Invented grotesques play an greater role in the writings of Ruskin and Arnold than do found ones. Ruskin's description of the "Goddess of Getting-on" in "Traffic" and Arnold's analysis of England's Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace in the third chapter of Culture and Anarchy exemplify some of the most brilliant satiric emblems of the sage. In his writings on political economy Ruskin makes major use of them, and they effectively replace the word-painting that characterizes his art criticism as a favorite rhetorical device. Ruskin's invented symbolical grotesques, which take several chief forms, are particularly useful in summing up the flaws in opposing positions. These little satiric narratives and analogies of course owe much to neoclassical satirists, particularly Swift, whose Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels make extensive use of elaborate analogies to cast an opposing view in a poor light.
In "Traffic" Ruskin mocks his audience's conception of an ideal life by presenting it in the form of what is essentially a dream vision. Arguing that his listeners' worship of the Goddess of Getting-on implies they also condemn others to miserable lives, he presents a picture of their ideal that enforces corollaries or implicit points they would willingly leave out of their sight and consciousness.
Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere beneath it. On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately-sized park; a large garden and hot-houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess; the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family; he always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of the bank, is to he the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long, with one steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language. (18.453)
As Ruskin points out, this image of human existence might appear "very pretty indeed, seen from above; not at all so pretty, seen from below," since for every family to whom the Englishman's deity is the Goddess of Getting-on, one thousand find her ,the "Goddess of not Getting-on" (18.453). By making explicit the implications of such a vision of life based upon an ideal of competition, this symbolical grotesque serves a powerful satiric purpose. Ruskin's expertise as an art critic here turns out to be particularly helpful, for he carefully explains the sketched-in elements of his supposedly ideal scene with the same skill that he uses in setting forth his descriptions of Alpine landscape, the city of Venice, or Turner's paintings. In each case he proceeds by resenting visual details and then drawing attention to their meaning. Here he first presents, slightly tongue-in-cheek, an image of the English capitalist's Earthly Paradise, and then, once he has sketched it for his audience, he presents its dark implications by showing the world of have-nots upon which it sits both literally and symbolically. By moving through his created word-picture from upper to lower, he endows each portion of his visual . image with a moral and political valuation: the upper classes reside literally, spatially, above the industries that provide their wealth and also above the workers who slave to make their lives ones of ease.
Last modified 19 March 2008