Ruskin Today

"What’s also fascinating is that Ruskin was championing Turner, almost in spite of Turner himself. Turner wasn’t especially excited by Ruskin battening onto him in this way, year after year. Ruskin’s father was furious that Ruskin was barely even acknowledged after Turner’s death. He left him not a farthing in his will. And still Ruskin did all this bloody hard work on his behalf. You could call it a thankless task, Ruskin’s obsessive dedication to the cause of Turner. It’s all so fascinating. I’m sure he was. Anybody would be freaked out by Ruskin’s extraordinary descriptions of them. They’d be overwhelmed by them, lucky to be praised rather than dispraised perhaps—but it was tricky to be praised by Ruskin. Very much so. Also he was following in Ruskin’s footsteps, Ruskin was the very first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Clark held that same position in the 20th century. Clark was passionately interested in Ruskin’s inaugural lecture as Slade Professor, and what it reveals to us about Ruskin’s passionate defence of the expansion of the British Empire. All deeply unfashionable stuff, of course. There are great parallels between the two men. As you say, Clark himself is now very much outmoded, but he was perhaps less so in 1964 when this book was first published. The interesting thing is, this book is still the authoritative anthology in my view. It was also the first anthology of Ruskin’s writings that I read, and I thought it absolutely wonderful, in so far as it showed us the extraordinary range of the man, which would be much more difficult to find and to fully appreciate if you were simply reading through Ruskin’s own works in 4o volumes…. Especially those that he wrote when he was very young. Why? Because he was at his most dreary and biblical and ponderous when he was very young and he got lighter of touch as he got older. When he was off his guard, writing letters for example, he could be a bit more light-hearted. Ruskin was very keen to be a populariser, although strictly on his own terms of course. And Clark was a brilliant writer in his own right. What’s so exceptional about Clark is the range of his reading on Ruskin. Many more books have been published in the last 50 years, but imagine how much more difficult it would have been in 1964 to have pulled together this range of material. The way that he brought it all together and edited it into shape, is magnificent. The pieces are often very judiciously short. They’re very well chosen, edited and pinpointed."