John Ruskin's Tragedy
JAMES and Margaret Ruskin were both almost middle-aged when their child John was born. The time was 1819 when the old hard-drinking fashions of the Regency were giving way to the genteel, evan- gelical Victorian fashions of the nineteenth*century.
His parents had missed a great deal in their lives, and experienced the world as hard. Thus the ruling passion of their lives was to give. him all the art and culture they could find, show him all the beautiful things in the world and at the same time protect him in every way from its evils. James, who was a wine merchant, continued to work very hard in order to make a great deal of money. No better padding for the child, he' thought. Margaret, who was a Puritan and evangelical, undertook to teach him Godliness. They read to him, they encouraged him to' write. He sat in his corner in their handsome, suburban drawing-room, " like an idol in a niche," as he says ; or travelled half over the Continent with' them, and a full complement of valets and couriers.
Oxford set its seal upon him, and his parents were proud of their work. He was famous by the time he was twenty-five, and pouring out notable books about the arts and living on the beauty that he found in Turner's pictures or in the Alps.
But he was not happy. At sixteen he had fallen desperately in love, at seventeen and eighteen less seriously. He had successively lost his Adele, his Miss Withers and his Charlotte. 'Finally, as a crown to his amorous misfortunes, he married Euphemia Gray.
Contact with real life always eluded Ruskin. Euphemia Gray was a beautiful girl ; he married her, but never consummated the marriage. He visited Paris in 1848, and was merely shocked by the barricades. He became a Communist and 'lived in the same city as 'Marx and Engels, and never got to know them. He was the patron and champion of the Pre-Raphaelite movement but was never free of their cheerful, Bohemian society.
It was only in the world of visible form and of words that Ruskin moved unfettered, loosed from his cheated body and heart. It is impossible to read the pieces of natural description, say, in Modern Painters or Stones of Venice without agreeing with Marcel Proust that here was one of the greatest masters of observation and expression that ever lived. Proust lauds him to the skies ; praises his matchless discrimination, his delicate touch, his vivid sense of colour, his ability to bring the perfume of a field of meadow-grass or a whole climatic zone before the reader.
Ruskin found himself in 1854 in the dramatic age of the industrial revolution. A new population was growing up, and very little effort was being made to give this new population any of the good things of life. A few people began to feel uneasy. Ruskin took up regular work at Frederick Maurice's Working Men's College, for he had been brought up to think that culture is the best and most precious thing in life and he wanted to give the best he had to the disinherited working class that he saw in England. . His contact with individual workers at Red Lion Square and his habit of lecturing to rich manufacturers at Manchester, 'Sheffield, and other new industrial towns, . gradually brought Ruskin round to the conviction that there could be no sound art in England unless something was done to relieve the economic pressures of the age. . Gradually his interests became less and less aesthetic, and more and more political ; and here, as can be imagined, things did not run so smoothly at home. Ruskin at forty was too sensitive so much as to write a letter to the Times on. taxation without his father's consent, and this was not invariably given... It seemed to old James Ruskin unnecessary that his John should mix himself up with this Radicalism—why, some of the things he wrote were little better than Chartism ! What more did John want ? He was fashionable and sought after, he taught drawing to all the smart ladies. Let him praise the beauty of apple blossom as a subject for the painter, and the walls of next year's Academy were pink with the stuff. Why must he venture on to this doubtful ground of politics and economics ? Poor James Ruskin, with his innocent snobbery and real love of beauty, was on tenterhooks over John's political activities, and begged his son to let well alone.
Ruskin, with no wife, quantities of acquaintances, but very few intimate friends, had depended too much on his relations with his home. When perfect understanding there failed him, he had a terrible sense of loneliness, and he experienced a growing conviction of unhappiness both in himself and in the world. The complacency and belief in progress of the rich people about him suddenly seemed to him grotesque. He himself saw oppression and undeserved suffering everywhere.
It was when a complete conviction had come upon Ruskin that the arts did not touch all this, when he had turned economist and lost his public, when everything had .gone wrong with him except his wonderful power of writing and expressing himself, that his father died. He wrote a terrible analysis of his life to his friend, Henry Acland, the Oxford physiologist.
"You never have had—nor with all your medical experience have you ever, probably, seen—the loss of a father who would have sacrificed his life for his son, and yet forced his son to sacrifice his life to him, and sacrifice it in vain. It is an exquisite piece of tragedy altogether—very much like Lear, in a ludicrous commercial way—Cordelia remaining unchanged and her friends writing to her afterwards—wasn't she sorry for the pain she had given her father by not speaking when she should ? "
There was still, however, one little seed of happiness growing in Ruskin's heart. He had had as one drawing pupil (one among many) a beautiful child called Rose La Touche. Gradually, as she grew in beauty, wit, and sensi- tiveness of perception, he fell in love with her. He felt that with this new hopeful creature he might begin life again and make something out of the wreckage. But here, too, life was to elude him. A psychological tangle and the jealousy of an older and stronger character swept this hope aside. Rose died, and with her Ruskin's last hope of ordinary happiness.
He was in the middle fifties ; his melancholy grew upon him, and the honour and abundant public fame in which he lived failed to nourish his heart. He began to see everything in dark colours ; fits of nervous depression swept over him which made him feel that his work was vain and useless. Gradually these waves of melancholy began to carry him over the border line of sanity.
. He avoided the world. He was nominally Slade Professor at Oxford ; but he spent most of his time in his house in the Lake District—an old prophet denouncing the hard-heartedness of the age and calling out to it in his Fors Clavigera, to turn and repent.
The waves of madness grow more frequent. He is full of years and honours, he has friends to love him, and yet says with Wordsworth's old schoolmaster, " I am beloved of all, and yet by none am I enough beloved. There are so few people to call me John now," he said.
What we have to ask about John Ruskin is whether his achievements—the exquisite character of his style, his astounding perception of visual beauty of all kinds and his championship of the oppressed—atone for the tragedy of
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