Softer Ruskin
Jonathan Keates
Reflections of a Friendship: Ruskin's Letters to Pauline Trevelyan 1848– 1866 edited by Virginia Surtees (Allen & Unwin 210.00) Savage Ruskin Patrick Conner (Macmillan 28.95)
Who about what? 'My own deepest feeling about it is not so much in that it has shown us what is in us yet – for I never doubted that – but in it binding us for ever –as1 trust– to our French brothers – surely after thus pouring out our blood together we cannot _turn against each other any more in unholy wrath.' Why, Ruskin, of course, on the Crimean War, in a letter to Lady Trevelyan. To those who know only their Modern Pairzters or Sesame and Lilies this will be quite 'as surprising as his interest, revealed elsewhere among this correspondence, in the breeding of Shorthorn cattle and his enthusiasm for the burnt cork and banjo-strumming of the Christie Minstrels.
An analysis of the disastrous Ruskin marriage, as part of the recent exhumation or dusting-down of the great Victorians, touched off a reappraisal of the man himself scarcely anticipated even in Kenneth Clark's pioneer studies. Everyone knows about the Glenfinlas holiday, the circumstances of the Millais portrait, the elopement, and the story, now a piece of English cultural folklore, of Effie's pubic hair. So Ruskin, we suddenly saw, was not Carlyle after all, and the grim, disembodying compactness of those neat little bound sets of the works, to be found in every secondhand book shop, became altogether less menacing. The always slightly patronising tones of Fors Clavigera and the admittedly Carlylean swaths and curlicues of The Stones of Venice were softened as their author grew more approachable.
Concurrently with the publication of his letters the new Ruskin emerges piece by piece from the dreary chrysalis of the Victorian sage. Positively Renaissance in his range of talents and concerns, triumphantly resistent to any categorisation, he offers a number of bizarre parallels in this respect with his direct contemporary Prince Albert (on whom, by the way, see his unsparing comments to Lady Trevelyan). We have already had the smug, lively aesthete of the 1845 Italian letters and the respectful guru of the correspondence with Lady Waterford. Now, more fascinating than either for the fretful, mercurial personality it discloses, comes this bundle to the eccentric, pre-Raphaelite-fancying chatelaine of Wallington Hall.
The hardening and moulding of a lonely singularity can be traced here against the familiar backgrounds of Effie's backsliding. his father's dreadful protectiveness and the hopeless affair with Rose La Touche to whom Ruskin, at 40 plus, proposed marriage when she was barely 17. Beyond the Swiss sunsets, the structure of ash boughs and the 'rocks and lichens in their everlasting strength & delicate glory' these letters fully justify their re-appearance bY their revealing profusion of detail. At Turin the shaggy prophet of Unto This Last disappears to be replaced by something altogether closer to his friend Browning's 'Italian person of quality' in `Up At A Villa': 'Military band while dressing. Study Italian character. Proceed finally to the Fruit market – and buy a melon for fourpence. 71 PM Coffee. 8i PM Opera Comique. 10i PM Little walk in square by moonlight. II Bed. N.B. Mushrooms at Turin wonderful.' Managing to throw in letters from Lady Trevelyan herself, Effie (who considered mustard 'one of the common necessaries of life') and Ruskin's pompous old sherry-merchant of a papa, Virginia Surtees has edited the correspondence with an exemplary respect for minutiae of every kind – what other modern editor would bother to ascertain a terminus post quem for the holding of Anglican services in the hotels at Neuchatel?
The gradual rescue of the man has been Pushed a stage further in Patrick Conner's excellent short biography. As an art historian he is most obviously concerned with the writer as aesthetician, and the book is, as far as I know, the first to attempt a clear exposition of Modern Painters, Seven Lamps and Stones in relation to the art criticism of the age. Conner quotes a letter to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in which Ruskin writes of discovering that 'great Art is of no real use to anybody but the next great Artist' and such bluntness of assertion is deftly used to support his picture of a forthright, sometimes embarrassing and often tormented Personality, borne on gusts of anger and enthusiasm to the spectacular flops of his Paddington Street tea shop and the Whistler libel case, as much as to the Oxford road digging or the enduring advocacy of Turner. Despite its appallingly mean presentation by the publishers, it is the best brief account of Ruskin's career yet to have appeared.
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