The unfinished story of John Ruskin I was just thinking that Ruskin had fallen into an irrevocable tangle of madness, when, on page 464, he told a vivid, economical and well-turned story of his dog, Wisie. Whether it was retrieved from his memory or his bureau, I don't know. But John Ruskin did have a way of bouncing back rapidly from bouts of insanity. The reason I was reading his last book, the autobiogaphical Praeterita, is that two or three years ago Mark Le Fanu, the brother of a friend, took me to task for disparaging Ruskin's prose style. Abashed, I took at last his advice to try what might seem the most approachable of Ruskin's works. Ruskin was aware that his madness was used by opponents as a weapon against him. "Whenever I say anything they don't like," he wrote in a letter, "they all immediately declare I must be out of my mind." So Praeterita, written in parts between 1885 and 1889, took the form of a narrative by a clever man adopting a tone of sanity, at least until it broke down and was left unfinished. I was greatly interested in Ruskin's religious ideas, closely bound up with his study of architectural history, notably that of Venice. But he says little of Venice in Praeterita: "All that I did there was bye-work." By the 1880s it had perhaps come to represent the corruption of an ideal. Yet his blatant omission of any reference to his disastrous marriage might suggest that he was avoiding Venice, too, as a theme too dangerous to be attempted in recession, as it were, from brain-fever. So we must collect Ruskin's insights as we may, here and there in his changing thoughts. Praeterita gives a clear, perhaps too clear, sketch of the day he lost his evangelical beliefs, his "un-conversion." He had, in 1858, on the Black Forest side of the Rhine, made a drawing on a Sunday for the first time in his life, at the age of 39. Some weeks later, he attended Sunday service at a Waldensian chapel in the outskirts of Turin, hearing the preacher discourse, he said, on "the exclusive favour with God enjoyed by the between 19 and 24 elect members of his congregation." That afternoon he looked at Veronese's rich canvas Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in the city gallery and heard a military band. That day, my evangelical beliefs were put away, to be debated no more. It was by no means the end of the story, for Ruskin did not lapse into an empty infidelity, but worked out an idiosyncratic amalgam of Catholic (but not "Roman" Catholic) attitudes with a private mythology of nature and art as representing the spiritual. By the 1870s he thought that his writings on art were becoming "more distinctly Christian" than ever. All this was mixed up with delusions brought on by the death of Rose La Touche. He had fallen in love with her when she was 10, in the fateful year 1858, and she died, with their love unconsummated, aged 27. The parallels with Ruskin's marriage and battles with parental control are obvious, but it is not at all clear whether this was a cause of madness or a focus for it. Longing for the dead Rose became mixed up with an enthusiasm for Carpaccio's paintings. As he wrote in a letter: "I went crazy about St Ursula and the other saints, - chiefly young-lady saints." Even Wisie seemed the very image of the dog in Carpaccio's picture of St Augustine in his study, hearing in his mind of the death of his friend St Jerome. But Wisie was also a nickname given to Rose's sister in the jesting fantasy that Ruskin played out with them in exchanges of letters. The years following Rose's death saw Ruskin reassess Venice in a half-masterpiece, St Mark's Rest, and a successful campaign to save the façade of the basilica. Yet a sane thought continued to oppress his increasingly deranged mind: "I see that men, wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty."