John Ruskin was one of England's most influential critics of art and society in the 19th century. In Art: A New History (2003), Paul Johnson observes that "Ruskin developed novel and profoundly interesting ideas about the relationship of art to religion, morality and justice, and expressed them in a rhetorical prose which has never been equaled for sonorous beauty."
In this excerpt from the opening of The Cestus of Aglaia (1865), note in particular Ruskin's awestruck description of a locomotive (paragraph four) and his exploration of the questions, "what arts should be generally taught to the English boy and girl, by what methods, and to what ends?"
The Dignity of Mechanical Art
Excerpt From The Cestus of Aglaia by John Ruskin
Our knowledge of human labor, if intimate enough, will, I think, mass it for the most part into two kinds--mining and molding; the labor that seeks for things, and the labor that shapes them. Of these the last should be always orderly, for we ought to have some conception of the whole of what we have to make before we try to make any part of it; but the labor of seeking must be often methodless, following the veins of the mine as they branch, or trying for them where they are broken. And the mine, which we would now open into the souls of men, as they govern the mysteries of their handicrafts, being rent into many dark and divided ways, it is not possible to map our work beforehand, or resolve on its directions. We will not attempt to bind ourselves to any methodical treatment of our subject, but will get at the truths of it here and there, as they seem extricable; only, though we cannot know to what depth we may have to dig, let us know clearly what we are digging for. We desire to find by what rule some Art is called good, and other Art bad: we desire to find the conditions of character in the artist which are essentially connected with the goodness of his work: we desire to find what are the methods of practice which form this character or corrupt it; and finally, how the formation or corruption of this character is connected with the general prosperity of nations.
And all this we want to learn practically: not for mere pleasant speculation on things that have been; but for instant direction of those that are yet to be. My first object is to get at some fixed principles for the teaching of Art to our youth; and I am about to ask, of all who may be able to give me a serviceable answer, and with and for all who are anxious for such answer, what arts should be generally taught to the English boy and girl, by what methods, and to what ends? How well, or how imperfectly, our youth of the higher classes should be disciplined in the practice of music and painting? --how far, among the lower classes, exercise in certain mechanical arts might become a part of their school life? --how far, in the adult life of this nation, the Fine Arts may advisably supersede or regulate the mechanical Arts? Plain questions these, enough; clearly also important ones; and, as clearly, boundless ones--mountainous--infinite in contents--only to be mined into in a scrambling manner by poor inquirers, as their present tools and sight may serve.
I have often been accused of dogmatism, and confess to the holding strong opinions on some matters; but I tell the reader in sincerity, and entreat him in sincerity to believe, that I do not think myself able to dictate anything positive respecting questions of this magnitude. The one thing I am sure of is, the need of some form of dictation; or, where that is as yet impossible, at least of consistent experiment, for the just solution of doubts which present themselves every day in more significant and more impatient temper of interrogation.
Here is one, for instance, lying at the base of all the rest--namely, what may be the real dignity of mechanical Art itself? I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into THAT! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile—--a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! What would the men who thought out this--who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfill this task to the utmost of their will--feel or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of water-color, which I cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else--mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them?
Concluded on page two
