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The present paper is a study of John Ruskin's essay An Idealist's Arraignment of the Age. In this essay Ruskin distinguishes between machine and man. With the advent of the machines man has become happier. However, there is a degeneration in human values in the modern times.Ruskin was an ardent critic of the modern civilization and a great lover of the Medieval Ages. In most of his works, he draws examples from the Medieval Ages or from the Biblical texts. He professed the values of the Medieval times by bringing in evidence of the beauty prevailing in those times and comparing them with the ugliness of the modern civilization for he did not believe in uttering the facts without illustrations.

This paper brings out the details in John Ruskin’s An Idealist’s Arraignment of the Age.

John Ruskin was born on February 8,1819, at London, in England and died on January 20,1900, Coniston, Lancashire. He was an English writer, critic, and artist who championed the Gothic Revival movement in architecture and had a large influence upon public taste in art in Victorian England. John Ruskin had been a follower of William Wordsworth as far as his love for Nature was concerned. He underlined the importance of the Gothic art which later on took the shape of Pre-Raphaelite Movement in Literature. His major works include Seven Lamps of Architecture, Stones of Venice (in three volumes 1851-53), Modern Painters published in five volumes between 1843 and 1860, Unto This Last (1860-62),Munera Pulveris (1862-72), Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Crown of Olives (1866), and a collection of letters Fors Clavigera (1871-84). The present letter An Idealist’s Arraignment of the Ageis the V one in Fors Clavigera.

Literature has, down the ages, been invariably defined as a mirror of society to society. A creative artist is required to portray life as it is. In An Idealist’s Arraignment of the Age, Ruskin not only plays the role of a creative artist by giving us a glimpse into the society he lived in times to come. Ruskin himself is of the opinion that the purpose of art also holds the position of a Vates[i], a visionary who foresees the kind of society that he knew would exist in times to come. Ruskin himself is of the opinion that that the purpose of art is the one depicted in ‘the early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto’ which bore ‘the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants’. It is noteworthy that the article on Ruskin by E. D. Mackerness, contributed to The Pelican Guide to English Literature (from Dickens to Hardy), was named as The voice of Prophecy. To put it in simple words, he also believes that Ruskin was a visionary and all his works including The Idealist’s Arraignment of the Age are of universal relevance. The degeneration of values in the modern age bears testimony to whatever Ruskin had in mind at the time of its conception.

Ruskin has made use of various literary devices to make his point of view lucid and effective. It is noteworthy that Ruskin chose the epithets ‘Idealist’ and ‘Arraignment’ to provide a suitable title to this literary piece. If one were to look for, one would discover innumerable words that may have been used instead. Ruskin’s objective would have been not only to criticize the temper of the age but also to provide the people with an opportunity to have their say with regard to the iniquity they are held guilty of. He does not yield to the declarations that the advent of machines has made man happier–. . . ‘or bring me –for I am not convincible by any kind of evidence– bring me the testimony of an English family or two their increased felicity?’ He doubts if any such proof can be brought in:

‘Or if you cannot do so much as that, can you convince even themselves of it? They are perhaps happy, if only they knew how happy they were . . . at present your steam propelled rustics are crying that they are anything else than happy’.

It would not be erroneous to remark that the title itself gives us a glimpse into the content of the essay. It is, to a large extent, summation of the reflections he presents later, addressing the entire mankind. ‘What grieves him the most is that the ‘verse’ with which letter opens may never be understood by men not because they are incapable but because they ‘would not desire to understand it.’

David Daiches, in his A Critical History of English Literature (vol.IV) states, ‘Ruskin’s fight against laisser faire and against the dominance of the machine over the individual was also a fight against ugliness. He was the first English writer to express over and over again his horrors at what industrialization had done to the face of England and to the living condition of men and women,’

Ruskin was an ardent critic of the modern civilization and a great lover of the Medieval Ages. In most of his works, he draws examples from the Medieval Ages or from the Biblical texts. He professed the values of the Medieval times by bringing in evidence of the beauty prevailing in those times and comparing them with the ugliness of the modern civilization for he did not believe in uttering the facts without illustrations. Ruskin wanted man to realizethat he was working towards self-annihilation which he could prevent only by accepting the fact that ‘there is no lovely thing ever yet done by man that you care for or can understand’ and by not repeating the folly again. He believed that the tendency of man is to ‘instinctively prefer the bad, and do more of it . . . instinctively hate the good and destroy it’, which must be overcome.

Man himself has been the cause of the destruction of Mother Nature which suckles in man and his desire to the extent of eliminating God.

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

Ruskin points out that the modern civilization has been aiming at quantity instead of quality. The so-called modern man not only continues manufacturing (with the help of machines he has been boasting of) but also claims that ‘it is over-production which is the cause of distress’. He observes that ‘it seems to be appointed function of the nineteenth century to exhibit in all things the elect pattern of perfect folly’. He was appreciation of the absurd ‘miscreations’, which by some whims of their own, they had assigned the highest pedestal. It is, however, not that the artists who created these have not been acquainted with the Florentine, Byzantine and Gothic works, but it seemed that they ‘misunderstood all they saw, and misapplied everything they did’. Lest someone contradict him, he produces evidences, from the contemporary life; of the ‘perfect folly’, that man has been busy exhibiting unconsciously moving towards absurdism:

It was several times chanced to me, since I began these papers, to have the exact thing shown or brought to me that I wanted for illustration, just in time, and it happened that, on the very day on which I published my last letter, I  had to go to the Kensington Museum, and  there I saw the most perfectly and roundly ill-done thing which, as yet, in my whole life, I ever saw produced by art.It had a tablet in front of it, bearing this inscription:

Statue in black and white marble, a Newfoundland Dog standing on a Serpent, which rests on a marble cushion, the pedestal.ornamented with pletro daro fruits in relief English Present Century No. 1.

Of the several other changes that Ruskin levels against science, one is that modern science dulls one’s appreciation of the natural beauty. Once a man is introduced into savoir mourir and its theories, he invariably starts looking for scientific evidences in Nature’s creations. Undoubtedly, Ruskin prefers the natural science of which the fruits are to make this world a happy place to live in and discards the modern science, of which the purpose is to bring about such awareness, which would, not in the least, affect our lives in any positive manner. He says:

And all true science—which my Savoyard guide rightly scorned me when he thought I had not—all true science is suvoir mearty. And of its very discoveries such as they are, it cannot make use.

Modern Science ‘disregards the life and passion of the creature, which were the essence ‘. For a botanist there may be no flowers—only leaves and fruits and roots—however, if one were to observe carefully one would know that ‘in the thought of Nature itself there is in a plant nothing else but its flowers’. He disapproves of that knowledge which may beguile a man into believing that there is‘no such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, no such thing as a God, but only a series of forces’.

Man cherishes the false notion of living a better, happier, and more prosperous life than his ancestors just because he has never known what it is   to live without the accessories bequeathed to him by ‘savoir mourir’. He believes of the innovations of modern science. It is ‘the road not taken, which would have made all the difference’. The modern man depends on these ‘iron goblins’ in much the same way as a handicap depends on his srutches. Ruskin makes it very clear that Man has achieved nothing but idleness:

I repeat, the power of your machine is only in enabling than to the idle. It will not enable them to live better than they did before, nor to live in greater numbers. Get your heads quite clear on this matter .Out of so much ground only so much living is to be got, with or without machinery. You may set a million of steam-plough to work on an acre, if you like......out of that acre only a  given numbers of  grains of corn will grow, scratch or scorch it as you will. So that the question is not at all whether, by having more machines, more of you can live. No machines will increase the possibilities of life. They only increases the possibilities of idleness.

This is not all. Ruskin further elaborates on the futility of machines as they have reduced man to a wretched being, incapable of performing even the rudimentary and elementary things:

“. . . plough-boys truly whistled as they went, for want of thought, whereas here was verily a large company walking without thought but not having any more even the capacity of doing  their own whistling.’’

According to Ruskin:

There are three material things, not only useful, but essential to life. No one “knows how to live’’ till he has got them.

These are pure air, water, and earth.

There are three immaterial things, not only useful, but essential to life.

No one knows how to live till he has got them also.

These are admiration, hope, and love.

He further asserts that man is endowed with the faculty of distinguishing good from bad. He may add to these ‘six chiefly useful things’ or destroy them at his will. Unfortunately, man, consciously or unconsciously, as been continuously ‘vitiating it to the best of your (his) power’. He ought to realize that he himself has to bear the consequences.

Finally, Ruskin appeals to the people of England to: . . . give the tenth of what they have and of what they earn, not to emigrate with, but to stay in England with, and do what is in their hands and hearts to make her a happy England. . . Ruskin’s An Idealist’s Arraignment of the Ageis a powerful comment on the values held dear by the Englishmen during his times. Ruskin reproaches man’s absolute dependence and love for scientific developments and loss in taste for art. This fact had reduced a man to a ‘fool’ and a mere machine with ‘only a major machinery governing’ him. It would not be wrong to agree with E.D. Mackerness when he writes that Ruskin possessed ‘a prophetic voice’, and now, we bear witness to this fact. Wherever Ruskin authored during his life is a ‘truth’.

1. Dwivedi, VartikaAn Idealist Arraignment of the Age.Lucknow:Gurukul Publications: 2000 2.https://books.google.com/book/about/An_Idealist_Arraignment_of_the_Age.html?id-K90EygAACAAJ 3. https://www.librarything.com/tag/John+Ruskin:+An+Idealist’s+Arraignment+of+the+Age 4. https://www.indiastudychannel.com/attachments/resources/31192-5178-scan0002.pdf 5. https://westerntradition.wordpress.com/tag/john-ruskin 6. https://www.worldcat.org/title/english-essays/oclc/1302059 7. Cf. Sidney (Apology of Poetrie) endows a poet with the title of ‘Vates’which means ‘a prophet’or ‘a foreseer.’