George Herbert and John Ruskin

Abstract

George Herbert and John Ruskin by John L. Idol, Jr. When a disciple of John Ruskin, W.H. Mallock, portrayed his master under the sobriquet "Mr. Herbert" in a work entitled The New Republic, he chose a name as close to Ruskin's heart as anyone could have, for Mallock presented him under the name of a man whom Ruskin revered as one of his greatest teachers, the poet George Herbert.' The keenness of Mallock's choice has largely gone unnoticed by students of both Ruskin and Herbert. Repeatedly, Ruskin paid tribute to Herbert and often quoted from his works, especially "The Church-porch," upon which he drew fourteen times. He also quoted or commented upon a dozen of Herbert's lyrics. Yet, curiously enough, not until J.C.A. Rathmell's undocumented but defensible assertion that revised interest in the poetry of the Metaphysicals can be "traced in its embryonic stages through the early admiration of Ruskin and Hopkins for Herbert" did a modern critic suggest how deeply Herbert's work was woven into the fabric of Ruskin's life and thought.2 Herbert's thoughts indeed were vital thread in Ruskin's thinking and writing. Ruskin moreoverclaimed, none too convincingly, that Herbert's style influenced his, and Ruskin did some of his earliest criticism of literary subjects by commenting on Herbert and Bunyan. For well over four decades, from 1840 during his student days at Oxford until 1889, not many months removed from his retreat from the written word, Ruskin never ceased to admire, find solace from, or champion the writing of Herbert. To his college friend Edward Clayton, another admirer of Herbert, Ruskin wrote, "Seriously, I admire George Herbert above everything, and shall learn The Church-porch' by heart as soon as I have time."3 He soon absorbed Herbert's poems so fully and came to cherish them so much that he dreamed of publishing a new edition "in an illuminated missal form, all gold and sky blue, as he ought to be — the most heavenly 11 John L. Idol, Jr. writer I know" (I, 466). During his trip alone to Italy in 1845, Ruskin began to see that Herbert offered something his Evangelical background and present experience with Roman Catholicism did not. I saw that George Herbert represented the theology of the Protestant Church in a perfectly central and deeply spiritual manner: his "Church Porch" I recognized to be blamelessly wise as a lesson to youth; and the exquisitely faithful fancy of the other poems (in The Temple) drew me into learning most of them by heart, — the "Church Porch," the "Dialogue," "Employment," "Submission," "Gratefulness," and, chief favourite , "The Bag," — deliberately and carefully. The code of feeling and law written in these verses may be assigned as a standard of the purest unsectarian Christianity; and whatever has been wisest in thought or happiest in the course of my following life was founded on the teaching of Herbert. [Ruskin nowquotesinfull "Submission," the poem he found "most useful ."] In these, and othersuch favourite verses, George Herbert, as aforesaid, was to me at this time, and has been since, useful beyond every other teacher.4 (XXXV, 344-45) Although Herbert's poetry was at this time a good traveling companion,5 Ruskin dropped his own poetic efforts and offered two explanations about his turning away from writing poems after feeling dissatisfied with "Mont Blanc Revisited," composed 9 June 1845 and sent to his mother in a letter to her on the same day: "I am getting far too methodical to write poetry now, and a little too pious — as you will see by the tone [of the poem] .... But the fact is, I really am getting more pious than I was, owing primarily to George Herbert, who is the only religious person I ever could understand or agree with, and secondarily to Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gossoli."6 12 HERBERT AND RUSKIN But Herbert had more to offer than mere piety, as Ruskin was to find time and again. For example, Herbert's volume of poems stood beside books by Wordsworth, Dante, and Plato when Ruskin in 1847 had to return to Leamington to undertake Dr. Jephson's...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.