John Ruskin: the Later Years by Tim Hilton. Yale University Press, 620 pp, £25 in UK
John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life by John Batchelor. Chatto and Windus, 369pp, £25 in UK
This is Ruskin's centenary year, so a flurry of interest was predictable, though it is far from certain as yet that this interest will continue for very long in any positive or constructive way. Victorian prophets may still beget biographers, but their teaching and ideas are buried in huge and multiple volumes which few except period scholars and a few enthusiasts now read in any depth. This is particularly true of Ruskin, who was not only a prolific writer but a hopelessly prolix one, and a man who rode his manias to the death and never knew when to stop or where to cut. If he had compressed his insights into half-a-dozen well-shaped books, it is highly probable that he would be far more widely read today; as it is, Modern Painters and even The Stones of Venice are close to being museum pieces. Yet of his historical importance there can be no doubt at all; Ruskin did revolutionise public taste and his influence continued down to Proust (of all people) and can be seen in what used to be called the Garden City school of English planners, designers and architects. It is architecture above all which is at the centre of his thinking, because it is both a communal and a public art; paintings may hang almost unseen in private houses or rooms, but buildings must be seen and lived with by the mass of people.
Along with Pugin and William Morris (he despised Pugin, incidentally) he was virtually the begetter of the Gothic Revival, something which had far-reaching cultural effects and was infinitely more than a mere passing fashion like the Gothic novel. Ruskin was essentially a moralist, not an aesthete, which is one of the reasons why his age took him so seriously. The Gothic for him was not merely a style, it was an entire system of moral and spiritual values which was intended to function as a corrective against the materialism and vulgarity of his era. (It was not until Wilde and the Nineties that culture became divorced from ethics.)
The Victorians liked preachers and being preached at, which is why they spent long hours at church on Sundays. Being scolded from the pulpit seems to have made them feel better, not worse, and was considered an essential part of society's moral hygiene. Ruskin was a born lay preacher and this was compounded by his friendship with his fellow-Scot and fellow-prophet, Carlyle. It was an unfortunate influence, to which most of the rant, bombast and moral hysteria of his later work can be traced, but from the start he was also the victim of the intolerant, evangelical Protestantism of his dominating mother. In fact, as an only son he remained tied to his parents' guiding-strings until he was on the edge of middle age. He remained devoted to both of them and the fact that his father, a wine-merchant, was a very rich man allowed him to travel and study as he liked - especially to Venice, which he enshrined in his best-known book and which also gave him the revelation of its great trio of painters, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.
The magnificent worldliness of Renaissance art upset all his systems and brought on a religious crisis, turning him into one of the great Victorian agnostics, though not into a hedonist. But Ruskin was not a man to achieve a Goethean balance or synthesis; to the end, the moralist and social prophet co-existed uneasily with the art-lover and collector (he was a generous and discriminating patron of Victorian painting, including the Pre-Raphaelites whom he took under his wing). Ruskin's marriage to Effie Gray has been discussed ad nauseam and we are unlikely ever to hear the whole truth. It was dissolved for failure of consummation and Effie, unable to bear the thought that Ruskin was uninterested in her physically, insisted on his sexual impotence - which he strongly denied. She married his young painter-protege, Millais, who became Ruskin's enemy and remained so to the end. Though the publicity was humiliating, Ruskin suffered far more, emotionally, in his later relationship with Rose La Touche, a beautiful young Irish girl of good family whom he adored, but who refused to marry him and shortly after died of TB. He never fully recovered from this ordeal by fire and it enhanced the depressiveness from which he already suffered, so that he underwent periodic breakdowns and lived out his last years in a mental twilight.
A romantic medievalist and in some ways even a socio-political reactionary, Ruskin hated the Industrial Revolution and savagely attacked the growth of capitalism. This put him at times in the same camp as the Socialist William Morris and even Karl Marx, with whom he has a surprising amount in common - a case of extremes meeting. He believed passionately in the dignity of labour, he hated the exploitation of the working man under industrialism, and did all he could to raise his lot both socially and culturally.
Ruskin's stances were never merely theoretical; he used his money, his influence and his many friendships to put his ideas into action, including an odd institution which he founded called the Guild of St George. He had strongly-held economic theories as well as aesthetic and social ones - in fact, there were few areas into which he did not bring his huge intellectual energy and learning and his considerable polemical powers.
In spite of his idealistic crankery and outsiderism, he was usually a welcome guest in the best houses (Gladstone was a friend) while ambitious bluestockings pursued him energetically in spite of his unconsummated marriage. Some of them were mere self-seekers, who abused his generosity for their own ends; Ruskin had many financial dependents, deserving and undeserving. He was also acceptable as a lecturer at Oxford University, where he set up a chair, though his mental clouding eventually forced him into relative silence. These last years make sad reading, when the one-time eagle comes to resemble - at least in photographs - a myopic barn-owl.
Of the two books reviewed here, Tim Hilton's is a timely follow-up to his excellent John Ruskin: the Early Years, which is now reissued as a paperback (Yale also, £10.95 in UK). For those who may find two volumes just one volume too many, Professor Batchelor's biography has a great deal to recommend it - though I cannot quite grasp the point of the subtitle. Meanwhile also worth mentioning here is Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet by Jan Marsh, recently published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (price £25 in UK). This biography of Rossetti is easily the best book on that slightly enigmatic figure since Oswald Doughty's A Victorian Romantic, now half a century old.
His relationship with Ruskin was ultimately an encounter of incompatibles; Rossetti, half cockney and half Italian, was too bohemian, too wayward, and too subtly sensuous and amoral for Ruskin's innate (though reluctant) puritanism to cope with. Ruskin, however, understood and appreciated his genius as a painter when few others did and duly gave his patronage - for which he received little thanks. But that, alas, was the story of so many of his dealings with other people, particularly artists, and it must have enhanced his final, terminal loneliness. Ruskin was unarguably a great man, both morally and intellectually, but he was not born to be a happy one.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic