May/June 2002

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Mere sanity is the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man's attributes." So goes one of the best known of William James's obiter dicta. It is not so widely known that James wrote those words in reference to John Ruskin, provoked by the appearance in the July 1904 Atlantic Monthly of some letters that Ruskin had written to their mutual friend, Charles Eliot Norton.

James was writing to Norton four years after Ruskin's death and 15 years after he slipped into silent insanity following a long period of mental unstability. Indeed, well before James penned his famous observation, Ruskin had receded into that limbo set aside for great authors the reasons for whose greatness no one can any longer quite explain, since almost everyone has stopped reading their books.

Ruskin's status has not altered fundamentally since 1904. Everyone knows he is a Revered Writer; but he is one who, unlike such very different contemporaries as Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot, is known to the general reader today by his halo alone rather than by his books. Students who take courses in English literature still meet snippets of his prose in anthologies; and scholars of Victorian literature and culture of course read him more extensively, but as a rule still spottily (his output was vast). They are well rewarded for their effort—though also often puzzled. Ruskin was a master of supple, inventive, coruscating, heart-rending, evocative, tender, volcanic prose, so highly original a writer that the reader caught up on the stream of his words is often dumped out at the end without knowing exactly where she has been.

Ruskin wrote endlessly about art, but was not an art historian or art critic in any conventional sense. He drew and painted beautifully ...