Laying the Ghost: D.H. Lawrence's Fight with Ruskin

There is only one precise reference to Lawrence’s reading of Ruskin in the early stages of his literary career; yet the Ruskinian presence seems to haunt many of his works, where he associates the Victorian writer with a way of thinking which he increasingly tends to see as a lethal threat to his own intellectual emancipation. Whereas his fight starts, as in other modernists, by exposing the inadequacy of Ruskin’s language to interpret reality, his attention gradually shifts towards a recovery of the physical dimension, which involves a rejection of Ruskin’s spiritualism. This rejec-tion also determines their contrasting response to Italy and, in particular, to Florence, a city which Ruskin sees as a great centre of European Christianity and Lawrence as the expression of a pagan, primitive attitude to life. But, paradoxically, there emerges a kind of continuity amid their contrasts, seeing that both artists reject any formalism and aiming at reaching the original, vital grain of artistic creation, and thus turning their attention to a past prior to Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility. Lawrence’s attention for primitive culture and his insistence on the “spirit of place”, therefore, indirectly betrays its roots in Ruskin’s love for the Middle Ages, for the gemeinschaft where human beings lived in harmony with them-selves, the community and the surrounding Nature, a harmony of which artistic creations were the direct manifestation.