The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton

"Yes, it is extremely significant. This correspondence really shocked me, because it showed us Ruskin talking to another man in a completely open-handed, open-hearted way, which was something he was incapable of doing with so many other people, even those—or perhaps especially those—who were closest to him. What fascinates me, moreover, is that he was writing so candidly to an American. With an Englishman’s reserve in the nineteenth century, such candour is almost unthinkable. What’s more, Ruskin was so condemning of America and American habits—take for example his denunciations of that poor family he travelled with to Verona, an episode which I describe in the dictionary. However he opens his heart to Norton in a way that he scarcely does to anybody else. It’s quite extraordinary to see the lengths to which he goes to expose himself, his own limitations, his own humiliations, his own anxieties about himself. Even his own lust to do things that he’s incapable of doing. Take for example a wonderful letter where he says, ‘I want, I want, I want’ . . . His manic delivery is striking, and he’s baring his soul in a way that he scarcely does anywhere else, and certainly not in his public lectures or in his public persona. It’s an amazing insight into the man himself, the way he responds to Norton. I think he did become unhinged in later years. It was partly due to the fact that he seems to have had no control of his emotional life. He would sometimes respond to women as if someone had thrown a brick at him. He doesn’t know how to cope with emotions, partly because of his difficult relationship with his parents. He was a man-child all his life. He was very subservient to his parents, he would never criticise them and didn’t know how to get beyond them. They were forever interfering in his life, as Effie tells us all the time in her letters. Ruskin doesn’t really grow up, but he is also this towering intellect, perpetually questing in all directions and never able to stop, until something stops him, and he collapses. Eventually he breaks down into complete madness, as a result of a tragic affair with Rose La Touche. Her mother invited him to give her drawing lessons, when she was nine years old. That’s how it all began, his complete infatuation with the girl. Interestingly, she didn’t welcome the way he wanted to get close to her at all when she was young. I’m very much aware of this having read around the subject, although the way it’s often been described means that you’re not necessarily aware of this. I don’t think anything terrible went on between them at all. Nevertheless, he made it clear that he wanted to marry her, and he had to contend with the appalling involvement of her mother, who was almost certainly attracted to him, too. It’s tragically bizarre, the whole arcane thing. He seems to be heading for a fall all the time. His manic nature suggests that he doesn’t really have any emotional ballast. This to me seems to be the problem. It is absolutely extraordinary that there is this total difference, that he can concentrate on a stone or a tree, and analyse it with such thoroughness and somehow find a point of stillness within himself, which enables him to pour forth everything about what he’s doing at that moment. But nothing beyond it. It is truly remarkable. I suppose that’s part of what we call his genius, the fact that he can still this emotional turbulence for a moment. In fact, he does say of his writing that it was consolatory. Although we know what his nature was like, he always said in his correspondence that his writing was a steady affair. In contrast to his friend Thomas Carlyle, writing was not a tumultuous, difficult business for Ruskin. He could move through it steadily and regularly. I think the very act of writing and finding these wondrously still moments of experience, both helped to keep him together. The humanising nature of proper work is central to Ruskin’s message. This is something that he begins to write about in the 1860s, and features very prominently in Unto This Last . It was something that his father was completely repelled by. He wanted Ruskin to concentrate on art criticism, not to stray into the social or political, which he felt were dangerous subjects. And of course they did prove dangerous in that tumultuous century. Take his contemporary William Morris, who championed a return to the hand-crafted as an antidote to industrial manufacture. Morris was a socialist and Ruskin certainly wasn’t, but they share a sensibility. In spite of the fact that Ruskin was a true blue conservative in so many respects, he was very much mindful of the exploitation of capitalism. Ruskin was coming at the idea of communism from a totally different perspective from that of Marx. He defended the idea of holding important principles in common and doing work which is not exploitative, work which does us good, in the same way that he believed art is health-giving. All these matters are utterly relevant for today. Absolutely. His work, even on matters artistic, bleeds into the political. That’s one reason why he was at such odds with John Stuart Mill, the idea that economics is some kind of disembodied, inevitable thing. Actually, economics has to do with the way you treat human beings and the way they behave in relation to each other. That was the message. I’m not a Ruskinian, nor have I ever been a Ruskinian really, but I’ve always read Ruskin and cared for his writing. That attachment to his writings really deepened over the last two or three years. I first became interested in Ruskin when I was young because there had once been a museum in Sheffield, although by the time I was a young boy that museum had been dispersed. The collections themselves were for the most part in storage in Reading when I was a boy, and they did not return to Sheffield until recently. Nonetheless, there were a few items from that original collection that stayed in Sheffield, and one of these created my very first link to Ruskin—it was my very first glimpse of him, you might say—when I used to visit Sheffield’s Mappin Art Gallery during my childhood. There I saw a drawing by Ruskin of a peacock’s feather. It was something I went to see again and again, well into my teens, in order to to marvel at the way in which he seemed to have rendered a peacock feather with such a minute attention to detail. I had never seen a feather painted like that. My only hands-on experience of feathers was to do with pillow fights, and the way that feathers floated up into in the air when you hit your sister with a pillow. It never really occurred to me at that moment of combat in our bedroom that a feather might be a very particular thing, which you might admire very minutely, and which might be painted in the hues of heaven, as this peacock feather seemed to be, and which struck me as absolutely extraordinary. It was a lesson from Ruskin about close observation. Close looking, close observation, help you to see the world in a way that you had never seen it before. To appreciate small things such as stones, as you have never appreciated them before. I learned this important lesson when I was a teenager by looking at this painting of the peacock’s feather, which is still in Sheffield to this day. So that kind of makes me a Ruskinian in spite of myself, does it not? Even though I wouldn’t readily accept the label, he has made me a disciple of acute looking. There’s no one who forces us to pay attention to everything that surrounds us more clearly than Ruskin himself. There is one of Ruskin’s books that I would read before anything else—his autobiography, which is called Praeterita . He wrote it when he was in his eighties. It was really his last major project, and it was finished by his cousin and carer Joan Severn, who edited it for publication, and even censored it. This is the book I would recommend to anybody to begin with, because it’s less cluttered, less convoluted, less theoretical, less difficult to read. In fact, it’s a wonderful read, even if it is not an entirely truthful book, in so far as Ruskin is remembering his past very selectively. He’s largely remembering his childhood—his later life gets much less attention—and even that he is often misremembering, describing the nature of his aloneness in ways which are not entirely true, because he was not completely alone. He likes to pretend that he was, in order perhaps to concentrate on his own uniqueness. It is a wonderful, lyrical book and it is composed of single, long paragraphs, which are delightful, like prolonged exercises in lyricism. The very last section of it is like something out of Ezra Pound’s Cantos , a complete delight to read. It can be read spasmodically, so you don’t feel you have to be limbering up every morning to read another 50 pages of Ruskin. You can read it quite casually, bit by bit, and it’s an absolute delight, end to end."