John Ruskin

 John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye by Robert Hewison, 212 pages

Midway through his life's journey, Ruskin wrote, "Once I could write joyfully about beautiful things, thinking to be understood; - now I cannot any more; for it seems to me that no one regards them."  Ruskin was, in fact, one of the most famous public intellectuals in the Anglophone world, but it was not fame he sought but understanding, and he had failed to gain many adherents for his more radical ideas, as he complained in another place: "I can get no soul to believe that the beginning of art is in getting our country clean, and our people beautiful."  Instead, Victorian England remained the prisoner of its own "greed for money, lust for food, pride of dress, and the prurient itch of momentary curiosity for the politics last announced by the newsmonger, and the religion last rolled by the chemist..."

Robert Hewison's task, then, is to facilitate a real understanding of the totality of Ruskin's thought, not as it stood at any one time as a complete, coherent doctrine, but as it changed and developed through what Ruskin himself admitted were a series of contradictions.  In Hewison's view, such understanding begins with the recognition that Ruskin was a visual thinker whose lifelong mission was to teach others how to see what he saw.  As such, his ideas are allusive and derive their power from analogy rather than logic.