Introduction

INTRODUCTION When the art historian Kenneth Clark began his ‘Introduction’ in 1949 to the important Hart-Davis edition of Praeterita , he helped commence the slow recovery of John Ruskin among readers. Ruskin’s visibility in the nineteenth century as a critic of art and society had been unequalled. He had hoped the best for England — its art, its trade, its buildings, its schools and universities, its treatment of the poor, its attitude to what we now call the environment. And he had been one of England’s most devastating critics. But by the end of the Great War, John Ruskin was either forgotten or derided. He was as unpalatable as the Victorian age itself: moralistic, anti-modern, illiberal. The once- great critic of the nineteenth century had become an emblem for what had been wrong with the recent past. It took some time before the tide began, gradually, to turn. Derrick Leon’s Ruskin: The Great Victorian (1949) was crucial in off ering an early, newly thoughtful and sympathetic reassessment. John Rosenberg’s The Darkening Glass: A. Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (1961) introduced Ruskin to students, and put him back into circulation, as Clive Wilmer’s edition of Unto this Last and Other Writings (Penguin, 1985) and Dinah Birch’s John Ruskin: Selected Writings (Oxford World’s Classics, 2004) keep him in circulation now. Some infl uential feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s were impatient with the author of Sesame and Lilies (1865), though gendered readings have now been refi ned. Today, Ruskin’s arguments are still a matter of contest. But his signifi cance is settled. He is widely studied. Now, there are scholars and journalists, furniture makers and pension managers, gardeners and artists, organic farmers and poets, economists and poli- ticians, preachers and teachers who remember his work and admire him. 1 The Hart-Davis edition, later reprinted by Oxford University Press and for several decades the only accessible (though unannotated) version of Ruskin’s autobiography, did his state some service. Lord Clark, who gave British television viewers the famous series his commissioner insisted on calling Civilisation (1969), literally began his ‘Introduction’ with a bracing line. ‘Praeterita’ , he said, ‘is the only one of Ruskin’s writings intended to give pleasure.’ 2 It was a good opening, 1 This is a selective list based in part on a few of the current Companions of the Guild of St George. 2 John Ruskin, Praeterita , introd. Kenneth Clark (London: Hart-Davis, 1949), p. vii. 000-Ruskin-FM.indd0-Ruskin-FM.indd iixx 33/7/2012/7/2012 4:58:254:58:25 PPMM x Introduction and it is tempting to believe it. Clark even had Ruskin for his authority. But, for all Lord Clark’s sympathetic understanding of a writer whom few in the 1940s were ready to read, he was wrong about Praeterita . Ruskin had neither a single audience in mind, nor a single purpose. Sometimes, in the midst of ill health, he struggled to know why he was writing his autobiography at all. The autobiography is an extended praise of the Alps, of the discovery of the genius of Turner, of a life lived with an increasing sense of the ministry and meaning of art, of the life-enhancing wonders of the early Italian Renaissance. But it is not singly so. About pleasure, Ruskin could not quite decide. ‘All great art is praise’ (LE xv. 351), he had said in The Laws of Fésole (1877–8). 3 The critic’s fi rst responsibility was to celebrate what was itself celebratory. Ruskin had spent his life in celebration, however much he is popularly remembered for his denunciations more than his affi rmations. Yet this long, late history of the making of a critic could not confi ne itself to sources of joy. In the ‘Author’s Preface’ to Praeterita , Ruskin said he was keen to omit passages of his life that brought no happiness in remembering (p. 5). Readers will look in vain for his mysterious falling- out with the English landscape painter to whom he had dedicated much of his early career, J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851); for Ruskin’s eventual vexation with the Pre-Raphaelite painters whom he had earlier sup- ported; for much about his politics; for much about his complex rela- tionship with his parents. They will look in vain for anything at all about his six-year marriage to Effi e Gray (1828–97) — and Ruskin’s decision to omit detail of his marriage is one of the reasons why we learn so little about Venice in this book, because his two major early visits to the city in preparation for The Stones of Venice (1851–3) were undertaken with his wife, whom he no longer wished to remember. But these omissions did not leave everything else an unalloyed delight. Loss, the failing of pleasure, and its unreachableness through the past, are Praeterita ’s recurrent themes. There may appear, for contemporary readers, something almost uncanny about Ruskin’s ability to build his life story around that which can be known no more. This starts with ordinary things. The house 3 All references to Ruskin’s work other than Praeterita , unless indicated otherwise, are to The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin , ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: Allen, 1903–12), and are given as volume and page number. This edition ( LE ) was made available as a hard copy digital reprint in Cambridge University Press’s ‘Cambridge Library Collection’ from 2009, and is also available free online from the University of Lancaster’s Ruskin Centre ( www.lancs.ac.uk/users/ ruskinlib/Pages/Works.html ). 000-Ruskin-FM.indd0-Ruskin-FM.indd x 33/7/2012/7/2012 4:58:254:58:25 PPMM Introduction xi at Hunter Street, London, in which Ruskin was born; the house at Herne Hill in which he wrote the ‘Author’s Preface’; the house at Denmark Hill his parents bought when their prosperity made it pos- sible and their social status required it — all are gone: only Brantwood, on the eastern shore of Coniston Water in the English Lake District, remains. It was Ruskin’s home from 1872 to his death. Praeterita cares a great deal about houses as it cares about places more generally. It is, in part, a remembered history of visiting. And it recalls much that is changed. The University of Oxford that Ruskin recollects in ‘Quem Tu, Melpomene’ and ‘Christ Church Choir’ has long passed away, changed, not least, by the mid-Victorian reformers. What Ruskin boldly calls in ‘The Col de la Faucille’ the three ‘centres of my life’s thought’ (p. 103) — Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa — are now, as modern commercial cities, dramatically altered from those Ruskin knew. When Ruskin speaks of Chamonix and the Alps (part of what he meant by ‘Geneva’), he did not know the ski destination the snows would become. In Pisa, Ruskin was entranced by the Campo Santo, the now austere cloister next to the cathedral church of Santa Maria Assunta. It was, Ruskin said in The Stones of Venice , one of the ‘three most precious buildings in Italy’ (LE xi. 403), 4 and its frescoes formed in Praeterita the subject of ‘Campo Santo’. A fi restorm after Allied bombardment on 27 July 1944 swept through the cloisters, destroying the painting. And what of Florence? Ruskin saw that city disappearing during his lifetime. ‘When I fi rst saw Florence, in 1840,’ he says in ‘Macugnaga’, the ‘great street leading into the Baptistery square from the south had not been rebuilt, but consisted of irregular ancient houses, with far projecting bracketed roofs. I mourned over their loss bitterly in 1845; but for the rest, Florence was still, then, what no one who sees her now could conceive’ (p. 228). Ruskin describes a world the modern reader can see has gone, and he was already a witness to its passing. Remembering with wonder, and often with pain, shapes this personal history. By the last chapter, it is hard to exaggerate the density of regret that Ruskin can imply in the briefest line. ‘I have been sorrowful enough for myself ’, he says in ‘Joanna’s Care’, ‘since ever I lost sight of that peach-blossom avenue’ (p. 362). They are innocent words, perhaps, and seem hardly capable of possessing much consequence. But they refer to walks in the gar- den at his parents’ house on Denmark Hill with the young Irish girl, 4 The other two were the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican and the Scuola di San Rocco, Venice. 000-Ruskin-FM.indd0-Ruskin-FM.indd xxii 33/7/2012/7/2012 4:58:254:58:25 PPMM xii Introduction Rose La Touche, whom from the 1860s he had hoped to marry and who died in 1875 at the age of 27. Those lost peach-blossoms, with their faintest glimpse of fragile purity, are the smallest — and thus the most crushing — hints of private sorrow. Never to know a functioning marriage, Ruskin did not cease to feel that his life had been blighted by the absence of a woman’s daily love, and, in particular, by Rose’s death. What is saved, what is peculiarly present , is that which is secured through pen and paper. Writing, here, does more than merely dryly record what the past was like. In Praeterita (Ruskin thought the title meant ‘past things’), words off er a self, a life , made through memory. Readers expecting a chronological narration will fi nd this only in the broadest sense.

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