![]() Examining, first, how Ruskin’s lectures embody the challenges that this new climate posed to sensation and its representation, I then consider how this experience of the environment in Storm-Cloud prompted subsequent fears about this ‘trembling’ wind’s effects on English artists. And so rather than seeking to find in Ruskin a proto-ecological theorist, I examine instead how Ruskin’s own work of depiction, composition, and revision in Storm-Cloud models the place of art in a time of climatic precarity. Instead of considering the physical or psychic origins of Ruskin’s ‘plague-wind’, this chapter instead considers the decomposing and fragmenting force it exerted on the form of the text itself. The chaotic nature of this account-‘thrown into form’, as Ruskin writes in the preface to his fragmented, digressive, passionate text-gave cause for critics in his time and ours to consider it as an expression of his declining mental health. Rather than examining the storm-cloud’s precise causes, Ruskin’s lectures were concerned primarily with furnishing a description of its effects, this pattern of weather that threatened to fundamentally alter England’s climate. His lectures attempted to account for the impending loss of the environmental system that, he argued, had shaped the perceptual faculties of Europe’s artists and architects, and those of England in particular. Yet it was what this new climate portended for art-inseparable for Ruskin from its ecological surround-that gave his account its urgency. Īccounts of Ruskin’s Storm-Cloud have rightly focused on its status in the history of environmental thinking, positioning it as a prescient depiction of current-day climate crisis. ![]() In the new era of the ‘storm cloud’, Ruskin perceived a receding horizon of possibility for England and its empire, ‘on which formerly the sun never set’ but now ‘never rises’. Storm-Cloud announced a crisis that traversed politics, art, and the environment, in which Ruskin’s aesthetic conception of nationalism converged with what Brian Day calls his ‘moral ecology’. Hence the relevance of his 1870 lecture, which warned that England ‘cannot remain herself a heap of cinders’, but must instead ‘make her own majesty stainless’ and reclaim a sky ‘polluted by no unholy clouds’. This new climate threatened to dissolve the environmental systems that had structured Ruskin’s thinking about both art and politics from the beginning of his career. Earlier that year, in his lectures The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, Ruskin revealed the appearance of a ‘trembling’, ‘blanching’, ‘filthy’ ‘plague-wind’. One answer might be that, in 1884, Ruskin was preoccupied with a different but closely related fear of ‘degeneracy’: the advent of a deteriorating environment that, rather than making England a ‘source of light’, was instead casting it into disorienting, inconstant darkness. Why does this sharply militant passage about nationalism, empire, and race resurface in this moment in Ruskin’s thought, framed by the language of light and purity? Upon Ruskin’s own return to this passage in 1884, he claimed it as ‘the most pregnant and essential’ of his teachings. And it was the primary text to which Edward Said returned in his Culture and Imperialism (1993) in order to resituate Ruskin’s aesthetic theory, in which empire often remained unspoken, within late-Victorian imperialist ideology. The 1870 Inaugural Lecture concluded with Ruskin’s call for England to ‘found colonies as fast and far as she is able’. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey … will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace mistress of Learning and of the Arts … ? We are still undegenerate in race a race mingled of the best northern blood. ![]() There is a destiny now possible to us-the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. On 18 October 1884, John Ruskin began what would be his last series of lectures at Oxford, The Pleasures of England, by quoting from the Inaugural Slade Lecture he had given there in 1870:
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