JOHN RUSKIN knew how to hate. His list of all- but-unendurable objects includes iron railings, the Houses of Parliament, lawyers, money-making, railways and their stations, cycling, the English Constitution, King’s College Chapel and The Hunch-back of Notre-Dame.
‘Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff,’ Wagner’s Meister-singers beat everything he had seen on stage. ‘I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember, in my life, by the stopping of any sound—not excepting railroad whistles—as I was by the cessation of the cobbler’s bellowing.’ It’s unlikely that Mrs Burne-Jones, to whom the letter was addressed, mistook it for praise.
However, he was equally extreme in his enthusiasms. Turner was one—‘the greatest of the age… in every faculty of the imagination’. After a pampered if restricted childhood, Ruskin…