Abstract
It is one of the central ironies of the Victorian period that, at the very historical moment when interest in observing and recording natural phenomena was at its most intense and religious, the natural world was emptied of its traditional spiritual meaning by the discovery of the theory of evolution.1 The man who had more influence than anyone over the way the early Victorians looked at the landscape around them, John Ruskin, developed the principles of Paleyan Natural Theology and Wordsworthian sacramentalism to create his own religio-aesthetic philosophy, and in his early writings he celebrated the inspired ‘truths’ of nature and insisted on their faithful representation in art. Ruskin’s precepts about art were the guiding force behind the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, which similarly centred on the minute depiction of nature to the end of penetrating its true spiritual meaning.
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Notes
Cf. Peter Fuller, ‘In God’s Garden’, New Society, no. 67 (8 March 1984). This paper developed out of discussions with Peter Fuller. I would like to thank him, without implication, for sharing his ideas about Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites so generously.
William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London, 1836) p. 9.
Ibid., p. 593. Quoted in Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (London, 1976) pp. 22, 24.
Charles Kingsley, ‘The Wonders of the Shore’, North British Review, no. 22 (1854) pp. 1–56.
Life, Letters and Journals of Sir C. Lyell, ed. Mrs C. Lyell, 2 vols (London, 1881) vol. II, p. 461.
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, 3 vols (London, 1887) vol. I, p. 66.
Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of his Life, ed. Mrs Kingsley (London, 1899) p. 44.
Quoted in William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians (Cleveland, 1959) p. 113.
The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, 1954–5 and 1978) vol. II, pp. 241–2.
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (Harmondsworth, 1970) pp. 73–4.
The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols (London, 1903–12), vol. XIII, p. 431; vol. xxi, p. 11.
Cf. Marcia Pointon, William Dyce 1806–1864 (Oxford, 1979) pp. 79–80. See also pp. 17–19 for a fuller account of Dyce’s scientific interests.
Ford Madox Brown notes having attended one of Ansted’s lectures on 31 January 1848: Praeraphaelite Diaries and Letters, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1900) p. 82.
Cited in Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford, 1973) p. 183.
William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols (London, 1905) vol. I, p. 148.
Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Thoughts about Art (Boston, 1874) p. 10. Quoted in Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, p. 174. An article on contemporary art in the Westminster Review, no. 63 (January 1855) pp. 292–302, distinguishes the English Pre-Raphaelites from their German counterparts by focusing on the scientific spirit which informs their art. By 1859, in the Introduction to her Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters, pp. xvi–xvii, Anna Jameson was able to point to the existence of a new ‘scientific class of art’.
Kenneth Bendiner, An Introduction to Victorian Painting (New Haven, 1985) pp. 48–9.
The Diaries of John Ruskin, ed. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, 3 vols (Oxford, 1959) vol. III, p. 821.
John Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps and Mountaineering in 1861 (London, 1906) p. 47.
Cf. Marcia Pointon, ‘The Representation of Time in Painting: A study of William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay: A Recollection of October 5th, 1858’, Art History, vol. 1 (1978) no. 1, for a full discussion of this painting.
For some indication of the profound impression left by Donati’s comet, see Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, ed. Charles Eastlake Smith, 2 vols (London, 1895) vol. II, p. 104.
Cf. John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (London, 1961) pp. 22–45
and Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (London, 1976) pp. 121–8, for the most interesting discussions of this period in Ruskin’s life.
Peter Fuller, Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions (London 1985) p. 81.
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© 1989 David Jasper and T. R. Wright
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Fraser, H. (1989). Truth to Nature. In: Jasper, D., Wright, T.R. (eds) The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20122-8_4
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