Volume 3, Number 12 · January 28, 1965
The Great Amateur
By Wylie Sypher
The Letters of John Ruskin to Lord and Lady Mount-Temple
edited with an Introduction by John Lewis Bradley
Ohio State University, 399 pp., $6.25
The Art Criticism of John Ruskin
edited with an Introduction by Robert L. Herbert
Anchor, 430 pp., $1.45
Ruskin Today
edited by Kenneth Clark
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 362 pp., $7.50
Thirty-odd years ago when psychiatric terms seemed so helpful R. H. Wilenski remarked that Ruskin was always victim of a manic-depressive malady. The diagnosis still seems relevant to Ruskin's five love affairs, with Adèle Domecq. Charlotte Lockhart, Euphemia Gray, Rose La Touche, and Kathleen Olander. But the despairing letters he wrote to the Mount-Temples about Rose prove that a clinical description is no more conclusive in Ruskin's case than in Hamlet's, for when seen from the patient's angle, the clinical can be transformed to the tragic. Indeed, Philip Rieff has warned us that the clinical approach is like a comedy of knowledge, offering a therapeutic solvent for anguish.
Review, 2562 words
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