A Great Prophet

The Tragedy of John Ruskin. By Amabel Williams-Ellis. (Cape. 12s. 6d.) or the giants of the nineteenth century there is none about whom so few good biographies have been written as Ruskin. We do not know the reason, perhaps it is because Ruskin's personality was so elusive and there was a spirit of detachment about him which it was difficult to penetrate. The fact remains that John Ruskin has not yet found his Boswell. Some day his enthralling and tragic story will be retold by a disciple who is on fire for his Master's teaching and who will make us catch again the idealistic background that was behind all his social teaching, but that day is not yet.

Mrs. Williams-Ellis has written a very readable life of Ruskin in parts there are passages of real brilliance and her work reflects a wide study of Ruskinian literature. It is a book that once taken up it is hard to lay down and it can be cor- dially recommended to all whom Sir E. T. Cook's two volume life left with a feeling of incompleteness and a desire for further elucidation on Ruskin's human relations, and especially the story of his tragic love for Rose La Touche—worthy of a Greek tragedy, so unsuited to a mid-Victorian setting. The year 1858 was a fateful one for Ruskin for in it was brought to see him at Denmark Hill, Mrs. La Touche, an Irishwoman from Kildare, and her little daughter of nine "Rosie "- on whom Ruskin lavished all the unsatisfied yearnings of his heart. The love he felt for this Irish girl (she was only twenty- Seven or twenty-eight when she died) was the strongest passion of his life. " Her letter that he loved the best he carried always with him, between thin gold plates."

The author gives us the best account we have found any- .Where of this tragic love story. Doubtless some day all the mystery which surroimds Ruskin's loVe for Rose and her feelings for . him—" St. Crumpet " she called him—will he cleared up. Many have wondered why her parents, after having encouraged him for years suddenly changed so com- pletely towards him when he asked for their daughter's hand and forbade further correspondence. A man with a nature as sensitive as Ruskin's would not have been hard to discourage. Mrs. Williams-Ellis implies that the solution to the mystery must be sought in Mrs. La Touche's feelings for her daughter's suitor. Apparently it was jealousy which caused the mother to do all she could to poison her daughter's mind against Ruskin. The author gives as her authority for this statement a talk with Dr. Greville Macdonald, a son of George Macdonald, who was one of Ruskin's intimate friends. But Rose refused to have her mind permanently poisoned against her lover, who was thirty years her senior. For the next three years Ruskin's hopes centred round the answer that Rose had promised to give him when she was twenty-one. Hoping against hope that Rose would some day change her mind Ruskin suffered much mental anguish on her account. This was undoubtedly one of the unsettling factors which had such dire effects on his mental stability. The love story came to an end with Rose's death in 1875. He was at Oxford at that time and in a letter to Carlyle he wrote :-

" I . . . was away into the meadows to see clover and bean blossom, when the news came that the little story of my Wild Rose was ended, and the hawthorn blossoms would fall this year—over her."

The author rightly devotes a large part of her story to

Ruskin the social reformer, the art critic with an international reputation who, after finishing Modern Painters in 1860, became a crusader and with a fire and passion sought to

rouse smug and utilitarian Victorian England out of its lethargy and who, like Carlyle, henceforward championed unpopular causes. His name became anathema to his former admirers, but Ruskin never swerved from his desire to solve all questions by the flashlight of the Eternal."

Mrs. Williams-Ellis in her penetrating survey of Ruskin's life is so hypnotized by his failures, and they were many, and by the lack of success which attended many of his attempts at social betterment, that she fails to apprize Ruskin's life at its true value. For all its tragedy—and there are few sadder pictures than these last years at Brentwood when the brilliant mind was as that of a child—Ruskin has had probably as great influence on succeeding generations as any one who lived in the nineteenth century. In considering Ruskin we must not use a microscope and try to pin him down to terminological exactitudes. If you try to analyse a Turner masterpiece you will come to grief unless you are a great critic. Turner—the painter who played such an important role in Ruskin's life and whose fame the younger man largely helped to create—gives us messages in his sun-

rises and sunsets which defy words. If you seek to refute Ruskin the teacher you can do so no doubt by taking this or that extract from Fors Clavigera, and his other social writings ; the general message of the prophet remains.

Mrs. Williams-Ellis is mistaken in saying on page 833 that the Guild of St. George has " died since the War." This reviewer has attended meetings of the Guild, of which he is a member, during the past few years and received a letter from the present Master of the Guild a few days ago.

We wish that the author had put the charming preface she has written at the end of her book, for as it is her retrospect

leaves us with a sense of sadness and doubt. We seem to feel that she cannot make up her own mind as to how far Ruskin succeeded in his life's task. " By the time lie died," she writes, "he had failed—not only in his chosen work,

but in every vital relation of life."

Could anything be less true ? How can we call a failute a life which has served as an inspiration to countless thousands and from her preface Mrs. Williams-Ellis evidently feels that too.

" Measure thy life by loss and not by gain. Not by the wine drunk, but by the wine poured forth."

We prefer to recall the opinion of one who attended the lectures at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1870, and who wrote :—

" His soul was one of the tenderest in the world, and sure I am that if ever there was a man who lived to praise God by chewing forth the glory-of His handiwork and to plow Him by ministering to Hie' children, that rasa was John Ruskin."