BOOKS
The Tragedy of John Ruskin
By PETER QUENNELL
N , o wreck is so frequent, no waste so wild, as the wreck and waste of the minds of men devoted to the arts,' announced John Ruskin in a letter of commiseration written during the year 1857. For readers who have studied his later life, the sentence has a sadly prophetic ring; but at the time he was still hopeful and vigorous, though, as an undergraduate, he had already suffered a severe emotional and physical break- down; and on March 22 of that same year he could still describe himself, in the pages of the daily jour- nal he kept, as feeling refreshed after a good night's sleep and 'singularly full of spirit and power of thought and planning today.' Not until he had pub'ished Unto This Last during the latter half of 1860—thus mortally offending his father and alienating a large section of the British reading public—did a sense of frustration and personal isolation begin seriously to overcloud his mind; while definite signs of his impending collapse did not appear until 1871. Thenceforward the process was accelerated by his tragic preoccupation with the idea of Rose La Touche, the strangely un- balanced and ill-fated girl whom, he had adored since 1858, when Ruskin had reached the age of thirty-nine and his beloved was only ten years old, and she came towards him across her parents' drawing-room to give the middle-aged visitor her hand 'as a good dog gives its paw, . . .'
The second instalment of Ruskin's Diaries,* edited by Joan Evans and the late John Howard Whitehouse, covers the most fruitful period of his adult life, from 1848 to 1873. During that period he produced The Seven Lamps of Archi- tecture, The Stones of Venice and the concluding volumes of Modern Painters, as well as Unto This Last—his bold attack on the doctrine of laisser- faire and the 'modern soi-disant science of politi- cal economy,' which displayed his genius in an entirely new light—and some of his more fan- tastic and more discursive works, such as Sesame and Lilies, The Ethics of the Dust and the earlier portions of Fors Clavigera. These diaries, in fact, show him rapidly developing and then, from the mid-Sixties or thereabouts, gradually losing strength and hope; and, as we read, we witness the slow decay of an extraordinarily gifted in- telligence. When the record opens, he is approach- ing the apex of his powers. He marries Effie Gray, an attractive, well-meaning but slightly frivolous young person, in the spring of 1848. But Effie acquires little hold either on his Passions or on his imagination; her abandonment of him in 1854 fails to deflect him from his dedi- cated course; and he merely remarks, as soon as he has left England, having refused to contest her suit for nullity, that he finds he is happier exploring Beauvais alone than when he had visited the place with his wife in tow. The fields are divinely peaceful, the buttresses of the cathe- dral particularly grand, 'carried, where they meet the apse wall, by small clusters of columns forming niches of exquisite beauty.'
* THE DIARIES OF JOHN RUSKIN, 1848-1873. Selected and edited by Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse. (O.U.P., 70s.) Ruskin's notes on nature and art are especially numerous and illuminating throughout the first 200 pages of the present volume. At Salisbury, for example, in July, 1848, he jots down a brief paragraph that he would afterwards expand into one of the most celebrated passages of The Stones of Venice—his description of the splendour of St. Mark's Square, compared with the humdrum picturesqueness of an ancient English cathedral close. Elsewhere he is 'writing of seagulls in Venice : It was lovely to see them in the grey darkness
of the snowy sky, with the deep local green of the sea—the dark canal—reflected on their white under bodies in a dim chrysoprase, opposed to the purply grey of their backs. Their wings are edged with white in front and they were pausing continually at one or two feet above the water, flapping their wings slowly like moths. . . .
Just as vivid and just as precise are his account of the struggle between an earth- worm and a brown beetle and his notes on the structure of a wild orchis, accompanied by a series of careful pen-and-ink drawings. Even in September, 1868, when he has once again returned to Venice—but grievously perplexed and anxious now that the twenty-year-old Rose La Touche is proving more and more elusive—he records his impressions of a flight of swallows, seen from the shipping quay beside the Brenta, with something of his old enthusiasm for transcendent beauty of the natural universe :
The sunshine was full of white showering specks and gleams, which were a shoal of swallows, who all dipped together and rose to- gether, making the water quiver as if with a shower of stones, and not merely touching it, but going fairly in, and rising heavily after an instant's bath.
Surely no other English writer, unless an ex- ception should perhaps be made for Coleridge, has had a more finely observant eye or has im- parted his observations in a more exact; yet more poetic, style! Add to this a solid basis of scholar- ship, immense industry and great artistic flair. Few imaginative critics have been so richly en- dowed or have entered the literary world with so radiant an air of promise. Yet Ruskin's life was 'to end in tragedy; and his last books, apart from the unfinished Prteterita, were to become increasingly diffuse and unreadable, as his grasp of his subject-matter declined and he plunged deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of private fancies. His journals may not explain the catastrophe—no doubt it had its origins in the circumstances of his curious childhood—but they throw many interesting sidelights on his develop- ment from youth to middle age. Little by little, his records of the outer world are replaced by glimpses of a terrifying world within. From the year 1866 onwards he frequently mentions that his sleep 'has been troubled; and before long he has contracted the habit of chronicling his dreams in detail. They are 'black,' base,"paltry,"dis- gusting,"horrible,"unclean.' Sometimes he is tormented by visions of serpents; and the serpent, his readers will recollect, was a creature that he
instinctively feared and hated, presumably be- cause it is a sexual symbol and he regarded it as the loathsome antithesis of a bird, which he identified with the innocent joys of the spirit. These visions rise to a hideous climax on Novem- ber 1, 1869:
Got restless . . . and had the most horrible serpent dream l ever had yet in my life. The deadliest came out in the room under a door. It rose up like a Cobra—with horrible round eyes and had woman's, or at least Medusa's, breasts. . . . I got some pieces of marble off a table and threw at it, and that cowed it . . . but another small one fastened on my neck like a leech and nothing would pull it off. I believe the most part of it was from taking a biscuit and glass of sherry for lunch, and partly mental evil taking that form.
One need not approach the problem froM a Freudian point of view to find in this night- mare a pathetic hidden meaning; and equally pathetic are the constant references to his ob- sessive preoccupation with his cult of Rose, the embodiment of youth and purity, all that he reverenced in memories of his own youth, and, having once experienced the domination of the Serpent, felt bitterly that he had lost for ever. Ruskin's Diaries, then, deserve to be studied both as a repository of memorable literary fragments and as an extremely moving self-portrait. They illustrate the growth of his.creative gifts and hint at the nature of the conflict that proved his undoing. Dr. Evans and Mr. Whitehouse have edited the manuscripts with exemplary patience; but it seems a pity that they should have not ex- cluded some of the shorter and more trivial notes =MILAN. See various churches,' and other similarly unimportant jottings. Twenty-three ex- cellent plates, reproductions of Ruskin's drawings and romantic water-colour sketches, give the story its proper pictorial background.
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