'Influential Works That Are Almost Never Read'

John Ruskin would have a difficult time of it in what passes for literary culture today. First, he was phenomenally prolific, even by Victorian standards, and how many people would read all five volumes of Modern Painters or the idea-rich sprawl of Fors Clavigera? Second, Ruskin doesn’t conform to modern fashions in morality. He would be “cancelled” by the censorious and self-righteous. His marriage was unorthodox and unhappy. He fell in love with a ten-year-old girl. In the second volume of his Ruskin biography, Tim Hilton puts in bluntly: “He was a paedophile” -- by all accounts, unconsummated. This makes him a brilliant writer, a master of prose, who we are unable to read without soiling our delicate sensibilities. If we were truly to censor every writer of the past who offended us, literature would amount to a stack of pamphlets. And we could no longer read Ruskin’s Praeterita, one of the great memoirs in the language. 

In his review of Hilton’s biography, Guy Davenport writes of Ruskin’s vast and eccentric Fors Clavigera, his proto-blog:

 

“The book still belongs to the distinguished list of worthy and influential works that are almost never read even by those interested in literature and ideas: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, Horace Traubel’s Conversations with Walt Whitman in Camden, Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and the Bible.”

 

And Davenport sums up the force of nature that was Ruskin:

 

“Most of the problems Ruskin addressed are ours as well. The century that began in the year of his death saw the most terrible wars in all of recorded history; and cruelty, without shame or pity, has gone on disgracing humanity. For fifty years Ruskin tried to show us how to live and how to praise.”

 

Ruskin died on this date, January 20, in 1900 at age eighty.

[Davenport’s Ruskin essay, first published in Harper’s in 2000, is collected in The Death of Picasso (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003).]