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Kenneth Clark, in his book Ruskin
Today* concurs with Ruskin’s description of himself as ‘a genius’ . Meanwhile, I have dismissed Ruskin, somewhere in this website, as a pompous Victorian.
My judgement, whether true or
not, has nagged at my mind ever since, for it arose out of my ignorance and too
little reading of his work 50 years ago. My
penance, then, has been
to do some literary research and provide this brief biography of a writer for whom I
still have little regard.
So
why should we read him?The
first reason we’re given is that he was a poet with “a passion and an appetite”.A
second reason for reading his work is that he was a ‘character’, one of great
fascination because he demonstrated it so vividly and often; a character of
interesting complexity worthy of genius. His personality reflected
contradicting qualities of intelligence and silliness; Puritanism and
sensuality; selfishness and extreme generosity. He was complicated as a lover
and baffling in his alternately broad vision and picky fussiness.
The choice below of the least
fanciful examples of his writing allow you to be your own judge – but be aware that he was admired by most of the prominent men of
letters in the nineteenth and early 20th century.
The opinions of Ruskin held by
Wordsworth and Proust; by Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw; and by an art critic such
as Kenneth Clark, are not to be dismissed lightly.
However, I was relieved to
find that Clark concedes that Ruskin is
not easily read today, partly owing to his effusive style, and partly because
of the incoherence of his later works, and partly because no-one nowadays seems
to have time to wade through 39 volumes of his eclectic, collected works.
Today
you may find books about Ruskin, but few copies of any of the books by him.
Fortunately
for us, Kenneth Clark spent 40 years reading Ruskin and made a careful and
representative selection of his works.
He
also offers reasons why Ruskin’s books, unlike the works of less
celebrated contemporaries, have
vanished from bookshelves.
Firstly,
Ruskin was an unmitigated moralist. A ‘preacher born’ who, even after he had
learned to control his didactic impulses, still could not discipline his
spirals of eloquence.
The
second reason why Ruskin is hard to read today lies in his inability to focus
on an issue, or concentrate on a theme. ”This was part of his genius,” contends
Clark. “In his mind, as in the eye of an impressionist painter, everything was
more or less reflected in everything else.”
When Ruskin tried to keep his mind in a single track, the result was a loss of energy and colour. . . except in his declining years, when the loss
was in logic and sanity.
His
other irritating quality was his self-indulgence in proclaiming his opinion on
every single topic, from art to zoology, from capitalism to mythology.
I
still believe Ruskin’s writings belong to yesterday – though his concepts of art
- as the exceedingly wise and sensitive Kenneth Clark points out, may be for
tomorrow
Unorthodox Lover
Even
as a young man Ruskin was considered in Victorian society to be a genius. His
reputation attracted an attractive socialite whom he married in 1847, the year
he turned 28. He tried, at first, to treat his bride as a kitten or ‘fairy
queen’, but she quickly tired of it, and she demanded reality, he shunned her.
After six painful years he pushed her into the arms of society’s darling, John
Everett Millais.
Clark writes: “By the end of 1859 two factors had
begun to unsettle Ruskin’s mind, his love for Rose La Touche and his
wholehearted engagement in social and economic problems, The first was pure
misfortune. Ruskin, who seems to have been incapable of normal relations with a
grown-up woman, had a passion for little girls, As a man of forty he
used to stay in a girls' school, where he joined in the games and talked to the
girls about history, geology, and morals, conversations which he polished up
into a book called The Ethics of the Dust. This diffused passion was
focused on Rose. Her mother, who was in love with Ruskin, had asked him
to teach her ten-year-old daughter painting.
Ruskin realised that this was to be the all-consuming passion of his
life, and set his heart on marrying Rose as soon as she should be of age. The
miserable drama that ensued lasted for over fifteen years. Rose changed from a
clever, self-conscious child into a morbid young woman, painfully religious
and, in the end, mentally unbalanced.
Mrs La Touche's love naturally changed to hatred and she used
every dishonourable means of turning Rose against Ruskin, destroying his
letters, and even writing to Effie Millais for a testimonial of his impotence
and cruelty, which, of course, Effie was delighted to provide.”
Ruskin always believed that it was this document which
fmally sent Rose out of her mind.
Finally Rose
died, on 26 May 1875, after sending Ruskin word that she would see him if 'he
could tell her that he loved God more than herself'.
The following extracts describe his life mainly in his own words.
Writer's Itch . . . Ruskin's letter to his father
Miss Edgeworth may abuse the word' genius'. . . There is such a thing as 'writers itch' indubitally and it consists
mainly in a man's doing things because he cannot help it, - intellectual
things, I mean. I don't think myself a great genius, but I believe I have
genius; something different from mere cleverness, for I am 'clever in the
sense that millions of people are -lawyers, physicians, and others. But there
is the strong instinct in me which I cannot analyse to draw and describe the
things I love - not for reputation, nor for the good of others, nor for my own
advantage, but a sort of instinct like that for eating or drinking. I should
like to draw all St Mark's, and all this Verona stone by stone, to eat it all
up into my mind, touch by touch.
How not to write for fun . . . Excerpt from Praeterita 11
In calling my
authorship, drudgery, I do not mean that writing ever gave me the kind of pain
of which Carlyle so wildly complains, to my
total amazement and boundless puzzlement, be it in passing said; for he talked
just as vigorously as he wrote, and the book he makes bitterest moan over, Friedrich,
bears the outer aspect of richly enjoyed gossip, and lovingly involuntary
eloquence of description or praise.
My own literary work, on the contrary, was always done as quietly
and methodically as a piece of tapestry. I knew exactly what I had got to say,
put the words firmly in their places like so many stitches, hemmed the edges of
chapters round with what seemed to me graceful flourishes, touched them finally
with my cunningest points of colour, and read the work to papa and mamma at
breakfast next morning, as a girl shows her sampler.
'Drudgery'
may be a hard word for this often complacent, and entirely painless occupation;
still, the best that could be said for it, was that it gave me no serious
trouble; and I should think the pleasure of driving, to a good coachman, of
ploughing, to a good farmer, much more of dressmaking, to an inventive and
benevolent modiste, must be greatly more piquant than the most proudly ardent
hours of book-writing have ever been to me, or as far as my memory ranges, to
any conscientious author of merely average power. How great work is done, under
what burden of sorrow, or with what expense oflife, has not been told hitherto,
nor is likely to be; the best of late time has been done recklessly or
contemptuously. Byron would burn a canto if a friend disliked it, and Scott
spoil a story to please a bookseller.
At Forty,
Life Turns . . . letter
to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1848
I have had
cloud upon me this year, and don't quite know the meaning of it; only I've had
no heart to write to anybody. I suppose the real gist of it is that next year I
shall be forty, and begin to see what life and the world mean, seen from the
middle of them - and the middle inclining to the dustward end. I
believe there is something owing to the violent reaction often after the
excitement of the arrangement of Turner's sketches; something to my
ascertaining in the course of that work how the old man's soul had been gradually
crushed within him, leaving him at the close of his life weak, sinful, desolate
- nothing but his generosity and kindness of heart left; something to my having
enjoyed too much of lovely things, till they almost cease to be lovely to me,
and because I have no monotonous or disagreeable work by way of foil to them; - but, however
it may be, I am not able to write as I used to do, nor to feel, and can only
make up my mind to the state as one that has to be gone
through, and from which I hope some day to come out on the other side.
His Madness . . . letter to Thomas Carlyle,
23 June 1878
It was utterly wonderful
to me to find that I could go so heartily and headily mad; for you know
I had been priding myself on my peculiar sanity! And it was more wonderful yet
to find the madness made up into things so dreadful, out of things so trivial.
One of the most provoking and disagreeable of the spectres was developed out of
the firelight on my mahogany bed-post; and my fate, for all futurity, seemed
continually to turn on the humour of dark personages who were materially nothing
but the stains of damp on the ceiling. But the sorrowfullest part of the matter
was, and is, that while my illness at Matlock encouraged me by all its dreams
in after work, this one has done nothing but humiliate and terrify me; and
leaves me nearly unable to speak any more except of the natures of stones and
flowers.
Growing old From St
Mark's Rest, ch. XI
Among the
many discomforts of advancing age, which no one understands till he feels them,
there is one which I seldom have heard complained of, and which, therefore, I
find unexpectedly disagreeable…
As (death – Ruskin avoids the word)
approaches me, not only do many of the evils I had heard of, and prepared for,
present themselves in more grievous shapes than I had expected; but one which
I had scarcely ever heard of, torments me increasingly every hour.
I had
understood it to be in the order of things that the aged should lament their
vanishing life as an instrument they had never used, now to be taken away from
them; but not as an instrument, only then perfectly tempered and sharpened, and
snatched out of their hands at the instant they could have done some real
service with it. Whereas, my own feeling, now, is that everything which has
hitherto happened to me, or been done by me, whether well or ill, has been
fitting me to take greater fortune more prudently, and do better work more
thoroughly. And just when I seem to be coming out of school- very sorry to have
been such a foolish boy, yet having taken a prize or two, and expecting to
enter now upon some more serious business than cricket, - I am
dismissed by the Master I hoped to serve, with a - 'That's
all I want of you, sir.'
His last years
In 1869 he became Slade Professor of Oxford where large audiences of
students hung on his every word. But
within three years the quality of his lectures deteriorated and he became incapable of concentration. He
abjured his expertise and his teaching subject – art – and turned his attention
to old pleasures such as Nature and birds and plants.
A visit to Assisi and a spell in a Franciscan cell
returned his calm. But in 1878 - soon after writing the touching passage on old age, quoted above, his mind collapsed
altogether and for six weeks mania set in. He recovered, but became vexed again
when Whistler sued him for libel and was awarded one farthing damages.
Gradually he ceased
to be aware of immediate experiences.. For his last eleven years he lived on in
a silent coma, unable to write, scarcely recognising his friends, Yet he was
frequently photographed – as a national institution. He died on 20 January
1900..
His reputation continued to grow, across America and
Russia as well as at home – not because of his poetic writing on art, but
chiefly because of his socio-economic ideas which were unheard of at the time,
and anathema to the upper classes.
Today, those concepts seem harmless enough, almost
childish. Here are two typical
examples, one culled from my small leather-bound, 1900 edition of Unto This
Last, and another selected by Kenneth Clark from the same work.
Capital
The best and simplest
general type of capital is a well-made ploughshare. Now, if that ploughshare
did nothing but beget other ploughshares, in a polypous
manner, - however the
great cluster of polypous plough might glitter in the sun, it would have lost
its function of capital. It becomes true capital only by another kind of
splendour, - when it is seen 'splendescere suko,' to grow
bright in the furrow; rather with diminution of its substance, than addition,
by the noble friction. And the true home question, to every capitalist and to
every nation, is not, 'how many ploughs have you?' but, 'where are your furrows?'
not - 'how quickly will this capital reproduce itself?' but, 'what will it do
during reproduction?' What substance will it furnish, good for life? what work
construct, protective of life? If none, its own reproduction is useless - if
worse than none, - (for capital may destroy life as well as support it), its
own reproduction is worse than useless; it is merely an advance from Tisiphone,
on mortgage - not a profit by any means.
From Unto
this Last, Essay IV, § 73
ADD ANOTHER SUITABLE QUOTE.
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