Word: ruskins
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...JOHN RUSKIN: THE PASSIONATE...
...bemused modern reader, John Ruskin is yet another long-gone marvel, a species of featherless biped now extinct. This rare bird, born in 1819, was a gentleman of means and an amateur of genius, whose leisurely travels to Italy and Switzerland resulted in a vast outpouring of noblesse oblige: Sesame and Lilies and Seven Lamps of Architecture and some 30 other volumes instructing his countrymen on how to think about art, man and socialism. His writing now seems overabundant; but in an age when color photography and its reproduction in books were lacking, there was a reason for his word...
...Ruskin was the precocious child of doting parents, as Historian Joan Abse relates in this vigorous, compassionate biography, and his life through middle age was a struggle to free himself from their loving tyranny. "My mother had never let me play cricket lest it should quicken my pulse, step into a boat lest I should fall out the other side," he wrote wistfully. When he matriculated at Oxford, she followed him and took lodgings there, to oversee his physical and spiritual health. She was a fierce evangelical Protestant, and her husband, a prosperous and essentially self-educated wine importer...
...Victorian age produced sexual cripples in quantity; it is no surprise that Ruskin was one of them. He never matured emotionally, and he could respond romantically to women only when they were safely unavailable because of physical absence, extreme youth, or, in a couple of cases, death. He fell windily in love with a succession of such phantoms, and was sufficiently blown about by his own gusts of inky ardor that he proposed, by mail, to a healthy, warm-hearted girl named Effie Gray, whom he married when he was 29 and she 19. She believed him when he wrote...
...private sector--corporate grants, individual contributions and ticket sales--for its support. Presumably they will step up government funding--in horror. Likewise, Americans, in preparation for future upheavals and the subsequent new society we may have to build, must learn from the British, from Matthew Arnold, William Morris, John Ruskin, John Maynard Keynes, and the other philosophers and men of letters who have helped to shape a policy that has made Britain, for all its other problems, a paradise for theatre, art and music lovers...