Volume 2, Number 4 · April 2, 1964
Ruskin
By Francis Haskell
The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings
edited with an Introduction by John D. Rosenberg
Braziller, 560 pp., $7.50
A man of the most searing sensual passions and dreams of masterful authority driven by them beyond the bounds of sanity; a visionary, surely, and the greatest prose writer of his age, forced by natural disgust at its callous cruelty and ugliness to create his own 'paradis artificiels'; a Lear of the nineteenth century, who could write of himself and his deluded feudal kingdom 'And what am I, myself then, infirm and old, who take, or claim, leadership even of these lords?…. Bred in luxury, which I perceive to have been unjust to others, and destructive to myself; vacillating, foolish, and miserably failing in all my own conduct in life—and blown about hopelessly by storms of passion—I, a man clothed in soft raiment,—I, a reed shaken with the wind…' This surely is the Ruskin who can still speak to us today. As a writer on art he was at times profound and certainly influential—but his dogmatic confusion now bewilders more than it enlightens; as an economist his hatred of the repellent stupidities of contemporary doctrines stimulated him more to nobly foolish ones of his own than to practical remedies—though much that he dreamed of is now part of our lives, and the effect on Gandhi and the young Labour Party was significant; his influence on Proust is more a matter for literary historians than for the general reader. What then remains? Praeterita, certainly, that perfect autobiography—but also a thousand fragments which bring to life one of the most richly gifted and tragic of men, whose heart had been 'broken ages ago, when I was a boy—then mended, cracked, beaten in, kicked about old corridors, and finally, I think, flattened fairly out.'
Review, 942 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |