198
PARTISAN
REVIEW
who was once the little boy blowing bubbles in an advertisement for
Pear's Soap, published his book,
The Order of Release)
whispers of a
"Ruskin scandal" circulated through Chelsea, Kensington, Bloomsbury
and the foliage surrounding Keats' Grove. In 1934 and in a Pre–
Raphaelite drawing room in Kensington Violet Hunt offered to tell me
the latest gossip concerning Ruskin and Effie Gray; I must have looked
either cool or unresponsive, for she then began to look for Henry James's
umbrella: had he left it there last night, or twenty five years ago? On
the trail of James's umbrella we walked upstairs into an angular sitting
room designed by Wyndham Lewis. The "Ruskin scandal" had to
wait until the good Admiral, armed with family letters and court records,
rushed to the defense of his grandmother in 1947. The truth was that
Effie Gray was an uncommonly normal and pretty young woman, who
after a difficult trial with Ruskin, heartily enjoyed presenting Millais
(who had become an outrageously popular painter) seven or eight
(the number is large enough to make counting irrelevant) handsome
little Millaises. Poor Ruskin was afflicted with auto-eroticism, an af–
fliction, so rumor has long insisted, he shared with
Schope~hauer.
3.
Although the book omits evidence for the details that Admiral
Sir William James gives us in
The Order of Release,
Amabel Williams–
Ellis'
The Tragedy of John Ruskin
is still the best biography of Ruskin
in existence. In comparison with it Mr. Quennell's book seems over–
whelmed by the evidence offered by the worthy Admiral; one loses sight
of the early Ruskin in his book, the gifted poet who wrote in prose, the
author of the first volume of
Modern Painters
and
The Seven Lamps of
Architedure.
In Mr. Quennell's book there are but two vivid flashes of
Ruskin striding between the silky veils of Mr. Quennell's prose: one is
of his inaugural lecture as Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford and
the other is of his old age and madness when he met the Devil by
stripping himself naked and paced a room open to winter's cold from
midnight to dawn. The difficulty that faces most biographers of Ruskin
is Ruskin's strange and remarkable book on his own life, his
Praeterita,
written in lucid flashes between fits of madness, a book which deserves a
place alongside of De Quincey's
The English Mail Coach
and Ezra
Pound's
Pisan Cantos.
Like De Quincey's Ruskin's prose (at its best) be–
longs within the stream of what is best in English Romantic poetry, and
like Pound's autobiographical cantos the gifts displayed by Ruskin are
fragmentary and metaphorical. Mr. Quennell's gifts are of another order;
their affinities are of a sort that would have prospered in an exchange of
