Seeing Ruskin Whole

...Writers & Writing SEEING RUSKIN WHOLE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL "It is the worst of the minor incapacities of human life," wrote John Ruskin, "that one's opinions ought, by rights, to be tested and refined every five years...

...Although most boys of his class were sent off to school as soon as they had outgrown the nursery, Ruskin studied at home (where he did sometimes have a companion or two his own age) and was taken to Europe...

...His Fors Clavigera attempted to explain economics to workmen...

...Near the end of his life, he resigned his chair at Oxford to protest the cruelty of vivisection...

...During his undergraduate years, a spell of ill health that forced him to withdraw from the university for a time convinced him that he would prefer to be his own teacher...

...In adapting the latter phrase for his title, Hunt notes how important it became to Ruskin, "so exactly did it register his own excitement and bewilderment at the expanding objects of his study...

...Ruskin was too honest a critic to oversimplify the issue by claiming that beautiful creations have made us nicer, yet he continued to wrestle with this conundrum until waves of depression and lunacy finally swamped him...

...In this instance, Ruskin practiced what he preached...

...John Dixon Hunt, happily, is more ambitious...

...If he disappointed his mother's hope that he might become a minister, even a bishop, "the whole momentum of Seven Lamps {of Architecture] and The Stones of Venice," as Hunt observes, moves toward "the role of the lay priest he had adopted...

...According to that selective autobiography, Praeterita, she denied him toys or playmates and subjected him to long hours of Bible study and ethical instruction, a program that (he believed) drove him to become selfish and unfit for normal pleasures...

...His The Wider Sea (Viking, 512 pp., $25.00) provides the fullest, most balanced account to date of the development of a critic whose writings shaped the 19th century's opinions and still influence our own era...

...One of Ruskin's favorite Renaissance artists, Tintoretto, remarked that "The study of painting is exhausting, and the sea always gets larger...

...Like many self-educated people, he did not fit well into the academic mold...

...house, Ruskin's life and work are crammed with things, so that it is not perhaps too surprising that he has survived piecemeal [in our understanding...

...As Hunt puts it, "Ruskin had an instinct for completeness" that was "forever threatened by his polymathic pursuits...

...some of his radical educational theories were put to the test (with mixed success) at the Wilmington Girls' School...

...Tracing Ruskin's continuing search for a way to unify his broad interests, Hunt shows that the critic's final method was to tie them together through their significance to himself: "The ever-personal inclination of Ruskin's response to natural phenomena, intense enough even in the most 'scientific' pages of Modern Painters I, had always been clear...

...In general, he enjoyed luxuries that only the great wealth of his father-A prosperous businessman-could provide: presents of architectural building blocks when he was little, illuminated missals and Turner paintings when he grew older...

...A ploughshare was exhibited to represent the type of architecture ('wherever complex mechanical force is to be resisted...

...Ruskin's precocious genius was not a parental delusion...

...The Storm Cloud is a terrifying indictment of Victorian decadence, contrasting its overstuffed, unstable society with more temperate eras when Englishmen lived close to nature...

...He is surely the most intellectual creature of his age that ever appeared in any age" wrote his doting father of eight-year-old John, describing the boy's "air of a Professor that has not yet taken the Chair...

...He excelled at discovering interrelationships among the most diverse subjects...

...At last, in The Queen of the Air this finds appropriate expression...

...Characteristically, says Hunt, "he began by redefining the function and scope and therefore the terms by which the arts are customarily known...

...They are the soul's clothes-And a healthy soul is always growing too big for its opinions and wanting them to be let out...

...The Wider Sea offers a compelling portrait of the luminescence of Ruskin's genius...

...As he grew older, he despaired of his ability to change people...

...Other biographies (in particular, John Rosenberg's TheDarkeningGlass, 1961) have depicted his tragedies more movingly...

...But Hunt has accomplished a gargantuan task in transcending this fragmentariness and demonstrating the size and wholeness of John Ruskin's achievements...

...He began work on Modern Painters, and thanks to his lack of formal schooling explored areas that would have been shunned by a more conventional mind...

...Later, in the famous lectures on sculpture, published as Aratra Pentetici, Ruskin honed his style...

...Nevertheless, he rarely missed a chance to play the reformer...

...His Modern Painters, for instance, was begun as an essay and eventually ran to five volumes...

...Were he a less powerful writer, Ruskin might sound like one of those cranks whose schemes for saving the world are more eccentric than informed...

...Hunt proves through evidence from family letters that this picture is unfair...

...It is not in the end the accuracy of his analysis of mythic shapes and roots that matters as [much as] the essentially poetic way in which their analysis becomes his vision...

...For he insists that myths must discover an answering sensibility in their interpreter as he constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs the matrix of their hieroglyphs...

...With the world growing darker to his eyes, he forced himself to compose the tranquilly sublime Praeterita-A monument to the triumph of his spirit over the illness that was destroying him...

...He also devised projects to encourage vocational training and ecology, not to mention the preservation and restoration of historical monuments...

...Small wonder, then, that so many biographers have avoided the difficult task of tracing the progress of his ideas and have concentrated instead on his life, particularly its more sensational aspects?his unconsummated marriage to his cousin, his relations with the Pre-Raphaelites, his impossible love for Rose La Touche, his insanity...

...In fact, he was the first to acknowledge that he might appear ridiculous...

...In The Storm Cloud of the 19th Century, a "diagnosis of the moral implications of the extraordinary weather...

...Trained in the habits of Calvinist self-examination, Ruskin throughout his life judged his own motives harshly...

...The critic blamed his formidable Calvinist mother for having done everything in her power to insure that her son would become a scholar and a saint...

...Ruskin matriculated at Oxford and later became the Slade Professor of Art there, but he never took a degree...

...In such mythical language Ruskin discovered a supreme vehicle for talking about any of his countless interests...

...Ruskin was never at ease with a purely esthetic approach, however...

...Greek coins, by their representation of animals, became, as it were, the reverse of zoology...

...then his breakfast plate, to illustrate the union of 'graphic and constructive powers.' And with similarly inventive and suggestive disregard for the traditional and simply esthetic parameters of his subject, he ranged over its technical, psychological and mythological aspects...

...The unseasonably cold and violent weather of the period proves a perfect trope for the violence that the industrial revolution wreaked on an agrarian economy...

...Hunt is especially interested in retelling the story of Ruskin's education...

...That Ruskin's opinions were constantly in a state of flux did not diminish his passion in expounding them...

...There is so much of misery and error in the world which I see 1 could have immense power to set various influnces against, by giving up my science and art, and wholly trying to teach peace and justice," he told his mother somewhat vaingloriously when he was still in his 30s...

...He added regretfully, "And yet my own gifts seem so specially directed towards quiet investigation of beautiful things that I cannot make up my mind, and my writing is as vacillating as my temper...

...his plan for improving the Hinkley road set Oxford undergraduates, Oscar Wilde among them, to breaking stones and carrying dirt in baskets...

...At 14 he was already describing Italian art and Alpine scenery in the vigorous style that would mark his mature writing...

...he had been noting for many years," he challenged his readers' possible accusations of madness directly by saying," I am indeed, every day of my yet spared life, more and more grateful that my mind is capable of imaginative vision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separate the speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinct of brutes...

...He notes that"Like his...

...representation itself, the obverse of man's childlike compulsion to depict his own world and its objects...

...Hunt has given the clearest account of "a complicated man, as various in idea, emotion and mood as the range of his writings suggests...

...Hunt believes that the real conflict was rooted in a desire to understand why art has so little effect on the quality or moral value of human life...

...Other Ruskin works discussed ethics while outlining the principles of geology, or explained economics through architectural examples...

...Many biographers interpret this as a perpetual struggle between his celibate absorption in his projects and the impulses that led to his disastrous relations with his wife and Rose La Touche...

...Indeed, the attacks of mania that overshadowed Ruskin's last years can be explained as an unfortunate extension of those emotions...

...He deplored being "torn between his wish to become involved in human affairs and his selfishness...

...Along with many parents of an only child, the elder Ruskins were inclined to be overprotective, but they were also indulgent to the point of allowing their son to pursue his studies in science and the arts when neither was considered a regular part of the academic curriculum...