Revelling with Ruskin

John Ruskin’s Praeterita is one of the most exhilarating books I know, and I often go back to it. For most of his life the great art-critic-cum-sage was writing books to educate people. Once, when a reader told him how much he enjoyed his books, Ruskin answered, ‘I don’t care whether you enjoyed them. Did they do you any good?’ But at the end of his life, when he feared he was going mad, he felt he must abandon all the religious and aesthetic and social controversy of his life, and write a book that just recalled the happiness of his youth. The result was Praeterita – ‘past things’.

His passionate delight in beautiful places began on his first journey abroad when he was 16, and travelling with his family to Switzerland in a fine coach hired for the occasion. They had got no further than Abbeville before he was entranced. ‘My most intense happinesses have of course been among mountains,’ he writes in Praeterita. ‘But for cheerful, unalloyed, unwearying pleasure, the getting in sight of Abbeville on a fine summer afternoon, jumping out in the courtyard of the Hôtel de l’ Eu rope, and rushing down the street to see St Wulfran again before the sun was off the towers, are things to cherish the past for – to the end.’ Symbolically, at least, he was jumping out of coaches and rushing down the street for the rest of his life. But mountains were also not far away, and his memories of that journey in 1835 take us past ‘the long blue surges’ of the Jura hills (with the family ‘lunching on French plums and bread’), to his first view, from the Col de la Faucille, of the lake of Geneva and the Alps stretching along a hundred miles of horizon.

Far as the eye could reach – that land and its moving or pausing waters . . . Rhône, and the infinitude of his sapphire lake – his peace beneath the narcissus meads of Vevey – his cruelty beneath the promontories of Sierre. And all that rose against and melted into the sky, of mountain and mountain snow; and all that living plain, burning with human gladness – studded with white homes, a milky way of star-dwellings cast across its sunlit blue.

Over fifty years later, Ruskin could still find the dazzling words and breathless pauses to recreate those sensations. It was the same on his trips through France to Rome in 1840, to Chamonix and Geneva in 1844, to Pisa in 1845. Everywhere he went he found fresh rapture – a crimson rainbow ‘and the clouds above on fire’ at Sestri di Levante, a little aspen tree that was ‘more beautiful than Gothic tracery, more than Greek vase-imagery’ at Fontainebleau, peaks at Chamonix ‘breaking into glorious spray and foam of white fire’ as the full moon rose behind them. These are more than just brilliant descriptions. They sweep one up completely into Ruskin’s fervour. There are of course other things in Praeterita. He writes tenderly of his family homes in Herne Hill and Denmark Hill, and amusingly about his time at Oxford. He tries to show how all his theories about art as a revelation of God in the universe grew out of his pleasure in nature and art. He explains his worship of Turner’s drawings and paintings – very unfashionable at the time. He is able by now to laugh ruefully at some of his unworldly blunders. He does not say a word about his six-year-long unconsummated marriage (his wife Effie went off with Millais), but he quotes a wonderful letter from a young Irish girl, Rose La Touche, whom he worshipped in vain and who called him ‘Dear St Crumpet’. Yet it is for those joyous discoveries that I really go back to the book – not the lessons he learned from them, but the sheer happiness of them. Their mood reminds me of the mood of Henry James’s early novel Roderick Hudson, where the two young men of the story are intoxicated by their discovery of the manifold beauty of Rome. That was based on James’s own visit there in 1869 when, as he wrote to his brother, he went ‘reeling and moaning thro’ the streets’ in a mixture of sensuous pleasure and awe at the vastness of Rome’s life and art. Rome, ironically, was one of the few places in Italy that Ruskin did not enjoy. But one must rejoice greatly, both for him and for oneself as a reader, that he recaptured in his last, rambling book so much of what he felt in the many places that he loved.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 3 © Derwent May 2004