John Ruskin
(My complete GMD bio/commentary
is here).
Bibliography
John Ruskin was one of the most esteemed artists, poets, social commentators, and art critics, not only by his own generation, but even today his work is taken as seriously as ever. G.K. Chesterton quoted from him and made mention of his work in several of his own books and essays. Chesterton enjoyed Ruskin's poetry well enough, and he identified with his disdain toward the plainness of 19th century architecture, but it was Ruskin's skepticism regarding the machinery and working class situation of the industrial age that truly united both Chesterton and MacDonald with Ruskin. George MacDonald was brought up during the middle of the industrial revolution and saw the devastating effects it had on both rural areas and on those who peopled them. During his lifetime he watched as the poor became enslaved to this new machinery in order to make the rich become even wealthier.
From MacDonald's novel, Ronald Bannerman, concerning machinery:
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There may be great pleasure in watching machine-operations, but surely none to equal the pleasure we had. If there had been a steam-engine to plough my father's fields, how could we have ridden home on it's back in the evening?... What more machines are there now? Strange, wild-looking mad-like machines, as the Scotch would call them, are growling and snapping, and clinking and clattering over our fields, so that it seems to an old boy as if all the sweet poetic twilight of things were vanishing from the country.
John Ruskin and George MacDonald shared a comfortable relationship despite the fact that they disagreed on nearly everything involving religion, at least until the latter part of Ruskin's life when he re-embraced the Christian faith of his childhood. Both men came at life from a different perspective though, one gauging mankind's participation and efficacy in creation by the work of his hands, the other by a more mystical approach involving man's thoughts, attitudes, and gestures. As Greville MacDonald put it, "Ruskin, the poet-artist, looked from without inwards; George MacDonald, the poet-novelist, looked from within outwards: that man's mission being the uplifting of work and its beauty, this man's the proving of the Divine Humanity. Ruskin's mind was the more scientific and aggressive, George MacDonald's imaginative and receptive...."
While people in the world of art and
architecture still recognize Ruskin's influence, many of
the everyday men and women in our era only remember Ruskin
because of the many plays and movies based on his failed
marriage to Effie Gray,
and his May-December romance with Rose la Touche, a girl
thirty three years his younger that he asked to marry him when she was only seventeen. Recently,
some critics have very unwisely tried to make
assertions that the relationship between Ruskin and Rose la
Touche was the impetus for Nabokov's novel--Lolita--a
wild and unworthy accusation at best. Rose's parents were distrustful of Ruskin because of his atheism
during the time of the proposed engagement, and also because of his annulled
former marriage which according to Effie Gray was never consummated
after five years. Gray suggested that Ruskin was impotent,
but Ruskin denied it and insisted that the marriage was
never consummated because almost from its outset he and
Gray began to bicker. At any rate, the parents of la Touche
did their best to keep their daughter away from from
Ruskin, and so, George and Louisa MacDonald, along with
Georgina Cowper, became a go between for Ruskin and Rose la
Touche, trying to make sense of the situation and to soothe
the relationship between Ruskin and the la Touche family.
Most who knew Ruskin, including the MacDonalds, thought his
motives were pure and his love honest.
However, even when Rose became of age
and could marry Ruskin at her own consent, she refused
because of their religious differences. Oddly, Rose la Touche, who as a
young girl was already considered quite strange in her
behavior, would go exceedingly mad and die in a nursing
home at only twenty seven years of age while suffering from severe bouts
of
mania. Shortly after her death, Ruskin began to take part
in the séances held at Broadlands endeavoring to
contact Rose. He had participated in séances here before,
but never trusted in their effectiveness. One particular séance
later in the year on December 20, 1875, began a change in him
however, one that would eventually lead him back to the
Anglicanism of his boyhood. A clairvoyant named by George
MacDonald simply as "Mrs. A", apparently gave to John Ruskin
a perfect description of Rose la Touche without ever having
seen her. This meeting in itself didn't entirely convince
Ruskin of the spirit world,
but it proved to be a catalyst for further religious
reflections. Eventually Ruskin would embrace a very relaxed
form of the Christian faith (described in his book Praeterita)
which didn't seem to include any elements of hell or
damnation. But, beginning in 1878, Ruskin started to have
visions of hellish elements including the Devil himself.
These visions would torment him off and on for several
years, but while he certainly believed in the dark forces
of the world which Christians so often refer to as the
Devil, he would never go so far as to say in what exact
form that malicious force took, whether physical matter,
spiritual, or, in some part, mental. Some Christians will
maintain that Ruskin's visions were brought about by God as
a useful agent to awaken the man's outlook to a real
Satanic force in the flesh. We do not know for sure what
George MacDonald thought of Ruskin's apparitions. Greville
MacDonald, however, does indeed refer to this period in
Ruskin's life (mainly 1878) as a "breakdown".