Ruskin

Over the last few days - in Paris, interviewing the last of the Saudi artists - I’ve been re-reading bits of This is Civilisation by Matthew Collings, the tie-in for his recent tv series. I like it more and more. I like the way he writes, the sweep of the book, and the change of pace that happens every time he switches from his light-coloured look-at-me-Mum-I’m-blogging chatty font to the slightly fatter one for Meaty Serious Stuff.

The best parts, though, are when he writes about John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, visionary and eccentric, someone Collings clearly likes. He's the one on the left in this picture. I guess part of the reason I like these passages is they flesh out one of the main themes of In Search of… - that of how Victorian writers and readers began to pine after their recent, vanished past and would by turns idolise or laugh at its apparent bawdiness and closeness to nature. Without them doing this, it’s unlikely that we’d be able to talk today with such familiarity about an ‘English eccentric’. This figure is part of the national furniture only because of the extent to which Victorians wanted to read about him.

In Collings’ book Ruskin becomes the guide to art in the second half of the 19th century. He explains Ruskin’s love of organic-looking Gothic design over the more regimented and classically pleasing symmetry of the Renaissance because you could see the hand of individual craftsmen in the former. For him, irregularity and inconsistency stood for humility, individuality, participation within the natural world; and this belief in the purity of Nature and the importance of being connected to it in some way was symptomatic of his age – a time of mass-urbanisation and mass-industrialisation. It’s also exactly what fuelled the Victorian fascination with English eccentrics.

As well as embodying something of why eccentrics were so popular during the Victorian era, Ruskin was an eccentric himself, both as someone who had visions and as a visionary. I didn't really take this in first time I read the book.

Collings: ‘He resisted the soul-destroying effects of industrialism with cranky concepts like free schools, free libraries, town planning, smokeless zones and green belts, all of which we now take for granted.’

Towards the end of his life he became ‘what we would nowadays call bipolar. He saw devils and had hallucinations and had to be constantly nursed, and finally spent the last twelve years of his life in silence, utterly withdrawn from public life, spending his days nodding and smiling in his house in the Lake District.'

Here he is nodding mode: