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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 (the Tate Gallery recently mounted a Ruskin exhibition) but rarely gave his work finish and never sold it. He expounded political economy at exhausting length but spouted doctrines impossible to take seriously as plausible economics or practical politics. His later writing was half autobiography, but students of Ruskin know better than to trust his stories of himself.
More than anything else, he was a prophet, in the mold of such self-conscious sages of nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture as Coleridge, Emerson, and Carlyle. Carlyle is the closest analogue, a writer whom Ruskin deeply admired, whose fiery radical Toryism and suspicion of everything modern he shared, and after whom he to some extent patterned himself. In Ruskin's heyday, prophets were honored in their own country, despite what the Bible tells us, as well as abroad, at least where English was spoken. They are not much anymore, especially when their deliberate obscurity makes it hard to figure out what they are trying to say. For 13 years, Ruskin addressed the more-or-less monthly letters called Fors Clavigera "to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain" (vanishingly few of whom can be imagined to have read them); the very titles of the issues of Fors send the most erudite reader off on a desperate (and usually fruitless) hunt for their meaning. No wonder Ruskin is to us more a name than a presence.
From this peculiar but real oblivion Tim Hilton strives to rescue Ruskin, to resuscitate him and his eruption of words for the advantage of twenty-first-century readers. Hilton even believes the impossible and endless Fors Clavigera to rank as perhaps Ruskin's greatest work, a judgment most readers will regard as eccentric, to put it mildly.
Nevertheless, Hilton is in key respects ideally equipped for the job of rehabilitation. Himself an artist, he has taught both painting and art history and written extensively about art. Among his previous books is a lucid study of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, the school that Ruskin famously championed and whose members loomed large in his personal life. (One of them, John Millais, ran off with their paladin's wife Effie when she could no longer endure her sexually mute but psychologically domineering husband; another, Edward Burne-Jones, became one of Ruskin's closest friends.) Not surprisingly, Hilton handles with ease and insight Ruskin's own artwork and the art-historical contexts of his life and writing. Indeed, in the first volume of this biography (John Ruskin: The Early Years, published originally in 1985 and reissued in paperback to coincide with the publication of the second and final volume), Hilton illuminated as never before the association between Ruskin and the older genius who became his friend, the painter J.M.W. Turner, an affinity critical in forming both Turner's reputation and Ruskin's thinking.
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