SOURCE: "Ruskin: Art and the Critic," in Artists and Writers in Revolt: The Pre-Raphaelites, David & Charles, 1976, pp. 16-34.

Described as 'the most eloquent and original of all writers upon art', John Ruskin was the fountain-head of the most vital developments of painting up to the time of the Impressionists. He was born on 8 February 1819, the son of a wealthy Edinburgh wine merchant settled in London. There was a possible dark psychological legacy from his grandfather, John Thomas Ruskin, who committed suicide at Bowerswell in 1817, after the death of his wife; and it was the fact that Bowerswell ten years later was bought by George Gray, Writer of the Signet in Perth, that set the scene for one of the great disasters of Ruskin's life, his marriage to George Gray's daughter Effie.

John Ruskin was an only and idolized son, whom both parents, strictly religious, were prepared to indulge in every whim of taste; and this too had its effect in forming the man. He was privately educated but entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a 'gentleman commoner', gaining the Newdigate prize for English poetry in 1839 and taking his degree in 1842.

Ruskin wrote in later life that as a boy he had 'vialfuls, as it were, of Wordsworth's reverence, Shelley's sensitiveness and Turner's accuracy all in one', and it is interesting that he showed in this no apparent knowledge of Shelley's politics, although his own social outlook was eventually to be similar. Shelley, disciple of Thomas Paine, by the mid-nineteenth century had already become a legend of romanticism, his best political writing still unpublished and his radicalism swept out of sight by the busy brooms of his conformist family and baronet son. Ruskin, a dutiful son, only towards the end of a long life acknowledged, with bitterness, the stultifying effect of his parents' hold over his life, and religious beliefs.

In artistic matters, however, they left him free and gave him every encouragement. He studied painting under Copley Fielding and Harding, but acknowledged as his g real masters Rubens and Rembrandt. His independency of taste was shown more originally in a passion for Turner, an aged recluse whom he enthusiastically courted and of whose will he became an executor. In 1843 the first volume of his Modern Painters was designed to protect Turner, then still alive, from an attack in Blackwood's Magazine, and to proclaim the superiority of modern landscape painters, especially Turner, to the Old Masters. In four later volumes, the last published in 1860, this design was expanded into a great treatise on the principles of art, 'interspersed with artistic and symbolical descriptions of nature, more elaborate and imaginative than any writer, prose or poetic, had ever before attempted'. It was in its time a revolutionary work, which helped to inspire a whole generation of young artists; and it set a pattern for descriptive and imaginative criticism, in all branches of the arts, until World War II changed and streamlined literary style into a kind of skeleton of word and image.

It is significant in assessing Modern Painters to realize that Ruskin was not only a scholar and linguist of wide classical range, he was also a student of geology, knowledge of which he had deepened on early foreign tours. In 1834 he had published, as a result of one of these tours, a paper in the magazine Natural History, 'On the Causes of the Colour of the Water in the Rhine and Facts and Considerations on the Strata of Mont Blanc'. During his second tour the following year he sent geological papers again to the same magazine, this time relative to stone and its changes due to exposure. In the Architectural Magazine he published articles on perspective. He was thus equipped in more than one direction to react with sympathetic understanding to the Turner Exhibition of 1836, which aroused critical abuse on a wide scale, not the least in Blackwood's Magazine which categorized Turner's use of sunset-flame and white gamboge as 'all blood and chalk'.

'I was first driven into literature', wrote Ruskin long afterwards in Fors Clavigera, 'that I might defend the fame of Turner.' In essence, Part I of Modern Pointers was this defence. It took him seven years from the time of the Turner Exhibition, and it rocketed him into fame. And this fame was not undeserved, for whatever its misjudgements upon other and especially classic painters, which Ruskin in subsequent tours of Italy came himself to acknowledge, Modern Painters was a panegyric of England's greatest and at the time most underrated painter, which drew on an immense range of knowledge and language. This knowledge was drawn on to analyse the very structure and variations of stone and cloud, mountain and valley, sky and chiaroscuro. It enables him to characterize 'Turner's use of one of the facts of nature not hitherto noticed, that the edge of a partially transparent body is often darker than its central surface, because at the edge the light penetrates and passes through, which from the centre is reflected to the eye. The sharp, cutting edge of a wave, if not broken into foam, frequently appears for an instant almost black; and the outlines of these massy clouds, where their projecting forms rise in relief against the light of their bodies, are almost always marked clearly and firmly by very dark edges.'

He is able to perceive with both the geologist's and artist's eye. 'All mountains, in some degree, but especially those which are composed of soft or decomposing substance, are delicately and symmetrically furrowed by the descent of streams. The traces of their action commence at the very summits, fine as threads, and multitudinous, like the uppermost branches of a delicate tree. They unite in groups as they descend, concentrating gradually into dark undulating ravines…' He can notice 'the grey passages about the horizon' unperceived by the old masters, and point to the daring of Turner in a still unsurpassed description of The Fighting Temeraire.

Take the evening effect with the Temeraire. That picture will not, at the first glance, deceive as a piece of actual sunlight; but this is because there is in it more than sunlight, because under the blazing veil of vaulted fire which lights the vessel on her last path, there is a blue, deep, desolate hollow of darkness, out of which you can hear the voice of the night wind, and the dull boom of the disturbed sea; because the cold, deadly shadows of the twilight are gathering through every sunbeam, and moment by moment as you look, you will fancy some new film and faintness of the night has risen over the vastness of the departing form.

It was a new voice in writing, just as Turner's was a new brushstroke in painting. Charlotte Bronte on reading Modern Painters wrote that she felt as if she had hitherto been walking blindfold, that the book seemed to give her eyes. George Eliot later referred to Ruskin as 'one of the great teachers of the day'. And Holman Hunt sat up reading the book all night, feeling as if it had been written expressly for him. It was, in the end, a bell which tolled in the whole Pre-Raphaelite movement.

In 1849 The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and in 1853-4 The Stones of Venice, extended Ruskin's reputation and influence and posed new conceptions of architecture. Both works were illustrated by Ruskin himself. A chapter in The Stones of Venice, 'Of the Nature of the Gothic', was to influence William Morris in his whole attitude to art and craftsmanship, based on Ruskin's belief that the vital roughness of the work of medieval sculptors and carvers was a sign of 'the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone'—that the splendour of medieval craftsmanship derived from the pleasure of the workman in his work, and his status as an instrument in the creative process. And The Seven Lamps equally inspired Morris in his attacks on the artistically disastrous attempts of his time to restore ancient buildings, and indeed reached down to similar resistance to building desecration or destruction in our own age. Ruskin himself in the preface to a later edition of The Seven Lamps of Architecture wrote that the book had become 'the most useless I ever wrote: the buildings it describes with so much delight being now either knocked down or scraped and patched up into smugness and smoothness more tragic than uttermost ruin'. The progress from this to Morris' later Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings is clear.

In the development and success of another artistic revolution, into which Morris was also drawn, Ruskin had an equally decisive part: and it was a part which was to involve a profound and cathartic experience in his personal life. In 1848, 'the year of revolutions' in a more political sense, several young men, led by the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, banded together in a brotherhood which they called 'Pre-Raphaelite', because it was based on a rejection of the now stultified 'classical' school of painting exemplified by the Royal Academy, and supposedly deriving from the Raphael tradition, and turned back to the artists who preceded Raphael in Renaissance Italy. It involved at once a 'return to nature' and a romantic medievalism: a renewed freshness and brightness of colouring achieved partly by abandoning the dark brown base of the current Royal Academy 'antique' school of painting, and the use of a white canvas, or white painted ground. Turner's white gamboge had already to some extent anticipated this, but the Pre-Raphaelites carried the lighter backgrounds to new and dangerous lengths. For the fumes of the white lead they used caused headaches, and perhaps some of the symptoms of psychosomatic illness later shown by so many of the practitioners.

The three young painters who led this new 'school' were Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and Hunt's passionately devoted friend, John Everett Millais, and the members agreed to sign their pictures only with the initials 'PR-B', in an enthusiastic and romantic emulation of the world of secret societies, so much a part of Rossetti's Italian inheritance (his father was a follower of the Italian freedom movement, the Carbonari, and had fled to exile in London). But by the time of the 1850 Academy Exhibition the secret of identity had been leaked, and a storm of critical abuse broke over the heads of the now desperate young revolutionaries. The Times described Hunt's "Fugitive Druids" as 'a deplorable example of perverted taste' and the influential Athenceum referred to the same picture and Millais' "Christ in the House of his Parents" as 'pictorial blasphemy'. Even Charles Dickens, for reasons rather obscure (but probably connected with his Academy friends), joined in the attack with a savage misrepresentation of Millais' work in Household Words.

Hunt and Millais tended to blame the leak on Rossetti, who had missed the worst brunt of the attack by showing his main picture, not at the Academy, but at the Free Exhibition. It was therefore into a distracted and slightly dissident group that Ruskin, his attention attracted to the young painters and their plight by a friend, the next year plunged with characteristic generosity. The 1851 Pre-Raphaelite entries to the Academy had provoked even greater savagery of response, what Hunt called a 'hurricane' of attacks. Ruskin went to see the pictures, and in two letters to The Times came out in support of a new artistic force which he felt to be of infinite promise. He did not know the artists personally, he wrote, but considered they had shown high fidelity to 'a certain order of truth and should be taken seriously'. He did more: he secured a buyer for Hunt's picture, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," made a personal offer for Millais' "Return of the Dove" (which had, however, already been sold), and later added a footnote to a new edition of Modern Pointers commending the high finish of their work. More fatally to himself, he made a personal call on Millais with his young wife, Effie.

Ruskin at this time was thirty-two years of age, Effie twenty-three. She was certainly not his first love, and it was his parents' fear of a recurrence of the grave depression he had suffered over a previous disappointment in love that had induced them not to oppose his marriage to a young girl whose sociable instincts, and lightness of character, they distrusted. (Their attitude, which Ruskin Senior was unwise enough to pass on to Effie's parents, did not help Effie to settle peacefully into matrimony. And it could not have helped Ruskin, either, if it were true, as he wrote in a letter, that Effie 'does not care for pictures'.) Ruskin was entirely dependent on his father, as his writing did not yet provide him with a living, and Mr Ruskin settled on Effie, at the time of the marriage, £10,000, the interest on which provided their basic income. He also provided an allowance and travelling expenses, on which the young couple had spent a long time in Venice, where Effie sparkled in society while Ruskin collected material for his book, The Stones of Venice.

There is no reason at this time to question the genuine affection of the pair; but it was a marriage in name only, some curious inhibition in Ruskin having decided him not to consummate the marriage. There are, in fact, various theories and stories as to his reason for this. One, spread by Mrs George Allen, who had been old Mrs Ruskin's maid, was that Effie had told her mother that she feared she would die if she had children, and Ruskin, hearing of this, vowed he would never be the death of any woman. It was not inconsistent with his basically gentle nature, but its source makes it suspect as a kind of post-divorce 'vindication' (Effie swiftly had a family by Millais). Another story, also not inconsistent with Ruskin's curious vein of romanticism, was that his image of women was innocently founded on the nude paintings of past and present artists, and his discovery of Effie's natural differences physically revolted him (Manet's most famous and reviled nude had not yet burst the bubble of artistic decencies). Effie herself, when passionately seeking her freedom and the annulment of the marriage, claimed that Ruskin had promised that he would 'marry' her in the full sense six years after the wedding: if so, the promise was not met, and by that time Millais' love for her had evoked in her a response that made her need for divorce doubly urgent.

This did not happen by any means at once, although soon after the visit Millais was using Effie as a willing model for several pictures. As for Ruskin, most deeply attached to his work, he was absorbed utterly in writing The Stones of Venice, and travelling every morning from his and Effie's new home in Camberwell to the study he still retained in his parents' house at Denmark Hill. The study was lined with the works of his beloved Turner: a collection which was to enrich the nation on his death.

He was still proud of Effie's success in society, which he himself hated, and curiously naive, in the circumstances, about the type of temptations to which his young wife might be exposed. He seemed also unaware of his wife's critical correspondence with her own parents, concealing of course the sexual situation but showing already an irritation with Ruskin's general attitudes and character. It was based in part on a sense of daily neglect that she did not appear to realize was the lot of every young wife left at home by her working husband, and in part on a blank insensitivity to her husband's fundamental nature. Ruskin's religious questioning (on forms of religion, not yet its basic truth) was the subject of Effie's almost hysterical interpretation. He was, he patiently wrote to Mrs Gray, not contemplating Catholicism but felt he could not write more against Catholics, 'for as I have received my impressions of them from Protestant writers, I have no right to act upon these impressions until I have at least heard the other side'. 'He has a number of ideas of this kind which I think most dangerous', wrote Effie, 'as his mind is naturally so imaginative.'

She complained about John's extravagance in buying '£160 of Liber Studiorum' (a now immensely valuable Turner collection) as compared with her own attempts at household economy. And she was completely out of key with her husband's tolerant and already slightly socialistic leanings. He had accepted with unsnobbish kindness her uncle's misalliance with his housekeeper, bitterly resented, with typical Victorian parvenu snobbishness, by herself and the Gray family. 'I have been much less shocked than anybody else by the whole affair: ' wrote John to her mother: 'but I have long held it for a fixed law of human nature that the best and wisest of men may lose their heads as well as their hearts—and what is worst their consciences—to a woman … '

Was John Ruskin already weighing up the consequences of losing his own heart, if not his head? Effie in her neurotic later letters, at the climax of the incipient break, was definitely to accuse him of deliberately throwing Millais and herself together in the hope of getting rid of her; but the accusation is at best unproven, and Ruskin not unnaturally denied it. But the initial base of [the collapse of the Ruskin marriage] was in Ruskin's character and the marriage itself. He was, he had written to Mrs Gray, 'as cool headed as most men in religion—rather too much so', but this was far more deeply, though not ineradicably, applicable to his general temperament at this time. Millais, before the Scottish episode reached its climax, and perhaps even before he was fully aware of his feelings for Effie, wrote to Holman Hunt: 'Her husband is a good fellow but not of our kind, his soul is always with the clouds and out of reach of ordinary mortals.' How much Ruskin's literary soul was enmeshed in the clouds we know from Modern Painters. Millais may have been obliquely referring to this.

That Ruskin was impervious to emotional involvements his later ill-starred passion for Rose La Touche was to disprove; but they were volcanic eruptions in a nature often more akin to a placid, even a little snow-touched, green field in a temperate climate. His truest passion was his work, his world of ideas: 'I have hardly any real warmth of feeling, except for pictures and mountains', he wrote to his father. ' … I have no love of gaiety as people call it … whatever I do love I have indulged myself in.'

It was hardly an uncritical self-estimate. In a remarkably candid letter to Rossetti later, Ruskin was to write: 'I am very self-indulgent, very proud, very obstinate, and very resentful; on the other side, I am very upright—nearly as just I suppose as it is possible for a man to be in this world—exceedingly fond of making people happy … ' And he added: 'It seems to me that one man is made one way, and one another—the measure of effort and self-denial can never be known, except by each conscience to itself.' It was a balanced and uncensorious comment on the variations of human nature that not all—least of all, all critics—are capable of making.

His reasoning on the breakdown of his marriage at the time was clear enough:

Looking back on myself—I find no change in myself from a boy … from a child except the natural changes wrought by age. I am exactly the same creature… in temper—in likings—in weaknesses: much wiser—knowing more and thinking more: but in character precisely the same—so is Effie. When we married, I expected to change her … she expected to change me. Neither have succeeded, and both are displeased.

Yet Ruskin was not cold: all (including even Millais) stressed his gentleness. His warmth was for pictures as he said, but it was also for a wider spectrum of humanity than the closely personal. It led him in the end to socialism: a caring for humanity as a whole, the nature of social justice and the betterment of conditions: something that, in spite of his own self-indulgences, was of wider benefit to people in the aggregate than any personal sexual attachment could have been. His detachment and apparent frigidity in this were not unlike those of two other humanitarian writers, Thomas Paine and Bernard Shaw, both of whom also appear to have had unconsummated marriages. 'The more I see of the world the more I find the warm-feeling people liable to go wrong in a hundred ways that quiet people don't', he wrote to his father. It was extraordinarily close to a sentiment expressed by Shaw's Dick Dudgeon, in his play The Devil's Disciple, when he said he had always been suspicious of the self-sacrifice that sprang from a red-hot emotion.

Whatever the psychological inhibitions or hidden stresses that dictated Ruskin's attitude in his marriage, he showed himself singularly free from the neurotic resentments that wracked Millais and Effie over the affair (could this have been unconscious guilt complex on their part?). Remarkably in a critic, he never apparently allowed personal feelings to influence his artistic judgement, at least with regard to Millais. He had the curious naivety of the naturally kind, showing hurt and surprise even when Millais, after Effie's divorce and remarriage, refused to renew the friendship. He continued to admire Millais' work and praise his pictures. It was only in later life, when the whole affair over Effie had receded, that Ruskin attacked Millais' work—the work of a revolutionary artist who had toed the line of success and least resistance, and become an honoured Academician. If he had artistic enthusiasm, the crusading spirit which is behind all the greatest criticism, he also had artistic honesty and detachment, which are among the critic's rarer qualities. His judgements could be unsound: but they were not unsound for the wrong reasons, at least for the major part of his life. In age, with its darkening mental pressures, it was sometimes a different story.

In old age, in spite of this recurring mental breakdown, he kept his passion for his work, and indeed for that of many others, intact. He had one great later love for a woman, Rose La Touche, in which for the first time he showed in his letters real and bitter appreciation of the damage Effie's proclamation of his failure as a husband had done to his chances of happiness. What he may not have known was that Rose's mother had written to Effie and received in reply a letter of such deliberately damaging content to Ruskin that all hope of his marriage to Rose was ended. He denied impotence strenuously, although how much to protect his reputation and how much from real knowledge of his capacity it is difficult, on the evidence, to say.

His reaction to Effie's unexpected flight to her parents and plea for annulment was one of slight shock but greater courage. To Effie's baffled fury (she seemed to take it as a personal affront) he made a point of being seen in society and at exhibitions, and wrote a letter to The Times as calmly as if his name were not being bandied about in quite a different context. He left a little later for a Swiss tour with his parents only because this had, in fact, been arranged long before the marital crisis. The even tenor of his life, a life of dedicated work for art and social philosophy, resumed on his return. Whatever Ruskin locked within the recesses of his heart, was never revealed: he threw away the key. Like Swinburne, he turned to the inaccessible Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's red-haired, mysterious model, now his ailing wife, for the feminine friendship some dim corner of his nature required. It was a companionship totally without emotional demands, safe and soothing to both sides (Lizzie, too, had her marital problems). Ruskin's gratitude was generous and uncomplaining, even when Lizzie, provided by Ruskin with money to go to Italy for her health, and indulge there in the painting he admired and encouraged, lingered instead in Paris, where she was joined by Rossetti until Ruskin's 'tin' (as Rossetti always called the elusive means of subsistence) ran out.

The story of his violent and all-consuming infatuation with Rose La Touche is strictly outside his involvement in Pre-Raphaelite history; but like his earliest emotional attachment, to Adele Domecq, it shows a deep and inconsolable self-abandonment that makes clear how little, in comparison, his original affection for Effie Gray meant to him. 'The worst of it for me has long been passed' he wrote as early as 1854, when the undertow of the break with Effie had hardly subsided. His immediate reaction, as always, was the basically natural one for him of seeking gentle and entirely asexual female society: Liz Siddal, so soon to die, was only the first of his 'platonics', as Mary Shelley called her husband's more questionable Italian devotions.

In a sense, this was Rose's rôle at first. She was a precocious child of only ten years when Ruskin first became enamoured of her. But it was no ordinary and idle child-complex, for unlike the little-girl friendships of, for example, Lewis Carroll, it continued and indeed grew into an exclusive obsession until the child was a woman in her twenties, herself torn between a growing love for Ruskin and the barriers which Victorian sex morality and religious conformity placed between the two. Parental disapproval, rumours of the Ruskin divorce, a kind of sexual petrification and something which grew, in the end, into religious mania destroyed Rose, burdened with a sense of Ruskin's nameless guilt in the matter of his divorce and his loss of faith: divisions which he became too inhibited and over-sensitive to dispel or justify.

The torment of this luckless pair in the self-inflicted inferno of Victorian puritanism and religiosity makes clear the inevitability of the reaction to permissiveness in our own society. Ruskin himself, unable either to deny his religious doubts or to live with them, was almost equally shattered. He could at once see clearly Rose's dilemma, and be appalled by it, while becoming powerless to fight the mental darkness that fitfully accompanied his loss of faith. 'The sky is covered with grey cloud; not rain cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sun can pierce.' Shelley put it another way:

  When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead—
  When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow's glory is shed.

In the end, this was Ruskin's tragedy, even although he was, nearly to the end of a long life, able to gather together the shattered fragments and for periods light once again the almost burnt-out wick.

To classify him as a psychiatric lover of little girls, as has sometimes been done, does not actually fit Ruskin's case. This was in the end an adult passion, and an adult tragedy. The progressive girls' school, Winnington Hall, Cheshire, run by one of his sturdy admirers, Miss Bell, which Ruskin often visited (as did many others, sometimes with him), was really a part of his educational enthusiasms. He also took an interest in boys' schools. Certainly he was charmed by the girls and gravely danced with the older ones at school balls; but there is no evidence that he looked on them with anything more than the aesthetic pleasure with which he would regard a Cumberland cloud formation or a group of butterflies. His heart remained with Rose. The preference for young girls was and is in any case not a Ruskinian but an English male characteristic. Old men traditionally married (and still marry, in this age of divorce) very young wives, and the Victorian vice (which was also a self-protective device against disease) of seeking little girls of twelve or thirteen years in brothels was something the idealistic Ruskin would have looked on (if indeed he was aware of it) with revulsion.

In the end, although he travelled with her letters in a rosewood box for many years after her death, he came to some kind of resignation, even about Rose. 'There is no use in trying to keep with us those who are not of this world', he was able to write; 'one might as well try to keep a rainbow.' Essentially, in his socialism as well as his love for at least two women, he was a romantic and an idealist. And like other humanitarians, romantic and the opposite (Shelley, Bernard Shaw, Albert Schweitzer), his reverence for life extended to the animal world. 'I would rather watch a seagull fly than shoot it, and rather hear a thrush sing than eat it … ' ('Reverence for life' was his own phrase, used first in The Eagle's Nest and later adopted by Dr Schweitzer.) In the end, he resigned from the University when it endowed the study of vivisection.

Art has many facets, and Ruskin's interests spread wide. His was the type of wide-ranging mind that was a feature of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and still lapped over into the following century, before the division of what C. P. Snow has called 'the two cultures'. But his scientific awareness took a different course: surrounded by the growing, blackening evidences of the Industrial Revolution, with the search for material wealth on the one hand, and appalling squalor and heaviness of labour on the other, Ruskin fought all his life these aspects of political economy and attacked them in particular in Muners Pulveris.

True political economy, in his creed, was neither an art nor a science; it was a moral and legislative system, intended to provide happiness and ample provision for the population, the 'multiplication of human life at the highest standard'. By this Ruskin meant beauty, intelligence and moral character, in the rather smug and restrictive moral terms of the Victorian age; but he carried the theme much further than that. It was with him a political philosophy which should deal, as one historian put it, 'with the relation of master to servant, employer to workman, of the state to its subjects, with the province of sanitary and commercial legislation, and with the duty of the state in promoting education, suppressing luxury, regulating the hours and wages of labour'.

It may be a strange ambivalency that some of this should come from a man who had never thought to question his right to live on his parents, so that he could fulfil himself as a writer. Probably Ruskin's crusading instincts, as well as a degree of personal egoism, were far too strong for him to question the means. He committed himself absolutely to the Working Men's College, at which he lectured regularly for the furthering of education and technical skills, and in the middle of his Scottish tour had given a course of four lectures at Edinburgh covering Architecture, Decoration, Turner and his Works, and Pre-Raphaelitism. In one of his most forward-looking if abortive experiments, he devoted much of his inherited fortune to founding the St George's Guild, intended as a form of agricultural community in which we read hints of 'hippie' communities, and the Israeli communes, later.

He continued to pour out books and articles on every aspect of art, architecture, sculpture and social ideas, and although his work was not directly political it formed a kind of yeast in the rise of more committed ideas of social reform and revolution later. His socialism and its influence (particularly on Morris) … flowed alongside his wider aesthetic interests and never superseded them. These extended to a remarkable range of studies, often originally delivered in lecture form. His lecture on "Modern Manufacture and Design," given at Bradford in 1859, was an historical spur to Morris and the famous Pre-Raphaelite 'Firm'. 'We have at present no good ornamental design', said Ruskin. His hopes lay in the schools of art then hardly envisaged outside London, and which Burne-Jones among others was very prominently, later, to support.

Even in lecturing, his feeling for the fine phrase did not desert him: 'the names of great painters are like passing bells' is a sentence which rings out from this lecture given among the 'satanic mills' of the north. The year before, he had astonished Tunbridge Wells, in the heart of rural Kent, with an exposition, The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art and Policy, in which his geological resources were used as a base for a study of post-industrial uses of iron and the advocacy, again, of improvements in design of everything from iron railings to gates and balconies. It pointed out the beauties of Swiss and Italian balconies and referred to 'a rich naturalist school at Fribourg, where a few bell-handles are still left, consisting of rods branched into laurel and other leafage'. It went on, indefatigably, to discuss fetters and ploughs, with a sideline on social policy: 'We buy our liveries, and gild our prayer-books, with pilfered pence out of children's and sick men's wages … this is only one form of common oppression of the poor—only one way of taking our hands off the plough-handle, and binding another's upon it.' Cheap labour, and speculation, were already themes which to Ruskin were ineradicably involved with the artistic product. In this he was an heir to the Lunar Society idealists at the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

Unlike many prophets (and especially revolutionary prophets), he was not only honoured in his own country in his lifetime, but honoured on an extensive scale. From 1869 to 1879 he was Slade Professor of Art at Oxford; and in 1871 he was given the degree of LL.D. by Cambridge University. The same year he donated £5,000 for the endowment of a master of drawing at Oxford, and subsequently founded a museum at Walkley, near Sheffield, which in 1890 was transferred to Sheffield itself. Part of his great library and art collection was housed there, and the rest still enrich many galleries and museums.

He died on 20 January 1900, on the very edge of a century which was to reverse many of his artistic ideals and bring others into new and startling focus: a world which was to abandon his gift of literary description for a visual outlook he almost certainly would not have understood, as he failed to understand either Whistler or the French Impressionists—hardly seeming to notice their echo of the experiments with light and image first indulged in by his idol Turner.

In some ways this was not surprising, for in spite of his long and devoted hours cataloguing Turner's works, and his youthful idolization of the painter, Ruskin, like the rest of his world, never understood Turner's ultimate period; the explosions of sunlight on indefinable objects which so haunted the dying painter's mind that his last words reputedly were 'The sun is God'. Turner himself must have realized this; he accepted the idolatry but never entirely the idolizer, as Ruskin admitted: showing, in fact, very much the same reaction as Rossetti to the critic as at best only a partial evaluer of the artist. In later life, Ruskin's clash with Whistler in a libel action merely emphasized the widening gap between the critical amateur, with a marvellous gift for words, and the artist as creator and innovator, thrusting his brush through the canvas of current taste.

In spite of his sexual neutrality and Protestant morality, and his inability to accept his own atheism without being mentally disturbed by it, Ruskin was, nevertheless, the first link in the chain-reaction that brought together so many of the artistically-inclined young men of his century, in a revolt against Victorianism in its more crushing aspects of art and society.