Mere sanity is the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man's attributes." So goes one of the best known of William James's obiter dicta. It is not so widely known that James wrote those words in reference to John Ruskin, provoked by the appearance in the July 1904 Atlantic Monthly of some letters that Ruskin had written to their mutual friend, Charles Eliot Norton.

James was writing to Norton four years after Ruskin's death and 15 years after he slipped into silent insanity following a long period of mental unstability. Indeed, well before James penned his famous observation, Ruskin had receded into that limbo set aside for great authors the reasons for whose greatness no one can any longer quite explain, since almost everyone has stopped reading their books.

Ruskin's status has not altered fundamentally since 1904. Everyone knows he is a Revered Writer; but he is one who, unlike such very different contemporaries as Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot, is known to the general reader today by his halo alone rather than by his books. Students who take courses in English literature still meet snippets of his prose in anthologies; and scholars of Victorian literature and culture of course read him more extensively, but as a rule still spottily (his output was vast). They are well rewarded for their effort—though also often puzzled. Ruskin was a master of supple, inventive, coruscating, heart-rending, evocative, tender, volcanic prose, so highly original a writer that the reader caught up on the stream of his words is often dumped out at the end without knowing exactly where she has been.

Ruskin wrote endlessly about art, but was not an art historian or art critic in any conventional sense. He drew and painted beautifully (the Tate Gallery recently mounted a Ruskin exhibition) but rarely gave his work finish and never sold it. He expounded political economy at exhausting length but spouted doctrines impossible to take seriously as plausible economics or practical politics. His later writing was half autobiography, but students of Ruskin know better than to trust his stories of himself.

More than anything else, he was a prophet, in the mold of such self-conscious sages of nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture as Coleridge, Emerson, and Carlyle. Carlyle is the closest analogue, a writer whom Ruskin deeply admired, whose fiery radical Toryism and suspicion of everything modern he shared, and after whom he to some extent patterned himself. In Ruskin's heyday, prophets were honored in their own country, despite what the Bible tells us, as well as abroad, at least where English was spoken. They are not much anymore, especially when their deliberate obscurity makes it hard to figure out what they are trying to say. For 13 years, Ruskin addressed the more-or-less monthly letters called Fors Clavigera "to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain" (vanishingly few of whom can be imagined to have read them); the very titles of the issues of Fors send the most erudite reader off on a desperate (and usually fruitless) hunt for their meaning. No wonder Ruskin is to us more a name than a presence.

From this peculiar but real oblivion Tim Hilton strives to rescue Ruskin, to resuscitate him and his eruption of words for the advantage of twenty-first-century readers. Hilton even believes the impossible and endless Fors Clavigera to rank as perhaps Ruskin's greatest work, a judgment most readers will regard as eccentric, to put it mildly.

Nevertheless, Hilton is in key respects ideally equipped for the job of rehabilitation. Himself an artist, he has taught both painting and art history and written extensively about art. Among his previous books is a lucid study of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, the school that Ruskin famously championed and whose members loomed large in his personal life. (One of them, John Millais, ran off with their paladin's wife Effie when she could no longer endure her sexually mute but psychologically domineering husband; another, Edward Burne-Jones, became one of Ruskin's closest friends.) Not surprisingly, Hilton handles with ease and insight Ruskin's own artwork and the art-historical contexts of his life and writing. Indeed, in the first volume of this biography (John Ruskin: The Early Years, published originally in 1985 and reissued in paperback to coincide with the publication of the second and final volume), Hilton illuminated as never before the association between Ruskin and the older genius who became his friend, the painter J.M.W. Turner, an affinity critical in forming both Turner's reputation and Ruskin's thinking.

But Hilton brings more to his encounter with Ruskin than technical acumen and art-historical knowledge. Like any serious biographer, he has immersed himself in Ruskin's published writings and manuscript remains. More, he has immersed himself, if one may say so, in Ruskin. It should be said at once that this biography is not a "life and times"; the perspective on Ruskin is very much a view from within his own world. Hilton does not seriously attempt to situate Ruskin's writings and influence within the larger context of Victorian intellectual life, nor does he seem to have the background of learning to do so. To say this is not to criticize, only to indicate the kind of book Hilton writes, and writes with panache and sensitivity.

Hilton is an amateur in the root sense of the word. His love for his subject goes back decades, and in his middle age it is still tinged with the enthusiasm of youth. In general, this affection does not cloud his eyesight: he sees pretty clearly Ruskin's faults, which were at least as numerous as his virtues. But he does perhaps minimize the heedlessness of others' feelings that was characteristic of Ruskin—too often amounting to cruelty—and he certainly overestimates his hero's magnaminity. But one is all the more ready to forgive these peccadillos, not simply because biographers commonly admire their subjects to excess, but even more because of Hilton's own generosity of spirit, which pervades the book and only rarely fails him. If one merited a biography of oneself, one would want this man to write it.

And yet. And yet. Ruskin was not a mature and well-rounded person but a genius who never fully grew up. He had astonishing strengths and equally amazing deficits; and Hilton's book, for all its admirable qualities, can resemble its subject in the lopsidedness of its insight and its charity. For instance, Hilton is, like many biographers, given to psychological speculation about his subject; and his speculations can be both acute and well informed. Yet the subjects which he selects for exploration seem almost random.

Ruskin was a pedophile, though not of the physically predatory type—psychological predation being another matter. Hilton does not blanch at recognizing pedophilia as central to Ruskin's psyche, but he does seem blind to the psychological predation that was Ruskin's bent and at least insensitive to the fairly gross differences between a middle-aged man's falling in love with a 12-year-old girl and with an adult woman. Hilton describes repeated cases in which Ruskin strove to infantilize grown women (perhaps most bizarrely in his communication with his cousin Joan Severn even when she was 40) but fails to recognize the phenomenon as chronic and significant. He is happy to speculate on the psychological meanings of details of Ruskin's most protracted pedophiliac "romance" (carried on mostly in his own head), with the unfortunate Irish girl Rose La Touche, but he feels no need to explore the far more vital question of the nature and sources of Ruskin's pedophilia itself.

Or consider Hilton's abuse of Charles Eliot Norton, whom Ruskin famously called in his autobiography Praeterita "my first real tutor." The close friendship between these two strikingly different but highly complementary personalities is not hard to explain, and in fact John Bradley and Ian Ousby did so perceptively in their admirable 1987 edition of the immense Ruskin-Norton correspondence, a book to which Hilton frequently recurs. Nor can Ruskin's fondness for Norton be counted among his eccentricities. Many of Ruskin's friends knew Norton, most notably perhaps Thomas Carlyle and Edward Burne-Jones; they also found him admirable and immensely likeable (the sole exception was, I think, James Anthony Froude, whom Norton distrusted and disliked from their first meeting). Hilton knows all this. But Hilton detests Norton and ipso facto finds nothing to understand, only to denounce. It is Hilton's own likings that matter to him, not Ruskin's—a crippling stance for a biographer.

An especial bÊte noire for Hilton is Norton's characteristically Victorian attempt to protect his friend's reputation, after Ruskin's death, by burning his more compromising and embarrassing letters—of which there must have been a vast trove, given Ruskin's childlike openness about his liking for pubescent girls. (Ruskin's will gave Norton charge of his unpublished manuscripts.) Hilton rails repeatedly against this supposedly disgraceful act. Oddly, though, Ruskin's secretary Sara Anderson also "efficiently removed the evidence of Ruskin's more embarrassing behavior" without losing Hilton's admiration; nor does Ruskin's analogous service for his friend J.M.W. Turner (destroying Turner's obscene drawings) draw any fire from Hilton. He writes as if his own dislike for Norton licenses him to apply a different standard to Norton than to Ruskin himself or Ruskin's other friends—and to shirk altogether the biographer's duty to understand his subject's personal relationships. This sort of idiosyncrasy was typical of Ruskin but does not give the reader entire confidence in his biographer.

We are left, then, with a rich but sometimes puzzling lump of a book. It is (taking the two volumes together) far and away the best biography of Ruskin. We understand the man—or at any rate many key aspects of the man—better in Hilton's pages than we have ever understood him before. This is especially true of his relations to artists, dead and living, and of his filiation with his parents, a loving dependency which remained Ruskin's primary emotional affinity long after the time when most young men would have stood on their own or transferred their deepest affections to a wife. It is hard to imagine we will ever have a fuller account (or ever want one: the book does have its longueurs) of the painful but crucial attachment to Rose La Touche, who was nine years old when they first met. At the same time, this second volume rambles on at times in a way that can only be called self-indulgent (in marked contrast to the carefully controlled pace of the first volume). And because Hilton lets himself be guided by his idiosyncratic interests, he leaves the reader with only a feeble grasp of some of the most important of Ruskin's connections and commitments.

In no case is this truer than in that of Ruskin's religion. Hilton recognizes the centrality of Ruskin's faith to his life and work; he describes the divigations that led Ruskin from his mother's orthodox evangelicalism to his mature (if one can ever apply that word firmly to Ruskin) and highly personal version of Christianity: diaphonous, labile, but intense; and he does both with an appealing evenhandedness and generous effort to understand. Other writers on Ruskin tend to scold. They either scorn the rigid (but in reality far from cheerless) evangelicalism in which Ruskin was raised or frown on the admittedly sometimes wacky religion that he evolved for himself. Everyone from post-Christian secularists to the most orthodox Christians has always been able to find plenty to dislike somewhere in Ruskin's changing beliefs. It is to Hilton's credit that usually, and certainly in this case, he is more interested in understanding than condemning. If he appears to prefer his hero's later faith, he is not really hostile to the earlier evangelicalism. For all the reader can tell, Hilton may be a religious man himself.

And yet he has a tin ear for religion, at least the Victorian varieties. In volume 1 he tells us much about the religious practices in the Ruskin household as John was growing up and about the preachers the family frequented, but he never seems to grasp the meanings and resonances of evangelicalism for the faithful in late Georgian and Victorian England and Scotland. Indeed, some comments lead the reader to suspect that Hilton thinks evangelicalism in 1830 pretty much the same thing, culturally speaking, as evangelicalism in 1930 or 2002.

Likewise, in volume 2, he makes clear that Ruskin read a good deal of or about the biblical critics of his day; and he recounts Ruskin's frequent references, after his "unconversion" in the 1850s, to his inability—or, as Ruskin wrongly supposed, the inability of any contemporary educated person—to read the Bible as telling a literally true story, as opposed to a compelling myth. The corrosive effect of biblical criticism on the Christianity of many Victorians is a commonplace among historians, Yet neither Hilton's explanation of the unconversion from evangelicalism in the first volume nor his episodic references to Ruskin's evolving beliefs in the second integrates Ruskin's encounter with the biblical critics of his epoch into the explanation of his ongoing religious development. Too often, Hilton leaves the reader familiar with the literature of Victorian religion shaking her head.

This is a shame; for at the end of the day Ruskin may be best understood in terms of the shifting meanings and consequences of religion for the Victorian intelligentsia—and Hilton himself may even recognize this. Ruskin's upbringing in the Bible-based evangelicalism that decisively shaped the Victorian middle classes also decisively formed him as an intellectual. Long after he had left his mother's faith behind (his father's is a more complicated question, and not at all easy to penetrate), both Ruskin's prose style and his symbolic imagination continued to reflect that lost world. His exploration in the early volumes of Modern Painters of the spiritual reality to be found underlying nature is a chapter in the story of the transference of once Christian faith to less doctrinally and historically specific sites—and possibly part of the grounding of his own unconversion several years later (though Ruskin certainly would not have suspected any such outcome at the time).

The faltering of his faith in the Bible, and hence in evangelical Christianity, under the impact of historical criticism of the Scriptures makes Ruskin an unusually visible instance, not only of the influence of German criticism, but more broadly of the transformation of Western culture by historicism, the idea that all we think and believe is the product of the particular history that has produced us. His recommitment in the 1870s to Christianity, but now a nondoctrinal Christianity stripped of its historicity and without stable foundation, is an almost textbook case of the transition from what may be called precritical orthodoxy to modernism.

Perhaps above all, Ruskin's self-conscious adoption of the stance and manner of prophet marks both the continuing centrality of religion for him and the recession of Christianity from the center of Anglo-American high culture. For Ruskin's often scorching denunciations and exhortations—as well as his haphazard and hapless stabs at organizing a better world—showed how Christianity had devolved into a secular faith, even for someone like Ruskin who believed fervently in a transcendent God.

Institutionally, he assumed the mantle of moral and spiritual authority traditionally worn by the clergy, yet he eschewed all connection or concern with any church. Substantively, his prophetic voice spoke not of saving souls, nor of a reformed society that would more profoundly glorify God, but of creating conditions of work and life that would allow men and women to use to the fullest their talents and express their ideal natures. This was far from a contemptible goal, but its connection with Christianity or with anything transcending the human is not obvious. The term "self-realization" was foreign to John Ruskin's ears, but its utterance was not far distant.

All of this Tim Hilton misses in a book otherwise notable for its intelligence and acuity, for its generosity and warmth. There are a great many pleasures and rewards in this deeply felt and often superbly achieved work of the biographer's art. But there is also much that one regrets not finding, lacunae that are not a scholar's quibbles but real holes. Too often, Hilton allows himself to indulge in his favorite's weaknesses: idiosyncrasy, lopsidedness, inconsistency. Perhaps, after all, mere sanity is not the most unimportant of a man's attributes.

James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities at the University of Notre Dame. Among his books are The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999) and Language, Religion, Knowledge, forthcoming from University of Notre Dame Press.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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