APOLLO FOR ATTLEE
199
letters with Horace Walpole, and I suspect that Mr. Quennell would
have felt more at ease in William Pitt's London than he does today in
the London of AttIee, Cripps, and Bevin. He has done his intelligent
best to give the Labour government an ApolIo in the person of a tortured
and auto-erotic Ruskin, but his heart was not in this extremely difficult
assignment. The Ruskins, wine merchant and wife and gifted son were,
if one views them as human beings, an unwholesome crew; Mr. QuennelI
tried to conceal his dislike of alI three and failed.
4.
Ruskin needs another kind of revaluation than what Mr.
Quennell has given him. As a critic of art much of Ruskin's value lies
in his appreciation of Gothic and Tudor forms, and his appreciation is
consistent with his genius in writing richly textured Evangelical prose. In
his own day his Biblical fervor was too often mistaken for soundness in
moral judgment, and it was not generally known by those who read him
that he was literalIy insane for sustained intervals during the last quarter
century of his life. He loved pictures that "told a story," and in his
milder moments he was loud in his
aff~ction
for the verses and drawings
made by Kate Greenaway, that pleasant artist of books for children. His
social instincts were humanitarian rather than humane; if children ap–
proached him, he would shout "Bow-wow,-Damn!" and usualIy suc–
ceeded in frightening them away. He preferred
his
children in Regency
costume and between the covers of a book. But these traits of thoroughly
inhuman behavior cannot dim the imaginative splendours of
The Seven
Lamps of Architecture
and his
Praeteria;
no one would
claim
that his
genius wasted its efforts there.
Ruskin has been remembered as Turner's most voluble patron, yet
Ruskin and his father colIected Turner's canvases and drawings in much
the same spirit as men of wealth conceive a passion for collecting postage
stamps. Shrewdly enough, the sturdy painter of sunsets refused to show
gratitude to either father or son, and by this expedient he retained their
respect which was not unmixed with awe.
5.
It is best to remember Ruskin by quotation from his prose, not
for its aesthetic perception, nor its moral soundness, but for the depth
of its (in his case a subjective one) psychological penetration. Ruskin
was describing the conditions of the "false life," the life of "death or
stupor" :
It
is that life of custom and accident in which many of us pass
