I’ve just finished reading Tim Hilton’s JOHN RUSKIN. But this is not actually a book report on this comprehensive and tree-killing (over a thousand pages, OMG) biography. This is a discussion of Ruskin himself.
John Ruskin is not much thought of these days. We know of him mainly because of those he influenced (the Pre-Raphaelites, Mahatma Gandhi, Frank Lloyd Wright) and his spectacularly disastrous love life. There’s even a movie about his unconsummated marriage to Effie Gray. And he spent most of his later adult life frantically in love with Rose LaTouche. He met her when she was 9 and he was 33. He proposed for the first time when she was 18 and he nearly 50, and even when she repeatedly declined him he insisted on staying in her life. She died in her 20s. And he undeniably had a mental illness in his latter years, which modern medicine has tentatively diagnosed:
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But Ruskin was extremely popular and influential in the period, one of the foremost thinkers of the Victorian era. This has been almost completely lost to the modern reader for several reasons.

Firstly, anyone who was inarguably a pedophile gets no quarter in this MeToo age. Back then, admiring children suggested a man was innocent and pure, on a higher plane than the sexual demands of grown women. His proclivities surely explain the failure of his marriage, but Ruskin never acted upon them. He probably died a virgin, and only ever ogled the little girls he preferred. But even this is just too hinky. Fatally, a number of his more creepy letters exist, cutely discussing the charming ‘pets’ he saw the other day and how he hoped their mothers would invite him over. His executors burnt most of them, and you can see why. Read just one of the survivors and your skin crawls. You would never, ever, leave Ruskin alone with your daughter or sister, especially the older Ruskin whose inhibitions were slipping with age and mental illness. No, stick a fork in him, he’s done.

Secondly, his professional prose style is damned near impenetrable. You’ve got to work to get through every sentence. This was held to be a virtue in the day, when comprehension was well down on the list of things authors were supposed to achieve. But who among us has ever plowed through Ruskin’s masterpiece MODERN PAINTERS, at 5 turgid volumes? And his larger intellectual flaws are really annoying, the tendency to whiz on off into digressions, the inability to distinguish between his own tastes and objective excellence, the ineradicable preference for everything in the past rather than the future. He would never have read science fiction, never have approved of the genre. For him the answer to everything was always in the past, which is to say his past, before the Industrial Revolution. This can never resonate with us, Airbuds in our ears, typing two-thumbed on our phones and surfing the internet.

But, finally and ironically – he’s lost to us because there was no technology. The tech he would have despised would have made him accessible to us. It’s clear from the historical accounts that he was a riveting personality and a dynamite speaker, a polymath who knew a lot about many diverse fields. This was a man born for TED talks and podcasts. He was able to fill the largest hall at Oxford University, and held the smartest audiences in the world spellbound for hours. When too many people had to be turned away, he was obliged to do repeats of his lectures. The power of his personality made the hearers glide right over his digressions and flaws. There are plenty of reports from his audience, saying things like ‘Not quite sure what he was saying but I wanted him never to stop.’ People invited him to dinner just to hear him speak. Fans formed Ruskin societies to talk about him. He wasn’t stuffy or highbrow, but unanimously described as charming. There are accounts of him dancing a jig (an Oxford professor in his 60s with a long beard and a frock coat!) to amuse the ladies. Where were the smartphone cameras, to record this so that we could see it on YouTube? By unanimous testimony Charles Dickens was a jaw-dropping speech-maker, and an actor who could move entire audiences to tears. But we know him now only on the page. Likewise we have never seen the real Ruskin. Everything people admired him for was ephemeral as smoke, gone with the wind.

Wealth, fame, and popularity are good, but possibly not for Ruskin. He was rich enough to self-publish, in an era before Kindle and Lightning Press made it possible for the masses. Thus every word that Ruskin wrote went straight from his pen into print when (frankly) some heavy-duty editing was called for. Academic rigor would have forced him to stick to his lines of argument and sharpen his prose, but as long as he was packing the lecture hall Oxford wasn’t going to lean on him. Born rich, he spent money lavishly and with great unwisdom, so that the poor he wanted to help were confused and he was in financial trouble in his last years. He knew he was brilliant, and this fostered an ego that didn’t allow him to form happy relationships with adult women. He was a man who had everything. Fate would have been kinder to him if he had been given a little less.