A life in letters: Ruskin, John (1819-1900)

I remember discovering a volume of extracts from the writings of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin one day in the mid 1990s. The old volume was in the recycling bin at the Library Support Unit:  my colleagues were discarding it. I fished the book out, and began browsing through it.  I didn’t know anything about Ruskin’s background, or about his slow retreat from orthodox Christianity, but the following episode in his life resonated profoundly with me as I lingered in the chilly garage reading it.

He describes how, one July Sunday in 1858 when he was in Turin he attended a Waldensian chapel in the southern suburbs of the city.

The assembled congregation numbered in all some three or four and twenty, of which fifteen or sixteen were grey-haired women. There solitary and clerkless preacher, a somewhat stunted figure in a black coat, with a cracked voice…put his utmost zeal into a consolatory discourse on the wickedness of the wide world, more especially of the plain of Piedmont and the city of Turin, and on the exclusive favour of God, enjoyed by the between nineteen and twenty-four elect members of his congregation….

Ruskin then walked back into Turin ‘neither cheered nor greatly alarmed by this doctrine,’ and walked into an art gallery ‘where Paul Veronese’s Solomon and the Queen of Sheba ‘glowed in full afternoon light.’

The gallery windows being open, there came in with the warm air, floating swells and falls of military music, from the courtyard before the palace, which seemed to me more devotional, in their perfect art, tune and discipline, than anything I remembered of evangelical hymns. And as the perfect colour and sound gradually asserted their power on me, they seemed finally to fasten in me the old article of Jewish faith, that things done delightfully and rightly were always done by the help and in the Spirit of God.

For Ruskin, this was a moment of insight, in which the rightness of his reflections ‘through many years’ were confirmed. ‘There was no sudden conversion possible to me,’ he writes, ‘either by preacher, picture, or dulcimer. But that day, my evangelical beliefs were put away, to be debated of no more.’

To me, standing in the garage reading Ruskin’s words was a ‘Yes! Moment; - one of those affirming instants when you connect with something which validates your own experience and gives you permission to be. Ruskin’s words confirmed my half-acknowledged recognition that God was much bigger than I had thought, that he was too colourful to be confined in a dull kind of Christian life and practice, that he was present and gloriously alive throughout his vibrant creation.