THE YOUNG RUSKIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 914, 15 February 1957, Page 12

THE YOUNG RUSKIN

THE DIARIES OF JOHN RUSKIN, 18351847, selected and edited by Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse; Oxford: Clarendon Press, English price £3/10/-.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

ERE are forty volumes in the library edition of Ruskin’s Works; and most of them, one suspects, stay in the library. To these we must now add the first of three massive volumes of hitherto unpublished diaries. "An essential basis for any study of Ruskin’s development," no doubt: but who is still interested in the development of this too-copious Victorian prophet? Surprisingly, it seems, a good many people. The tragedy of Ruskin’s private life came as a piquant footnote to Sesame and Lilies: Sir William James’s The Order of Release, some years ago, was widely read; more recently Dr. Joan Evans, in her own biography, underlined the fatal effects of his frustrated youthful love for Adéle Domecq. The indulgent, obsessive parents of a brilliant, sin-haunted boy had much to answer for, as these diaries make clear. In this first volume, the seventy opening pages are perhaps too generously given to a precocious schoolboy’s detailed record of four months in Switzerland in 1835, neatly illustrated by exact little geological drawings. At least, this celebrates Ruskin’s first great love-the Alps, and rock formations. There is a gap till 1839: the brief lively shadow of Adéle appears, then suddenly "I have lost her.’ The young undergraduate at Christ Church has his first lung haemorrhage, and is ordered to winter abroad. It was in this year, 1840, that Ruskin determined "to keep one part of diary for intellect and another for feeling." The "book of pain" was later destroyed by the diarist: yet what remains isa considerable bulk of extraordinary richness and liveliness. It begins with a full record of the Italian tour of 1840-41. Ruskin is still travelling with his parents, occasion-

ally spitting blood, and worried about his eyes, which he overstrained by continual sketching. The intense application of the dedicated student of art compels admiration; but Ruskin was often the conventional Englishman abroad. Florence — "the Arno a nasty muddy ditch"; Rome — "the inside (of St. Peter’s) would make a nice ballroom-but is good for nothing else"; > Naples-"nothing extraordinary and the bay too large"; Paestum and Vallombrosa — "humbugs"; at last, Venice"Thank God I am here! ... This and Chamouni are my two bournes of earth." The Alps, Turner, St. Mark’s-Ruskin had discovered his true vocation; and the remaining diaries until 1847 cover the heroic years of Modern Painters and the Seven Lamps. Dr. Evans has illustrated them handsomely with exe

cellent reproductions from the diary sketches; and more elaborate studies from the Ruskin Catalogue-it is often forgotten that this evangelist of art was himself an admirable draughtsman, and a skilful if uninventive painter in water colour. All this is background material superbly presented and edited, and the art historian will be properly grateful for it. But the general reader will probably relish more the emerging character -touchy, passionate, crusty, more and more self-contradictory-of a very great Victorian. Here is a charming sample of Victorian sensibility in an entry for Ash Wednesday, 1844: Finished Amalfi, satisfactorily, and heard a valuable sermon from Melville on the fall of man ... My uncle Tweddale is said to be on his deathbed, and we receive from his daughter Mary a letter which I shall keep as a curiosity: ‘Gentlemen, my father is dying, and for that reason will you have the kindness to stop the Tires Newspaper’!