BOOKS

Silly but not like us

Philip Hensher

JOHN RUSKIN: THE LATER YEARS by Tim Hilton Yale, £20, pp. 656

ho could read it,' Dante Gabriel Rossetti asked about Unto This Last, 'or anything about such bosh?' And most peo- ple since have tended to agree with him. Ruskin hasn't entirely vanished from our mental landscape, but hardly any writer has suffered such a catastrophic drop in the esteem of his readership after his death. No writer of the time was more highly esteemed by his contemporaries; when he wrote to the Daily Telegraph in 1870 about the Franco-Prussian war, it is recorded that the newsvendors' placards announced a `Letter from Mr Ruskin'. And now, what is left? A shelf of prize-day copies of Sesame and Lilies in every second-hand bookshop in the land, the useful critical term 'the pathetic fallacy', and, among older readers, the memory of a children's fable, The King of the Golden River. That once famous prose style, those famous putrid set-pieces on Alpine scenery are now, frankly, unreadable; unreadable as hieroglyphics, unreadable as Carlyle. Whenever you pick him up, somehow it is only ever a matter of pages before one of those assertions appears which can hardly fail to make the reader blush. 'Pictures are my friends'; `Colour is the type of love — especially connected with the blossoming of the earth.'

He remains a profoundly interesting figure, presented in summary. But can any- one be interested in his writing? It was Kenneth Clark who, years ago, pointed out the contrast between the Ruskin biography industry and the small number of people who are prepared to read his books. What that represents, of course, is the familiar modern phenomenon by which we pay industrious researchers to read books which we ourselves have no intention of reading, as busy mediaeval noblemen paid monks to pray on their behalf. Whether a biographer can subsequently persuade us to give Unto This Last another chance is a test of his success.

Ruskin, of course, was a complete twit, and examples of his colossal capacity for silliness can hardly make his life anything but entertaining. Fancy going out, in all seriousness, to 'dig a hole in search of a rumoured Swiss hobgoblin'. Fancy round- ing up a lot of undergraduates to dig a sewer — euphemistically described as 'a road' — in Ferry Hinksey. The enterprise, incidentally, came to an end when the undergraduates, lily-wearing aesthetes to a man, started shagging the professional hole-diggers. Imagine, if you will (as Ruskin, in imperative mood, was fond of saying), the distinguished art critic going to the very worst sort of medium and asking Portrait of Ruskin by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, 1879 (National Portrait Gallery) her to summon up the spirit of Paolo Veronese. I mean, what on earth was he proposing to ask?

Silliness in life is one thing, but Ruskin could never quite keep it out of his writing and his opinions. It was sheer silliness that made him tell Gladstone, who was praising the Quakers, that I am really sorry, but I am afraid I don't think that prisons ought to be reformed, I don't think slavery ought to have been abol- ished, and I don't think war ought to be denounced.

Whether Gladstone replied, as he ought to have done in this faintly Gilbcrtian exchange, 'What — never?', history does not relate.

Henry James, I think, had a clear view of him.

Ruskin himself [he wrote to his mother] is a very simple matter. In face, in manner, in talk, in mind, he is weakness, pure and sim- ple. He has the beauties of his defects, but to see him only confirms the impression given by his writing, that he has been scared back by the grim face of reality into the world of unreason and illusion, and that he wanders there without a compass or guide — or any light save the fitful flashes of his beautiful genius.

That seems a fair assessment to me. Cer- tainly, when we look at his art criticism, a general admiration is tempered by an awareness of what really, in the end, is only weakness. For the most part, his art criti- cism, if read in sequence, seems like a slow and not very admirable retreat. If, in the early Modern Painters, he proved quite wonderfully open to the wild airy fantasies of the late Turner, later in life he often seemed wilfully blind to the best art of his time. His comment on Whistler in Fors Clavigera: I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face was a mere casual aside, elevated to the status of a serious judgment by a famous libel trial — Ruskin was unable to defend himself by reason of temporary insanity, but it would have been interesting to know if he had thought very deeply about the matter. But other judgments of his later years are not as easily written off. The author of the famous and valuable compar- ison in The Queen of the Air between a Persian miniature and a Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva found himself defend- ing 'finish' as a standard of artistic quality; the man who transformed English sensibili- ties with The Stones of Venice ended his career burbling inanities about Kate Greenaway.

There is a lot which is very difficult to take about Ruskin, but, by a long way, the most revolting are all those little girls. There is a vein of mystical paedophilia in 19th-century literature which I don't think we have much chance of understanding, even in Novalis or Little Dorrit; the cult of innocence, of feminine purity, often seems now to be disguising some unattractive desires. Ruskin was as bad as anyone. For a time in Oxford, he and Charles Dodgson shared the Liddell girls between them, Dodgson taking Alice while Ruskin pre- ferred Edith — and, goodness, how the girls must have longed for a bit of a break from all that knee-trembling with dirty old dons in punts. Worse, it infected his aes- thetic judgment, encouraging him into writ- ing an unreadable book like The Ethics of the Dust, a series of Platonic dialogues among schoolgirls — 'whimsical, incongru- ous and silly beyond all measure', the Sat- urday Review accurately said. Or making him praise some feeble exercises in the faux-naif, such as Kate Greenaway, or see- ing some pretty odd things in the old mas- ters. Here he is, in sickening vein, on Botticelli's `Zipporah':

Di wee ma, me's nearly driven myself quite wild today with drawing dear little Z's chemisette — you never did see such a dear little wimply-dimply, crinkly edge as it's got just across four inches under her chin — and it looks as if the least breeze would blow it loose — and, di ma, me do so want to see what's inside it.

This is almost funny, but at the centre of Ruskin's life is a truly awful story, that of Rose La Touche. When Ruskin met her, she was the small daughter of a family of Irish gentry. Ruskin worked himself up into a frenzy of enthusiasm over her innocence, her purity. The Liddell girls could look after themselves very well, but Rose La Touche was vulnerable and emotional, and between them Ruskin and her highly reli- gious parents destroyed her. Everyone wanted her to be a saint; some of them might even have believed her to be one. In her own words, she was led by her upbring- ing to have 'the one aim of being perfect' — a tragic and disgusting thing to encour- age in a child. Ruskin proposed marriage. Her parents, seeing too late the damage that he was doing, banished him from their lives. Rose's mother wrote to Ruskin's ex- wife, Effie, now married to Millais, about Ruskin; Effie's letters back are destroyed, but it seems likely that she said that he was impotent and — something to horrify the mid-Victorian mother — a keen masturba- tor. That, Ruskin's readers may come to conclude, seems about right.

Ruskin, despite the banishment, never- theless found ways to communicate with Rose; she sent him single flowers between the pages of books (a rose-leaf, a weed) which he dementedly pondered over, trying to decipher what message poor mad Rose might be trying to communicate to him. In the end, she said, in a heartbreaking letter, that 'Mr Ruskin' might have the 'remnant' of her, if he still wished, but it was all too late by then; self-hatred, religion and that ceaseless, revolting harping on girlish inno- cence had done for her, and she died at 25, almost certainly of anorexia. And Ruskin, as much as anyone, was to blame. More than once, reading Tim Hilton's excellent biography, one wonders if Ruskin was actually bonkers. There is something deeply mad in the way his mind wanders from one subject to another, drawing glee- ful links between things, like a lunatic assuring one that, of course, everything is connected. Occasionally, it is inspired; more often, there is nothing but the rest- less fancy of Ruskin's pen, wandering from one thing to another as it comes to mind. Fors Clavigera, his series of letters to the workers of Britain, can hardly keep to the point until the end of the sentence, and, like most of Ruskin, it is only interesting if you are interested in the author, and not in his subject. And sometimes it seems to wander over the edge into something truly unhinged:

You know, if there are such things as souls, and if any of them haunt places where they have been hurt, there must be many about us, just now, displeased enough. You may laugh, if you like. I don't believe any one of you would like to live in a room with a mur- dered man in the cupboard, however well preserved chemically — even with a sun- flower growing out of the top of his head.

Is there anything there? I wonder. It seems to me that the best that can be said about a lot of Ruskin is that reading him is, as was once said, 'like being out in a thunderstorm'. There is a certain power there, but it is too inward, too obsessed with its own rhetoric. Only occasionally, now, does one catch a glimpse of some- thing truly exciting in Ruskin, as that famous incantatory style spills over into poetry, and he starts to sound, even in non- sense, like a literary descendant of Blake. This is Modern Painters:

Between the burning light [of the heavens], — their deep vacuity, and man, as between the earth's gloom of iron substance, and man, a veil had to be spread of intermediate being; — which should appease the unen- durable glory to the level of human feeble- ness, and sign the changeless motion of the heavens with a semblance of human vicissi- tude. Between the earth and man arose the leaf. Between the heaven and man came the cloud. His life being partly as the falling leaf, and partly as the flying vapour.

This long-awaited sequel to Tim Hilton's life of the young Ruskin is a model of enthusiasm, scrupulous research and bal- ance. His account of the Rose La Touche affair puts the best possible face on things, and largely sees the matter as Ruskin, deluded, saw it; and yet the reader finds himself able to come to completely differ- ent conclusions, so tactfully laid out is the material. He quotes substantially, and approvingly, though with every quotation the reader will start to amass more and more doubts about his subject. His specula- tions I found without exception peculiarly plausible — the suggestion that Rose La Touche was anorexic is his, and so is the thought that what Effie Millais told Rose La Touche's mother was that Ruskin mas- turbated too much.

Pleasingly, Hilton is most committed to Ruskin as a political prophet, regarding Fors Clavigera as his masterpiece — I think we can all happily take his word for that. It's easy to agree that Ruskin's deeds were deeply admirable; he founded all sorts of educational schemes for industrial workers which changed the shape of English soci- ety; less easy for the biographer to argue with a straight face that his economic and political writings, such as Unto This Last, resemble anything but being 'preached to death by a mad governess', as the reviewers said. Nevertheless, it is good to have a seri- ous and enthusiastic account of Ruskin the political thinker as well as the aesthetician. Indeed, Ruskin as an artist gets rather squeezed out — and in some respects he was a fine painter, one of the most pleasing of his time. But for Ruskin the writer Hilton makes the fairest and most eloquent case imaginable, and it is not his fault that it probably won't be enough. One never picks up Ruskin, never reads one of those imperative sentences or those rolling per- orations without the odd reflection coming to mind that this, surely, is the work of an only child. Someone, somewhere, ought to have told Ruskin to sit down and stop talk- ing 'such bosh'; but it was all, always, far too late.