“Beautiful art can only be produced by people who have beautiful things about them, and leisure to look at them.”
John Ruskin
Beauty has a unique place in human life. One of the most fascinating aspects of beauty is how there are different kinds of it.
There is the beauty of nature, the beauty of fine arts, and the beauty of products of other crafts. There are beautiful faces, and beautiful places. Perhaps most of all there are beautiful actions and beautiful characters.
One thing of which Plato was confident is this: all different kinds and instances of beauty have a real inner connection and similarity. Just what the connections are is a question that can be as difficult as it is important.
Here John Ruskin makes an assertion that has much intuitive force. To become capable of producing beautiful things—more specifically beautiful art—people must be formed by contact with beautiful things.
Ruskin has perhaps hit on a fundamental truth: beauty is self-diffusive. It tends to bring about more beauty.
I know a mother who would say: “I want my children at least to have seen and heard great things of beauty.” She had confidence that exposure to truly great art, architecture, and music, not to mention the natural world, has a profound even while mysterious effect on a person.
Ruskin is reflecting on what makes a soul capable of producing beautiful art. A case can be made that in surrounding ourselves with beautiful things even more is at stake than forming our ability to produce art. Or another angle to consider is: perhaps more is going on in forming the ability to produce beautiful art than we have realized.
The choice to try to surround ourselves with beautiful things, of various kinds, should not be a flight from reality. Indeed, it might just be the hidden path to finding it.
John Ruskin (1819-1900) became the leading art critic of Victorian England. Moved by the ravages of the Industrial Revolution he shifted his focus later in life to social and economic issues. A controversial and insightful thinker, his way with words has an enduring power.
I am currently doing research in his works, and I plan to share more quotations from them.
Image: the Cathedral at Chartres, France. It is interesting to ponder: what kind of culture formed the people from whom came such art?
Bethany Update: While the July Bethany Weekend on Virtue and the Moral Life is full, there are spaces in the August weekend on the same topic: Bethany Weekends
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John I read all your brief essays and find them inspiring. Thank you for what you do.
I am a bit troubled by the notion of surrounding oneself with beautiful things. I think there are examples of wealthy people purchasing many beautiful things yet they remain ugly people. One must see beauty but beauty is everywhere and available for free just for using our senses. CREATION of beautiful things is the real deal. Can you absorb some beauty and then create some more? That’s the challenge and it is a challenge that requires that elusive leisure time. Creation of beauty seems to take TIME and God grants us only a little bit of time.
I’m no philosopher
Thanks
Dick, You raise some great points. Here is a thought. While it is certainly true that one can surround oneself with beautiful things and remain, at least in some real sense, ‘ugly’ on the inside, there can still be good reason to try to surround oneself with beautiful things. There are many different kinds of beautiful things–some can be purchased for money, and then there are many that, as you note, are free for the taking.
What I am recommending in my post is a holistic approach: we can seek to surround ourselves and our family and friends with beautiful things of many kinds: great architecture, great art, the natural world, as well as people of good character and liturgy. The most important of these can be done at no financial cost. But then again it is also worth spending financial resources, when possible. on these things.
I am likewise in complete agreement that creating beautiful things is of central importance; but then that brings us back to Ruskin’s original assertion…
Thanks again for your thoughts.
what kind of culture formed the people from whom came such art?
Nope, not going to ponder long on that one. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Margaret Meade might not agree with me but she’s dead and gone, but I would venture a guess that EVERY culture produces beauty.
I’m fond of Maslow’s concept of self actualization and the creation of beauty is self actualization for a special group of people
Dick,
I think that some cultures have been on the whole productive of an objectively more beautiful art and architecture, and so I likewise think it is worth pondering how that could come to be the case. We might have to agree to disagree on this.
I do agree with you, however, that every culture does produce some beauty.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Thanks for this John! I’ve been a fan of his insights for years. This is a gem from Ruskin I’ve always loved: “To watch the corn grow and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over plowshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray — these are the things that make man happy… And I am… enthusiastic enough to believe that the time will come when the world will discover this. It has now made its experiments in every possible direction but the right one; and it seems that it must, at last, try the right one… It has tried fighting, and preaching, and fasting, buying and selling, pomp and parsimony, pride and humiliation, — every possible manner of existence in which it could conjecture there was any happiness or dignity ; and all the while, as it bought, sold, and fought, and fasted, and wearied itself with policies, and ambitions, and self-denials. God had placed its real happiness in the keeping of the little mosses at the wayside, and of the clouds of the firmament.”
– John Ruskin, Modern Painters
Bill, And thank you for sharing this remarkable and provocative quotation. I am no expert on Ruskin, and I am still trying to discern more clearly some of his views. It seems to me that at one and the same time he has a profound insight expressed in this quotation–one that our world desperately needs to hear, while at the same time he does not fully appreciate (or in any case articulate) what I would call the central place of the worship of God and the stewardship of creation as a part of the service of God. I might be off in this assessment, and I am very open to correction or other thoughts. Thank you very much for sharing this.
I love this! Interesting note about leisure time. I work at home and have a good deal of flexibility, so I hike miles and miles in the woods every day with my dog. I’ve cataloged the wild flowers in spring and summer, watched up close how the landscape changes with the seasons, contemplated the veins on a leaf and the specks on a robin’s egg. This immersion in natural beauty, from the vast to the minute, deepens my gratitude and lends me patience with others. Just yesterday I happened on a recently dead woodpecker and was able to get a close look at the spots on his belly and his coral tail feathers. I’m not so quick now to recoil in horror at a bug or a carcass, but to instead ponder its Creator and the uniqueness, mystery, and intention of its being. All this because I have a dog who needs to be walked and the time to indulge it!
Susanna, You make an outstanding point. And leisure is something we have to make a point to cultivate, even if simply by making the space for these kind of moments to happen. Thanks for the comment.
It is important to cultivate a sense of beauty throughout childhood and to continue in adulthood. True, beauty is in the eye of the beholder; however, there are also classically and universally beautiful things that can inspire us all.
Just because you may not want to hang a piece of artwork in your home doesn’t mean you can’t find it beautiful in a certain way. Beauty takes many ways, means, forms, and ideas.
Sonrie, I think you are correct in pointing to how at one at the same time there is an objectivity to beauty, but at the same time we need to cultivate in ourselves the ability to see it for what it is. Thank you.
I’ve taught the history of classical music to many students over the years and have had for a long time to grapple with the idea of beauty and its objectivity as relates to music. I’ve come to realize that beauty, coming from the hand of God as it does, must be objective, but we all have subjective preferences. For instance, I much prefer the rolling, verdant hills of the MIdwest to the sandy, sunset-colored desert of the Southwest, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the beauty that it holds nevertheless. We need to cultivate an appreciation for objective beauty while recognizing that we may like some types more than others. Just a few thoughts from 20+ plus years of thinking about this.
Thank you for the weekly lessons in living more humanly. I look forward to them every Wednesday!
I’ve taught the history of classical music to many students over the years and have had for a long time to grapple with the idea of beauty and its objectivity as relates to music. I’ve come to realize that beauty, coming from the hand of God as it does, must be objective, but we all have subjective preferences. For instance, I much prefer the rolling, verdant hills of the MIdwest to the sandy, sunset-colored desert of the Southwest, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the beauty that it holds nevertheless. We need to cultivate an appreciation for objective beauty while recognizing that we may like some types more than others. Just a few thoughts from 20+ plus years of thinking about this.
Thank you for the weekly lessons in living more humanly. I look forward to them every Wednesday!