The Desire of My Eyes: The Life & Work of John Ruskin

by Wolfgang Kemp, Jan Van Heurck (Translator)

Overview

This "tour de force of analysis" (Joel Agee) examines the life and work of the prolific, visionary writer, painter and critic. Kemp finds in Ruskin's life — which spanned the same years as Queen Victoria's and thus embodied the Victorian era itself — a faithful mirror of the history and psychological evolution of his age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374523480
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/01/1992
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.18(d)

About the Author

Wolfgang Kemp is a cultural historian at the University of Marburg, Germany. He has taught and lectured widely in the United States.

Read an Excerpt

The Desire of My Eyes

One

The Little Phenomenon 1819—1842

1

The English academic painter James Northcote had turned out scores of commissions like this. A wine merchant from the City of London had asked him to do a portrait of his son, who had just turned three and a half. The year was 1822. Northcote, now seventy-seven, must have seemed the ideal artist to paint the child, as he could still lend an aristocratic flair to the hackneyed genre. A pupil of Joshua Reynolds, he never tired of reapplying the same formulas which in the eighteenth century had made English portraiture the model for the world—relaxed, unconstrained, even sprightly poses; an absence of pomp in costuming and decor; a nature scene in the background—and he clung to the conventions all the more with his middle-class clients. Northcote liked to pose children as "nature sprites" or "sylphids." He had the formula down pat, so the child's role was little more than that of a pho tographer's model who sticks his head through an empty hole in the canvas to have his picture snapped above a prepainted body. Such is our first portrait of John Ruskin.

"I am represented as running in a field at the edge of a wood"—half floating, half arrested: the same suspended lunge achieved by duchesses and actresses in the paintings of Reynolds. The child's light white garment flutters as a small dog bounds along beside him. The animation is studied, recaptured by the composition; and the child's face, intently seeking the viewer, remains aloof. The face is still rounded, unformed, but already we see the beginnings of Ruskin's long skull, framed by an abundance of fine, pale blond hair. The features are so clear-cut as to have an academic look, butfuture portraits will show that the artist was faithful to his model. A flaring curve runs from the eyebrows to the nostrils, indented halfway down the face to make the bridge of the nose appear more delicate and the lower part of the nose broader and fleshier.

A good likeness, the artist must have thought, once he had transferred these dominant features of the face onto the canvas. For the rest, he stuck to the routine pattern. As he put in a poetic blur of landscape and filled one corner with an indeterminate species of tree, he had no way of knowing that the child he was painting would one day be acclaimed, by contemporaries and by later generations alike, the keenest observer of nature born in his century, an art critic unrivaled in his alertness to the detail of trees and mountains. Northcote knew none of this, and yet possibly he was the first to see a clue to Ruskin's future. After the child had sat for him for ten minutes, he asked the painter why his carpet had holes in it. "My formed habit of serenity was greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I sat contentedly motionless, counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,—a beautiful operation, indeed, to my thinking;—but I do not remember taking any interest in Mr. Northcote's application of the pigments to the canvas; my ideas of delightful art, in that respect, involving indispensably the possession of a large pot, filled with paint of the brightest green, and of a brush which would come out of it soppy."

Northcote followed up this commissioned portrait with a second, privately designed work for which he also used the child Ruskin as a model. It is a small genre piece, a scene from classical antiquity, in which a russet-colored satyr is removing a thorn from the foot of an Apollonian nature sprite against a background of grazing sheep—a schematized Arcadia. Northcote painted the nature boy with a part in his hair, neatly stroked into place only moments before by his mother. Below the hair is a woebegone little face, and below that, the body of a nude from the Sistine Chapel. Everything in this picture is false, formulaic, geared to produce cheap effects. Not one of its themes or sentiments would have any future in Ruskin's life: not classicism or Michelangelo,not mythological dress-up or lower orders of spirits soothing his troubled senses. In fact, neither the gentility ofNorthcote's portrait nor its hackneyed appeal to antique models is in any sense a prefiguration. Both are hallmarks of the eighteenth century. But there is also something nineteenth-century about it, insofar as the artifices no longer work. Art critics were already pointing out that the dryads and naiads churned out by painters of the day had lost all point except as nude studies. Nevertheless, two more decades would go by before the adult Ruskin formally declared them passe and called on artists to devote themselves directly to the nude, and to study real trees and sky. Meanwhile, Ruskin's parents must have been quite pleased with Northcote's portraits, because they went on to commission portraits of themselves.

Ruskin's mother and father were first cousins. Ruskin senior had grown up in Scotland, and his wife in southern England. Neither came from a prosperous or distinguished background. John James Ruskin was the son of a small tradesman, and Margaret Ruskin's family ran a pub. The cousins met when Margaret traveled to Edinburgh to serve as helper and companion to her aunt, John James's mother. The two women grew close and soon fastened on a common object of love and concern, John James. The threesome had scant illusions about the fourth member of their household, its father and head, John Thomas Ruskin, who involved himself in reckless and unrealistic business deals in his drive for success. Briefly he achieved his life's goal when he rose from small retailer to merchant; but after that he was only able to maintain his position by fraud. Finally, in 1817, John Thomas died by suicide, in a fit of depression, after two years of mental disorder. He left a heavy burden to his only son, now in his early thirties and already afflicted with a mild form of his father's mental illness: some £5,000 worth of debt from his embezzlements, and a lifelong dread of ending up in the same state of despair and instability.

John James went to London at age sixteen in search of work. He was well educated, which in different circumstances might have earned him something better than a job as a merchant's assistant (indeed, in 1804, he commissioned a portrait of himself holding abook which undoubtedly is not just a business ledger) but his family could not afford to give him long-term professional training. Also, Britain at that time was isolated from the Continent by Napoleon and foreign trade was almost at a standstill. The political situation made it difficult for a young Briton to establish himself in the business world, and John James was hard pressed to find even a minor position in a London firm. For seven years, he worked in a colonial trading company for only £100 a year. He kept to a grueling schedule, working seven days a week until eight o'clock at night, except for two evenings, when he would work until eleven. By the age of twenty-three, he had managed to earn a central post in a large shipping office. Then, after nine years without a vacation, he fell gravely ill, and it took months of nursing by his mother and cousin to bring him back to health. In 1814 he transferred to a small wine-importing house where he became the sole active partner, and from then on he was in business for himself. Describing his career in later years, he claimed that he had visited every town in England, most in Scotland, and a number in Ireland as a sales representative for his company, until he had increased business from a mere twenty barrels a year to three thousand, making the firm of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq the leading sherry importer in Britain. "There must be brought an unconquerabel Will & Power to Seize upon that which a hundred Competitors are Striving to Keep from you," he wrote, describing the two forces behind his business success. Will and power—not the gambler's instinct, the sudden stroke of luck, the "good nose" on which his father apparently had staked his hopes. John James carried on his business as if it were a paid office, a duty for which he was publicly accountable, with fixed hours of work, set assignments, and concrete goals to achieve. Later his son, when writing his works of social theory, had the same scrupulous attitude that his time was not his own but belonged to the public.

Like many self-made men of the nineteenth century, John James first learned responsibility by having to care for his family. The year 1808 brought the bankruptcy of his father's business and installed young John James as head of the household. He had alwaysadored his mother and now was closer to her than ever. His new responsibilities probably intensified his sense of duty and his serious attitude to life, and it is in keeping with this gravity that he became engaged to his cousin Margaret the following year, in 1809. By choosing to marry his cousin, he was marrying all that was familiar to him from his own mother; his mother, in fact, used to call her niece "the half of myself."

When young Margaret left the provincial town of Croydon in southern England and moved to Edinburgh to live with her aunt, she was following a well-beaten path, in the sense that she had been reared with no other prospects than a busy and pious life in the bosom of her family. But in Edinburgh she was unexpectedly exposed to influences which broadened her horizons. The Scottish capital, known then as the Athens of the North, was teeming with the theological, philosophical, and scientific speculations thrown up by a circle that included such luminaries as Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Adam Smith; and not even a simple young woman with little formal education could remain untouched by them. Indeed, the remarkable thing about the enlightened Scottish school of philosophers is that it attracted the lively interest of the general populace, despite the climate of religious stricture and intolerance emanating from the Scottish Church.

The national church of Scotland, of which the Ruskins were members, was committed to the basic Calvinist beliefs in predestination and the depravity of human nature—beliefs which made no allowance for aesthetic enjoyment or for the delights of independent study. This was all the more true at a time when the Scottish Church was embroiled in minor wars of religion against forces both within and without. But although Ruskin's parents always remained loyal to the principles of Scottish orthodoxy, they nevertheless persisted in reading contemporary authors (even authors as depraved as Byron), socializing with artists, taking long and expensive trips, and enjoying the luxuries appropriate to their class.

Yet religion was more to them than a matter of duty or social propriety. If that had been all, then John James and Margaret couldhave found a simpler and socially more attractive denomination when they moved south to London, which was home to a broad spectrum of English churches. There was, for example, the High Anglican Church, whose style of worship filled the need of many rising men of the nineteenth century for ornamental richness and religious fervor, without placing strict demands on their mode of life. Instead, the Ruskins chose an evangelical sect, the closest thing they could find in England to the national church of Scotland. This seemingly contradictory behavior cannot be dismissed simply as a case of individual eccentricity. Foreign observers regarded such behavior as hypocrisy and a British national trait. The nineteenth-century German historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote: "We find there [in Britain] a rigid adherence to traditional dogma rivalling that of the Jews, side by side with a popular morality—long potently embodied in the bold, practical egotism of that nation—which ... at bottom has always judged moral matters by the advantage to be derived." Treitschke tried to explain this dualism—British "Protestant strictness" versus British "worldhness"—by emphasizing the need of the middle class to find security and meaning amid the unpredictable bustle that they themselves had unleashed. But, in the Ruskins' case at least, other factors also played a part. John Ruskin's family home was highly religious and yet not narrowly or conventionally opposed to everything new in art, literature, and science. This openness was in part due to the great value which his parents attached to the work of mental craftsmen; and this in turn was traceable to the fact that they, too, had risen in the world by their own talents and efforts. They would happily have admired the English upper class and other governing institutions had they seen in them anything to admire; but the intellectual vacuum in the south led them to follow the Scottish model, and to cherish the achievements of those who, like themselves, had worked their way up without name and rank.

Like many middle-class townspeople of their day, they were impressed by the fame that writers, painters, scientists, and preachers had been able to achieve since 1800. It cannot have escaped the notice of Ruskin senior that, on the day in 1814 when Byron'sCorsair went on sale in London, whole streets of the business district were blocked by the crowds clamoring to buy it, and that the publisher, John Murray, reported the sale of ten thousand copies on this single day. And yet, at the same time, John Ruskin's parents must have felt the writer's profession to be a particularly hazardous and stressful one. To see one's name in print; to face critics like those who, in Edinburgh, were just then honing their craft into a fine art; and to influence public affairs—these seemed enterprises even riskier than the intrigues of the business world. All their lives, Ruskin's parents grew anxious each time one of his books was published and faced public scrutiny, whereas the author himself was inclined rather to view the process as a disruption of his work on new projects.

In Edinburgh, and later in Perth, Margaret read a great deal: the Bible with her aunt, numerous other religious and philosophical works, and fine literature. (She would one day pack into her son's traveling luggage curious treatises that betray her liking for a semi-philosophical type of devotional writing.) During her long years in Scotland, she occupied herself with "self-improvement" and preparation for marital life, while she carried on her chief duty of helping her aunt in these times of trouble. Apparently, Margaret seldom wanted anything for herself, but she did firmly expect that her vigil would one day end in marriage to her cousin and in their joint independence. This was the goal she waited and even fought for, resisting, with her modest resources, the opposition of her uncle and aunt, who desired a more brilliant match for their only son than their impoverished niece from Croydon. This same pattern of events was to repeat itself, a generation later, between Effie Gray and John Ruskin's parents.

No one knows whether John James himself felt indecisive about marrying his cousin, and whether this partly explains the length of their engagement—from 1809 to 1818. Later their son John commented on the subject in a passage that he wrote for his autobiography Praeterita and then omitted: "Very certainly, had there been what is rightly called 'love' on both sides it [the long engagement] would have been impossible, and as things were, it wasby my present judgment, unwise, and even wrong." We need not be overly swayed by this remark. The son always felt that his mother had been the loving partner in his parents' marriage, and assumed that his father treated his mother as he treated him: rationally and controllingly. Yet the letters exchanged by John James and Margaret after the birth of their son do not bear out this assumption, and even suggest the opposite. The long engagement—incomprehensible to us now, like much of the behavior both of the parents and of their son—was probably the result of their firm middle-class willingness to sacrifice present happiness in order to advance John James's London career, and their devotion to their aging parents in Scotland, who needed increasing amounts of care. There is no way of telling how the tale of the long-suffering lovers might have ended, had it not been for the dramatic events of 1817, the year which saw the deaths of all their surviving parents—Margaret's mother and John James's mother and father—and so altered their circumstances that the couple were able to marry in February 1818.

They moved to London at once, and one year later, on February 8, 1819, their only son, John Ruskin, was born in their new home at No. 54, Hunter Street. By this time Margaret was thirty-eight, John James thirty-three. If we consider the years of struggle that preceded their marriage, and the fact that in those days it was unusual for a mother of comparatively advanced age to give birth to a healthy child, we may more readily understand the parents' exaggerated anxieties about their son. For Margaret especially, her child represented the confirmation and fulfillment of decades of hope when hope was all but gone. She formed her own interpretation of the great event. Looking to the Bible for precedents, she felt that she was a second Hannah whose years of prayer for a child had been answered by God, and who dedicated her child to him in return: "For this child I prayed; and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of Him: therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord" (I Sam. 1:27-28). But Hannah-Margaret's vow went unfulfilled: John Ruskin did not become a clergyman. Instead, he ended up a prophetlike Hannah's son Samuel—to the discomfiture of his mother, who lived long enough to see it happen.

2

Historians have long regarded 1819 as a pivotal year in British history, when the kingdom came closer to revolution than in any year since, except 1848. A political battle was fought and lost then, which became known as "Peterloo": a working-class crowd had assembled at St. Peter's Fields, Manchester, to demonstrate for repeal of the Corn Laws and for the fundamental reform of Parliament, only to be brutally dispersed by the army and the police, who left eleven dead and four hundred wounded. Shelley, in his sonnet "England in 1819," described the Peterloo massacre as a moral Waterloo committed by a corrupt nobility opposed to reform:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring; Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow; A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—An army, which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield—Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,—Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed; A Senate,—Time's worst statute unrepealed,—Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

The meaning of the last lines, especially the phrase "glorious Phantom," has often been debated. Biographers of Queen Victoria and of John Ruskin, both of whom were born in this fateful yearof 1819, have refrained from claiming that the prophecy refers to either one. And as it turned out, what rose from the graves of 1819 was neither something so dim as a will-o'-the-wisp nor so bright as a beacon. Peterloo was the Waterloo of the workers and of the reform-minded middle class: it meant their neutralization as a political force. On the Continent, 1819 was the year of the Carlsbad Decrees repressing civil liberties in the German states, while at the same time the Restoration further entrenched itself in France. On the other hand, 1819 was also the year of the first law to reform working conditions in Britain. Working hours were reduced for child laborers, and employers were prohibited from hiring children under the age of nine. This paved the way for a series of small-scale but essential reforms effected by political means, not by violence and counterviolence, which culminated in 1846—47 in the repeal of the Corn Laws and the restriction to a ten-hour workday for women and children.

John Ruskin was born into an English middle class, most of whom, during his adolescent years, shared Shelley's opinion of the authorities, yet went on faithfully supporting the monarchy and the aristocracy. In fact, the middle class was excluded from governmental functions until the first franchise reform was enacted by Parliament in 1832. But the ongoing debates about reform, and the occasional piece of reform legislation, perpetuated the illusion that their interests, too, were being represented. And the fact that virtually no restrictions were placed on their own characteristic activities in trade, manufacturing, and intellectual life convinced them that there was no need for them to take a more active stand. John James had recognized that he had a job to do in England, and tackled it with a will. His success, and the success of many others of his generation, confirmed his view that, while one might defer to the upper classes, one did not necessarily have to share their politics in the narrower sense. Party politics and the formation of government and foreign policy could safely be left to the small governing class, as long as a man was free to manage his own affairs, for they were what really counted.

The son born to the Ruskins in that momentous year of 1819would not begin to interest himself in politics until relatively late in life, and where politics were concerned, he always remained a product of his class. His excursions into current affairs looked amateurish, and his indifference to party conflict naive, for he continued to believe that only the most basic things—the relationship of man to nature and the relationship of man to man, within the discipline of work and faith—deserved the name of politics or the total dedication of the politician.

The following passage—Ruskin senior's comment on the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert, from a letter he wrote to his wife in February 1840—reflects, in its seemingly contradictory tones, the static political platform of the English middle class, and as it shows us the father, equally it reveals the character of his son: "We are a King & Queen loving people but they must keep up their own dignity & keep the higher classes around them—else we may grow tired of paying for pomp. She the Queen is but a silly child & seems to have no Character. I wish the Boy [Prince Albert] may grow into something better. It is a poor prospect for the Country. We must look to our domestic Circles & our own neighbourhood & let politics alone. I am exceedingly well off under any sort of Queen & I shall make no attempt at revolution or disturbing the Government."

In 1819 the Ruskins' priority was to look to their "domestic Circles," and they do not give the impression of feeling overtaxed by the demands of their newly won independence and domesticity. They stayed in their first home, a narrow four-story row house, for only four years, before moving to a villa surrounded by extensive grounds in Herne Hill, south of London—an area that had not yet been overtaken by the metropolis. They lived here for nineteen years, until 1842, when they moved to nearby Denmark Hill, to an even larger villa with even larger grounds—a property with extensive greenery in the garden and surrounding landscape, big enough to maintain and occupy the little family and a fairly large retinue of servants. This was the house where John James and Margaret died many years later.

At Herne Hill, remote from the noise and dirt of the city, onelevated ground with a panoramic view, Ruskin's parents began a way of life which they were never called on to give up, which they never changed in any basic respect, and which their son later faithfully copied. The Ruskins were not of farming stock, but they set out to grow their own food as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They had milking cows, and vegetables and fruit in abundance. Ruskin's mother tended the flowers and decorative plants, and the head gardener, of whom there were several over the years, was always of central importance in the household. (Years later, before undertaking one of his social-reform projects, John Ruskin would as a rule send his gardener to evaluate the situation first.)

In establishing this kind of self-contained village economy, the Ruskins were not so much imitating an aristocratic life-style as trying to realize the ideal of autarky—economic self-sufficiency. The 1820S saw the publication of William Cobbett's popular pamphlets on self-sufficient farming. These pamphlets were aimed at a different, less wealthy audience than the Ruskins, but the family seems to have taken up his basic ideas: don't give up your natural means of subsistence, don't trust in the monetarization of labor and exchange, resist the destruction of nature and custom. Cobbett was, at least at times, a radical Tory—today we might call him a cultural conservative—and the same must be said of both John James and his son. After all, John Ruskin later began his autobiography with the sentence: "I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school;—Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's." The political platform of the radical Tory found its tersest expression in the words of William Blake, in his famous poem "The New Jerusalem" from the Preface to Milton which ends:

I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green & pleasant Land.

Cobbett was the man who led this struggle during Ruskin's youth: a radical who wrote gardening manuals and cookbooks, who had traveled all over Britain on horseback, a nature conservationist, a politician who made his stand in an England that was a garden—and from there fought like a champion.

John James, as a radical Tory, felt that the good life was life close to nature, and that this must go hand in hand with resistance to progress. Admittedly, he ran a flourishing business in the City of London, but he did not belong to that segment of the middle class which sets store by innovation. As a merchant of the old school who maintained personal contact with his customers and never sold any but the best and purest of products, he was a figure representing stability, not progress. He never took to that symbol of the new age, the railroad: "These Railroads are the most thorough nuisances that ever a Country was infested with." He hated the way that the railroads changed business practice through the stocks and lending system used to finance them, and when he made his annual business trips, it filled him with sadness and despair to see the drastic transformations taking place in England and the English. He was gratified to have a son who voiced more resoundingly than any other man of his time concerns that the father was probably not in a position to express even to the circle of his clients and colleagues.

But it caused him a great deal of anxiety, and alienated the two men, when Ruskin junior went a step further and began to interpret the railroad, industrial machinery, and the new conduct of finance as mere symptoms of a deeper-lying malady, and to prescribe a cure that would have undermined his father's economic foundation along with the other instances of modern blight. For, after all, how could John James have risen from obscurity to become the largest sherry dealer in England, without the new wealth, and without the improvements in communications and transport? Thus, the autarky at Herne Hill, and later at Denmark Hill, was less a new feudal state established by a socially and commercially successful merchant than a tangible symbol of middle-class insecurity and defensiveness. And the symbol lay under siege from all directions.It was threatened by a possible working-class revolution, the kind which had at last begun to look possible after the violent events of 1819. From another side came the threat that the incompetent policies of the ruling class might lead to the abrupt ruin of trade, in which case the little Ruskin estate might offer a remnant of security. Finally, it acted as a bulwark against those destructive tendencies which were being unleashed by John James's own entrepreneurial class.

The independent state in the hills above London did not limit itself to the production of milk and apples. It was also the center of gravity for a little family who enjoyed each other's company and were developing a characteristic pattern of life. In addition, ill health necessitated a comfortable domestic refuge. His mother remained sickly for years after John's birth, and his father suffered periodic relapses after his serious bout of illness in 1813. John James dreaded the business trips, often lasting for months, that exposed him to heat, cold, rain, and dust, the laziness of waiters and coach drivers, and the foolish chatter of customers. At night in his hotel room he would write letters to Margaret, often one a day: long, unhappy, nearly illegible monologues, expressing his weariness and disgust. It is important to read these letters because they correct the image of John James as the tough, dour, and dogmatic old curmudgeon, an image which for a long time Ruskin's biographers tended to paint. His letters show him to have been a deeply insecure man with a strong urge to unburden his feelings, and also given to self-accusation: "I know my utter Selfishness & I mourn over it but I mend not in it. Myself only have I all my Life Studied." And

I have a sort of a Schoolmaster within that seems to scorn his pupil that can neither lead me nor whip me forward[,] that goads & soothes & flatters & reprimands but all in vain. I feel I shrink I wince but am in two hours your senseless monster again, an amazing thick coating of Clay has this Carcase of mine—the Spirit shines through it as a Candle through a Horn Lantern—it is all but a total darkness—Someare made of fine China clay & are clear & transparent—I am composed of absolute mud, incapable of shaping or moulding into anything tolerable or decent. In truth I can put myself into no form that will endure for a single day.

Amazing confessions to come from the pen of Britain's most successful sherry merchant! His two driving motors, "Will & Power," have switched off, and doubt undermines that self-confidence, that strong sense of identity, which we automatically attribute to every entrepreneur of his day.

At the same time, we must recognize that self-criticism of this kind can be merely a perfunctory exercise, a reflex of duty and convention. No article of faith lay closer to the heart of a Scots Presbyterian than the doctrine of his own worthlessness and depravity. And even in the nineteenth century it was still common practice in Scotland to denounce oneself before the congregation. Young John Ruskin had the same proclivities as his father, and many of his later snippets of self-analysis sound like variations on themes set by John James. In Praeterita, he wrote of himself at twenty-three: "I was a mere piece of potter's clay, of fine texture, and could not only be shaped into anything, but could take the stamp of anything, and that with precision."

Thus, father and son alike complain that the stuff of which they are made refuses to take on independent form; that is, an identity. But whereas the father expects himself to supply his form ("I can put myself into no form") and despairs of his inability to do so, the son sees at least one positive feature in his protean nature: it lets him absorb impressions from outside and reproduce them accurately. Already we have a statement of what set the son apart from the father, and of what set John Ruskin apart from most of his contemporaries: he saw salvation neither in a well-rounded ego nor in a superego anchored in the world beyond, but rather in the world of things, reality, what in the quoted passage he calls "anything" —which demanded to be perceived and assimilated with precision. The realization of reality ranks before self-realization.

And there is yet another notable difference, if we compare theparallel quotations of father and son. The father reveals his inner life to only one person, a trusted confidante, whereas the son speaks to everyone who will listen or read. The father found a way out of his cyclically recurring depression by resuming his role as a hard-boiled businessman, and consoled himself with the thought that no man with a wife, a child, and sound business sense could be a total reprobate after all, whereas the son publicized his self-doubt and introspection yet found no release.

Although John Ruskin never threw away his parents' extensive correspondence, we cannot say with any certainty when, if ever, he understood the implications of the letters which John James and Margaret exchanged. Many things in their letters prefigure the themes of his own life and work. This does not necessarily mean that his parents directly influenced him in his behavior in relationships, that he deliberately imitated them, or that he inherited their traits. It was simply that this son who lived with his parents until they died absorbed as a matter of course all aspects of their marital relationship: their mutual solicitude, the serious attention they gave to each other's moods and ailments, the exaggerated devotion stemming from low self-esteem, their anticipation of each other's wishes, their awareness of areas where each was vulnerable or touchy—in short, all the things that tend to stimulate inner life and emphasize its importance.

Yet we should note again that the parents had cause for real concern, especially where their child was concerned. The annual adult mortality rate in Britain at this time was 2. 5 percent, meaning that the average adult could expect to live to the age of forty; but the mortality rate for infants in the first year of life was over 16 percent. Consequently—as J.F.C. Harrison comments in his book Early Victorian Britain—"the ordinary Victorian family was intimately acquainted with death in a way which is rare today. To ensure two surviving children a married couple could expect to have five or six births." Those who feel, when they read the family correspondence, that the Ruskins fretted and fussed too much should pay more heed to those many passages which tell of the deaths of relatives and friends. To cite just one example, Jessie,John James's sister, bore ten children and lost six of them during her lifetime. Ruskin's parents were comparatively lucky that their only child outlived them, and almost inevitably, they paid for their good luck by the compulsion to overprotect him.

3

Ruskin expressed widely differing opinions of his parents and of the way they brought him up. "I should have to accuse my own folly bitterly; but not less, as far as I can judge, that of the fondest, faithfullest, most devoted, most mistaken parents that ever child was blest with, or ruined by." And: "In all these particulars, I think the treatment, or accidental conditions, of my childhood, entirely right, for a child of my temperament." The glaring contradiction between these two remarks mirrors that of many other passages and is fundamental to Victorian attitudes in general. The Victorians felt ambivalent about children. Adults who as children were harshly disciplined and at the same time idolized regarded their own children as angels but also as sensual beings with dangerous proclivities. The nineteenth century brought major social advances, and the claim that the Victorian Age invented childhood is undoubtedly true, and yet the most heinous crimes were committed against children in this period. The view that every cultural achievement is counterbalanced by, and closely linked to, a new manifestation of barbarism is certainly borne out in this case. For example, in L. Walther's essay "Invention of Childhood," we read a description of middle-class Victorian family life which says that this was a time when "children were much favored while they were much denied. It was during Victoria's reign that the Christmas tree was introduced to England, that penny and halfpenny and farthing toys became popularly available, that the children's book trade reached previously unparalleled heights in volume and quality. It was also the age in which the early isolation of children from their parents—through the growth of the nursery and Nanny traditions—became established and acceptable in middle class homes; and the child forwhom new games and amusements were being created was also painfully familiar with the cane, the strap, and the riding whip as disciplinary methods."

John James, certainly, did not succumb to the nineteenth-century fashion for discovering poetry and magic in even the most unhappy childhood, and stated curtly: "I have not one pleasing association of my childhood or youth to help me." His son, on the other hand, described the narrow landscape of his childhood as a Garden of Eden, a paradise, albeit a paradise ruled by far stricter laws than the first Eden: for he was forbidden to eat not just one of its abundant fruits but all of them—or so he claimed. Nothing could state more succinctly the essence of a middle-class Victorian childhood.

John Ruskin did not accuse his parents of beating him, or of using the customary brutal techniques employed to teach children that kettles are hot and that fingers stuck in doors tend to get pinched. It was rare for Ruskin or for any other Victorian to question the value of punishment or the need to curb a child's early pleasures and passions. No, his main reason for criticizing his parents was that they tried, out of concern for his welfare and from puritanical motives, to bring him up in artificial poverty. "My mother's general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first allowed." Dolls given him by a sympathetic aunt were taken away at once, he recalls, and for years his only playthings were a bunch of keys, a cart, and a ball. He was never allowed sweets, pets, playmates, physically strenuous games, or any of the other normal pleasures of childhood. This secluded upbringing, he thought, profoundly affected his life. He claimed to have had "nothing to love," "nothing to endure," and no power to make his own decisions. "I had no companions to quarrel with, neither; nobody to assist, and nobody to thank." "Danger or pain of any kind I knew not: my strength was never exercised, my patience never tried, and mycourage never fortified." "My judgment of right and wrong, and powers of independent action, were left entirely undeveloped; because the bridle and blinkers were never taken off me."

By the time he wrote these remarks, Ruskin was an old man who did not like himself and whose life had gone awry in many ways—not exactly the most reliable of informants. Indeed, recent studies have revealed that his autobiography is riddled with factual errors. A close reading of Praeterita shows something wrong in Ruskin's portrait of himself as a young Robinson Crusoe living alone on a green island and never allowed to do what he wants. To cite a few simple facts: the dog bounding along beside the child in Northcote's painting is no fancy of the artist, for there were always dogs in the Ruskin household (one of which once bit John on the upper lip, leaving permanent scars). Nor did Ruskin grow up without the company of other children. The servants' children were there, and often the children of relatives; and John's parents, concerned for his happiness or his proper upbringing, took a young relative, a little girl named Mary, into their home, where they treated her like a daughter. Moreover—fruitless as it may be to try to reconstruct the exact contents of Ruskin's nursery—his father's household expense ledgers show that the elder Ruskins tended rather to refuse their son too little than too much. And what message is conveyed by the following excerpt from a letter which his mother wrote to his absent father, describing young John's third birthday?

John never spent such a birthday you know how bridget loves him she even put a stop to cleaning that the servants might enjoy themselves and everyone of the children brought him something he was particularly cheerful himself too and at night he made me feel more joy in him than I think I have felt in any one of his doings or sayings since his birth he had heard me speak to his Aunt of the storm you had been in you know how he listens I was obliged to repeat it all to him again when I did his little heart filled and he said I want my papa home from the wind & the rain I told himyou were out of it now and he cheered up no more was said about it all day but at night when he said his prayers—without even a hint being given or a word said he said "pray God bring my papa home away from the wind & the rain will that do Ann[?]"—is he not a dear lamb[?]

This and many similar documents of the period reflect a shift in attitudes, a growing sensitivity among parents and adults generally to the special qualities and rights of children. Children have always studied the behavior of adults; but only late in history, and under certain specialized conditions, have adults begun to pay attention to the feelings of children. The most important of the required preconditions was the formation of the middle-class nuclear family. In the Ruskins' case, the nuclear family existed in a particularly pure form, so it is no wonder that by 1820 we find them already exhibiting behavioral traits which were not to become the norm until the twentieth century: celebrating a child's birthday, for instance, to the extent of allowing it to dominate all the activities of the household; or writing down things a child said, and collecting specimens of any other medium in which he expressed himself. (Thanks to his parents' habit of dutifully amassing evidence of everything he said or did, we still have a large number of Ruskin's childhood drawings and letters, and of course his juvenilia, the early literary compositions which he began to churn out at the age of seven as if he could not help himself, and which would fill a thick volume if brought to print.) Moreover, Ruskin's parents staged activities and diversions quite suitable for a child: surprises, outings, visits from relatives, and family trips on which they were often accompanied by John's nanny, the same who had cared for Ruskin senior when he was a child.

In short, Ruskin's childhood was not as unstimulating as he remembers it, and there is no evidence of a lack of parental affection or of puritanical strictness. His mother, admittedly, was older than most mothers and perhaps less given to physical contact with the child than was normal. But, on the other hand, both parents underwenta kind of regression to his level and then kept pace with his development, albeit always maintaining the sober and edifying manner that was all they knew. Both parents worked their way through English literature and scientific journals with their son, while the boy sat every evening in a little recess in the drawing room, like "an Idol in a niche," listening as his father read aloud. When he showed an interest in pictures, his parents brought him panel reproductions and then original artworks. They were equally cooperative when he turned to natural history. Not only did John James and Margaret quietly supply everything his childish curiosity desired, but in a sense they joined him in his studies, accompanying this perceptual giant into a school of their own making, which they refurnished again and again, so that it always brimmed over with equipment and objects of study.

This disparity between Ruskin's memory of his childhood and its reality does not necessarily imply that he was mistaken in his judgment or in assigning blame to his parents. It is certainly possible for a person to be wrong about the facts but right about the general picture. His parents brought up their child as best they knew—that is, they followed the best available model. They raised him at home and gave him an upper-class education, but blended it with more stringent middle-class values such as devotion to religion, the zeal for knowledge, the taste for art. The child never lacked possessions and stimulation, company and interesting experiences. But—and it is here that his criticisms seem justified—everything with which he came into contact was selected for him, weighed and measured, given the parental seal of approval.

Once grown to adulthood—though still looked after by his parents—John Ruskin developed a theory of education quite different from the one he had experienced, and different, too, from the type of state education which was then coming into vogue. His chapter on "The Two Boyhoods," from Volume Five of Modern Painters (1860)—famous for its contrasting descriptions of Giorgione's childhood in Venice and Turner's childhood in London—secretly states what Ruskin felt was missing from his own childhood:

Born half-way between the mountains and the sea—that young George of Castelfranco—of the Brave Castle:—Stout George they called him, George of Georges, so goodly a boy he was—Giorgione.

Have you ever thought what a world his eyes opened on—fair, searching eyes of youth? What a world of mighty life, from those mountain roots to the shore;—of loveliest life, when he went down, yet so young, to the marble city—and became himself as a fiery heart to it?

A city of marble, did I say? nay, rather a golden city, paved with emerald. For truly, every pinnacle and turret glanced or glowed, overlaid with gold, or bossed with jasper ... . A wonderful piece of world. Rather, itself a world. It lay along the face of the waters, no larger, as its captains saw it from their masts at evening, than a bar of sunset that could not pass away; but for its power, it must have seemed to them as if they were sailing in the expanse of heaven, and this a great planet, whose orient edge widened through ether ... . As not the flower, so neither the thorn nor the thistle, could grow in the glancing fields. Ethereal strength of the Alps, dreamlike, vanishing in high procession beyond the Torcellan shore; blue islands of Paduan hills, poised in the golden west. Above, free winds and fiery clouds ranging at their will;—brightness out of the north, and balm from the south, and the stars of the evening and morning clear in the limitless light of arched heaven and circling sea.

Such was Giorgione's school—such Titian's home.

Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, a square brick pit or well is formed by a close-set block of houses, to the back windows of which it admits a few rays of light. Access to the bottom of it is obtained out of Maiden Lane, through a low archway and an iron gate; and if you stand long enough under the archway to accustom your eyes to the darkness you may see on the left hand a narrow door, which formerly gave quiet access to a respectable barber's shop, of which the front window, looking into Maiden Lane, is stillextant, filled, in this year (1860), with a row of bottles, connected, in some defunct manner, with a brewer's business. A more fashionable neighbourhood, it is said, eighty years ago than now—never certainly a cheerful one—wherein a boy being born on St. George's day, 1775, began soon after to take interest in the world of Covent Garden, and put to service such spectacles of life as it afforded.

No knights to be seen there, nor, I imagine, many beautiful ladies ... . [Instead,] dusty sunbeams up or down the street on summer mornings; deep furrowed cabbage-leaves at the greengrocer's; magnificence of oranges in wheelbarrows round the corner; and Thames' shore within three minutes' race.

Profoundly different though their circumstances may have been, with regard to their natural and human environments, the boy Giorgione and the boy Turner had one thing in common: the unregulated variety, the raw impact of their surroundings. Their world was unprocessed, both in the sensory impressions they received and in the rough-and-tumble conduct of their lives. Turner, for instance, was a Huckleberry Finn type who spent all day hanging around the river, whose playroom was the harbor and the marketplace, whose first teachers were prostitutes and seamen. Ruskin describes him as a child not unlike Sam Weller in Dickens's Pickwick Papers, whose father tells Pickwick: "I took a good deal o' pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was wery young, and shift for his-self It's the only way to make a boy sharp, sir." Ruskin had great appreciation for this kind of unstructured, practical upbringing—not only because of his affection for Turner but because, as he wrote in another volume, "It is not the going without education at all that we have most to dread." His parents must have shuddered to read such remarks. They would never have dreamed of letting their child out onto the street to play unsupervised with youngsters his own age, or of accepting the resultant escapades, pranks, and brawls as normal childhood behavior.

However, Ruskin rejected the idea that children could be prepared for life by exposing them to the kind of Darwinistic free-for-all popularized in the 1857 novel Tom Brown's School Days, written by fellow Oxonian Thomas Hughes. He also opposed any national program of education which would universalize the kind of circumscribed training that he felt he had suffered in his own childhood. Whereas the Swiss educational theorist Johann Pestalozzi said that middle-class children should not be taken into the woods because the trees there "are not arranged in systematic order, in an unbroken sequence," Ruskin preferred children to learn outside the schoolhouse. And while the educational psychologists of his century were recommending that classroom walls be solidly whitewashed, Ruskin pictured them painted in bright colors and crowded with things to look at. From his first major writings to the last, his autobiography, Ruskin's thought was dominated by the idea of richness, of abundance; and his theory of education is no exception. His own childhood was a pattern of instruction devised by wealthy parents and by no means without its charms. What it lacked—and what Ruskin believed to be an indispensable part of the concept of "wealth"—was the element of the uncontrolled, the adventurous and accidental. His final judgment of his own education—"that it was at once too formal and too luxurious" —seems to get to the heart of the matter more directly than complaints about sensory impoverishment, loneliness, and rejection.

4

Nothing very exciting happened in the Garden of Eden at Herne Hill during the years when Ruskin was growing from a little "idol" into a "little phenomenon." "I never had heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in any question with each other; nor seen an angry, or even slightly hurt or offended, glance in the eyes of either. I had never heard a servant scolded; nor even suddenly, passionately, or in any severe manner, blamed. I had never seen a moment's trouble or disorder in any household matter; nor anythingwhatever either done in a hurry, or undone in due time."

Young John's schooling was all carried on at home. At the age of four he began to read and write, and soon the mornings were formally assigned to schoolwork. His mother read the Bible with him and gave him whole chapters to memorize. He pursued drawing, or rather copying, without any guidance or prompting. He studied Latin systematically, with the aid of a dictionary and a grammar; he learned geography from books filled with beautiful illustrations. Mathematics was comparatively neglected. Besides all this, he went far beyond the normal home-teaching curriculum in his reading matter and devoured everything his father read aloud in the evenings and every book that was bought for him. This literature included a great deal of popular science: geology, meteorology, astronomy. At the age of seven, John began to disgorge all he had been fed by writing his first poems, dialogues, scientific treatises, plays, and novels. His poetical writings became his main occupation. When his father was away, John preferred to compose something for him rather than to write him a letter. On March 4, 1829, his mother wrote to her husband, apologizing for the brief note sent him by their son: "He has commenced writing a novel & a Sermon."

Contrary to Ruskin's later claims that it was his mother who kept him at his rhyming and so spoiled him, his parents' letters tell us that his mother tried to curb his authorial drive. It was his father who started dreaming of having a writer as a son and who gave John various sorts of encouragement, even awarding him a shilling for each page produced. Once, when his mother begged him to do something else for a while, John replied: "Well Mamma as you think I had better put this aside for awhile I will but then you must give me some subject for an Epic." So mother and son went out to the post office, but no sooner had they returned than the son sat down at the table and started writing again. His mother renewed her reproaches, whereupon he answered: "Why Mamma in the forenoon you almost put me out of heart about it and I thought I would give it up but I have so much to say it does not give me the least labour and is so delightful and pleasant to methat I really cannot give it up." "What in this case do you think should be done[?]" the mother then asked the father. "I cannot think." In his fanatical zeal to turn everything into grist for his poetic mill, John even wrote a poem about the fight he had with his mother when she told him to go to bed just as he was trying to squeeze in one last poem.

The works of the child author range from epic poems "On the Universe" and "On Happiness" to one entitled "Want of a Subject." Many themes seem to prefigure Ruskin's later work, and there is also much which later disappears altogether—for example, an interest in modern machinery. (His first poem was an ode to the steam engine!) But his thematic interests appear to have been outweighed by a concern for poetic form. Ruskin was experimenting with the uses of language and applying his findings to a vast range of subjects, not just the so-called poetic. His gradual mastery of the medium gave him a sense that the world—both the prosaic elements of everyday family life and the abstract elements of the sciences—was controllable. He acquired a feeling of competence that stayed with him all his life.

Objective and subjective factors combined to enhance his self-confidence. In the early nineteenth century, the sciences—even in their most advanced form—still lent themselves to poetic depiction, as we see from English poet Erasmus Darwin's didactic poem "The Temple of Nature, or the Origin of Society" (1803). Goethe's Theory of Colors (1810 ff) shows that the reverse was also true, that science could still profit from aesthetic insights. That nonprofessionals could still advance science through playful experiment is further documented by the work of the independently wealthy Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who in 1816 began experiments which would eventually lead to the invention of photography. This was a time when an individual could still be competent in a variety of fields. Henry Fox Talbot, for example, another pioneer of photography, also made a name for himself as a mathematician, philologist, mythologist, and chemist. The sciences were steeped in myth, especially Christian myth—a matter to be discussed at greater length later in this chapter.

All this does not mean that a seven-year-old boy could hold his own with adult scientists; but the world of science did not seem to him hostile and impenetrable. Its variety and charm could be conveyed by word and picture, and it was empirical, tangible. This made it possible for the boy to imitate at least its outward forms and then little by little to grasp its inner meaning. When he came to write his autobiography, Ruskin quoted a sample of his early writings, well suited to illustrate these points. He chose an excerpt from a work he wrote at age seven. This "book," an imitation of the popular dialogues of Jeremiah Joyce and Maria Edgeworth, was handwritten in an imitation of type, a clear indication that Ruskin was already entertaining thoughts about publishing his work. Indeed, the "little boy" had only four years to wait before he would see one of his poems in print.

Here is the end of the first (and only) volume of Harry and Lucy, as Ruskin himself published it in Praeterita:

Harry knew very wellwhat it was and went on with his drawing but Lucy soon called him away and bid him observe a great black cloud from-the north which seemed ra ther electrical. Harry ranfor an electrical apparatus which his father had given him and the-cloud electrified his apparatus positively after that another cloud came which electrified his apparatus negatively and then a long train of smaller ones but before this cloud came a great cloud of dust rose from the ground and followed the pos itive cloud and at length seemed to come in contact with it and when the other cloud came a flash of lightning was seen to dart through the cloud of dust upon which the negative cloud spread very much and dissolved in rain which pres ently cleared the sky After this phenomenon was over and also the surprise Harry began to wonder how electricity could get where there was so much water but he soon-observed a rainbow and arising mist under it which his fancy soon transform ed into a female form. He then remembered the witch of the waters at the Alps who was raised from them by-takeing some water in the-hand and throwing it into the air pronouncing some unintelligable words. And though it was a tale it-affected Harry now when he saw in the clouds some-end of Harry thing and Lucy like it.

In Praeterita, Ruskin explained what he felt was the significance of this curious scientific fantasy; namely:

That the adaptation of materials for my story out of Joyce's Scientific Dialogues and Manfred, is an extremely perfect type of the interwoven temper of my mind, at the beginning of days just as much as at their end—which has always made foolish scientific readers doubt my books because there was love of beauty in them, and foolish aesthetic readers doubt my books because there was love of science in them. [Also,] that the extremely reasonable method of final judgment, upon which I found my claim to the sensible reader's respect for these dipartite writings, cannot be better illustrated than by this proof, that, even at seven years old, no tale, however seductive, could "affect" Harry, until he had seen—in the clouds, or elsewhere—"something like it."

The subject matter of Harry and Lucy is also symptomatic of Ruskin's future development. Clouds, dark and otherwise, always fascinated Ruskin—indeed, they haunted him—right into his old age. One of his very last works was called The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. By then, however, he no longer envisioned witches in the clouds. Instead, after carrying out detailed observations of the overcast sky, he thought he could read there a prefiguration of Apocalypse, of the end of the world. Coeli Enarrant (The Heavens Tell) was the title he gave to a collection of his texts on clouds. To read what nature had to say about man, to keep open the bridges between the human world and the world of inanimate objects, and between art and the sciences: that was Ruskin's life's work, the task to which he devoted himself, through changing circumstances, from childhood on.

Very likely, the reason he took such a lively interest in clouds as a boy was that they would not submit to the confined, pinned-down world of Herne Hill. They were a faraway, unconstrained reality. True, they also brought other realities with them: fog, smog, dirt, and gloom, all of which the Ruskins had been at painsto shut out of Herne Hill—all things which, even then, were largely attributable to the environmental pollution of the London metropolis. At ten, Ruskin wrote a poem "On the Appearance of a Sudden Cloud of Yellow Fog Covering Everything with Darkness," an accurate and dramatic description of this blight upon the climate, albeit without an explanation of the causes:

It low'red upon the earth,—it lay A champion in the face of day: It darkened all the air around, It let not free a single sound: A leaf stirred not: the trees stood still; The wind obeyed the darkness' will; Not a thing moved; 'twas like the night ... .

5

In the summer of 1835, the Ruskin family went on a six-month tour of France, Switzerland, and Italy. John packed into his luggage a cyanometer for measuring the intensity of blue of the sky, a notebook for recording geological observations, a sketch pad, a square rule and a large foot rule to help him copy the architecture correctly, a diary, and of course enough paper to write a poetic rendition of his trip. "I determined that the events and sentiments of this journey should be described in a poetic diary in the style of Don Juan, artfully combined with that of Childe Harold."

He prepared for the journey by studying Saussure's Voyages dans les Alpes, William Brockendon's Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps, and Robert Jameson's System of Mineralogy, as well as by non-stop digestion of all poetic descriptions of the area—led of course by the aforementioned works of Byron. Samuel Rogers's Italy, and the poems of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge, served as poetical travel guides in the absence of a proper British guidebook. These writings were supplemented by pictorial works like Samuel Prout's Sketches in Flanders and Germany.

The trip to the Continent which the Ruskins took in 1835 set a pattern for their many subsequent journeys together and for those that John would make on his own, although it was not their first joint tour. Starting when John was three, they had begun to travel around the Lake District and Scotland, and mother and son often accompanied the father on his business trips, crisscrossing the whole of Britain. Then, cautiously, they extended the radius of their tours onto the Continent: first to Paris, then across the Alps to Genoa. In 1835, their route crossed France and Switzerland to Italy, and concentrated on Chamonix and Venice. This route became canonical: Ruskin, who spent approximately half his life in travel, was to follow it twenty-six times in his life, with minor variations and abbreviations. "A traveller I am / And all my tale is of myself," Wordsworth wrote, and the lines apply equally well to Ruskin—provided that one deletes the word "myself" and substitutes "the things I see."

Like Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Samuel Rogers, and indeed the majority of English authors of the early nineteenth century, Ruskin wrote travel books. His titles alone make that clear: The Stones of Venice, Verona and Its Rivers, Mornings in Florence, The Bible of Amiens. Others of his main works—Modern Painters and Fors Clavigera, to name only two—brim over with descriptions of his journeys or observations he gathered while abroad. The title of a late work, On the Old Road, might serve as a motto for almost the whole of his life.

Ruskin's traveling skills were acquired in "the olden days of travelling, now to return no more"; that is, before the coming of the railroad.

In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among themeadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long hoped for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent.

After some unhappy experiences traveling by public mail coach, the Ruskins extended to the Continent the same practice they had formed in England: they hired or bought their own coach. This was more expensive, and it increased their party from four or five—the parents, John, Mary, and usually the nurse—to seven or eight, by adding two postilions and a courier. But this style of travel had such advantages that they soon felt it was indispensable.

To all these conditions of luxury and felicity, can the modern steam-puffed tourist conceive the added ruling and culminating one—that we were never in a hurry? coupled with the correlative power of always starting at the hour we chose, and that if we weren't ready, the horses would wait? As a rule, we breakfasted at our own home time—eight; the horses were pawing and neighing at the door (under the archway, I should have said) by nine. Between nine and three,—reckoning seven miles an hour, including stoppages, for minimum pace,—we had done our forty to fifty miles of journey, sate down to dinner at four,—and I had two hours of delicious exploring by myself in the evening; ordered in punctually at seven to tea, and finishing my sketches till half-past nine,—bed-time.

Later, when Ruskin traveled without his parents, he would sometimes journey by rail, but he used coaches whenever possible. "Going by railroad I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely 'being sent' to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel." By the 1870s, stagecoaches were used only for short-distance travel; but Ruskin had a large traveling coach built especiallyfor him and, when he traveled in it, attracted as much attention as if he were riding in a steam-driven automobile.

The Ruskins felt that owning their own transport was not merely a luxury and a convenience but a necessity: for their son was the kind of person who felt compelled to stop to examine a particular landscape which he had seen in a painting by Turner or Samuel Prout; who wanted to leave the main road to study an interesting geological formation; and who, above all, needed time and more time to record new or familiar sights in elaborate drawings.

What is the proper title for a person who travels equipped like the young Ruskin, who pursues such an active itinerary, who returns home laden with poems, drawings, geological samples, and scientific notes: material enough to occupy him until his next journey? We might, I suggest, call him a studying traveler or a poet-observer, a type distinct from all earlier and later species of traveler: different, that is, from the traveling aristocrat and the curiosity hunter, from the traveling scientist or artist, and also from the tourist or cultural sightseer of our own day.

The Ruskins were middle-class travelers at a time before middle-class people began to travel in any significant number; while traveling, they moved in a sort of social vacuum. The upper classes had always been fond of travel and had their own characteristic behavior patterns, their own destinations and interests. Business travelers, too, had their own routes and habits, as John James knew better than anyone. When the Ruskins went on their study tours, the father would always ask for the second-best hotel rooms because he felt that this was in keeping with his median social status. Although he wanted something better than the quarters used by traveling salesmen and other commercial travelers, he did not want to stay in the best rooms, lest one of his many noble clients turned up unexpectedly and wanted the best for himself. For the same reason, he never sent his courier ahead to prepare a change of horses for his coach, because he regarded a mounted courier as another privilege of the nobility.

What distinguished travelers like the Ruskins from all other travelers of the past or their own time was their social isolation,their anonymity. For the traveling aristocrat or the curiosity hunter, and even for scientists and artists, travel was fundamentally a matter of making contact with other people. The Ruskins, exemplifying the priorities of the new studying traveler, focused on things.

Since the seventeenth century, people had toured Europe with a long list of names and addresses, to which they added whenever they could. The nobility had their far-flung network of relatives and contacts, duty calls to pay on the local gentry, and special "watering places." The middle class had their own smaller network, made up of business correspondents and trading partners. They, too, carried letters of recommendation and kept lists of suggested contacts among the local persons of influence; and they could always turn to other members of their own class, who held senior positions at public institutions like libraries, art galleries, universities, and academies. To most people, traveling meant moving as fast as they could through long, boring stretches of wilderness so as to arrive at an island of civilization, where they would then settle down for a while, making and receiving visits. The Ruskins, on the other hand, avoided the fashionable spots and were likely to stop almost anywhere along the road. They spent no more time with the locals than was necessary to arrange their travels and, unless they accidentally ran into someone they knew, were always alone wherever they went.

During the family's early trips through England, the father's business concerns forced him to steer for the houses of the gentry, but later they were free to keep to themselves. They never even made arrangements to be shown private art collections or other notable sights that were privately owned. As dutiful members of the middle class, they stuck to what was open to the public: the few state- and community-run museums; the churches; nature's monuments and anything else that could be seen out-of-doors. A typical feature of the Ruskins' traveling style was the way they always kept their distance, and this trait had far-reaching effects on John Ruskin's future work. For instance, one reason that he devoted so much attention to the features of Catholic churches,despite his unfamiliarity with and dislike of the Catholic religion, was simply that, of all the architectural monuments of Europe, Catholic churches were the most accessible to the traveler. Although he was extraordinarily sensitive to everything which could be grasped by the eye, his deeply engrained stance as an outsider partly explains why he did not acquire an adequate understanding of the functional aspects of art and especially of architecture: because to understand these things fully he would have had to talk to people and ask questions. It also explains why he always viewed art as an inferior adjunct of nature, not only because nature was his first love but also because it could be experienced without constraints. Nature left him free to enjoy what—in describing the trip of 1835—he called his "entire delight," which was "observing without being myself noticed,—if I could have been invisible, all the better."

Ruskin tried to refine himself into a "pure eye," an organ without any body attached, without social and historical obligations. But nimbly and freely as it may play over surfaces, such an organ is incapable of penetrating them. The eye is, literally, defenseless. It has to get along without the aid of property, convention, the counsel of experts. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travelers reflected the mechanistic world view of their time, in that everywhere they went they had one main question on their minds: How does it work? Whatever they saw, natural or man-made, they wanted to know what lay behind or inside it, what made it tick. They preferred watching the pressure derrick of a well to seeing the jet of water shoot up; they wanted to observe the hoisting machinery backstage at the theater, rather than the gods rising toward heaven on stage. And the key to all the machinery, they thought—and to works of art as well, for weren't these, too, half composed of tricks and gadgets?—was people. To study things meant to find out about the inventor or artist: how things were made or acquired and incidents or anecdotes connected with them.

The new nineteenth-century traveler pursued an opposite course. He had his own form of information gathering, which was to approach the object alone and without constraints, in the "freedom"of nature, or in an art collection open to the public, and there to concentrate wholly on its outward aspect, on the "impersonal" data it supplied—an isolated observer of an isolated phenomenon. Ruskin was one of the first true representatives of this type. He cared nothing for the opinions of guides, either in the flesh or in books. The only things he considered valid were his own analyses and his own visual composition of chosen objects.

But at the moment it is only 1835, and Ruskin has not yet had a chance to realize and defend his methodology. So far, he is simply filling in the blanks, following the lead of people around him. "My father liked a view from his [hotel] windows, and reasonably said, 'Why should we travel to see less than we may?'—so that meant first floor front." Concentration on the outward aspect brought the risk of being dominated by the outward charm. That was the risk John ran, unwittingly, in these apprentice years. The possible reward lay in the chance that, through sight, he might progress to insight.

The Ruskins, as we have said, gravitated mainly to places devoid of the cultural and social attractions sought by the old-style traveler. In a sense, they filled in the gaps between other people's destinations, and journeyed to empty places on the map. They were long-term guests not on the Riviera but in the Chamonix Valley, years before it became a tourist center. They valued Lucca more than Florence and spent much more time in Abbéville than in Paris:

About the moment in the forenoon when the modern fashionable traveller, intent on Paris, Nice, and Monaco, and started by the morning mail from Charing Cross, has a little recovered himself from the qualms of his crossing, and the irritation of fighting for seats at Boulogne, and begins to look at his watch to see how near he is to the buffet of Amiens, he is apt to be baulked and worried by the train's useless stop at one inconsiderable station, lettered ABBEVILLE. As the carriage gets in motion again, he may see, if he cares to lift his eyes for an instant from his newspaper, two square towers, with a curiously attached bit of traceried arch, dominant overthe poplars and osiers of the marshy level he is traversing. Such glimpse is probably all he will ever wish to get of them; and I scarcely know how far I can make even the most sympathetic reader understand their power over my own life.

It is permissible, even essential at this point, to mention the resemblance between the towers of St. Riquier in Abbéville and the bell tower of St. Hilaire in Combray: for, dear as the former were to Ruskin, the latter was equally dear to Proust, who said of his bell tower that it lent to all the town's activities, times, and spectacles their aspect, their culmination, and their blessing; and moreover, that it was able like nothing else to connect him with what was deepest in his life. (See Part I, "Combray," Chap. 2 of Du côté de chez Swann.) We need to note this connection here, because it was Proust who translated Ruskin into French, and because Abbeville and Combray fulfilled a similar function in the lives of the two men as a home away from home.

We may, for a moment, wonder why the cautious denizens of Herne Hill were willing to expose themselves each year to the rigors and hazards of a long journey. We may even wonder how, in the light of these many journeys, Ruskin can ever have felt that his childhood lacked excitement and stimulation. The answer to both questions is that the Ruskins' traveling style was such that in a sense they never left home. Indeed, for the middle class, travel meant arranging things so that they were always at home wherever they went. The Ruskins had their own special route, their own favorite lodgings, their own private destinations, their favorite views, "their" couriers and mountain guides; and all these things remained unchanged over a period of decades. "The reader must pardon my relating so much as I think he may care to hear of this journey of 1835, rather as what used to happen, than as limitable to that date; for it is extremely difficult for me now to separate the circumstances of any one journey from those of subsequent days, in which we stayed at the same inns, with variation only from the blue room to the green, saw the same sights, and rejoiced the more in every pleasure—that it was not new."

This passage makes clear another marked difference between the Ruskins and traditional travelers. Byron had described travel as life's most powerful excitement besides ambition, as something whose purpose was heightened sensation, an intensification of the sense of being alive. Thus, his Childe Harold is said to seek change at any cost, even death. But the Ruskins, when they traveled, were searching not for the new but for the old. Their journeys were homecomings. They derived from travel superimposed images of the same things, enriched each time by the change of perspective. To them, changes were a source of sadness rather than of pleasure and diversion. In 1833, Ruskin had noticed the unusual blue of the Rhône in Geneva, and the following year he published some brief remarks about it in Loudon's Magazine of Natural History. In 1835, when he returned to Geneva, he then filled his diary with fresh observations on the color of the river and referred to it in his rhymed account of his journey. He went on writing about the same subject year after year, and his final work, his autobiography, contains a celebrated and often-quoted passage about the Rhône's remarkable blue.

Ruskin commented frequently on his affection for the familiar. He referred to Geneva as a second home, a second center of his life, and it was there that he entered this passage in his diary on June 5, 1841, at the age of twenty-one: "I have been very happy all day, seeking out all my well known old haunts. There has been much building about the place, but still it is the same about the Hotel des Etr[anger]s, and the gravelly walk and old wooden seats are precisely what they were ... and I felt six years younger." Earlier he had written: "I never can enjoy any place till I come to it the second time." And: "I believe the only part of a journey really enjoyable to be the first six weeks, when every feeling is fresh, and the dread of losing what we love is lost in the delirium of its possession."

The aim of the middle-class traveler is to turn what is no one's property into his own internal possession. Ruskin's compulsive need to view the same sights again and again results from his dread of not seeing adequately, of not having really seen what he saw,and so losing it. Thus, we have the following lament, which seems so extreme for a man who has hardly begun his life:

I was tormented with vague desires of possessing all the beauty that I saw, of keeping every outline and colour in my mind, and pained at the knowledge that I must forget it all; that in a year or two, I shall have no more of that landscape left about me than a confused impression of cupola and pine. The present glory is of no use to me; it hurts me from my fear of leaving it and losing it.

Ruskin lived by two main strategies. One was to convert the déjà-vu, the already seen, into the déjà-vécu, the already lived, and to recharge himself over and over from the same objects and scenes. The other was to develop techniques of assimilating and incorporating what he saw so as to conserve "the present glory" without killing it off. His concentration on seeing meant concentrated seeing, repetitive, patient percipience, the inward expansion of the zone of vision.

"There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast." This was the central message broadcast by the adult Ruskin, the message instilled in him by his travel experiences as a child and a young man. And yet he seems to have felt this way from the very start, as we can see by the following short excerpt from his childhood work Harry and Lucy, describing the attractions of a family outing:

such a fine day that they all got out and walked a good way they had intended to walk very quick but they did not for they were attracted by such variety of objects such as the white major convolvolus in the hedges the black & white broad beans the butterfly like pea's the sparkling rivulets and winding rivers all combined their forces to make them walk slowly.

The late-eighteenth-century cults of the picturesque and the sublime vastly expanded the range of what was considered aesthetically appealing, so that people now went out of their way to look at sights which previously they would have ignored. The Ruskins, too, benefited from this enrichment of the visible. "A very few years,—within the hundred,—before [I was born], no child could have been born to care for mountains, or for the men that lived among them, in that way. Till Rousseau's time, there had been no 'sentimental' love of nature; and till Scott's, no such apprehensive love of 'all sorts and conditions of men.'" Nor, we may add, until the time of William Gilpin, a leader of the cult of the picturesque, did people take any aesthetic interest in Tudor nooks, low-slung peasant cottages, and stunted willow trees.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a traveler—assuming that he was not simply out for pleasure and adventure—would collect data on the great theme of man's power and dominion over nature. In a foreign country, he would want to know about its machines, its technical skills and memorabilia, and its methods for maintaining civic order. This type of traveler was then replaced by others, who wanted to see nature that had never been subjugated by man, or human creations that had since been abandoned, and so could be aesthetically ingested by a solitary observer. To stand awestruck before the snow-covered peaks of the Alps, or to derive aesthetic enjoyment from a decaying thatched roof, presupposed that one would ignore the significance these objects might hold for the non-spectator. Much later, Ruskin wrote that the charms we find "in a completely picturesque object, as an old cottage or mill ... are introduced, by various circumstances not essential to it, but, on the whole, generally somewhat detrimental to it as cottage or mill." What attracts us in the sublime and the picturesque, Ruskin says, are "parasitical" rather than intrinsic qualities stemming from "merely outward delightfulness" and from the fact that they stimulate a flow of associations. These are not—as is the case with the beautiful—qualities or values in themselves but, as Hazlitt says, are "interesting only by the force of circumstances and imagination." The picturesque and the sublime can be enjoyedif you neither can nor wish to own the object itself: if you confine yourself to traveling and looking.

The young Ruskin had cut his teeth on the poets of the picturesque and the sublime. Undecided whether he preferred Byron's mocking version or the metaphysical direction of the Lake Poets, he experimented with both manners in thousands of lines of verse. Here are just five, in Wordsworth pastiche:

Give me a broken rock, a little moss, ... for I would dream Of greater things associated with these,—Would see a mighty river in my stream, And, in my rock, a mountain clothed with trees.

In his drawings, the youthful Ruskin imitated Samuel Prout, who drew townscapes and architectural scenes. Like the Ruskins, Prout admired the decaying crannies of Continental cities, bits of rustic architecture, and everyday life in historic settings. His style was extremely mannered and thus easily copied. Embracing the principle that the main quality of the picturesque is the marred or broken, he never drew a straight line in his life but reproduced everything with cracked and jagged contours. To judge by Prout's pictures, there was not a single undamaged building left in all of nineteenth-century Europe, and nothing remained of the grand architectural designs of bygone ages except ruins surrounded by a rusticated race physically and spiritually dwarfed by the monuments of their forebears.

In Britain, however, there seemed to be more of the new all the time—"the world is more and more," Tennyson wrote in 1836. From this vantage point, the crumbling Continent looked like an undiscovered vacuum just waiting to reveal itself to the trained eye of the New Traveler and be filled up with his wealth of associations. Prout's attitude to the small cities of Europe was mirrored by Hazlitt's, in this succinct evocation of the "enchanting" city of Ferrara: "You are in a dream, in the heart of a romance; you enjoy the most perfect solitude, that of a city which was once filled with'the busy hum of men,' and of which the tremulous fragments at every step strike the sense and call up reflection."

The traveler in search of the picturesque had his own way of experiencing Italy. A sine qua non was that he must ignore the "official" ruins of Roman antiquity and devote himself to his everyday surroundings and to the random blend of culture, nature, and the life of the common people.

Describing his 1840 sojourn in Rome, Ruskin wrote that he "proceeded to sketch what I could find in Rome to represent in my own way, bringing in primarily,—by way of defiance to Raphael, Titian, and the Apollo Belvidere all in one,—a careful study of old clothes hanging out of old windows in the Jews' quarter." A diary entry points up his views about the importance of picturesque detail:

So completely is this place picturesque, down to its doorknockers, and so entirely does that picturesqueness depend, not on any important lines or real beauty of object, but upon the little bits of contrasted feeling—the old clothes hanging out of a marble architrave, that architrave smashed at one side and built into a piece of Roman frieze, which moulders away the next instant into a patch of broken brickwork—projecting over a mouldering wooden window, supported in its turn on a bit of grey entablature, with a vestige of inscription; but all to be studied closely before it can be felt or even seen: and I am persuaded, quite lost to the eyes of all but a few artists.

Thus, Ruskin subscribed almost word-for-word to the view expressed by aficionados of the picturesque, in their dictum—a line from Cicero: Quam multa vident pictores in umbris et eminentia, quae nos non videmus. ("How many things do the painters see in light and shadow that we see not.")

The picturesque was an education for the young Ruskin. It taught him to see what other people tended to overlook. He learned that there is something to see everywhere, even in the commonplaceand the trivial. He learned to build up a visual impression by putting together the details, rather than turning at once to the grand, ready-made structures. In all these respects—and in one other—he remained faithful to the picturesque in the years to come. Picturesque artists like Prout, and authors like William Hazlitt, looked at history in its present form; they were not interested in idealizing or reconstructing the past. On the contrary, what they valued most was what Ruskin called, in the just-cited passage, "bits of contrasted feeling," the blend of past and present—in other words, some old clothes hanging out of a marble architrave. It is in this sense that Ruskin praises his model Prout for his "ideal appreciation of the present active and vital being of the cities." It may sound strange to hear him say this, considering that Prout always chose to depict scenes of ruin and decay. And yet Ruskin is right: life amid ruins is still life. In Prout's work, culture is changing into nature, and that moment of transition creates the special form of vitality, of which the "hunter of the picturesque" can never get enough. Ruskin, too, was loyal to the actual—not the ideal—aspect of what he saw. The school of the picturesque drew him toward material, phenomenal things, and away from books, archives, data, and numbers. In an age dominated by the historical sciences, it was no small decision to commit oneself to present time.

On the other hand, Ruskin never developed into a "slave to the picturesque," as Hazlitt described himself. Quite the contrary, he has every claim to be considered its first critic. With the ferocity that only the apostate can muster, he writes that the "lower picturesque ideal is eminently a heartless one" and that "the lover of it seems to go forth into the world in a temper as merciless as its rocks." We have already noted that the picturesque had its negative sides and potential hazards, particularly in its concentration on outward appearances. Without doubt, Ruskin succumbed to all its temptations in his youth, being innocently led astray both by great models and by the conditioning influences of his own background. Yet he was able to marshal some resistance even at a young age, as his 1835 geological studies show; and later, after undergoing aperiod of hostility toward the picturesque, he created a new blend in which he was able to reaffirm its positive features.

Ruskin's main objection to the picturesque was a moral one: those who fell prey to its charms lost touch with the human reality of the people they observed. However, at the age of fifteen or twenty he could not yet be expected to know this. From his point of view, the peril that threatened him had to do with the possibility that he might see nothing more than "merely outward delightfulness" and patterns that often were accidental; and that his perceptions might inspire him to mental associations which were remote from reality. For, paradoxical as it may sound, these two contrary tendencies—the cult of the concrete and the cult of the abstract—came together in the cult of the picturesque and the sublime. The humble, the accidental, the uncivilized, the unrefined, were made more valuable by the sophisticated attractions they now held for the trained eye. But beyond the concrete attraction, devotees of the picturesque always went on to show links to grander, more abstract values. Matter underwent continual transformation, or was penetrated by something more subtle. "Give me a broken rock, a little moss" was never enough: the poet then wanted to see a mountain in the rock. And if he started out with a mountain—Mont Blanc, for instance, which the Romantic poets regarded as the quintessence of the sublime—he would come up with still more rarefied associations. Byron, after his stay in Chamonix in 1816, wrote: "to me / High mountains are a feeling." Coleridge, in "Hymn Before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni," celebrated Mont Blanc in these words:

O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone.

As thought and emotion ascend heavenward, the mountain itself gradually joins in:

Rise, O ever rise, Rise like a cloud of incense from the Earth!

And Wordsworth, it seems, would have preferred his idea of Mont Blanc to the actual view of it, for he complains of having "a soulless image on the eye / Which had usurp'd upon a living thought / That never more could be." Not until he reaches the Simplon Pass do the mountains appear to him "Characters of the great Apocalypse, / The types and symbols of Eternity." Hazlitt put the same experience into prose: "You stand, as it were, in the presence of the Spirit of the Universe, before the majesty of Nature ... . The mind hovers over mysteries deeper than the abysses at our feet; its speculations soar to a height beyond the visible forms it sees around it."

When Ruskin took his turn to extol the mountain, he, too, felt compelled to change his "mountain clothed with trees" into something more:

That burning altar in the morning sky;

And the strong pines their utmost ridges rear, Moved like an host, in angel-guided fear And sudden faith. So stands the Providence

Of God around us; mystery of Love!

It is not my intention here to discuss the caprices of the Romantic experience of nature. I wish simply to point to a single paradox: that poets who used the sublime and the picturesque to unlock new spheres of reality ended by exchanging these newly won realities for suprasensory, imaginative experiences. Hazlitt—as was so often the case—expressed this most clearly: "Let us leave the realities to shift for themselves," he wrote when his picturesque expectations were disappointed by the reality—"and think only of those bright tracts that have been reclaimed for us by the fancy, where the perfume, the sound, the vision, and the joy still linger, like the soft light of evening skies!"

But Ruskin, even as a young man, was disinclined to be sobroad-minded. By 1835, the "realities" had gained considerable ground against the "associations, recollections, fancies." Ruskin describes his 1835 tour as an equal blend of science and emotion. For, though the Ruskins wanted to feel what Byron had felt, they also wanted to observe what Saussure, the great Alpine geologist, had observed, or at least John did. An early poem shows that mountains may in fact "tell" him the same sort of thing they told other writers of Romantic nature poetry: they may be a message from God, a presentiment of infinity, an emblem of the beauty of earthly things and of man's inadequacy. On the other hand, mountains might equally well tell him something else, as we see from the following passage picked at random from the diary describing his 1835 tour of the Continent:

July 14th. MARTIGNY. Very fine. The rocks which you pass immediately after leaving St. Gingoulph are exceedingly remarkable. The first are composed of calcareous tuffa, and are moistened by a hundred dripping streamlets, which deposit their carbonate of lime in beautiful translucent brown stalactites, which in some places coat the original rock entirely; some in the progress of formation, instead of being soft and crumbling like lumps of brown sugar, as some stalactites are, were flexible, something like a rather tough paste. The rocks which are below this tuffa break out soon afterwards—ironstone veined with quartz—in thin layers, divided by lamina of indurated blue clay rendering the rock easily separable. In one piece I found a quartz vein pierced through by a long cylindrical hole, quite filled with blue clay.

Here, Ruskin is a geologist who fills a whole book with similarly exact observations; here, he is faithful to appearances. He can, of course, still find beauty in what he observes; but he does not yield to the compulsion to admire the Alps simply because of their ruined look—"a ruined universe"—which made English travelers find them so picturesque, so "rustic." ("Rural" was the epithet that Byron heard from an English lady in Chamonix.)

Nor does Ruskin immediately start seeing the stalactites as the handiwork of God. His self-taught geology was an experimental science demanding prolonged and many-sided examination of an object. The same was true of meteorology, which Ruskin pursued with equal zeal. Both sciences—of the earth and of the sky—lent themselves to study by the layman, who could enrich them by careful observation. Jameson's System of Mineralogy, which Ruskin used to guide his geological studies, promised readers that the author had classified his minerals according to their external qualities, so that no knowledge of chemistry was required to pursue their study.

Ruskin also praised Saussure because "I found Saussure had gone to the Alps, as I desired to go myself, only to look at them, and describe them as they were, loving them heartily—loving them, the positive Alps, more than himself, or than science, or than any theories of science." Thus, the young amateur of outward delights and outward information focused on two vast but distinct realms of study: the field of the accidental and the field of characteristic features. But different though they were, the two had one thing in common: they were accessible not to analytical but only empirical effort. His empiricism was to be Ruskin's most enduring and valuable quality. In his youth, he quite naturally found it hard to discern the common factor in his many divergent interests. It was not that he actually experienced the diversity as stressful, but he did feel a need to separate "science" from "feeling." He did not long to sacrifice one to the other as the young are wont to do, but he did want to be able to tell them apart. So, on March 31, 1840, he wrote: "I have determined to keep one part of diary for intellect and another for feeling."

6

His feeling side was not destined solely to compose poetic verses about his observations of nature. His emotional needs went deeper than that. The Garden of Eden at Herne Hill, where one was notallowed to touch the fruit, was now visited by Eve—but, alas, only visited.

In 1833 the Ruskins had visited their Spanish sherry supplier, Pedro Domecq, in Paris. Domecq, the Spanish partner in Ruskin's firm of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq, was married to an Englishwoman and had five daughters. In Paris, young John encountered a social world totally different from his own. The Domecqs were nobility: wealthy, urbane, Catholic, ostentatiously fond of luxury; a large family with branches in many nations. They were exactly the sort of people for whom John James always gave up the best rooms in the hotel and who, when they traveled, gravitated toward the fashionable resorts which the Ruskins strenuously avoided. Their daughters attended fine convent schools where they acquired all the social graces: "They were the first well-bred and well-dressed girls I had ever seen—or at least spoken to." John naturally was obliged to be attentive when they wanted to play, dance, and chat with him; but he was very impressed by the skilled conversation of the youngest daughter. He must have found it odd to hear her rave about the Domecq home on the Champs-Elysées and say that she thought all Paris was a paradise.

And then, in 1836, four of the Domecq girls came to visit the Ruskins in London. "A most curious galaxy, or southern cross, of unconceived stars, floating on a sudden into my obscure firmament of London suburb." Ruskin's own account of the visit is unsurpassable, and deserves quoting, because the other sources do not show that it is in any way inaccurate:

How my parents could allow their young novice to be cast into the fiery furnace of the outer world in this helpless manner the reader may wonder ... . Virtually convent-bred more closely than the maids themselves, without a single sisterly or cousinly affection for refuge or lightning rod, and having no athletic skill or pleasure to check my dreaming, I was thrown, bound hand and foot, in my unaccomplished simplicity, into the fiery furnace, or fiery cross, of these four girls,—who of course reduced me to a mere heap of whiteashes in four days. Four days, at the most, it took to reduce me to ashes, but the Mercredi des cendres lasted four years.

Anything more comic in the externals of it, anything more tragic in the essence, could not have been invented by the skilfullest designer in either kind ... . Clotilde (Adèle Clotilde in full, but her sisters called her Clotilde, after the queen-saint, and I Adèle, because it rhymed to shell, spell, and knell) was only made more resplendent by the circlet of her sisters' beauty; while my own shyness and unpresentableness were farther stiffened, or rather sanded, by a patriotic and Protestant conceit, which was tempered neither by politeness nor sympathy; so that, while in company I sate jealously miserable like a stock fish (in truth, I imagine, looking like nothing so much as a skate in an aquarium trying to get up the glass), on any blessed occasion of tête-à-tête I endeavoured to entertain my Spanish-born, Paris-bred, and Catholic-hearted mistress with my own views upon the subjects of the Spanish Armada, the Battle of Waterloo, and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.

Ruskin wooed Adèle with all the means at his command: he wrote her long letters in laughable French; he wrote a blood-and-thunder tale for her about an Italian bandit, which was actually published; he wrote poems, which were also published. All of this amused Adèle, but less than a fashionable outing or a ball. His courtship was so romantically vague that, although she might suspect, she could not know for certain that the young Englishman had fallen in love with her. John knew, but what he did not know was what to do about it: "I had neither the resolution to win Adèle, the courage to do without her, the sense to consider what was at last to come of it all, or the grace to think how disagreeable I was making myself at the time to everybody about me."

So alert to their son's every mood, his parents recognized the change in him but initially thought it was due to a passing infatuation. Then, as the affair dragged on, they concluded that the infatuation was an illness which they must quietly wait for him toget over. John stood no serious chance of actually being able to marry Adèle. The daughters of the Domecqs were meant for the sons of the European nobility, and the parents on both sides would have regarded the difference in religion as an insurmountable barrier. Eventually, the girls transferred to an English boarding school, which enabled John to see Adele a number of times over the next few years; but there was no change in their basic situation. Adèle showed no wish to commit herself, and John elevated her to heavenly rank both in his thoughts and in his verses. He had found his "ideal beloved" and was unhappy and preoccupied. His new feelings are best expressed in two lines of poetry which unfortunately do not represent his best work as a poet:

Nature has lost her spirit stirring spell She has no voice, to murmur of Adele.

Actually, things were not quite so bad. The years 1836 to 1840 may have been overshadowed by Adèle, but they did not grind to a halt on her account. "Nature's spirit stirring spell" worked on as indomitably as before and, in fact, was the real inspiration behind Ruskin's student years at Oxford. There were also new trips, new works of art to delight in—Ruskin lost interest in Prout as the universe of Turner opened up for him. These other interests and distractions do not dispel Ruskin's claim to deep and serious emotion; but they show he was not as helpless in dealing with it as he may have thought. On the other hand, there is also something rather ominous in the plight of a young man who is reduced to inventing rhymes on his mistress's name, and who knows that his first unrequited love has the sanction of a school of poetry and thought which views love as, by nature, unrequitable.

John Ruskin went through a period of academic tutoring, brief attendances at private schools, and courses at King's College, London, to fill some of the gaps in his unconventional education, before beginning his studies at Oxford at the start of 1837. His mother took stock at this watershed in her son's life and wrote in a letter to her absent husband: "Our child has entered his nineteenth yearwithout having by his conduct occasioned a moments serious uneasiness to either of us, and as we have the Divine assurance following the commandment, train up a child in the way he should go, & when he is old he will not depart from it, so I think I may venture to prophesy that his future conduct will not differ from the past."

But Margaret cannot have been as confident of her son's well-being as she claims, or she would not have moved to Oxford for the duration of his studies to watch over him—an action that can hardly have helped Ruskin's position at the university. Many years later, in Praeterita, he commented that he thought it was very much to his credit that he had never felt his mother's presence to be embarrassing. Thirty years before Ruskin enrolled at Oxford, Byron, then a student at Cambridge, wrote the following in a letter to a friend who had suggested that Byron's mother might be coming to visit him: "You hinted a probability of her appearance at Trinity; the instant I hear of her arrival, I quit Cambridge, though Rustication [temporary suspension] or Expulsion be the consequence."

"Oxbridge" undoubtedly made a more suitable setting for a dandy like Byron than for the studious, knowledge-hungry John Ruskin. Byron had pointed out in 1805 that "College improves in every thing but Learning[:] nobody here seems to look into an author ancient or modern if they can avoid it. The Muses poor Devils, are totally neglected." What had been true then was still true in 1837, especially for students from high-born or wealthy families. They could afford to cut themselves off from the ordinary students, the commoners, and from ordered study activities.

John James, of course, had spared no expense to ensure that his son was registered at Oxford as a "gentleman commoner." This did not mean that he would get a different or better standard of education, but merely that he would not be required to take an entrance examination, would be entitled to better lodgings and food, and would rub shoulders with the nobility. His dinner companions, next-door neighbors, and daily associates were young noblemen, a fact which deeply gratified his parents but does not appear to have meant much to John himself. He had gone to Oxford to study, whereas the students of noble birth thought of their three years' stay as an opportunity for amusement. As a result, John had to fight a clique of young playboys to defend his right to study, while at the same time defending himself against his parents' reproaches that he was cutting himself off from the other students and losing out on the chance to form contacts with men of rank. Despite the close eye his parents kept on him, they appeared not to understand the conflict into which they had plunged him. Later, Ruskin reprimanded them for it:

You and my mother used to be delighted when I associated with men like Lords March & Ward—men who had their drawers filled with pictures of naked bawds—who walked openly with their harlots in the sweet country lanes—men who swore, who diced, who drank, who knew nothing except the names of racehorses—who had no feelings but those of brutes—whose conversation at the very hall dinner table would have made prostitutes blush for them—and villains rebuke them—men who if they could, would have robbed me of my money at the gambling table—and laughed at me if I had fallen into their vices—& died of them.

 

In a different letter, Ruskin tells how one day, when he had no classes, he used the free time to make drawings of his college, Christ Church, while two of his aristocratic fellow students spent the day racing each other on horseback along the road from Oxford to London and back again. Six hours later, just as he was packing up his drawing pencils, the two returned: first the winner, and hard on his trail the loser, who was now on foot after having ridden one horse to death and broken the legs of a second.

In spite of this often sharp contrast between Ruskin and his classmates, at no other time in his life did he conduct himself as adroitly as during his studies at Oxford, and in no other setting was he as successful at human relations. He parried with ease the constant interruptions, pranks, and tactless intrusions of the youngrogues. He would take part in their drinking bouts when it seemed called for, and proved he could hold his liquor, like the good wine dealer's son he was. He shared out his allowance as evenly as possible, and clearly he was well liked, for otherwise the young lords would not have made such persistent efforts to win over a bookish, middle-class student. He sought the company and friendship of the few like-minded young men at Oxford, who were equally fond of him. A twenty-year-old who had traveled extensively and was proficient in many fields, and who had files and drawers filled with the amazing objects he had collected, was a rare find even at Oxford, and he was soon admitted to scientific societies and invited to the dinner tables and evening gatherings of various faculty members. He accepted good-naturedly the indifference or outright rebuffs of the majority of the dons, like the classics lecturers who tended their field like the Holy Grail and soon realized that Ruskin was not interested.

John managed to let his mother and his cousin Mary share in his life, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to be in Oxford. His mother, seeing how coolly he took the teasing of the young lords, wrote to her husband that she was pleased to see that John did not take himself too seriously—which was quite true. Ruskin walked with the sure-footedness of a sleepwalker through this murky compound of scholarly study, which had the mores of a feudal manor. And yet he was not really asleep but had a clearer idea what he was doing than almost everyone around him.

Ruskin's problem during his Oxford years was not his social life but his studies. The undergraduate curriculum consisted of classics, mathematics, and theology—the latter including its subsidiary branches, ethics and philosophy. None of these subjects had ever been of much interest to Ruskin, and none was ever to play a significant role in his life. He worked very diligently, sometimes to the satisfaction and more often to the surprise of his tutors, who looked with scorn on his earlier patchwork education. But his heart was not in it, and he profited no more from his officialcourse of studies than he would have from any thorough training in the humanities.

It is no accident that he began to write his first major work of art criticism the moment he started at Oxford, to divert himself from the university's deficiencies. The Poetry of Architecture was a series of reflections on the aesthetic aspects of architecture, which began to appear in the Architectural Magazine in 1838 and led to other small pieces as well. Oxford could teach him nothing about this kind of trade literature. There was no Professor of Fine Art at Oxford at this time; the first—Ruskin himself—would not arrive until thirty-two years later.

The only university offering which aroused his enthusiasm was the Newdigate Prize, an annual award for the best poem by an Oxford student. Three times he submitted a poem laden with erudition and metaphors, and the third time he won, read his poem aloud to an audience of two thousand, and was introduced to William Wordsworth. The Newdigate Prize was just about the best reference a poet could have to launch himself on a career as a writer of occasional verse and sentimental album poetry. Of course, this support and encouragement came rather belatedly for Ruskin, who by this time was already a regularly published poet. His work had been appearing since 1835 in Friendship's Offering, an annual anthology of lyric poetry put out by William Henry Harrison. But although a number of people took pains to ensure that the Newdigate Prize would go to Ruskin in his final year at Oxford, no one had any illusions about his being a great poet. Even his father, who admitted that he normally tended to overvalue his son's achievements, did not want publishers to advertise John's other writings by listing him as the "Winner of the Newdigate Prize." "As we can no longer pass him off as The little phenomenon I am afraid of letting the Kindness of Friends, usher him into the world of Literature as any great phenomenon." All the same, John James did continue to "indulge a hope that he may, if spared, become a full grown poet." The phrase "if spared"—neither pampered with praise nor intimidated by harsh criticism—shows the antiquatedview that Ruskin's parents, and also literary Oxford, held about what goes into the making of a poet. The only truly readable verses that Ruskin wrote are his love poems; that is, work reflecting an experience which did not "spare" him.

Some years earlier, Wordsworth had written disparagingly of his years of study at Cambridge: "I had melancholy thoughts ... / And, more than all, a strangeness in my mind, / A feeling that I was not for that hour, / Nor for that place." Ruskin was saved the need to say the same by the fortunate fact that at Christ Church there was one faculty member at least who encouraged his private researches in a field which interested him. He was William Buckland, canon of Christ Church and lecturer in geology and mineralogy. Through Buckland, Ruskin stayed in touch with developments in geology. As a member of the Geological Society, a frequent visitor to the British Museum, and a collector and researcher in his own right, Ruskin would most likely have made good progress in his geological studies, even if he had stayed at home in London. But his encounters with one or two teachers within a university setting enabled him to develop a professional method from what might otherwise have remained no more than a hobbyist's urge to collect.

Geology was the key science of the age. The future of other disciplines—history, theology, biology, anthropology—all depended on the pronouncements of geology—pronouncements which in the 1830s, when Ruskin began to approach the field's great issues, had yet to be made. Chief among the unsolved problems, and the most ticklish of them all, was whether the Biblical account of the Creation could be reconciled with the most recent discoveries in geology and paleontology.

Some thirty years earlier, the French comparative anatomist Cuvier had studied fossil remains from the Paris basin and drawn certain conclusions based on them which had not yet been digested by the theologians. Cuvier had reconstructed whole species of long-extinct creatures. Fossil findings seemed to contradict the Old Testament, which appeared to say that only six thousand years had elapsed since the creation of the world, and which also indicatedthat God never allowed any species to perish, or brought any new ones into existence. Although Cuvier himself had managed to wangle his way out of the dispute, he had lent impetus to the science of stratigraphic geology, a field which then made rapid strides, especially in Britain. More and more unknown creatures were emerging from the dark of time, deeper and deeper strata were being quarried, and people were asking with growing urgency whether the Book of Books could stand comparison with the Book of Nature.

Scientists with a Christian orientation—and that meant most of them—came up with an idea which temporarily relieved the strain. Assuming that the extinct species really were once alive, then they must have lived before man's expulsion from Paradise. Paradise being timeless, many aeons of natural history could have come and gone before the expulsion. But this explanation raised other tricky questions. Was it possible for a species to die out in Paradise? Did death even exist then?

This explanatory model and the accompanying theological conflict were under debate when Ruskin arrived at Oxford. Characteristically, Ruskin immediately embroiled himself and his family in the problem. His geology lecturer, William Buckland, had his own thesis: the extinct animals did live in Paradise, and they ceased to exist by eating each other up—but this could not actually be called dying. Margaret Ruskin's comment on this was: "The question is a very puzzling one—it is a great mercy that neither our welfare here nor our happiness hereafter depend on our solving it—it would I think be wise in the Dr. and his compeers I think if they would let the Bible alone, until they had gained sure knowledge on the subject." John James, who was fretting over the problem on one of his sales trips, wrote (before hearing Buckland's suggested solution): "The monsters as we must let them live by Geologists Chronology—ceased to live by the power of Deity but in a way yet not called dying."

Their son took a different tack and argued in a number of pamphlets more scientifically than the scientists. The laws of metabolism stated quite simply that plant life is dependent on thedisintegration of animal life, and animal life on the disintegration of plant life. Therefore, he said, to speak of life and growth was to speak of death and destruction at the same moment. The same laws must have applied in the Garden of Eden, whose greenery was destined to turn into flesh; destruction was already there. Thus, while everyone else was trying to argue that death, by definition, could not have existed in Paradise, Ruskin took the positive position: death is a precondition of life. The theme of decay seemed not to shock the young theorist, who, after all, had been brought up to appreciate decay as picturesque.

The second part of his answer also had an individual stamp. One must not take the Biblical account of Creation too literally, in its statements about history, for it is an Eastern allegory. We know what we are, Ruskin said, and we also know what we shall be; but only God knows what we were. This was an amazing remark coming from a student of geology, a science just on the brink of redefining both the nature and the dimensions of time. It was amazing, too, because it was written in a century dominated by reflections about history and by attempts to recapture it. Faced by the question What can we know? Ruskin replies: the present and the future, but not the past. In other words, he has reversed the perspective of his century. He has begun to establish the spot from which he will view the world: the present moment. He turns to nature in its eternal wealth of phenomena; and to art, that most contemporary vehicle of history, which is only too ready to sacrifice information to appearance. So far, he remains unimpressed by the rubble of past epochs, styles, and individuals, by the laws of becoming and passing away, by the laws of action. He wants to devote his life's work to the present.

But this was a bad moment to make that choice. The century of historicism became an age of revolutionary change. As far as art and nature were concerned, the present tense was shifting to the past so fast that, to investigate the present, a man had to straddle the world with one leg in the past and the other in the future: a historian and a prophet at the same time. This was, in fact, the normal posture of a Victorian "sage" like Carlyle. But no one feltit was such a bone-wrenching contortion as Ruskin did, who had focused all his senses onto the present. Nor did anyone pay a more bitter price than he did for risking a reply to the question: What can we know? When the now became unbearable, he swung back and forth between a past and a future which alike rejected him, and in the end he was left with nothing but that which he had wanted to leave up to God: the knowledge of what had been.

The nineteenth-century speculations on Genesis and geology had a lasting effect on Ruskin in that he avoided such speculations in the future, clearly realizing how hard it was to combine the offices of priest and scientist. William Buckland came into conflict with orthodox theologians at Oxford. And the geologist Sir Charles Lyell, who unlike Buckland was not a clergyman, had to give up his professorship at King's College, London, because of his geological theories. The prospects for future geologists were far from appealing. Ruskin had had enough of authority at home; he was not the sort who could function creatively within a system of dogma.

But from his involvement in this controversy, and particularly from Buckland's example, came something which would stand him in good stead in his future work. In his youth, Ruskin had picked up as a matter of course the classical scientific skills of collecting, defining, and classifying. Now he learned that the model scientist, the paleontologist, must be able to do more: by looking at the present, he must be able to extrapolate, reconstruct, prophesy about the past. His true sphere of operations is not the neatly filled specimen case but the insignificant detail which in itself hardly warrants collection and classification. An eye attuned to microscopic detail, however, the eye that could "see a world in a grain of sand," could infer from a present trace the living whole of the past. As Cuvier wrote, "Today it suffices to see the print of a cloven hoof, to conclude that the animal which left the mark was a ruminant. This conclusion moreover is as certain as any in physics or ethics. This one print is enough to tell the observer the shape of the teeth, the jawbones, the vertebrae, of all the legbones, thighbones, shoulder and pelvic bones of the animal which walked by."

Buckland operated on this same basis. He was a keen-eyed reader of fossil imprints. The first to study the fossil traces of rain and hail, he drew conclusions from them about the climate of prehistoric times. By examining the eyes of trilobites, he calculated the intensity of light that penetrated prehistoric seas. This method aimed to bring the fragments of the past back to life. It was, in fact, the classical method of inductive reasoning, which took relics of the past and theoretically completed them so as to give them life. They were not placed in any new order but were projected back into the old one. The starting point for the chain of reasoning was the individual fact, not any overall system of classification.

This method must have greatly appealed to Ruskin, because it validated his empirical turn of mind and his devotion to detail. At the same time, it stimulated him to go beyond recording, identifying, and collecting, to the mental work of reconstruction and to the exercise of his scientific imagination. Moreover, it gave him the capability—although he seemed unaware of it at the time—to lay a common basis for his investigation of the works of nature and the works of man.

Ruskin also profited personally from his contact with Buckland. This was the first natural historian with whom he developed a close relationship, and the eccentric cleric taught him that a man can be many things besides a scientist, and that he is nothing if he is a scientist only. Buckland was anarchic in his life-style, fond of wild parties, as well as an obsessive collector: by profession a priest, teacher, scientist, and writer all rolled into one. He refused to separate his activities as researcher and university lecturer from the rest of his life. Ruskin was often invited to his home and saw how Buckland and his friends would do mathematical-probability calculations while gambling, then later use stilts to walk around the library. On another occasion, they sent a young lady to an evening party wearing a live snake for a necklace. We owe it to Buckland's influence that our young gentleman commoner never turned into a scholastic, a specialist, a rigidly systematic thinker.

Ruskin's first stint at Oxford finished abruptly, in an emotional and physical crisis. On December 28, 1839, he wrote in his diary:"I have lost her." Adele had left England to marry a French baron in Paris. Shortly after their wedding in March 1840, Ruskin started coughing up blood, was removed from the university, and spent two years recuperating from his illness, which seems not to have been the dreaded consumption after all. Recovery was slow but complete. Ruskin spent ten months in Southern Europe, although this time he could not be as active, or undertake as many projects, as in past sojourns abroad. The shadow of his illness and the shadow of Adèle fell "on the old road." His diary "celebrated" a season of gloom. But his notebooks continued to fill up with notes, and his portfolios with sketches and watercolors.

Finally, in May 1842, with his health reasonably restored, he was able to complete his bachelor's degree at Oxford. Again he faced the question of what to do with his life: "What should I be, or do?" His father, Ruskin claimed later, had higher expectations of his son than of himself, and had already made up his mind that "I should enter at college into the best society, take all the prizes every year, and a double first [highest honors] to finish with; marry Lady Clara Vere de Vere [a Tennyson character]; write poetry as good as Byron's, only pious; preach sermons as good as Bossuet's, only Protestant; be made, at forty, Bishop of Winchester, and at fifty, Primate of England."

His mother, who had promised him to God when he was born, seemed more accepting of his scientific inclinations and would have been satisfied, Ruskin thought, if he had become a combination naturalist and country parson like Gilbert White of Selborne.

While he was ill, Ruskin had given much thought to the question of choosing a profession. He did not simply avoid the issue because it made him uncomfortable, as he claimed later in Praeterita. He thought, but his thoughts produced nothing concrete, except a negative determination not to become a clergyman as his parents wished. Unable to make an immediate decision, he set out on a trip with his parents—to Switzerland.

Copyright © 1983 by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich

Editorial Reviews

This "tour de force of analysis" examines the life and work of the prolific, visionary writer, painter and critic. Kemp finds in Ruskin's life — which spanned the same years as Queen Victoria's and thus embodied the Victorian era itself — a faithful mirror of the history and psychological evolution of his age” —Joel Agee

From the Publisher

Examining the English critic alongside Byron, Carlyle, Karl Kraus and others of his time, and considering views of him given by Shaw and Proust, the author, a German art historian, contends that Ruskin (1819-1900) was a reflection of Victorian history and pathology. Kemp regards him as not only a major reformer, educator and ecologist, but also as a great realistic draftsman whose drawings reveal developing emotional instability. Increasingly, Ruskin's attention moved from art to society as he came to criticize capitalism, religion, technology, the destruction of nature--and himself. First sightseer, then see-er, finally seer and mythmaker, Ruskin in his old age became industry as well as institution: there were Ruskin ceramics and linens, even Ruskin cigars. This distinguished work, gracefully translated, is illustrated with portraits of the critic and drawings by him. (Aug. )

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Artist, writer, and world traveler, Ruskin moved vigorously through Victorian times with a unique view of the way things were and a strong conviction regarding the way they should be. His ideas, whether aesthetic, moral, or political, influenced lay audiences as well as his artistic and intellectual peers. The portraits that open each chapter of this book provide a literal as well as literary depiction of this man, too often seen as either saint or madman. But though the renewed interest in Ruskin may allow for a more balanced view of the man and his ideas, this somewhat awkward translation of a 1983 introduction for German audiences is too superficial to provide such a portrait.--Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York

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