The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Ruskin · an autobiography in twenty-eight chapters · George Allen, Orpington, issued in parts, 1885 to 1889 · scored in English, the original, on the twenty-eight chapters as Ruskin published them, ending with “Joanna’s Care”, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Autobiography as a history of perception: what one man saw and how he came to see it, told in chosen scenes rather than as a complete record
Mythos
Paradise and its loss: a walled garden, the Alps seen as the walls of a lost Eden, an expulsion of faith, and an exile who returns at the close to an evening of innocent light
Phase
Written at Brantwood, Coniston, from 1885 to 1889, in the intervals of mental illness; the life told reaches, in its main line, little past the late 1850s and early 1860s
Presentation
Prose; first person, retrospective and digressive, with footnotes and cross references to Ruskin’s other books; twenty-eight chapters issued one to a part and gathered in three volumes of twelve, twelve and four
Register
Late, plain, comic and tender, with a conversational pressure, rising without strain into passages of transport
Scale
One life, its family, its faith and its eye, across England and Europe, in three volumes, the third a third the length of the others
Governing Proposition
Praeterita is John Ruskin’s account of his own past, written at Brantwood in the intervals between attacks of mental illness and issued in parts from 1885 until repeated breakdowns stopped it in 1889. It tells the making of an eye: a childhood at Herne Hill under devoted and possessive parents, the carriage tours that brought a boy to the Alps, Oxford, and the afternoon at Turin when his evangelical faith gave way. It is neither a confession nor a defence. Its wager is that a life can be held in chosen scenes, told cheerfully by a man who knew it had been ruinous, and that what he passes over in silence, his marriage and its annulment and his madness, belongs to the design.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens on a joke against itself: “I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school”, and the old school proves to be Scott’s and Homer’s. Praeterita. Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life was issued by George Allen at Orpington in twenty-eight parts, one chapter to a part, between 1885 and 1889, and gathered in three volumes of twelve, twelve and four chapters. Ruskin wrote it at Brantwood, Coniston, in the intervals between attacks of mental illness.
The first chapters set out the family: a father in the sherry trade of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq, a mother who read the Bible through with her son, and behind them a genealogy told with comedy and love. Chapter titles such as “The Springs of Wandel” and “Papa and Mamma” give the manner, place and person held in affection. The parents become one of the great double portraits of Victorian prose, and the book will both honour them and diagnose them.
The title says what kind of book this is: outlines, of scenes perhaps worthy of memory. From its first chapter it is a book of chosen scenes, not a complete history. What Ruskin leaves out, his marriage to Effie Gray and its annulment above all, he leaves out by design, and the book is weighed as that design, not as a life that failed to be told whole.
Movement II
The childhood at Herne Hill is a walled garden and a narrow allowance of things. The boy has few toys: a bunch of keys and a box of bricks. He studies the patterns of the carpet and the wallpaper for hours, and he learns chapters of the Bible by heart with his mother. Out of that poverty of objects a gift of seeing is made.
The book tells this as paradise and, in the same pages, diagnoses it. Ruskin sets out the blessings of his upbringing and then its calamities: he had nothing to love, his parents being to him like powers of nature rather than persons loved, and he was given nothing to endure, and so no training in judgement or self command. A devoted, possessive love is stated here more exactly than almost any Victorian before Gosse stated it.
Here too the book builds its myth. The garden stands as an Eden, and the child who names things by seeing them is the archetype of everything Ruskin would write. The pattern of paradise and its loss runs from these chapters to the last page, and it is built most firmly here, in the first volume; later it is evoked more than carried.
Movement III
The father’s carriage tours took the family across England and the Continent, and on one of them, from the hill above Schaffhausen in 1833, the boy saw the Alps for the first time, a horizon he first took for clouds. The book places the passage so that a whole life turns on it, and it is one of the great passages of nineteenth century prose.
The aspen at Fontainebleau is the second turn. Drawing it, Ruskin understands that it is composed by laws finer than any he had been taught, and perception becomes knowledge in a few lines. The Rhone at Geneva and the Alps from Champagnole and the Jura come back across the book as the same transport of seeing.
These are the book’s heights, and they are frequent; between them lie long reaches of domestic comedy, itinerary and record. The late style is pitched lower than Modern Painters, plainer and quicker, and it rises without strain into these passages because it has not strained elsewhere.
Movement IV
A wine merchant’s son goes up to Christ Church, Oxford, and the book follows him there with the eye it turned on Herne Hill. The second volume widens into tours, drawings and people met, and its selection often reads as what came to mind. This is where the book is loosest, and where many pages could go without the reader missing them.
At Turin the book finds its centre again. In a single afternoon a dull Waldensian sermon and a painting by Veronese undo the evangelical faith of the childhood, and the passage from faith to its loss is disclosed whole. It is the expulsion in the book’s myth: the garden of the Bible read with his mother is closed.
What the book does not tell lies around these chapters. The marriage and its annulment are passed over in silence, as the madness is. Turning from Rousseau’s confession, Wordsworth’s growth of a poet’s mind, Newman’s defended faith and Mill’s defended mind, Ruskin writes a history of perception, and the silences are its method and its cost together.
Movement V
The third volume has four chapters, “The Grande Chartreuse”, “Mont Velan”, “L’Esterelle” and “Joanna’s Care” among their titles, the last closing the book. It is a third the length of the others and was written closest to collapse. It compresses years, scatters its attention and introduces Rose La Touche only to leave her, and the polemicist of Fors Clavigera breaks in. The main line of the life reaches little past the late 1850s and early 1860s.
Repeated breakdowns stopped Ruskin in 1889, and he wrote nothing more of substance before his death in 1900. The public Ruskin of Unto This Last, Fors Clavigera and the Slade chair is only glanced at. The book is weighed as it was published: the stop is charged where it shows in the text, in the disorder of this volume, the unreached public life and a form under strain from without, and not as a missing part.
The last paragraph is dated at Brantwood, June 1889. It returns to an evening at Fonte Branda in Siena with Charles Eliot Norton, fireflies rising and falling among the lightning: light at night, intermittent, more intense than the stars. The exile comes back to a Tuscan evening of innocent light, and the book closes on a summit, in the form’s own figure.
Act III · The Twelve
The lowest of the twelve. The book is loose by method. It wanders into family genealogy, the sherry trade of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq, travel itineraries, notes on Ruskin’s later books, asides on politics and religion, and portraits of servants and tutors whose place in the whole is affection rather than need. Many chapters could lose a third without loss, and the second volume has stretches of record whose selection reads as what came to mind. The main line is required: Herne Hill, the carriage tours, Schaffhausen, the aspen at Fontainebleau and Turin are each a step in the making of one eye. What holds the axis there is that the omissions are necessary and the inclusions often are not; the axis weighs what is in.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What the book brings into the open is an articulated condition: how a gift of seeing was made, and what the same making cost. The childhood is told as paradise and, in the same pages, diagnosed. Ruskin sets out the blessings of his upbringing and then its calamities: that he had nothing to love, his parents being to him like powers of nature rather than persons loved, and that he was given nothing to endure, and so no training in judgement or self command. It is an account of a devoted, possessive love stated more exactly than almost any Victorian managed before Gosse. Held below the gate because the truth is partial by choice: the marriage, its annulment, the full story of Rose La Touche and the madness are kept out, and the disclosure stops where the life hurt most.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation here is of one kind, the transport of seeing, and it comes often. The first sight of the Alps from the hill above Schaffhausen in 1833, a child before a horizon he first takes for clouds, is one of the great passages of nineteenth century prose, and the book places it so that a life turns on it. The aspen at Fontainebleau, drawn and suddenly understood as composed by laws finer than any he had been taught, rises in a few lines. The Rhone at Geneva and the Alps from Champagnole and the Jura return to the same height, and the last paragraph, fireflies over Fonte Branda among the lightning, closes on a summit. Between them lie long reaches of domestic comedy and record with no aim at height: high and fairly frequent, not sustained.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The book builds one myth, paradise and its loss, and builds it in its first third. The walled garden of the Herne Hill childhood stands as an Eden, the Alps are seen as the walls of a lost one, and the arc of the whole runs from the garden through the expulsion of faith at Turin to an exile who comes back, at the close, to a Tuscan evening of innocent light. The child who names things by seeing them is the archetype of all Ruskin’s work, and he stays particular: a boy with a bunch of keys and a box of bricks. Held below the gate because past the first volume the myth is evoked more than load bearing; the second volume’s chronicle does not carry it, and the expulsion that would complete it, the marriage and the breakdown, is the part withheld.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The tradition is Rousseau’s Confessions, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Newman’s Apologia (1864) and Mill’s Autobiography (1873): the autobiography of confession, of a poet’s growth, of a faith or a mind defended. Ruskin turns from all four. He refuses confession, keeping silence over what was painful; he refuses apology and argument, for the book defends nothing; and he writes instead a history of perception, in chosen scenes and a cheerful, comic, tender voice laid over a life he knew had been ruinous. The stake was real: it was written in parts, against his own collapse. Held below the gate because the turn is of tone and selection more than of form: the frame is the ordinary chronology, and the growth of a mind is Wordsworth’s subject.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. A full and continuous life would have to tell the marriage and the madness, and would stop being what this is: the knowledge of a man who can hold his past only by choosing it, scene by scene, in the light of what he loved. The outline, the digression, the cheerful surface and the silences are the instrument of that knowledge, and the closing image, light at night, intermittent, more intense than the stars, is the form’s own figure. Against it, much of the looseness is not shaped but merely loose; the issue in parts shows in chapters that end where the instalment ended; and the short, crowded chapters of the third volume show a form under strain from without, which is charged here.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The evidence of return is long. The book has been in print and read for well over a century, edited and introduced by Kenneth Clark in 1949 and by Francis O’Gorman since, and it is central to every life of Ruskin, Hilton’s two volumes above all. It is argued over chiefly for its silences, its account of the parents and the relation between the evangelical child and the late mind, and it keeps yielding on the questions it leaves open: whether the diagnosis of the upbringing is the book’s truth or its alibi, whether the cheerfulness is serenity or defence, how far the Alps and the garden are memory and how far composition. What holds the axis there is that its re-readers are mostly readers of Ruskin, and its formal depth is less than its psychological depth.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is English autobiography and the memoir after it. The intrinsic force is high in kind: a reorganisation of what an autobiography could be about, perception rather than deeds, faith or argument, and a demonstration that selection and silence could be the method of a life written by its subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book stands in the line that runs to Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) and to the twentieth century memoir of childhood and the eye, Clark’s Another Part of the Wood and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory among it, and Proust’s long engagement with Ruskin is part of its afterlife, though not of this book alone. What holds the axis there is that no later book can be shown to have taken its method from this one rather than from the tradition it belongs to.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The highest of the twelve. A hundred and thirty-seven years have passed since the last part, and the text survives whole as Ruskin issued it, in every collected edition; its unfinished state is the state of its first publication and takes nothing from what survives. It has been continuously in print and is taught in Victorian studies. Presence is what holds the axis below its span. Its readers are now largely the academy and readers of Ruskin, whose general readership has fallen sharply since the early twentieth century, and it is little translated and little read outside English. A century and a third of survival does not stand above that charge, and the figure is set below the usual mark for its span on that account.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The prose is Ruskin’s late, plain style: shorter periods than Modern Painters, a conversational pressure, exact visual description, comic timing and a cadence that rises without strain into the great passages. The first sentence shows the timing, “I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school”, and the old school turns at once into Scott’s and Homer’s. Kenneth Clark and many since have taken it as the best of his prose. Against it, the digressions run uncontrolled, the footnotes and cross references to his own works break the surface, and some sentences go slack with garrulity. The command of the sentence is near the top of Victorian prose; the making of the whole, proportion and the shape of chapters, is lower.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comic portrait of the sherry merchant father in the first chapters and the near ecstatic fireflies of the last page. They obey one law, the voice of an old man recalling with love and selecting for joy, and the law holds through Oxford, the Alps and Turin. What holds the axis there is that the law is broken repeatedly: by the polemicist of Fors Clavigera breaking in, and by the third volume, written closest to collapse, which compresses years, scatters its attention and introduces Rose La Touche only to leave her. The chronology loosens and the tonal control loosens with it. This is where the book’s stop costs most, and the figure is charged for it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The orders held are several and are integrated in one consciousness, not listed. The family, in the parents, drawn as one of the great double portraits of Victorian prose. Religion, in the evangelical childhood, the Bible as education and the loss of faith. Art and the formation of taste. The natural order of Alps, rivers, stones and plants. Class and commerce, in a wine merchant’s son at Christ Church. Europe as the English middle class travelled it. What holds the axis there is what is not held: marriage and sexuality are withheld, the labouring world and the state that occupied Ruskin’s later life are barely entered, and the madness that frames the writing is unspoken. A wide book about one man’s seeing, not a world.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Made at 8.7, and The Unconcealment and The Sublime at 8.4. A text whole for a century and a third and continuously in print; a late prose whose sentences stand near the top of Victorian English; an exact disclosure of what a devoted, possessive upbringing made and cost; and a transport of seeing, the Alps from Schaffhausen, the aspen at Fontainebleau, the fireflies at Siena, that comes often.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6: the omissions are necessary, but the inclusions often are not, and much of the book is loose by method. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition, The Inner Law and The Encompassed at 7.8, and The Archetypal Deep at 7.9: a reach believed in but not shown in any later book that took its method; a law broken by the polemicist and by the thinning third volume; a wide book about one man’s seeing, with marriage, labour and the state left out; and a myth built in the first third and evoked thereafter.
The Necessity Cap clears, The Inevitable at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.7, The Living Form at 8.1, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, its truth partial by choice and stopping where the life hurt most; The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 falls six tenths short, its myth of paradise lost built in the first volume and evoked thereafter; The Swerve at 8.0 falls five tenths short, a turn of tone and selection inside the ordinary chronological frame; and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 falls seven tenths short, its reach believed in but not shown in a later book that took its method from this one. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the book is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Ruskin’s Praeterita. Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life, issued by George Allen at Orpington in twenty-eight parts between 1885 and 1889 and gathered in three volumes: the first of twelve chapters (1885 to 1886), the second of twelve (1886 to 1887), the third of four (1888 to 1889). It is scored in English, the original, as the twenty-eight chapters Ruskin published, ending with “Joanna’s Care” and dated at Brantwood in June 1889. The book is unfinished, and it is scored as published. Dilecta, the letters and documents Ruskin issued in parts alongside it, is context and not the work. The texts in mind are the Library Edition of Cook and Wedderburn (volume 35, 1908), Kenneth Clark’s edition (1949) and the Oxford World’s Classics text edited by Francis O’Gorman. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where the words are certain: the title, the chapter titles named, and the first clause of the opening sentence; everything else is paraphrase. Matters that could not be verified, among them the wording of the preface, the chapter in which the blessings and calamities of the upbringing are set out, whether the text itself names the garden an Eden, the order and titles of the second volume’s chapters, the order of the third volume’s, and the book’s length in words, are not given.