SHARAFF/SZE COLLECTION
Praeterita (1886)
John Ruskin
A venerated figure in Victorian England, John Ruskin was the leading
critic of his time. His books deal with politics, social reform, economics,
art theory and architecture. He viewed art as an expression of morality.
He supported Pre-Raphaelism. and rejected the classical tradition while advocating the Gothic. In architecture, he particularly praised Venetian Gothic in The Stones of Venice. His views had an enormous influence on English builders. In a letter to his father he once wrote, "I should like to draw all St. Mark's and all this Verona stone by stone, to eat it all up into my mind, touch by touch."
In 1885 Ruskin, first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, resigned his post. He had for some time been increasingly hounded by mental attacks. Now at his childhood home near London, the stooped Ruskin, no longer the energetic young man who had gazed upon Mont Blanc in ecstasy, penned the preface to Praeterita in the room that had once been his nursery.
Although Ruskin's mind was unbalanced during the years he wrote Praeterita, he wished to write "frankly, garrulously, and at ease ... passing in total silence things which I have no pleasure in reviewing." He described "the recreation of gathering visionary flowers." This then was to be a selective, fragmentary autobiography. Peter Quennell writes, "he surveyed the landscape ... a lost landscape: yet every detail and every colour retained its virgin freshness."
Ruskin writes of his tranquil early years at Herne Hill where he was watched over by adoring middle-aged parents. There he led "a small, very perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life." His father was a prosperous sherry merchant, his mother a religious fanatic, who had dedicated her child to God before he was born. Isolated from other children, he developed intense visual gifts. When he sat for his portrait at the age of three he asked the painter to include hills in the background "as blue as my shoes."
The lyricism of Praeterita is a blind for the tragedies of Ruskin's life. Ruskin never mentions his unconsummated marriage to Effie Gray, annulled by court decree after six years in 1854. Effie married the painter John Millais the following year. Ruskin alludes to Rose La Touche, who was a child of nine when he first met her at age forty. "So presently the drawing-room opened, and Rosie came in, gave me her hand, as a good dog gives its paw, and then stood a little back." In the end, Rose La Touche gave her heart to God, not Ruskin.
Another attack of madness prevented Ruskin from completing Praeterita. It was his last work but contains some of his finest prose.
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