 5 7

305

50. 1 October i860, in Letters of Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Jane Whitehill (London, 1932), pp. 67-70. 51. "Introduction," The Two Paths (New York, 1 8 9 1 ) , pp. vii-ix; "Introduction," Modern Painters II, rev. by the author, 2 vols. (New York, 1 8 9 1 ) , I, via; "Introduction," The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York, 1 8 9 1 ) , p. viii. 52. "Introduction," The Crown of Wild Olive (New York, 1 8 9 1 ) , pp. viii-ix; see also the introductions to the Brantwood Edition of Time and Tide, A Joy Forever, and Munera Pulveris. 53. "Introduction," Lectures on Art (New York, 1 8 9 1 ) , pp. viii-ix. 54. Frank J. Mather, Jr., Charles Herbert Moore, Landscape Painter (Princeton, 1957), pp. 44-62; Moore, "John Ruskin as an Art Critic," Atlantic Monthly, LXXXVI (October 1900), 438-450. 55. "An American Art-Scholar: Charles Eliot Norton, 1908," Notes on Novelists With Some Other Notes (New York, 1 9 1 4 ) , p. 422; cf. George Santayana, The Middle Span (New York, 1945), p. 166.

EPILOGUE 1. For example, Outlook, LXIV (27 January 1900), 202-204; Dial, XXVIII ( 1 February 1900), 73-75; among the more perceptive obituaries were those by W. P. P. Longfellow, Forum, XXIX (May 1900), 298-312, and the hostile note by W. C. Brownell, Scribner's Monthly, XXVII (April 1900), 502-506. 2. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, ed. E. H. Miller, III (New York, 1964), 174, n. 9; see also ibid., pp. 148-149, 307. 3. La Farge, "Ruskin, Art and Truth," International Monthly, II (November 1900), 520-521; Marshall, Pain, Pleasure and Aesthetics (London, 1894), pp. 1 3 1 - 1 3 2 ; Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1896) is the outstanding contribution to this literature; see also the many studies by Raymond, beginning with The Genesis of Art-Form: An Essay in Comparative Aesthetics (New York, 1893). 4. Berenson, Venetian Painters of the Renaissance With an Index to Their Works (New York, 1894), pp. iii-iv; when Howells regrouped his critical essays for Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1 8 9 1 ) , he too began on the same note, quoting J. A. Symonds' Renaissance in Italy: The Fine Arts [1877] on the glories of the scientific spirit (pp.

306

NOTES TO PAGES 2 5 8 - 2 6 2

1-2); for Berenson's continuing admiration for Ruskin, see his late Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947-1958, ed. Nicky Mariano (New York, 1963), p. 86. 5. Abbot, Independent, L I I (February 1900), 301-302; cf. his "Ruskin Land," Cosmopolitan, XXVIII (March 1900), 501-506. 6. F. J. Stimson, "Ruskin as a Political Economist," Quarterly Journal of Economics, II (July 1888), 444; cf. the reply in Nation, LXVII (23 August 1888), 145-146, and the following typical reviews: T. M. Coan, "Ruskin's Tors Clavigera,' " Appleton's, XX (July 1878), 58-65; Horace E. Scudder, "St. George's Company," Atlantic Monthly, X L I I (July 1878), 39-51; The Message of Art: An Address by I. Edwards Clarke, A. M., Delivered at the Annual Commencement of the Schools of Art and Design of the Maryland Institute, Baltimore, June 5, 1888 (Baltimore, 1888). 7. Frank D. Curtin, "Aesthetics in English Social Reform: Ruskin and His Followers," Nineteenth-Century Studies, ed. Herbert Davis, et al. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1940), pp. 199-245. 8. Two good summary studies which emphasize Ruskin's role are Arthur Mann, "British Social Thought and American Reformers of the Progressive Era," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, X L I I (March 1956), 672-692, and Clara and Rudolph Kirk, "Howells and the Church of the Carpenter," New England Quarterly, XXXII (June 1959), 185-206. 9. In addition to the sources cited in n. 8 above, see Charles H. Kegel, "Ruskin's St. George in America," American Quarterly, IX (Winter 1957), 412-420; Beard, "Ruskin and the Babble of Tongues," New Republic, L X X X V I I (5 August 1936), 370-372.

APPENDIX 1. Martin Matheson, John Wiley and Sons, New York, to the author, 1 May 1959 and 14 May 1959. 2. Ruskin to the Editors, Crayon, I (2 May 1 8 5 5 ) , 283; "The American Trade in 'Ruskins.' An Interview at Mr. Wiley's, New York," Pall Mall Gazette, X L V I ( 2 1 December 1887), 1 : 2 ; Critic, XXXIII (October 1898), 224. 3. Because the American editions were pirated, with a few exceptions they were not listed by E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn in the bibliographies of the several volumes of the Library Edition of The

NOTES TO PAGES 2 6 2 - 2 6 3

307

Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols. (London, 1 9 0 3 - 1 9 1 2 ) , which is the source for information concerning English editions. Information and statistics on American editions of Ruskin's works which follow have been compiled from the following sources: Henry-Russell Hitchcock, American Architectural Books . . .to 1895 [4th rev. ed.] (Minneapolis, 1962), the best source within its given limits of subject and date; A Catalogue of Books Represented by Library of Congress Printed Cards Issued to July 31, 1942, 167 vols. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 19421946); Harvard College Library Catalogue. The listings in M. Ethel Jameson, A Bibliographical Contribution to the Study of John Ruskin (Cambridge, 1 9 0 1 ) , give additional information not found elsewhere, but they are so inaccurate and incomplete as to preclude their usability. 4. See above, Chapter III, n. 13. 5. Ruskin, Works, VIII, lv. 6. The list is printed in Pall Mall Gazette, XLVI, 2 : 1 . 7. The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and M. H. Halsey, 4 vols. (New York, 1952), I, 354. The entry is dated 6 June 1849; The Seven Lamps of Architecture was published in England on 10 May 1849. Cf. Diary, II, 128, entry for 24 August 1853; The Stones of Venice II was published in England on 28 July 1853. See also Catalogue of the Books, Manuscripts, Etc. of the Late George T. Strong, Esq (New York, 1878). 8. Ariadne Florentina, Deucalion, Mornings in Florence, St. Mark's Rest, The Laws of Fesole, and The Art of England. 9. For The Poetry of Architecture, see above, Chapter V, n. 23. An Inquiry into Some of the Conditions at Present Affecting the Study of Architecture in our Schools, originally published in Royal Institute of British Architects, Sessional Papers, XIX (1864-65), was published separately by Wiley in 1866 and reprinted several times thereafter. It was not published in book form in England until 1885 in On the Old Road. The Pleasures of England, which was not issued in volume form in England until 1898, was issued by Wiley and others in the late 1880's. 10. Pall Mall Gazette, XLVI, 2 : 1 .

INDEX

Abbot, Leonard D., 257-258 Abelard, Peter, 224 Academie des Beaux Arts, 150, 204, 206, 220n Adams, Brooks, 222 Adams, Henry: on course of empire, 134-135; and science, 158, 161; on R and Gothic, 209, 219; on art and morality, 222-225, 226, 229; compared to Norton, 241, 244; mentioned, 199 Addams, Jane, 259 Aesthetic thought defined, x Aestheticism: North American and, 46; Strong's fear of, 73, 93; Poe leads to, 83-84, 87; King's fear of, 172; James and, 211, 213, 215217, 231; Adams and, 222; Frederic on, 226-227; religious fears of, 227-231, 233, 236; and Norton and Howells, 248-250. See also Ruskin: "aesthetic" vs. "theoretic" faculty Agassiz, Louis: and Thoreau, 90; Humboldtian views of, 159-160; in America, 160-162, 171 Albany, N.Y., 113-114 Alexander, Francesca, 197 Alexander, J. W., 82 Alison, Archibald: associationism, 19, 54; as Cole's authority, 23; R's use of, 35-37, 39; and Downing, 48, 51; R leads Americans from, 154 Allston, Washington: Simms on, 4; American years, 5; Exhibition of 1839 reviewed, 16-18; Holmes on, 19-23, 46; Fuller on, 27, 28, 2930; mentioned, 151, 194 American Art-Union: growth, 3, 67; and cultural nationalism, 11; Bulletin on Seven Lamps, 66-67, 234; mentioned, 79, 109 American Institute of Architects, 6972, 199

American Museum, 271n36 American Review on Modern Painters I, 42 Andover Review on Christianity and aestheticism, 230 Angelico, Fra, 130, 137 Apollo Association, 3. See also American Art-Union Appleton's Journal: on Taine vs. R, 221; on Americans abroad, 227; Coan in, 258n Aquinas, Thomas, 224 Archeological Institute of America, 240, 242 Architectural Magazine, 50, 110 Architecture: American aesthetic criteria of, 8; vs. building, 8-9, 11-12, 65, 130, 200; problem of style in America, 57-59; cast iron in, 69-72; Jarves on American, 130, 145; New Path on, 149-151; science and, 162; R's role in development of American, 193, 199208, 296nI2. See also Downing; Functionalism; Gothic Revival; Greek Revival; Middle Ages; Norton, Charles Eliot; Pugin; Ruskin: Seven Lamps, Stones of Venice, Lectures on Architecture and Painting Aristotle, 39 Art. See Architecture; Painting; Sculpture Arundel Society, 110 Associationism: English sources, 19; R's indebtedness to, 34-37 passim, 39, 68; and American aesthetics, 35-36; of Downing, 51, 55, 56; as mediator between classic and romantic, 54-55; Crayon opposes, 112-113; New Path opposes, 153154; Marsh on R's misuse of, 164165; King and, 173; R rescues Americans from, 186

310

INDEX

Athens, Greece, 242 Atlantic Monthly: Stillman on Modern Painters in, 103-104, 122-123; idealism of Warner in, 115; publishes Jarves, 138; publishes King, 173, 183; James on Tyndall and R in, 182-183; Cabot's attack on R in, 187-189; James's art criticism in, 210, 211; on Taine, 220; on English response to art, 232-233; Howells on R in, 248; on R as art critic, 253; H. Scudder in, 258n Bacon, Francis, 167 Bain, Alexander, 123, 246 Baptist Quarterly Review on art and religion, 229-230 Barney and Chapman, architects, 207 Bascom, Rev. John, as aesthetician and teacher, 233-234, 239-240 Baudelaire, Charles, 85 Beard, Charles, 259-260 "Beatrice Cenci," 86, 112. See also Reni, Guido Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, 144, 218 Bellamy, Edward, 248, 258, 259 Bellows, Rev. Henry W., 11 Benjamin, Asher, 8 Bentham, Jeremy, 12, 41, 291n6 Berenson, Bernard, 239, 256-257 Biblical Repository and Princeton Review. See Princeton Review Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, 70 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Neal on American art in, 10, 127 Blair, Rev. Hugh, 19, 21n Bliss, Rev. W. D. P., 259 Bogardus, Thomas, 70 Boston, Mass., 5, 6, 19, 26, 30, 33, 43, 61, 63, 69, 132, 138, 184, 215, 228, 242, 259, 261 Boston Athenaeum, 2, 3, 138 Boston Magazine, 271n36 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 227 Boston Review: on nature worship, 96; on R, 96-97; on aesthetic religion, 228 Brewer, William, 170-172 Bridgewater Treatises, 38, 99, 158

British Foreign and Evangelical Review on art and morality, 231nI2 Britton, John, 64 Brooklyn, N.Y., 200 Brooklyn Daily Eagle and King's County Democrat, 42 Brown, Brownlee, 107, 118 Brown, Ford Madox, 112 Brown, J. G. B., 119 Brown, Rev. Samuel G., 67-68, 76 Brownell, William C., 198, 305nl Browning, Robert and Elizabeth, 128, 130 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 243-244 Brush, George J., 170 Bryant, William Cullen: and nationalist aesthetic, 15; and Wordsworthian impact, 104-105; mentioned, 24, 131, 184 Buckland, Rev. William E., 38, 154 Buffon, Comte de, 160 Bulteau, Abbé M. J., 222 Burges, William, 202 Burke, Edmund: as source in America, 19, 26; and Locke, 21n; R and, 37, 186; separation of aesthetic from moral, 54 Burroughs, John: on the observation of nature, 166; on Taine vs. R, 221 Bushnell, Rev. Horace, 96, 165n Butler, C. M., 228 Butterfield, William, 201 Byronism in America, 22, 35, 96, 97, 153, 180, 214 Cabot, James Eliot, 187-189 Cady, Berg, and See, architects, 207 California Geological Survey, 170, 172 Cambridge Camden Society, 62 Campbell, Gabriel, 239 Campbell, Rev. S. M., 228 Canova, Antonio, 6 Carlyle, Thomas, 147-148, 258, 260 Carpaccio, Vittore, 227 Carson, Pirie & Scott Department Store, xvi, 208 Casilear, John W., 3 Catholic Church: American antiCatholicism, 61, 63, 64-65, 80,

INDEX 127-130 passim; and religious art in America, 76-77, 138-139; and writing of art history by Americans, 135-144 passim; Adams on, 224-225; Frederic on, 226; L. G. Ware on, 229. See also Gothic Revival; Middle Ages Cellini, Benvenuto, 213 Century Association, 3, 234 Century Magazine, James on Venice in, 211-212 Chase, Salmon, 219 Chase, T., 79-80 Chateaubriand, François René, Vicomte de, 160 Chicago, Illinois, 208, 248, 256, 259 Christian Examiner: on American architecture and Seven Lamps, 69; on R's contribution to art literature, 97-98; on R and the study of nature, 163-165; on Sesame and Lilies, 289n1 Church, Frederic, 104, 105, 193 Church Review on religion and art, 228 Cimabue, 151, 208 Clark, Ronald: cited, 181-182 Clarke, T. C„ 69 Classical Revival. See Greek Revival Claude Lorrain: as norm, 15, 16, 21, 23, 24; Reynolds on, 21; R's response to, 33, 37, 43, 115; purchase by Neal, 126 Clemens, Samuel L. See Twain, Mark Coan, T. M., 306n6 Cole, Thomas: Bryant on, 15, 131; on Turner, 23-24, 27; Wordsworthian aesthetic, 24-27; Noble on, 24-32 passim; on lack of associations in America, 112-113; on course of empire, 134, 235; "The Architect's Dream," xiv; "The Course of Empire," xiv, 31; "The Cross and the World," 31; mentioned, 5, 131, 194 Coleridge, Samuel T., 28-29, 38, 238, 302nI6 Collingwood, W. G., 167 Colorado River, 178-181 Columbia University, 61, 259

3XI

Comte, Auguste, 127 Condit, Carl: cited, 72 Condorcet, M. J. A. N., Marquis de, 10, 134 Congregatiorwlist Quarterly on architecture and Christian principle, 76 Conwell, Rev. Russell, 233 Cook, Clarence, 73-74, 148-149, 202 Cooper, James Fenimore, 3 Copley, John Singleton, 4, 5, 9 Corcoran Gallery, 227 Cornhill Magazine, 147 Cosmopolitan, 258 Cosmopolitan Art Journal and aesthetics of sculpture, 111 Cousin, Victor, 82, 84, 118, 229 Cowper, William, 95 Cram, Ralph Adams, 193, 208-209 Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 116 Crayon: Ruskin to, 1, 32, 261; Durand's nationalist manifesto in, 14-15; architectural debates, 6971; significance as R's advocate, 101-103; analyzed, 101-123; and Pre-Raphaelitism, 102-103, 108, 112, 131; differences from R, 104105, 107-108, 110; founding of, 105-107; on interrelation of art, religion, and nature, 108-110; reprints R's works, 110-111; theory of perception, 117-120; turns against Ruskin, 120-123; attacks Jarves, 124-125, 130-131; mentioned, 81, 132, 221, 241 Critic on R's popularity, ix, 261 Croly, Herbert, 259 Crystal Palace, 7, 149, 199 Curtis, George William, 248 Cuvier, Georges, Baron, 162 Dalton, John, 158 Dana, James Dwight, 169, 170 Dana, Richard Henry, Sr., 55 Dante Alighieri, 88 Darley, Felix O. C., 3 Darwin, Charles: and aesthetic theory, 123; and Jarves, 145; Agassiz's opposition to, 161-162, 171; mentioned, 155, 222, 223 Davis, Alexander Jackson, 54 Day, Rev. Henry N., 186

312

INDEX

Democratic Review: on Trinity Church, 62n; on Modern Painters III, 88-90 Dexter, Franklin B.: attack on nature as aesthetic norm, 43-45; on art and faith, 45-46, 59, 161-162, 189, 244; compared to Downing, 48, 56 Dial (Boston): on Allston Exhibition, 17-18, 27, 28, 29-30; Emerson's "Thoughts on Art" in, 36; Ward on art and architecture in, 49 Dickens, Charles, ix Dix, Rev. Morgan, 75-76 Dod, Albert Baldwin, 82 Dod, Rev. William Armstrong, 81-84, 223 Dolce, Carlo, 151 Döllinger, Ignatius, 160 Domenichino, 4, 151 Donatello, 237 Downing, Andrew Jackson: Ruskin's impact on, 1, 50-56 passim; aesthetic development, 46-47, 54-56; and Gothic Revival, 47, 48, 51, 59; compared to Dexter, 48, 56; and British picturesque theorists, 48, 274n33; and functionalism, 4950, 54; and Reynolds, 51; and Alisonian associationism, 51, 55, 56; on domestic architecture, 5356 passim; on vernacular style, 5859; Cottage Residences, 47-51; Architecture of Country Houses, 49, 51-54; Landscape Gardening, 51, 55; mentioned, 64, 73 Droz, Gustave, 222 Duccio, 208 Dunlap, William: History of Design, 2, 10, 23 Durand, Asher B.: and nationalist aesthetic, 14, 15, 103, 104, 107; attack on picturesque, 112; on ideal vs. real, 114-115, 116, 194; "Sketch from Nature," xiv; mentioned, 3, 106, 131, 193 Durand, John, 106, 122, 220-221 Dürer, Albrecht, 78 Düsseldorf Gallery, New York, 3 Dutton, Clarence Edward, 179

Duyckinck, George and Evert, 75, 135 Dwight, Timothy, 21n Eastlake, Charles Lock, 199, 204205 Ecclesiology. See Episcopal Church Eclectic Magazine on Seven Lamps, 66 ficole des Beaux Arts, 150, 204, 206, 220n Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey on Alison in, 19 Edwards, Jonathan, 82 Eggleston, Edward, 220 Eidlitz, Leopold: on R, cast iron, and role of architect, 71-72, 199, 201, 203; aesthetic theory, 203, 204, 205-207; critique of R, 205207; mentioned, 193, 202 Eliot, T. S., 209 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: reads Modern Painters, 1, 42; and Greenough, 12-13; Holmes on, 16; and Wordsworth, 19; transcendental aesthetic, 26-30; attack on Unitarians, 28; on Gothic and nature, 36, 60-61; compared to R, 38; Princeton Calvinists' attack on, 82, 85; and Stillman, 119; and Carlyle, 148; Norton on, 244-245, 246, 247; "American Scholar," 17, 18; Nature, 18, 85, 184; "Divinity School Address," 30; "Thoughts on Art," 36; mentioned, 22, 45, 107, 166, 187, 226 Emmons, Samuel F., 177 Episcopal Church: and Noble, 24, 30-31; and Cole, 31; and ecclesiology, 61-63, 66, 74, 75-76, 149, 208; role in America of, 61, 74; and social reform, 259; mentioned, 228 Everett, Rev. Charles C., 89-90, 189190 Faraday, Michael, 158 Farrer, Thomas, 148-149 Fechner, Gustav T., 123 Flaubert, Gustave, 221 Flexner, James T.: cited, 3, 115

INDEX Florence, Italy, 4, 5, 128, 140, 142, 143, 144, 194, 197, 211, 212, 241, 243, 244 Forbes, Rev. John Murray, 63 Forum., 155n, 255n Fraser, Charles, 4 Frazer's Magazine, 147 Frederick, Harold: The Damnation of Theron Ware, 226-227, 230 Froude, James Anthony, 240 Fuller, Margaret: on collecting, 3; on Allston Exhibition, 16-18, 27, 28, 29-30, 119; and Emersonian ideals, 17-18; religious objections to, 96 Functionalism: and Sullivan, xvi, 208; and Greenough, 12-13, 40-41, 50, 54, 92; as American aesthetic norm, 12-14; in R's idea of Gothic, 40-41, 68, 69, 149-150, 199-200, 203; and Downing, 4950, 54; and technology, 70-72, 162; and Viollet-le-Duc, 150, 203204, 205; and Eidlitz, 205-207. See also Architecture Fuseli, Henry, 84 Gaddi, Taddeo, 139 Gainsborough, Thomas, 151 Galaxy on American architecture, 202 Gardner, Albert Ten Eyck: cited, 196 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 227 Gaskell, Charles Milnes, 209 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 251 Geddes, Patrick, 259 Gentile da Fabriano, 139 George, Henry, 258 George Washington University, 240 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 237 Gibbs, Willard, 155 Gilbert, Katharine: cited, 39 Gilpin, Rev. William, 24, 91, 112 Giotto, 137, 139, 144, 151 Gladden, Washington: aesthetic views, 230-232; social thought, 259; mentioned, 234, 244 Godkin, Edwin L., 248 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 60, 88-89, 118

313

Gonse, Louis, 239 Gothic Revival in America: architectural examples, xiv-xvi, 200-202; sources, 8, 36, 59-64; associationism and, 36; Downing and, 47, 48, 51, 59; Pugin and, 64-66, 202, 203, 204, 229; and modern technology, 69-72, 162; success, 72-77, 201-202; significance of R's Gothicism in America, 73-74, 76; Sturgis and, 149-151; and western scenery, 173; Cabot's attack on, 187; R's impact on buildings of, 199-200, 204-205; and Viollet-leDuc, 203-207 passim; Wright and, 208; Henry Adams and, 222-225. See also Architecture; Catholic Church; Episcopal Church; Middle Ages; Renaissance; Ruskin: Seven Lamps, Stones of Venice Goupil, Vibert, and Company, New York, 3 Grand Canyon, 178-181 Gray, Asa, 155, 166 Greek art, 137, 226, 230, 236, 237, 240, 242, 250 Greek Revival in America: as national idiom, 8; and associationism, 35-36; opposition to, 47, 48, 49, 58, 68. See also Architecture Greenough, Henry: attack on R, 193194, 218, 225 Greenough, Horatio: in Italy, 6; statute of Washington, 7; his functionalism compared to R, 12-13, 40-41; compared to Downing and Thoreau, 50, 54, 92 Gronlund, Laurence, 248, 258 Guido Reni. See Reni, Guido Guyot, Arnold, 165 Hale, Edward Everett, 155, 259 Hall, Basil, 10 Hamerton, Philip G., 210 Harper's Monthly: Waldstein on R's influence in, 167-168, 194-195; Howells on art in, 249 Harper's Weekly, article and portrait of R, xv Harris, Neil, xii Harris, William Torrey, 190-192

314

INDEX

Hartley, David, 35 Harvard University: architecture of, 70, 201-203, 241; science at, 161162, 166, 169; mentioned, 90, 105, 232 Haven, Rev. Gilbert, 95-96, 130, 161, 165, 238-239, 301n9 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: and R, 1, 152; aesthetic conflict, 28, 85-86, 97; and "Beatrice Cenci," 112; James on, 192, 212; "The Artist of the Beautiful," 28 Hay, John, 177 Haymarket affair, 248 Hegel, Georg W. F.: early praise of, 89-90; and Crayon, 121; Cabot's debt to, 187-190 passim; Everett's debt to, 189-190; Journal of Speculative Philosophy and, 190192; compared with R's aesthetic, 190, 191-192; mentioned, 123, 217, 238, 245, 302nl6 Herbert, Edward, Baron of Cherbury, 94 Hill, John W., 103, 196 Hingham, Mass., 247 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, vii Hodge, Rev. Charles, 82 Hodge, Rev. D. M., 228 Holaens Dollar Magazine on Seven Lamps, 66 Holmes, Oliver Wendell: on Allston Exhibition, 16, 18, 19-23, 24, 46; religious objections to, 95, 96-97 Holmes, William Henry, 180 Holt, Henry, 221 Homer, 88 Homer, Winslow, 151, 196 Hooker, Richard, 94 Hoppin, Augustus, 234 Hoppin, Rev. James Mason: on Americans abroad, 227-228; early years, 234-235; aesthetic views, and R, 234-239; on art education, 235-236, 240, 242; mentioned, 244, 248, 250, 256 Hoppin, Thomas Frederick, 234 Hoppin, William James, on Seven Lamps, 67, 234 Horticulturist, Downing in, 58 Hotchkiss, Thomas, 193

Howells, William Dean: realism vs. idealism, 115-116, 184, 225, 249; and Norton, 115-116, 248-250; on King, 177; and James, 210; early debt to R, 219-220, 221, 222, 227; on painting, 232-233; social thought, 248-250, 252, 259, 305n4; on Savonarola, 288n5I Hubbard, Elbert, x Humboldt, Alexander von, 159-166 passim Hume, David, 122n Hunt, Richard Morris, 70-71, 203 Hunt, William Holman, 112, 125 Hunt, William Morris, 196 Huxley, Thomas H., 162 Huysmans, Joris Karl, 222 Illustrated Magazine of Art (New York): on American art, 78; on Pre-Raphaelitism, 79-80, 81; and Crayon, 102 Independent on R as revolutionary, 257-258 Inness, George, 152-153, 194 International Monthly Magazine on R, art, and truth, 256 Irving, Washington, 3, 55 Jacobi, Friedrich H., 26 James, Henry: early exposure to art, 131, 196, 209; on Tyndall vs. R, 182-183; on Hawthorne's innocence, 184, 212-213, 244; organic aesthetic, 192-193, 209; on RWhistler suit, 198, 217; on R, 210-217 passim; aesthetic development, 209-217, 220, 221, 222; and Norton, 210, 241, 253-254; his realism attacked, 231; "The Madonna of the Future," 192-193, 213; Roderick Hudson, 213-214; The American, 214-217, 218, 227, 244, 248; mentioned, 152, 223, 225, 232, 257 James, William, 193, 196 Jameson, Anna B. M., 76, 142 Jarves, James Jackson: Crayon attacks on, 105, 124-125, 130-131; debt to R, 124-146 passim; religious views, 127-130, 142, 244;

INDEX and Norton, 128-143 passim, 241, 244; first exposure to art, 131-133; on medieval painting, 131, 137138; differences from R, 133-135, 141-142, 145; on purpose of art history, 135-137; painting collection, 138-140, 234, 241; on American promise, 141-142, 145-146; on course of empire, 144, 234, 235; on Renaissance, 150-151, 256; praise of Inness, 152-153; Art-Hints, 124-125, 130-131; Art Studies, 131, 138, 146; The ArtIdea, 144-145; Art Thoughts, 145; mentioned, 76, 81 Jefferson, Thomas, 6-7, 8, 35, 58, 159 Jeffrey, Francis, 19, 186 Johnson, Eastman, 151 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Hegelian aesthetic of, 190-192 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 19, 240 Kant, Immanuel, 19, 26, 122n Keble, Rev. John, 62 Kensett, John, 103 Kimball, Francis, 207 King, Clarence: early training, 161, 169-170, 171; as geologist, 170179 passim; conflict between science and nature worship, 172177, 183-184; and R, 174, 177; and Adams, 222; Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, 173-184 passim Klopstock, Friedrich G., 118 Knickerbocker Magazine: on Modem Painters I, 42, 126; on Seven Lamps, 66; mentioned, 19 Kropotkin, Prince Peter, 258 Labrouste, Henri, 70, 71 Ladd, Henry: cited, 38, 53 LaFarge, John, 193, 195-196, 256 Langley, Batty, 59 LaTouche, Rose, 225 Laugel, Auguste, 210 Leonardo da Vinci, 140 Lessing, Gotthold, 111, 118 Lindsay, Alexander William Crawford, Lord, 76, 124 Literary World: on The Stones of

315

Venice, ix-x, 80-81, 135; on Modern Painters I, 42; attack on ecclesiologists, 63; on Seven Lamps, 64n, 66; on Pre-Raphaelitism, 279n3; mentioned, 19 Locke, John: as source in America, 19-22; epistemology of, 35, 52, 55, 119, 181; and R, 37, 44, 55; American defense of, 44-45, 82, 85; mentioned, 134, 248 London, Jack, 259 London, England, 5, 23, 36, 105, 149, 196, 199, 241, 259 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 83, 95, 105n, 130 Longinus: On the Sublime, 60 Lorrain, Claude. See Claude Lorrain Loudon, John Claudius: publishes R, 34, 36, 110; and Downing, 48, 50, 51; waning appeal, 112 Louvre, 131, 209, 214 Lowell, James Russell, 95, 105, 138 Luini, Bernardino, 215, 216, 217, 244 Lutheran Church, 229 Lyell, Sir Charles, 179 Lyman, Professor, 170 McCosh, Rev. James, 239 McKim, Mead, and White, architects, 256 McVickar, Rev. Dr. John, 94 Magoun, Rev. George F., 76 Mâle, Emile, 222 Mantegna, Andrea, 213 Marsh, George Perkins: on R, science, and religion, 162-165 Marshall, Henry Rutgers, x, 256 Marx, Leo: cited, 108 Massachusetts Quarterly Review: on Modem Painters I, 42-43; on Seven Lamps, 69, 74, 107 Massacio, 237 Mayr, Ernst: cited, 162 Medici family, 140, 143, 146, 237 Melville, Herman: on country vs. city, 107; and "Beatrice Cenci," 112; Moby-Dick and epistemology, 19, 22, 45, 86, 97, 119, 120; Pierre, 86-87

3I6

INDEX

Methodist Quarterly Review, essay on R, 95-96 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 227 Michelangelo, 132, 137-138, 140, 143-144, 191, 213 Middle Ages: appeal of its painting to Americans, 74-75, 76, 77, 151; Jarves on art of, 131, 137-144 passim; Norton on churchbuilding in, 140, 141-142, 241-247 passim; democratic character of, 142-144; Hegelians on art of, 188189; late 19th century study of, 239. See also Gothic Revival Mill, James, 12, 41, 291nff Mill, John Stuart, 169, 222, 245-246 Miller, Lillian B., xii Millet, Frangois, 251 Minnesota, University of, 239 Montalembert, Charles F., Comte de, 76, 136 Montegut, Emile, 211 Montgomery, Alexander, 78 Moore, Charles Herbert, 103, 149, 195, 239, 253 Moore, Thomas, 96 Moran, Thomas: as artist, 180, 196, 198; "Cliffs of Green River," xv Morris, William, 205, 249, 259 Morse, Samuel F. B., 194 Motley, John Lothrop, 6 Mould, C. Wray, 202 Muir, John, 166, 179 Mumford, Lewis, 259 Munich, Germany, 160 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 132 Nation: Stillman's attack on R in, 152, 167; on Proserpina, 166; James's criticism in, 198, 210-211, 212; on architectural reform, 202203; on R's economics, 306n6 National Academy of Design, xiv-xv, 2, 114, 148, 200-201 National Magazine on Christian art, 76, 89 Neal, John, 10, 126-127, 135-136 Neander, August, 234 New Englander and, Yale Review: on Seven Lamps, 68; on Lectures on Art, 186; on Taine, 221n; on art

and education, 227-228; on principles of art, 235-236 New Path: discussed, 148-155; King and, 169-170; mentioned, 157, 193 New Republic, Beard on R in, 259 New York City, 2, 3, 6, 33, 58, 61, 73, 75, 78, 104, 130, 148, 150, 151, 200, 203, 204, 217, 222, 227, 234, 237, 242, 259, 261 New-York Ecclesiological Society, 62, 63, 75. See also Episcopal Church New-York Ecclesiologist on church architecture and R, 62-63, 66, 74, 75 New York Quarterly on architecture and R, 73 New York Times on nature painting, 114 New York Tribune, Cook's art criticism in, 148 Newman, Henry R., 196-197 Newman, John Henry Cardinal, 38, 62, 63 Newport, Rhode Island, 196 Noble, Rev. Louis L.: biography of Cole, 24-32 passim; R and, 32 North American Review: on Allston Exhibition, 16, 19-22 passim; on Modern Painters I, 43-46, 56; attacks on transcendentalism, 44-46 passim; on Seven Lamps, 67-68; on Pre-Raphaelitism, 79-80; on Modern Painters III, 89-90; on Elements of Drawing, 90; "Natural Theology of Art" in, 99, 165; on Jarves, 126; on ornament in art and nature, 186-187; on Hamerton, 210 Norton, Rev. Andrews, 30, 105, 129, 130, 244, 247 Norton, Charles Eliot: and R, 105, 128, 147-148, 210, 240-253 passim; and Crayon, 105-106, 132, 241; early national optimism, 110, 141-142, 148; and Howells, 115116, 248-250; moral aesthetic, 115, 116, 231, 243-248, 249-254; religious views, 128-130, 244-248; and Jarves, 128-143 passim, 241,

INDEX 244; on Americans abroad, 132; on mediaeval church-building, 140-142, 241-247 passim; on modem architecture, 162, 201; James and, 210, 241, 253-254; as teacher, 242, 243, 244, 247, 253-254, 257; edits R's works, 242, 251-253, 262; Notes on Travel and Study in Italy, 105-106, 140, 142, 242-243, 247; Historical Studies of ChurchBuilding in the Middle Ages, 242244, 247 Oleen, Lorenz, 160 Old and New on art and early church, 229 Organicism, 28-30, 192-193. See also Functionalism Orvieto, Cathedral of, 140, 141-142, 242 Osgood, Rev. Samuel, 79, 109 Outlook on R, 255 Overbeck, Friedrich, 125 Oxford Ecclesiological Society, 62 Oxford Movement, 38, 61-62, 79. See also Episcopal Church Oxford Museum, 201 Painting: exhibitions in America, 2, 3, 9, 16-20 passim, 113-114, 148; collections in America, 3, 227; Americans abroad on European, 4, 23, 29, 32, 76, 98, 116, 131-133, 218-219, 227-228, 233; development in America, 5-6, 10, 32, 78-79, 103, 108; response of Americans to mediaeval, 74, 7577, 138-139; Melville on, 86-87; Crayon on superiority of American landscape, 111-115 passim; New Path on, 151-154 passim; King on, 173-174; Powell on, 178-179; James's fictional view of, 192-193, 213-214; R's role in the development of American, 193-199; James on criticism of, 209-213 passim; Norton on, 250-251; Berenson on, 256-257; study of influence in, 296nJ2. See also Jarves; PreRaphaelitism; Ruskin

317

Paley, Rev. William, impact in America, 99, 158-159, 165-171 passim Paris, France, 131, 209, 214, 227 Parker, Rev. H. W., 99, 147, 165, 186-187 Parker, Rev. Theodore, 28, 95 Parrington, Vemon Louis, 260 Parthenon, 242 Pater, Walter, 226 Pathetic fallacy, 87-88, 93, 116, 120, 154, 175, 176 Pattison, T. Harwood, 229-230 Paxton, Joseph, 149 Peabody, Andrew P., 90 Peabody, R. S., 204, 206 Peale, Charles Willson, 2 Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 232-233 Perkins, Charles Callahan, 111 Perry, Thomas Sargent, 196 Philadelphia, Pa., 2, 6, 9 Picturesque: English theorists of, 19, 24, 36, 54-55; Downing and, 48, 50, 55; and Thoreau, 91; R and its waning appeal in America, 112, 154, 199, 200 Picturesque America, xv Pirrsson, John W., 75n Plato, 94, 238 Poe, Edgar Allan, 83-86 passim, 97, 119 Poussin, Gaspard, 23 Poussin, Nicolas, 15, 22, 33, 37 Powell, John Wesley: Exploration of the Colorado, 178-181 Powers, Hiram, 7, 78, 111, 194; "The Greek Slave," 7, 111 Pre-Raphaelitism: R on, 79-80, 90; and Crayon, 102-103, 112; Jarves on, 124-125; and New Path, 149, 153; and American painters, 195 Price, Uvedale, 24, 36, 48, 112, 199 Princeton Review, Biblical Repository and: on Stones of Venice, 80; on Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 81-84, 118 Princeton University, 233, 239, 240. See also Princeton Review Progressivism, viii, 258-260 Pugin, A. W. N., 64-66, 202, 203, 204, 229 Pusey, Rev. Edward B., 38, 62

3I8

INDEX

Putnam's Monthly Magazine: on R's domination in America, 1-2, 101; on Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 81; on Modern Painters III, 88-90, 101 Quarterly Journal of Economics on R, 258 Quarterly Review of the Evangelical Lutheran Church on art and worship, 229 Raphael Sanzio, 137, 140, 151, 191, 213 Rauschenbusch, Rev. Walter, 259 Raymond, Rev. George L., 240, 256 Reid, Thomas, 19 Renaissance: and American origins, 58; and sublime, 60; Stones of Venice on corruption of, 65, 141, 147, 154-155; as period of decline and downfall of art, 131, 137,141143, 146, 205, 218, 243-244, 247; revival as architectural style, 150151, 256; late 19th-century American praise of, 187, 236-237, 256-257; James's fictional treatment in Luini, 215-217. See also Gothic Revival Reni, Guido: Simms on, 4; "Beatrice Cenci," 86, 112; American worship of, 140 Repton, Humphry, 48 Reynolds, Sir Joshua: as critical guide in America, 16, 20, 21-22, 24, 26, 43-46 passim, 51, 193-194, 275n43; and premise of general nature, 20-22, 115; and R, 33, 35, 87, 115, 124, 244 Richards, William Trost, 196 Rio, Alexis François, 76, 124 Rome, Italy, 5, 132, 134, 137, 145, 240 Rood, Ogden N., 123 Rosa, Salvator, 15, 23, 24, 37, 132, 151 Rosenberg, John D.: cited, 132-133 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 102, 238 Rossetti, William Michael, 103 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 160 Ruskin, John: social thought, viii, 89,

197, 223, 224, 248, 257-260 passim; reception in America, viii-ix, 32-33, 41, 296n 12; portrait of, xv; on his American audience, 1, 32, 261; reception in England, 1, 181182, 225; appearance in America, 9, 18, 19, 23, 264; "truth to nature," 31, 38, 42, 43, 49, 82, 8788, 89, 113, 171, 181, 184-185, 190, 194-195, 214; early intellectual development, 33-41,56; on the imagination, 34, 88, 113; religious background, 37-39, 74-75, 127, 129; on dependence of art upon morality, 38-41 passim, 74, 191; "aesthetic" vs. "theoretic" faculty, 39-40, 91, 109-110, 119, 197-198; Typical Beauty, 40, 53, 118, 119, 171, 181, 195; Vital Beauty, 40-41, 53, 117, 181, 195; "The Nature of Gothic," 66, 135, 141, 197, 200201, 205, 223, 243, 247, 248; weaknesses of his architectural theory, 80-81, 199-200; on science, 88, 154-155,167,170, 181; American anthologies of, 94, 225-226, 259; compared to influence of PreRaphaelites in America, 102-103; weakness as critic of sculpture, 111; illness, l l l n , 197, 225, 241, 242; on greatness in art, 113, 180181, 190; as literary stylist, 126, 143, 174, 176, 225-226; Civil War attitudes, 147-148; as guide for painters, 195; publication in America, 226, 242, 251-253, 261-263; sketches exhibited in America, 237, 242, 247; American obituaries of, 255-258. See also Norton; Pathetic fallacy; Wiley —"The Poetry of Architecture," 3437, 65, 110; Modern Painters I, 37-38, 41-46, 67; Modern Painters II, 39-46, 67, 95; The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 63-69,107, 199, 247; The Stones of Venice, 65-66, 80-81, 110-111, 133-134, 135, 145, 150-151, 154-155, 167, 199; Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, 79; Pre-Raphaelitism, 79-80, 90; Lectures on Architec-

INDEX ture and Painting, 81-84, 290n6; Modem Painters III, 82, 87-90; Elements of Drawing, 90; Modern Painters TV, 98, 122-123, 170, 181; Giotto and His Works at Padua, 110; "Education in Art," 110; Aratra Pentelici, 111; Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris, 147, 257; The Crown of Wild Olive, 147, 252, 257; Proserpina, Studies of Wayside Flowers, 166; Lectures on Art, 186, 252; Sesame and Lilies, 226, 289ni; Time and Tide, 248; Fors Clavigera, 197, 259, 306n6 Ruskin, John James, 33 Ruskin Co-operative Association, 259 Ruskin Hall, Oxford, 259 St. Luke's, Smithfield, Va., 58 St. Petersburg, Russia, 227 San Francisco, Cai., 259 Sano di Pietro, 137 Santayana, George, x, 245, 256 Sassetta, 139 Savonarola, Girolamo, 143-144, 230 Schiller, Friedrich, 118, 121-122, 127, 235 Schlegel, August and Friedrich, 60, 61, 76, 118 Schlesinger Mayer Department Store, xvi, 208 Schliemann, Heinrich, 240 School for Classical Studies, Athens, 242 Schuyler, Montgomery, 12, 207-208 Scott, Gilbert, 290n6 Scott, Sir Walter, ix, 60, 88, 89 Scottish Realism, impact in America, 19, 44, 82, 169, 240 Scribner's Monthly Magazine: on Whistler, 198; on R, 305nl Scudder, Horace, 306n6 Scudder, Vida, 259, 260 Sculpture: American aesthetic criteria of, 6-8, 10, 11-12; collections, 6, 227; journals on, 111; Hoppin on, 237-238; Norton on, 250 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: "Beatrice Cenci," 112 Siena, Italy, 241, 243, 245

319

Signorelli, Luca, 239 Silliman, Benjamin, 159 Simms, William Gilmore, 4 Sketch Club, New York, 3 Smibert, John, 4 Smillie, James, 3 Smith, E. Vale, 108 Smith, Goldwin, 304n36 Smith College, 240 Society of Christian Socialists, 259 Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art. See New Path Southern Literary Messenger on Stones of Venice, 80 Southern Quarterly Review: on Allston, 4n; on R's architectural books, 68 Spencer, Herbert, 123 Steegmuller, Francis: cited, 125 Steffens, Lincoln, 227 Stegner, Wallace: cited, 178, 179 Stephen, Leslie, 304n36 Stewart, Dugald, 19, 116, 169 Stillman, William James: early enthusiasm for R, 1, 102, 103-104, 110, 193; founds Crayon, 102, 105107; theory of perception, 117119; on Modern Painters, 122-123; attacks Jarves, 124-125, 130-131; criticizes R, 152, 167; R's effect on his painting career, 195-196. See also Crayon Stimson, F. J., 258 Story, William Wetmore: "Cleopatra," 7 Street, George, 201, 202 Strobel, Rev. W., 229 Strong, George Templeton, 61-62, 73, 93-94, 99 Sturgis, Russell: and New Path, 149151,193; architecture of, 200, 201, 241; catalogues Jarves Collection, 234 Sublime: Cole on, 23; Melville and, 45; Downing and, 55; role of, 60; "technological," 108; Crayon on, 114; and western explorers, 174, 178-182 passim; mentioned, 229. See also Burke Sullivan, Louis, xvi, 193, 207-208 Sully, Thomas, 123

320

INDEX

Swinburne, Algernon, 222 Symonds, John Addington, 305n4 Taine, Hippolyte: J. Durand and, 106, 220-221; James on, 210, 220, 221; compared to R by Howells, 220; impact in America, 220-223; Gladdens attack on, 231; mentioned, 238 Taylor, Jeremy, 94 Tennyson, Alfred Lord: Maud, 114 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 99 Thoreau, Henry David: and R, 9093, 94; mentioned, 54, 107, 184 Thorwaldsen, Bertel, 6 Tieck, Ludwig, 118 Tiffany, Rev. Francis, 229 Tintoretto, 98, 152 Titian, 126, 130, 250 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 10, 11 Tolstoi, Leo, 248, 249, 258, 261 Torrey, Rev. Joseph, 233 Townsend, Francis, vii Toynbee Hall, London, 259 Transcendentalism: aesthetic of, 2630; attack on, 44, 46, 82-84; mentioned, 93, 117, 189, 205. See also Dial, Emerson, Fuller, Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Thoreau Trinity Church, New York, 62, 75, 203, 234 Trollope, Frances, 10 Trumbull, John, 4, 5 Turin, Italy, 129 Turner, Joseph M. W.: R's defense of, 1, 37-38, 43, 198, 262; unfamiliarity of Americans with, 2, 23, 42, 91; Holmes on, 20-23 passim; Cole on, 23-24, 27; Durand on, 115; Jarves on, 124-125; Hawthorne and, 152; King on, 173, 174; and Moran, 180, 196; Americans disappointment in, 235; mentioned, 98, 181 Turner Gallery, 23 Tuthill, Louisa C., 94 Twain, Mark: on art and morality, 217-218, 227; mentioned, 184, 247, 261 Tyler, Royall, 9-10 Tyndall, John: King and, 169, 170,

176; on science and imagination, 182-183; James on, 210 Unitarianism: transcendental attack on, 28, 30, 44, 46; and Gothic, 63; and C. E. Norton, 129, 130, 143, 244; James's fictional version of, 215-217. See also Christian Examiner; Norton, Andrews; Ware, Loammi G. U. S. Geological Survey, 170, 172, 178 United States Democratic Review. See Democratic Review United States Magazine, and Democratic Review. See Democratic Review Universalist Quarterly on R, 228 Upjohn, Richard, 63 Utilitarianism: American response to, 12, 291n6; R's hatred of, 41; Norton and C. Wright on, 245-246 Van Brunt, Henry: on R and cast iron in architecture, 69-71, 199, 201, 203; and Memorial Hall, Harvard, 201-203, 241; on Viollet-leDuc and Eidlitz, 203-204, 205; and Norton, 243 Vasari, Giorgio, 142 Vassar College, 240 Vaux, Calvert, 54, 193, 202 Veblen, Thorstein, 70 Vedder, Elihu, 193, 195-196 Venice, Italy, 65, 132, 133, 135, 140, 141, 144, 145, 147, 195, 211, 212, 218, 219, 227, 241, 243, 257. See also Ruskin: Stones of Venice Vermont, University of, 229, 233 Vernet, Horace, 113 Veronese, Paolo, 130, 151 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel: New Path lauds, 150; and American architecture, 203-205, 207; as authority on Gothic, 223, 239, 253; and Taine, 300n63 Volney, Constantine F., Comte de, 134 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 76

INDEX Waldstein, Charles, 167-168, 194195 Wallace, Horace Binney, 126-127, 139 Walpole, Horace, 59 Ward, Samuel G., 49 Ware, Rev. Loammi G., 98, 156, 228-229, 232, 244 Ware, William R., 70, 201, 203, 241 Warner, Charles Dudley, 115 Washington, George, 6-7 Washington, University of (Seattle), 260 Washington University (St. Louis), 240 Wayland, Rev. Francis, 159n Wayland, Julius, 259 Weir, John F., 221 Weiss, John T., 285n5J Wellesley College, 240 Wells, H. G., 209 West, Benjamin, 5, 9 Whewell, Rev. William, 169 Whistler, James A. M.: American response to his suit against R, xvxvi, 197-199; mentioned, 217, 226, 232, 242, 249 White, Andrew D., 107 Whitman, Walt, 42, 114, 255 Whitney, Josiah, 172

32I

Wight, Peter B.: architecture, xiv-xv, 200-201, 234; and New Path, 149, 193; later views of R, 205 Wilde, Oscar, 230, 250 Wiley, John, and Co.: publishes R, 1, 41-42, 79, 81, 87, 90, 94, 261263, 277nI3 Williams College, 234, 240 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 106, 136 Winsor, Justin, 116-117 Woods, Robert, 259 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 299n49 Wordsworth, William: American and English impact contrasted, 14-15, 19, 104-105, 107-108; Cole's indebtedness to, 24-27; R's reliance on, 37-38, 41, 122; mentioned, 35, 48, 95, 164 Wright, Chauncey, 245-246, 250, 251 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 193, 207-208 Yale University: influence of R on architecture at, xv, 199; and Jarves Collection, 138; curriculum, 166, 169, 170, 171; School of Art, 221, 227, 234-237 passim, 242 Young, Thomas, 158 Zola, Emile, 238, 261