John Ruskin: Illth

John Ruskin - art critic, social scourge, artist, author, reformer, sage and prophet - turns 190 today. A hundred years ago, none would have questioned that he was a giant, a towering figure of worldwide importance. He was read by and influenced everyone, from schoolchildren to world leaders and great writers (notably Proust and Tolstoy). Today, I suspect, he is scarcely read at all outside Academe. This is partly a result of the decline in literacy and public education (very few schoolchildren today - and few world leaders, come to that - would even be able to understand his complex, richly allusive prose). But also we have generally turned against the kind of high earnestness that Ruskin embodied, and to distrust the Great Man and the prophetic voice, especially, perhaps, one as overtly biblical as his. I remember, in the 60s and 70s, often coming across sets of Ruskin's dauntingly copious collected works mouldering away in secondhand bookshops and junk shops, where they were simply unsaleable. In more recent times, positive biographies and critiques of Ruskin have done something to rescue his name from total oblivion. However, he survives in the public imagination only as a specimen of morbid psychology, known for his supposed aversion to his wife's pubic hair (a probably untrue story) and his supposedly unhealthy fondness for little girls. The poor man would indeed be revolving in his grave, if he knew how thoroughly mean and trivial our world has become.
For myself, I've read a good deal of Ruskin in my time - a rollercoaster reading experience, if ever there was one, as Ruskin lurches from piercing insight into impenetrable obscurantism, from clear rightness of judgement to the most boneheaded wrongness, from forcefully expressive prose into hypertrophied prosing and apopletic ranting. Exciting in a way, yes, but I doubt I could take it now in any but small doses. There is, though, an essence in Ruskin of something of true and lasting value - and, as the bankers bring us to our knees, might not the sonorous trumpet blast of his prophetic voice have something to tell us? For a start, we could revive his useful word illth. What were those bankers doing if it was not creating, on a world-destroying scale, illth? Perhaps it's time to have another look at Unto This Last...