John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life
John Batchelor
Chatto & Windus £25, pp448
The Romantic poet, according to Shelley, served as 'the unacknowledged legislator of mankind'. Later in the nineteenth century, poets took to writing prose, and began to issue legislative edicts in earnest, convinced of their duty to rectify the world. Ruskin, like Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, saw himself as a sage, preaching and prophesying to the nation. As the Bible lost credibility, writers were promoted to the status of oracles, or even deities. In his last decade, Ruskin even cultivated shaggy patriarchal whiskers like those of the heroic demiurge who animates Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
By then, however, the elderly Ruskin was incurably mad. He raged apocalyptically, smashed furniture and hurled food at his carer, Joan Severn. Repentant, he regressed to childhood, called the long-suffering Severn 'Mama', and begged her to forgive her 'little donkey boy'. This is the tragic paradox of his life and work, not very effectively sorted out by John Batchelor in a study which vacillates between biography and criticism. Ruskin's acolytes - a company which included Tolstoy, Gandhi, Proust and most of the Labour politicians elected to the House of Commons in 1906 - cherished him as a moralist, the upright conscience of industrial society. But his prescriptions for social change were at best dotty, at worst feudally nostalgic.
Despising neoclassicism, in 1853 he ordered the citizens of Edinburgh to demolish their Georgian squares and rebuild their town in the Gothic style: pointed arches signalled godly aspiration, whereas square-cut window jambs were smug, dull and grossly worldly. In 1874, he put into practice his belief in the sanctity and sanity of manual work, assembling a gang of Oxford undergraduates to mend a muddy road at Ferry Hinksey.
Oscar Wilde did some amateurish digging (a rehearsal, perhaps, for his later hemp-picking in Reading Gaol), while the ungrateful villagers jeered. Then the university vacation came and the incompetently repaired path reverted to mire. All Ruskin could propose, as his antidote to the iniquities of industrialism and the frenetic progress of 'the steam-whistle party', was the quaintly retro Guild of St George, with specially selected agricultural tenants cultivating plots of land. He specified that these anachronistic peasants must be 'cheerful and honest, accustomed to obey orders, and afraid of God'.
As Batchelor makes painfully clear, Ruskin's fondness for easy remedies and alluring fictions led him to espouse sentimentality, silliness and soft porn. He set up a Ruskinian academy for girls (whom he addressed as 'My dear Birds') in Cheshire, and asked the conductor Hallé to inculcate domestic virtue by playing them the treacly ballad 'Home, Sweet Home'.
Hallé railed that Ruskin preferred this 'sickly and shallow' tune to the symphonies of Beethoven. Certainly, by the 1880s he had come to prefer the coy, kitsch illustrations of Kate Greenaway to the more challenging art of Whistler (whose impressionistic nocturnes made him, though Ruskin could not see it, the successor to his juvenile idol Turner). Ruskin's only objection to Greenaway's nymphets was that they wore too many clothes. He coaxed his protegée to strip off their hats, shoes, mittens, and finally their frocks.
Despite Ruskin's crazed infatuation with the anorexic teenager Rose La Touche, Batchelor claims that he was no paedophile. The reason seems to be a quibbling technicality: Lewis Carroll 'was exclusively attracted to little girls', whereas Ruskin managed to prolong his own fixations into 'the young adult life of the chosen girl'.
Grown-up women dismayed him, and he never made love to his wife Effie, unmanned by 'certain circumstances in her person'. Usually this is thought to refer to his revulsion from her pubic hair. Batchelor speculates that the gawky bridegroom might have been baffled by the lunar mysteries of menstrual flow, or perhaps put off by what T.S. Eliot called the 'female stench'. Nevertheless, Ruskin reacted tetchily when accused of impotence. He was a vigorous and assiduous masturbator, and wrote to his friend Mrs Cowper-Temple offering a demonstration: 'I can prove my virility at once.'
Whatever you decide about Ruskin's partiality for unfledged maidens, there's another secret sympathy between him and Lewis Carroll. At the end of his book, Batchelor remarks that Ruskin's imagination inhabited a series of private, privileged worlds, like the insulated city of Venice or that girls' school outside Manchester or his fantastical guild: he 'was working towards a total, spatial organisation, a kind of world-map called "Ruskin" '. Although Batchelor does not say so, this idyllic, self-absorbed garden has much in common with J.M. Barrie's Neverland and also with the Wonderland of Carroll's stories about Alice. Ruskin, prophetically intent on actualising the New Jerusalem, was actually a creator of that Victorian alternative to bleak, iron-bound reality which we call Nonsense.
His ideas, for the most part, are - as Batchelor admits - 'sublimely silly'. What remains worth celebrating is the writing which, with its visual finesse and its visionary frenzy, transforms criticism into poetry: the rhapsodies about clouds in Modern Painters, the first enraptured glimpse of San Marco in The Stones of Venice, the fulminations against industrial filth in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, or the aerial survey of Europe from the Mediterranean to the Volga in The Nature of Gothic.
In the year of Ruskin's centenary, we don't need more biographies of the wretched, demented man. Why doesn't someone publish an anthology of his prose?
