Virginia Woolf really could not place Ruskin: she saw him as a sad figure who had undoubtedly been an impressive prose stylist but one whom advanced art critics and economists in her set had left far behind. Yet she had to acknowledge what she called ‘a force which is not to be suppressed by a whole pyramid of faults’, and goes on to say: ‘That is why perhaps people in his lifetime got into the habit of calling him Master. He was possessed by a spirit of enthusiasm which compels those who are without it either to attack or applaud; but beneath its influence they cannot remain merely passive.’ She describes the critical prestige accorded similarly magisterial figures who were set apart:

Recognizing a deference to that high ground, involving almost the courting of his moral censure, she comments that Ruskin's contemporaries submitted to a ‘scolding’. Why did the civic fathers of such industrial powerhouses as Manchester, Bradford and Sheffield solicit his predictable scourging in public lectures? Woolf admits, ‘Even now the straight free lashing of Fors Clavigera seems to descend far too often for our comfort upon the skin of our own backs.’ Aspects of his evangelicalism appalled her, but a lingering assumption of some kind of authority, driven by belief and purpose, attached uneasily to his ambiguously marginalizing and empowering prophetic role.

Perhaps it was necessary to identify authority figures against whom the Bloomsburyites’ rebellious modernity could define itself. But whatever sense of admiring compunction Woolf still harboured it was not disturbed by any conscious residue of shared Christian values. She had no more regard for Ruskin's religious imagination than had Lytton Strachey for Cardinal Manning's.