Stones of Ruskin

By John Skow

JOHN RUSKIN: THE PASSIONATE

MORALIST by Joan Abse

Knopf; 363 pages; $18.50

To a bemused modern reader, John Ruskin is yet another long-gone marvel, a species of featherless biped now extinct. This rare bird, born in 1819, was a gentleman of means and an amateur of genius, whose leisurely travels to Italy and Switzerland resulted in a vast outpouring of noblesse oblige: Sesame and Lilies and Seven Lamps of Architecture and some 30 other volumes instructing his countrymen on how to think about art, man and socialism. His writing now seems overabundant; but in an age when color photography and its reproduction in books were lacking, there was a reason for his word-painting, for the microscopically detailed Stones of Venice and for the page after airy page in which he dilated about the precise textures of clouds. His judgments--notably his passionate conviction that J.W.M. Turner was the best of English painters--hold up well enough. His underlying belief that art should be moral might be expected to seem priggish to a 20th century reader, but in fact does not. There is no trace of stuffiness in the man, and his persistent innocence was of a grand, highhearted sort.

Ruskin was the precocious child of doting parents, as Historian Joan Abse relates in this vigorous, compassionate biography, and his life through middle age was a struggle to free himself from their loving tyranny. "My mother had never let me play cricket lest it should quicken my pulse, step into a boat lest I should fall out the other side," he wrote wistfully. When he matriculated at Oxford, she followed him and took lodgings there, to oversee his physical and spiritual health. She was a fierce evangelical Protestant, and her husband, a prosperous and essentially self-educated wine importer, was a worshiper of art. The minimum they expected of him, he commented later, was that he should "write poetry as good as Byron's only pious."

But his poetry was bloodless, as his own acute critical sense told him, and his faith was in Art. His parents, with whom he often lived and traveled until he was middleaged, were disappointed that he was to be neither Byron nor the Bishop of

Winchester. It is not even clear that they were entirely mollified when he became, as the five volumes of Modern Painters began to appear when he was in his mid-20s, the pre-eminent art critic of England.

The Victorian age produced sexual cripples in quantity; it is no surprise that Ruskin was one of them. He never matured emotionally, and he could respond romantically to women only when they were safely unavailable because of physical absence, extreme youth, or, in a couple of cases, death. He fell windily in love with a succession of such phantoms, and was sufficiently blown about by his own gusts of inky ardor that he proposed, by mail, to a healthy, warm-hearted girl named Effie Gray, whom he married when he was 29 and she 19. She believed him when he wrote, racily, that he sought immortality not in heaven but "among the snowy mountains and sweet valleys of this world." It was not so; he convinced her that it was best for her health to delay consummation of their marriage for five years. A year after the deadline passed, she sued bitterly for annulment.

Ruskin was intermittently mad during the last years of his long life (he died in 1900), and during his periods of sanity he liked to talk babytalk. His biographer is indulgent, however, and her tone seems correct. Ruskin's passion, after all, was to teach Truth, and not once in 80 years did he doubt--for a modern reader, this is the wonder--that he knew what Truth was.

--By John Skow

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