CHAPTER I_The Life of John Ruskin

THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN

W. G. COLLINGWOOD

M.A., F.S.A., Late Professor of Fine Art, University College, Reading

1911

PREFACE TO THE SEVENTH EDITION

This book in its first form was written nearly twenty years ago with the

intention of contributing a volume to a series of University Extension

Manuals. For that purpose it included a sketch of Ruskin's "Work," with

some attempt to describe the continuous development of his thought. It

had the advantage--and the disadvantage--of being written under his eye;

that is to say, he saw as much of it as his health allowed; and it

received his general approval.

To explain my venturing upon the subject at all, I may perhaps be

allowed to state that I became his pupil in 1872 (having seen him

earlier), and continued to be in some relation to him--as visitor,

resident assistant, or near neighbour--until his death.

After his death the biographical part of my book was enlarged at the

expense of the description of his writings; and in revising once more I

have thrown out much relating to his works, chiefly because they are now

accessible as they were not formerly.

W.G.C.

CONISTON, May 1911

CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE BOY POET (1819-1842)

CHAPTER

I. HIS ANCESTORS

II. THE FATHER OF THE MAN (1819-1825)

III. PERFERVIDUM INGENIUM (1826-1830)

IV. MOUNTAIN-WORSHIP (1830-1835)

V. THE GERM OF "MODERN PAINTERS" (1836)

VI. A LOVE-STORY (1836-1839)

VII. "KATA PHUSIN" (1837-1838)

VIII. SIR ROGER NEWDIGATE'S PRIZE (1837-1839)

IX. "THE BROKEN CHAIN" (1840-1841)

X. THE GRADUATE OF OXFORD (1841-1842)

BOOK II

THE ART CRITIC (1842-1860)

I. "TURNER AND THE ANCIENTS" (1842-1844)

II. CHRISTIAN ART (1845-1847)

III. "THE SEVEN LAMPS" (1847-1849)

IV. "STONES OF VENICE" (1849-1851)

V. PRE-RAPHAELITISM (1851-1853)

VI. THE EDINBURGH LECTURES (1853-1854)

VII. THE WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE (1854-1855)

VIII. "MODERN PAINTERS" CONTINUED (1855-1856)

IX. "THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART" (1857-1858)

X. "MODERN PAINTERS" CONCLUDED (1858-1860)

BOOK III

HERMIT AND HERETIC (1860-1870)

CHAPTER

I. "UNTO THIS LAST" (1860-1861)

II. "MUNERA PULVERIS" (1862)

III. THE LIMESTONE ALPS (1863)

IV. "SESAME AND LILIES" (1864)

V. "ETHICS OF THE DUST" (1865)

VI. "THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE" (1865-1866)

VII. "TIME AND TIDE" (1867)

VIII. AGATES, AND ABBEVILLE (1868)

IX. "THE QUEEN OF THE AIR" (1869)

X. VERONA AND OXFORD (1869-1870)

BOOK IV

PROFESSOR AND PROPHET (1870-1900)

I. FIRST OXFORD LECTURES (1870-1871)

II. "FORS" BEGUN (1871-1872)

III. OXFORD TEACHING (1872-1875)

IV. ST. GEORGE AND ST. MARK (1875-1877)

V. "DEUCALION" AND "PROSERPINA" (1877-1879)

VI. THE DIVERSIONS OF BRANTWOOD (1879-1881)

VII. "FORS" RESUMED (1880-1881)

VIII. THE RECALL TO OXFORD (1882-1883)

IX. THE STORM-CLOUD (1884-1888)

X. DATUR HORA QUIETI (1889-1900)

THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN

BOOK I

THE BOY POET (1819-1842)

THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN

CHAPTER I

HIS ANCESTORS

If origin, if early training and habits of life, if tastes, and

character, and associations, fix a man's nationality, then John Ruskin

must be reckoned a Scotsman. He was born in London, but his family was

from Scotland. He was brought up in England, but the friends and

teachers, the standards and influences of his early life, were chiefly

Scottish. The writers who directed him into the main lines of his

thought and work were Scotsmen--from Sir Walter and Lord Lindsay and

Principal Forbes to the master of his later studies of men and the means

of life, Thomas Carlyle. The religious instinct so conspicuous in him

was a heritage from Scotland; thence the combination of shrewd

common-sense and romantic sentiment; the oscillation between levity and

dignity, from caustic jest to tender earnest; the restlessness, the

fervour, the impetuosity--all these are the tokens of a Scotsman of

parts, and were highly developed in John Ruskin.

In the days of auld lang syne the Rhynns of Galloway--that

hammer-headed promontory of Scotland which looks towards Belfast

Lough--was the home of two great families, the Agnews and the Adairs.

The Agnews, of Norman race, occupied the northern half, centring about

their island-fortress of Lochnaw, where they became celebrated for a

long line of hereditary sheriffs and baronets who have played no

inconsiderable part in public affairs. The southern half, from

Portpatrick to the Mull of Galloway, was held by the Adairs (or, as

formerly spelt, Edzears) who took their name from Edgar, son of

Dovenald, one of the two Galloway leaders at the Battle of the Standard.

Three hundred years later Robert Edzear--who does not know his

descendant and namesake, Robin Adair?--settled at Gainoch, near the head

of Luce Bay; and for another space of 300 years his children kept the

same estate, in spite of private feud, and civil war, and religious

persecution, of which they had more than their share.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, John Adair, the laird of

Little Genoch, was married to Mary Agnew, a near kinswoman of the

celebrated Sir Andrew, colonel of the Scots Fusiliers at Dettingen. The

exact relationship of Mary Agnew to "the bravest man in the British

army" remains undecided, but letters still extant from the Lady Agnew of

the day address her as "Dear Molly," and end, "Your affectionate cousin"

or "kinswoman." Her son Thomas succeeded his father in 1721, and,

retiring with his captaincy, settled on the estate. He married Jean,

daughter of Andrew Ross of Balsarroch and Balkail, a lady noted for her

beauty, her wit, and her Latin scholarship, and a member of a family

which has given many distinguished men to the army and navy. Among them

Admiral Sir John Ross, the Arctic explorer, Sir Hew Dalrymple, and

Field-Marshal Sir Hew Dalrymple Ross, were all her great-nephews, and

her son, Dr. John Adair, was the man in whose arms Wolfe died at the

taking of Quebec; it is he who is shown in Benjamin West's picture

supporting the General.

Dr. Adair's sister Catherine, the daughter of Thomas Adair and Jean

Ross, married the Rev. James Tweddale, minister of Glenluce from 1758 to

1778, representative of an old Covenanting family, and holder of the

original Covenant, which had been confided to the care of his great-aunt

Catherine by Baillie of Jarviswood on his way to execution in the

"killing time." The document was sold with his library at his death, his

children being then under age, and is now in the Glasgow Museum. One of

these children, Catherine, married a John Ruskin.

The origin of the name of Ruskin is English, dating from the middle

ages. Soon after the dissolution of Furness Abbey, Richerde Ruskyn and

his family were land-owners at Dalton-in-Furness. One branch, and that

with which we are especially concerned, settled in Edinburgh.

John Ruskin--our subject's grandfather--when he ran away with Catherine

Tweddale in 1781, was a handsome lad of twenty. His portrait as a child

proves his looks, and he evidently had some charm of character or

promise of power, for the escapade did not lose him the friendship of

the lady's family. Major Ross, her uncle and guardian, remained a good

friend to the young couple. She herself was only sixteen at her

marriage--a bright and animated brunette, as her miniature shows, in

later years ripening to a woman of uncommon strength, with old-fashioned

piety of a robust, practical type, and a spirit which the trials of her

after-life--and they were many--could not subdue. Her husband set up in

the wine trade in Edinburgh. For many years they lived in the Old Town,

then a respectable neighbourhood, among a cultivated and well-bred

society, in which they moved as equals, entertaining, with others, such

a man as Dr. Thomas Brown, the professor of philosophy, a great light in

his own day, and still conspicuous in the constellation of Scotch

metaphysicians.

JOHN ADAIR, = MARY, cousin of Sir Andrew Agnew, of Lochnaw,

of Little Genoch. | hereditary Sheriff of Wigtownshire.

Capt. Thomas Adair, = Jean Ross, of Balsarroch, great-aunt of Sir

of Little Genoch. | John Ross, the Arctic explorer,

| of Sir Hew Dalrymple, and of Sir

| Hew Dalrymple Ross.

+-----------------------+============+

| | | |

Rev. = Isobel Dr. Mrs. Cath. = Rev. John

Andrew McDouall, Adair, Maitland Adair | James Ruskin

Adair, of of grand- | Twaddle, (1732-

Minister Logan Quebec mother | of 1780)

of and of | Glen- |

Whithorn London J.E. | luce |

Maitland | |

of | |

Kenmure | |

Castle | |

| |

+---------+=======+ +==========+--------------+

| | | | |

Cath. = James Cath. = John Margt. = Capt. Other

Mactaggart | Tweddale, Tweddale| Ruskin Ruskin | Cox issue

(aunt of | of (1765- | of (b. 1756)| of

Sir John | Glen- 181[?]) | Edinburgh | Yarmouth

Joseph Mactaggart, | laggan | (1761- | (1757-

Severn Bart., M.P., | | 1812[?]) | 1789[?])

of of | | |

Rome Ardwell) | | |

| | | |

+-+ +----+ +----+==+ +====+---+

| | | | | | |

| George = Cath. | Peter = Jessie J.J. = Margaret Bridget= Mr.

| hered- | | son, | of | (1781- | son

| itary | +----+ of | Billiter | 1871) | of

| | | (1785- | |

| | | 1864) | |

| | | | |

+-+------+ +-------+------+ +-+-+-+-+-+-+ | +-+++-+-+-+

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Other Arthur = Joan Other James John John (d.

issue Severn, | Ruskin issue (d. young), Ruskin in

R.I., | Agnew John, of (b. 1819) Australia),

of | Glasgow, William

Hearne | William, M.D., George (of

Hill | (Tunbridge Croydon)

| Wells), Charles

+-+-+++-+ Andrew (d. in (drowned

Lily Catherine Margaret

Arthur (d. young), Bridget

Agnew Margaret and

Violet Peter

Herbert (d. young)

Mary

(1815-1849),

Jessie

(1818-1827)

Their son, John James Ruskin (born May 10, 1785), was sent to the

famous High School of Edinburgh, under Dr. Adam, the most renowned of

Scottish head-masters, and there he received the sound old-fashioned

classical education. Before he was sixteen, his sister Jessie was

already married at Perth to Peter Richardson, a tanner living at Bridge

End, by the Tay; and so his cousin, Margaret Cox, was sent for to fill

the vacant place.

She was a daughter of old Mr. Ruskin's sister, who had married a Captain

Cox, sailing from Yarmouth for the herring fishery. He had died in 1789,

or thereabouts, from the results of an accident while riding homewards

to his family after one of his voyages, and his widow maintained herself

in comfort by keeping the old King's Head Inn at Croydon Market-place.

Of her two daughters the younger married another Mr. Richardson, a baker

at Croydon, so that, by an odd coincidence, there were two families of

Richardsons, unconnected with one another except through their

relationship to the Ruskins.

Margaret, the elder daughter, who came to keep house for her uncle in

Edinburgh, was then nearly twenty years of age. She had been the model

pupil at her Croydon day-school; tall and handsome, pious and practical,

she was just the girl to become the confidante and adviser of her

dark-eyed, active, and romantic young cousin.

Some time before the beginning of 1807, John James, having finished his

education at the High School, went to London, where a place had been

found for him by his uncle's brother-in-law, Mr. MacTaggart. He was

followed by a kind letter from Dr. Thomas Brown, who advised him to keep

up his Latin, and to study political economy, for the Professor looked

upon him as a young man of unusual promise and power. During some two

years, he worked as a clerk in the house of Sir William Gordon, Murphy

and Co., where he made friends, and laid the foundation of his

prosperity; for along with him at the office there was a Mr. Peter

Domecq, owner of the Spanish vineyards of Macharnudo, learning the

commercial part of his business in London, the headquarters of the

sherry trade. He admired his fellow-clerk's capacity so much as to offer

him the London agency of his family business. Mr. MacTaggart found the

capital in consideration of their taking his relative, Mr. Telford, into

the concern. And so they entered into partnership, about 1809, as

Ruskin, Telford and Domecq: Domecq contributing the sherry, Mr. Henry

Telford the capital, and Ruskin the brains.

How he came by his business capacity may be understood--and in some

measure, perhaps, how his son came by his flexible and forcible

style--from a letter of Mrs. Catherine Ruskin, written about this time;

in which, moreover, there are a few details of family circumstances and

character, not without interest. John James Ruskin had been protesting

that he was never going to marry, but meant to devote himself to his

mother; she replied:

"... But my son an old Batchelor--believe me my beloved Child I

feel the full force and value of that affection that could prompt

to such a plan--dear as your society is to me it would then become

the misery of my existence--could I see my Child so formed for

domestick happiness deprived of every blessing on my account. No my

Dr John I do not know a more unhappy being than an old Batchelor

... may God preserve my Child from realizing the dreary picture--as

soon as you can keep a Wife you must Marry with all possible

speed--that is as soon as you find a very Amiable woman. She must

be a good daughter and fond of Domestick life--and pious, without

ostentation, for remember no Woman without the fear of God, can

either make a good Wife or a good Mother--freethinking Men are

shocking to nature, but from an Infidel Woman Good Lord deliver us.

I have thought more of it than you have done--for I have two or

three presents carefully [laid] by for her, and I have also been so

foresightly as to purchase two Dutch toys for your Children in case

you might marry before we had free intercourse with that

country.... Who can say what I can say 'here is my Son--a hansome

accomplished young man of three and twenty--he will not Marry that

he may take care of his Mother--here is my Dr Margaret, hansome,

Amiable and good and she would not leave her _Ant_ (I mean Aunt)

for any Man on Earth.' Ah My Dear and valuable children, dear is

your affection to my heart, but I will never make so base a use of

it. I entreat my Dr John that you will not give yourself one

moment's uneasiness about me--I will at all events have £86 a year

for life that your Father cannot deprive me of, and tho' I could

not live very splendidly in a Town on this, yet with a neat little

House and Garden in the country, it would afford all the means of

life in fullness to Meggy myself and our servant. You forget, my Dr

how much a woman can do without in domestick affairs to save

Money--a Woman that has any management at all can live with more

comfort on £50 a year than a Man could do on two hundred. There was

a year of my life that I maintained myself and two children on

twenty pound, the bread too was 1/2 the loave that year: we did not

indeed live very sumptuously nor shall I say our strength improved

much but I did not contract one farthing of debt and that to me

supplyed the want of luxuries. Now my Dr John let me never hear a

fear expressed on my account; there is no fear of me; make yourself

happy and all will be well, and for God sake my beloved Boy take

care of your health, take a good drink of porter to dinner and

supper and a little Wine now and then, and tell me particularly

about yr new Lodgings," etc.

He returned home to Edinburgh on a visit and arranged a marriage with

his cousin Margaret, if she would wait for him until he was safely

established; and then he set to work at the responsibilities of creating

a new business. It was a severer task than he had anticipated, for his

father's brain and business, as the above letter hints, had both gone

wrong; he left Edinburgh and settled at Bower's Well, Perth, ended

tragically, and left a load of debt behind him, which the son, sensitive

to the family honour, undertook to pay before laying by a penny for

himself. It took nine years of assiduous labour and economy. He worked

the business entirely by himself. The various departments that most men

entrust to others he filled in person. He managed the correspondence,

he travelled for orders, he arranged the importation, he directed the

growers out in Spain, and gradually built up a great business, paid off

his father's creditors, and secured his own competence.

This was not done without sacrifice of health, which he never recovered,

nor without forming habits of over-anxiety and toilsome minuteness which

lasted his life long. But his business cares were relieved by cultured

tastes. He loved art, painted in water-colours in the old style, and

knew a good picture when he saw it. He loved literature, and read aloud

finely all the old standard authors, though he was not too old-fashioned

to admire "Pickwick" and the "Noctes Ambrosianæ" when they appeared. He

loved the scenery and architecture among which he had travelled in

Scotland and Spain; but he could find interest in almost any place and

any subject; an alert man, in whom practical judgment was joined to a

romantic temperament, strong feelings and opinions to extended

sympathies. His letters, of which there are many preserved, bear witness

to his character, taste, and intellect, curiously anticipating, on some

points, those of his son. His portraits give the idea of an expressive

face, sensitive, refined, every feature a gentleman's.

So, after those nine years of work and waiting, he went to Perth to

claim his cousin's hand. She was for further delay; but with the

minister's help he persuaded her one evening into a prompt marriage in

the Scotch fashion, drove off with her next morning to Edinburgh, and on

to the home he had prepared in London at 54, Hunter Street, Brunswick

Square (February 27, 1818).

The heroine of this little drama was no ordinary bride. At Edinburgh she

had found herself, though well brought up for Croydon, inferior to the

society of the Modern Athens. As the affianced of a man of ability, she

felt it her duty to make herself his match in mental culture, as she was

already in her own department of practical matters. Under Dr. Brown's

direction, and stimulated by his notice, she soon became--not a

blue-stocking--but well-read, well-informed above the average. She was

one of those persons who set themselves a very high standard, and

resolve to drag both themselves and their neighbours up to it. But, as

the process is difficult, so it is disappointing. People became rather

shy of Mrs. Ruskin, and she of them, so that her life was solitary and

her household quiet. It was not merely from narrow Puritanism that she

made so few friends; her morality and her piety, strict as they were

within their own lines, permitted her most of the enjoyments and

amusements of life; still less was there any cynicism or misanthropy.

But she devoted herself to her husband and son. She was too proud to

court those above her in worldly rank, and she was not easily approached

except by people fully equal to her in strength of character, of whom

there could never be many. The few who made their way to her friendship

found her a true and valuable friend.

CHAPTER II

THE FATHER OF THE MAN (1819-1825)

Into this family John Ruskin was born on February 8, 1819, at half-past

seven in the morning. He was baptised on the twentieth by the Rev. Mr.

Boyd.

The first account of him in writing is in a letter from his mother when

he was six weeks old. She chronicles--not without a touch of

superstition--the breaking of a looking-glass, and continues: "John

grows finely; he is just now on my knees sleeping and looking so

sweetly; I hope I shall not get proud of him." He was a fine healthy

baby, and at four months was "beginning to give more decided proofs that

he knows what he wants, and will have it if crying and passion will get

it." At a year his mother resolves that "this will be cured by a good

whipping when he can understand what it is," and we know that she

carried out her Spartan resolve.

This, and the story in "Arachne," how she let him touch the tea-kettle;

and the reminiscences in "Præterita" of playthings locked up, and a lone

little boy staring at the water-cart and the pattern on the carpet--all

these give a gloomy impression of his mother, against which we must set

the proofs of affection and kindliness shown in her letters. In these we

can see her anxiously nursing him through childish ailments, taking him

out for his daily walk to Duppas Hill with a captain's biscuit in her

muff, for fear he should be hungry by the way; we hear her teaching him

his first lessons, with astonishment at his wonderful memory, and

glorying with Nurse Anne over his behaviour in church; and all these

things she retails in gossiping letters to her husband, while Mr.

Richard Gray gives two-year-old John "his first lesson on the flute,

both sitting on the drawing-room floor, very deeply engaged." "I am

sure," she says, "there is no other love, no other feeling, like a

mother's towards her first boy when she loves his father;" and her pride

in his looks, and precocity, and docility--"I never met with a child of

his age so sensible to praise or blame"--found a justification in his

passionate devotion to the man who was so dear to them both.

Though he was born in the thick of London, he was not City-bred. His

first three summers were spent in lodgings in Hampstead or Dulwich, then

"the country." So early as his fourth summer he was taken to Scotland by

sea to stay with his aunt Jessie, Mrs. Richardson of Perth. There he

found cousins to play with, especially one, little Jessie, of nearly his

own age; he found a river with deep swirling pools, that impressed him

more than the sea, and he found the mountains. Coming home in the

autumn, he sat for his full-length portrait to James Northcote, R.A.,

and being asked what he would choose for background, he replied, "Blue

hills."

Northcote had painted Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin, and, as they were fond of

artistic company, remained their friend. A certain friendship too, was

struck up between the old Academician, then in his seventy-seventh year,

the acknowledged cynic and satirist, and the little wise boy who asked

shrewd questions, and could sit still to be painted; who, moreover, had

a face worth painting, not unlike the model from whom Northcote's

master, the great Sir Joshua, had painted his famous cherubs. The

painter asked him to come again, and sit as the hero of a fancy picture,

bought at the Academy by the flattered parents. There is a grove, a

flock of toy sheep, drapery in the grand style, a mahogany Satyr taking

a thorn out of the little pink foot of a conventional nudity--poor

survivals of the Titianesque. But the head is an obvious portrait, and a

happy one; far more like the real boy, so tradition says, than the

generalized chubbiness of the commissioned picture.

In the next year (1823) they quitted the town for a suburban home. The

spot they chose was in rural Dulwich, on Herne Hill, a long offshoot of

the Surrey downs; low, and yet commanding green fields and scattered

houses in the foreground, with rich undulating country to the south, and

looking across London toward Windsor and Harrow. It is all built up now;

but their house (later No. 28) must have been as secluded as any in a

country village. There were ample gardens front and rear, well stocked

with fruit and flowers--quite an Eden for a little boy, and all the more

that the fruit of it was forbidden. It was here that all his years of

youth were spent. Here, under his parents' roof, he wrote his earlier

works, as far as vol. i. of "Modern Painters." To the adjoining house,

as his own separate home, he returned for a period of his middle life;

and in the old home, handed over to his adopted daughter, he still used

to find his own rooms ready when he cared to visit London.

So he was brought up almost as a country boy, though near enough to town

to get the benefit of it, and far enough from the more exciting scenes

of landscape nature to find them ever fresh, when summer after summer he

revisited the river scenery of the West or the mountains of the North.

For by a neat arrangement, and one fortunate for his education, the

summer tours were continued yearly. Mr. John James Ruskin still

travelled for the business, then greatly extending. "Strange," he writes

on one occasion, "that Watson [his right-hand man] went this journey

without getting one order, and everyone gives me an order directly." In

return for these services to the firm, Mr. Telford, the capitalist

partner, took the vacant chair at the office, and even lent his carriage

for the journeys. There was room for two, so Mrs. Ruskin accompanied her

husband, whose indifferent health gave her and his friends constant

anxiety during long separations. And the boy could easily be packed in,

sitting on his little portmanteau, and playing horses with his father's

knees; the nurse riding on the dickey behind.

They started usually after the great family anniversary, the father's

birthday, on May 10, and journeyed by easy stages through the South of

England, working up the west to the north, and then home by the

east-central route, zigzagging from one provincial town to another,

calling at the great country seats, to leave no customer or possible

customer unvisited; and in the intervals of business seeing all the

sights of the places they passed through--colleges and churches,

galleries and parks, ruins, castles, caves, lakes, and mountains--and

seeing them all, not listlessly, but with keen interest, noting

everything, inquiring for local information, looking up books of

reference, setting down the results, as if they had been meaning to

write a guide-book and gazetteer of Great Britain. _They_, I say, did

all this, for as soon as the boy could write, he was only imitating his

father in keeping his little journal of the tours, so that all he

learned stayed by him, and the habit of descriptive writing was formed.

In 1823 they seem to have travelled only through the south and

south-west; in 1824 they pushed north to the lakes, stayed awhile at

Keswick, and while the father went about his business, the child was

rambling with his nurse on Friar's Crag, among the steep rocks and

gnarled roots, which suggested, even at that age, the feelings expressed

in one of the notable passages in "Modern Painters." Thence they went on

to Scotland, and revisited their relatives at Perth. In 1825 they took a

more extended tour, and spent a few weeks in Paris, partly for the

festivities at the coronation of Charles X., partly for business

conference with Mr. Domecq, who had just been appointed wine-merchant to

the King of Spain. Thence they went to Brussels and the field of

Waterloo, of greater interest than the sights of Paris to six-year-old

John, who often during his boyhood celebrated the battle, and the heroes

of the battle, in verse.

Before he was quite three he used to climb into a chair and preach.

There is nothing so uncommon in that. Of Robert Browning, his neighbour

and seven-years-older contemporary, the same tale is told. But while the

incident that marks the baby Browning is the aside, _à propos_ of a

whimpering sister, "Pew-opener, remove that child," the baby Ruskin is

seen in his sermon: "People, be dood. If you are dood, Dod will love

you; if you are not dood, Dod will not love you. People, be dood."

At the age of four he had begun to read and write, refusing to be taught

in the orthodox way--this is so accurately characteristic--by syllabic

spelling and copy-book pothooks. He preferred to find a method out for

himself, and he found out how to read whole words at a time by the look

of them, and to write in vertical characters like book-print, just as

the latest improved theories of education suggest. His first letter may

be quoted as illustrating his own account of his childhood, and as

proving how entirely Scotch was the atmosphere in which he was brought

up. The postmark gives the date March 15, 1823. Mrs. Ruskin premises

that John was scribbling on a paper from which he proceeded to read what

she writes down (I omit certain details about the whip):

"MY DEAR PAPA,

"I love you. I have got new things. Waterloo Bridge--Aunt Bridget

brought me it. John and Aunt helped to put it up, but the pillars

they did not put right, upside down. Instead of a book bring me a

whip, coloured red and black.... To-morrow is Sabbath. Tuesday I go

to Croydon. I am going to take my boats and my ship to Croydon.

I'll sail them on the pond near the burn which the bridge is over.

I will be very glad to see my cousins. I was very happy when I saw

Aunt come from Croydon. I love Mrs. Gray and I love Mr. Gray. I

would like you to come home, and my kiss and my love."

[First autograph in straggling capitals]

"JOHN RUSKIN"

When once he could read, thenceforward his mother gave him regular

morning lessons in Bible-reading and in reciting the Scotch paraphrases

of the Psalms and other verse, which for his good memory was an easy

task. He made rhymes before he could write them, of course.

At five he was a bookworm, and the books he read fixed him in certain

grooves of thought, or, rather, say they were chosen as favourites from

an especial interest in their subjects--an interest which arose from his

character of mind, and displayed it. But with all this precocity, he was

no milksop or weakling; he was a bright, active lad, full of fun and

pranks, not without companions, though solitary when at home, and kept

precisely, in the hope of guarding him from every danger. He was so

little afraid of animals--a great test of a child's nerves--that about

this time he must needs meddle with their fierce Newfoundland dog,

Lion, which bit him in the mouth, and spoiled his looks. Another time he

showed some address in extricating himself from the water-butt--a common

child-trap. He did not fear ghosts or thunder; instead of that, his

early-developed landscape feeling showed itself in dread of foxglove

dells and dark pools of water, in coiling roots of trees--things that to

the average English fancy have no significance whatever.

At seven he began to imitate the books he was reading, to write books

himself. He had found out how to _print_, as children do; and it was his

ambition to make real books, with title-pages and illustrations, not

only books, indeed, but sets of volumes, a complete library of his whole

works. But in a letter of March 4, 1829, his mother says to his father:

"If you think of writing John, would you impress on him the propriety of

not beginning too eagerly and becoming careless towards the end of his

_works_, as he calls them? I think in a letter from you it would have

great weight. He is never idle, and he is even uncommonly persevering

for a child of his age; but he often spoils a good beginning by not

taking the trouble to think, and concluding in a hurry."

The first of these sets was imitated in style from Miss Edgeworth; he

called it, "Harry and Lucy Concluded; or, Early Lessons." Didactic he

was from the beginning. It was to be in four volumes, uniform in red

leather, with proper title, frontispiece, and "copper-plates," "printed

and composed by a little boy, and also drawn." It was begun in 1826, and

continued at intervals until 1829. It was all done laboriously in

imitation of print, and, to complete the illusion, contained a page of

errata. This great work was, of course, never completed, though he

laboured through three volumes; but when he tired of it, he would turn

his book upside down, and begin at the other end with other matters; so

that the red books contain all sorts of notes on his minerals and

travels, reports of sermons, and miscellaneous information, besides

their professed contents; in this respect also being very like his later

works.

There you have our author ready made, with his ever-fresh interest in

everything, and all-attempting eagerness, out of which the first thing

that crystallizes into any definite shape is the verse-writing.

CHAPTER III

PERFERVIDUM INGENIUM (1826-1830)

The first dated "poem" was written a month before little John Ruskin

reached the age of seven. It is a tale of a mouse, in seven octosyllabic

couplets, "The Needless Alarm," remarkable only for an unexpected

correctness in rhyme, rhythm, and reason.

His early verse owes much to the summer tours, which were prolific in

notes; everything was observed and turned into verse. The other

inspiring source was his father--the household deity of both wife and

child, whose chief delight was in his daily return from the city, and in

his reading to them in the drawing-room at Herne Hill. John was packed

into a recess, where he was out of the way and the draught; he was

barricaded by a little table that held his own materials for amusement,

and if he liked to listen to the reading, he had the chance of hearing

good literature, the chance sometimes of hearing passages from Byron and

Christopher North and Cervantes, rather beyond his comprehension, for

his parents were not of the shockable sort: with all their religion and

strict Scotch morality, they could laugh at a broad jest, as

old-fashioned people could.

So he associated his father and his father's readings with the poetry

of reflection, as he associated the regular summer round with the poetry

of description. As every summer brought its crop of description, so

against the New Year (for, being Scotch, they did not then keep our

Christmas) and against his father's birthday in May he used always to

prepare some little drama or story or "address" of a reflective nature,

beginning with the verses on "Time," written for New Year's Day, 1827.

That year they were again at Perth, and on their way home some early

morning frost suggested the not ungraceful verses on the icicles at

Glenfarg. By a childish misconception, the little boy seems to have

confused the real valley that interested him so with Scott's ideal

Glendearg, and, partly for this reason, to have found a greater pleasure

in "The Monastery," which he thereupon undertook to paraphrase in verse.

There remain some hundreds of doggerel rhymes; but his affection for

that particular novel survived the fatal facility of his octosyllabics,

and reappears time after time in his later writings.

Next year, 1828, their tour was stopped at Plymouth by the painful news

of the death of his aunt Jessie, to whom they were on their way. It was

hardly a year since the bright little cousin, Jessie of Perth, had died

of water on the brain. She had been John's especial pet and playfellow,

clever, like him, and precocious; and her death must have come to his

parents as a warning, if they needed it, to keep their own child's brain

from over-pressure. It is evident that they did their best to "keep him

back"; they did not send him to school for fear of the excitement of

competitive study. His mother put him through the Latin grammar herself,

using the old Adam's manual which his father had used at Edinburgh High

School. Even this old grammar became a sort of sacred book to him; and

when at last he went to school, and his English master threw the book

back to him, saying, "that's a Scotch thing," the boy was shocked and

affronted, as which of us would be at a criticism on _our_ first

instrument of torture? He remembered the incident all his life, and

pilloried the want of tact with acerbity in his reminiscences.

They could keep him from school, but they did not keep him from study.

The year 1828 saw the beginning of another great work, "Eudosia, a Poem

on the Universe"; it was "printed" with even greater neatness and

labour; but this, too, after being toiled at during the winter months,

was dropped in the middle of its second "book." It was not idleness that

made him break off such plans, but just the reverse--a too great

activity of brain. His parents seem to have thought that there was no

harm in this apparently quiet reading and writing. They were extremely

energetic themselves, and hated idleness. They appear to have held a

theory that their little boy was safe so long as he was not obviously

excited; and to have thought that the proper way of giving children

pocket-money was to let them earn it. So they used to pay him for his

literary labours; "Homer" was one shilling a page; "Composition," one

penny for twenty lines; "Mineralogy," one penny an article.

The death of his aunt Jessie left a large family of boys and one girl to

the care of their widowed father, and the Ruskins felt it their duty to

help. They fetched Mary Richardson away, and brought her up as a sister

to their solitary son. She was not so beloved as Jessie had been, but a

good girl and a nice girl, four years older than John, and able to be a

companion to him in his lessons and travels. There was no sentimentality

about his attachment to her, but a steady fraternal relationship, he, of

course, being the little lord and master; but she was not without

spirit, which enabled her to hold her own, and perseverance, which

sometimes helped her to eclipse, for the moment, his brilliancy. They

learnt together, wrote their journals together, and shared alike with

the scrupulous fairness which Mrs. Ruskin's sensible nature felt called

on to show. And so she remained his sister, and not quite his sister,

until she married, and after a very short married life died.

Another accession to the family took place in the same year (1828); the

Croydon aunt, too, had died, and left a dear dog, Dash, a brown and

white spaniel, which at first refused to leave her coffin, but was

coaxed away, and found a happy home at Herne Hill, and frequent

celebration in his young master's verses. So the family was now

complete--papa and mamma, Mary and John and Dash. One other figure must

not be forgotten, Nurse Anne, who had come from the Edinburgh home, and

remained always with them, John's nurse and then Mrs. Ruskin's

attendant, as devoted and as censorious as any old-style Scotch servant

in a story-book.

The year 1829 marked an advance in poetical composition. For his

father's birthday he made a book more elaborate than any, sixteen pages

in a red cover, with a title-page quite like print: "Battle of Waterloo

| a play | in two acts | with other small | Poems dedicated to his

father | by John Ruskin | 1829 Hernhill _(sic)_ Dulwich."

To this are appended, among other pieces, fair copies of "Skiddaw," and

"Derwentwater." A recast of these, touched up by some older hand, and

printed in _The Spiritual Times_ for February, 1830, may be called his

first appearance in type.

An illness of his postponed their tour for 1829, until it was too late

for more than a little journey in Kent. He has referred his earliest

sketching to this occasion, but it seems likely that the drawings

attributed to this year were done in 1831. He was, however, busy writing

poetry. At Tunbridge, for example, he wrote that fragment "On Happiness"

which catches so cleverly the tones of Young--a writer whose orthodox

moralizing suited with the creed in which John Ruskin was brought up,

alternating, be it remembered, with "Don Quixote."

Coming home, he began a new edition of his verses, on a more

pretentious scale than the old red books, in a fine bound volume,

exquisitely "printed," with the poems dated. This new energy seems to

have been roused by the gift from his Croydon cousin Charles, a clerk in

the publishing house of Smith, Elder, and Co., of their annual

"Friendship's Offering." Mrs. Ruskin, in a letter of October 31, 1829,

finds "the poetry very so-so"; but John evidently made the book his

model.

He was now growing out of his mother's tutorship, and during this autumn

he was put under the care of Dr. Andrews for his Latin. He relates the

introduction in "Præterita," and, more circumstantially, in a letter of

the time, to Mrs. Monro, the mother of his charming Mrs. Richard Gray,

the indulgent neighbour who used to pamper the little gourmand with

delicacies unknown in severe Mrs. Ruskin's dining-room. He says in the

letter--this is at ten years old: "Well, papa, seeing how fond I was of

the doctor, and knowing him to be an excellent Latin scholar, got him

for me as a tutor, and every lesson I get I like him better and better,

for he makes me laugh 'almost, if not quite'--to use one of his own

expressions--the whole time. He is so funny, comparing Neptune's lifting

up the wrecked ships of Æneas with his trident to my lifting up a potato

with a fork, or taking a piece of bread out of a bowl of milk with a

spoon! And as he is always saying [things] of that kind, or relating

some droll anecdote, or explaining the part of Virgil (the book which I

am in) very nicely, I am always delighted when Mondays, Wednesdays, and

Fridays are come."

Dr. Andrews was no doubt a genial teacher, and had been a scholar of

some distinction in his University of Glasgow; but Mrs. Ruskin thought

him "flighty," as well she might, when, after six months' Greek, he

proposed (in March, 1831) to begin Hebrew with John. It was a great

misfortune for the young genius that he was not more sternly drilled at

the outset, and he suffered for it through many a long year of

struggles with deficient scholarship.

The Doctor had a large family and pretty daughters. One, who wrote

verses in John's note-book, and sang "Tambourgi," Mrs. Orme, lived until

1892 in Bedford Park; the other lives in Coventry Patmore's "Angel in

the House." When Ruskin, thirty years later, wrote of that

doubtfully-received poem, that it was the "sweetest analysis we possess

of quiet, modern, domestic feeling," few of his readers could have known

all the grounds of his appreciation, or suspected the weight of meaning

in the words.

CHAPTER IV

MOUNTAIN-WORSHIP (1830-1835)

Critics who are least disposed to give Ruskin credit for his artistic

doctrines or economical theories unite in allowing that he taught his

generation to look at Nature, and especially at the sublime in

Nature--at storms and sunrises, and the forests and snows of the Alps.

This mission of mountain-worship was the outcome of a passion beside

which the other interests and occupations of his youth were only toys.

He could take up his mineralogy and his moralizing and lay them down,

but the love of mountain scenery was something beyond his control. We

have seen him leave his heart in the Highlands at three years old; we

have now to follow his passionate pilgrimages to Skiddaw and Snowdon, to

the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc.

They had planned a great tour through the Lakes and the North two years

before, but were stopped at Plymouth by the news of Mrs. Richardson's

death. At last the plan was carried out. A prose diary was written

alternately by John and Mary, one carrying it on when the other tired,

with rather curious effect of unequally-yoked collaboration. We read how

they "set off from London at seven o'clock on Tuesday morning, the 18th

May," and thenceforward we are spared no detail: the furniture of the

inns; the bills of fare; when they got out of the carriage and walked;

how they lost their luggage; what they thought of colleges and chapels,

music and May races at Oxford, of Shakespeare's tomb, and the

pin-factory at Birmingham; we have a complete guide-book to Blenheim and

Warwick Castle, to Haddon and Chatsworth, and the full itinerary of

Derbyshire. "Matlock Bath," we read, "is a most delightful place"; but

after an enthusiastic description of High Tor, John reacts into bathos

with a minute description of wetting their shoes in a puddle. The cavern

with a Bengal light was fairyland to him, and among the minerals he was

quite at home.

Then they hurried north to Windermere. Once at Lowwood, the excitement

thickens, with storms and rainbows, mountains and waterfalls, boats on

the lake and coaching on the steep roads. This journey through Lakeland

is described in the galloping anapæsts of the "Iteriad," which was

simply the prose journal versified on his return, one of the few

enterprises of the sort which were really completed.

To readers who know the country it is interesting as giving a detailed

account in the days when this "nook of English ground" was "secure from

rash assault." One learns that, even then, there were jarring sights at

Bowness Bay and along Derwentwater shore, elements unkind and bills

exorbitant. Coniston especially was dreary with rain, and its inn--the

old Waterhead, now destroyed--extravagantly dear; "_but_," says John,

with his eye for mineral specimens, "it contains several rich

coppermines." An interesting touch is the hero-worship with which they

went reverently to peep at Southey and Wordsworth in church; too humble

to dream of an introduction, and too polite to besiege the poets in

their homes, but independent enough to form their own opinions on the

personality of the heroes. They did not like the look of Wordsworth at

all; Southey they adored. The dominant note of the tour is, however, an

ecstatic delight in the mountain scenery; on Skiddaw and Helvellyn all

the gamut of admiration is lavished.

On returning home, John began Greek under Dr. Andrews, and was soon

versifying Anacreontics in his notebooks. He began to read Byron for

himself, with what result we shall see before long; but the most

important new departure was the attempt to copy Cruikshank's etchings to

Grimm's fairy tales, his real beginning at art. From this practice he

learnt the value of the pure, clean line that expresses form. It is a

good instance of the authority of these early years over Ruskin's whole

life and teaching that in his "Elements of Drawing" he advised young

artists to begin with Cruikshank, as he began, and that he wrote

appreciatively both of the stories and the etchings so many decades

afterwards in the preface to a reprint by J.C. Hotten.

His cousin-sister Mary had been sent to a day-school when Mrs. Ruskin's

lessons were superseded by Dr. Andrews, and she had learnt enough

drawing to attempt a view of the hotel at Matlock, a thing which John

could not do. So, now that he too showed some power of neat

draughtsmanship, it was felt that he ought to have her advantages. They

got Mr. Runciman the drawing-master, chosen, it may be, as a relative of

the well-known Edinburgh artist of the same name, to give him lessons,

in the early part of 1831. His teaching was of the kind which preceded

the Hardingesque: it aimed at a bold use of the soft pencil, with a

certain roundness of composition and richness of texture, a conventional

"right way" of drawing anything. This was hardly what John wanted; but,

not to be beaten, he facsimiled the master's freehand in a sort of

engraver's stipple, which his habitual neatness helped him to do in

perfection. Runciman soon put a stop to that, and took pains with a

pupil who took such pains with himself--taught him, at any rate, the

principles of perspective, and remained his only drawing-master for

several years.

A sample of John Ruskin's early lessons in drawing, described by him in

letters to his father, may be not without interest. On February 20,

1832, he writes:

"... You saw the two models that were last sent, before you went

away. Well, I took my paper, and I fixed my points, and I drew my

perspective, and then, as Mr. Runciman told me, I began to invent a

scene. You remember the cottage that we saw as we went to Rhaidyr

Dhu (_sic_), near Maentwrog, where the old woman lived whose

grandson went with us to the fall, so very silently? I thought my

model resembled that; so I drew a tree--such a tree, such an

enormous fellow--and I sketched the waterfall, with its dark rocks,

and its luxuriant wood, and its high mountains; and then I examined

one of Mary's pictures to see how the rocks were done, and another

to see how the woods were done, and another to see how the

mountains were done, and another to see how the cottages were done,

and I patched them all together, and I made such a lovely

scene--oh, I should get such a scold from Mr. Runciman (that is, if

he ever scolded)!"

After the next lesson he wrote, February 27, 1832:

"You know the beautiful model drawing that I gave you an account of

in my last. I showed it to Mr. Runciman. He contemplated it for a

moment in silence, and then, turning, asked me if I had copied. I

told him how I had patched it up; but he said that that was not

copying, and although he was not satisfied with the picture, he

said there was something in it that would make him totally change

the method he had hitherto pursued with me. He then asked Mary for

some gray paper, which was produced; then inquired if I had a

colour-box; I produced the one you gave me, and he then told me he

should begin with a few of the simplest colours, in order to teach

me better the effects of light and shade. He should then proceed

to teach me water-colour painting, but the latter only as a basis

for oil; this last, however, to use his own words, all in due

time.... Oh, if I could paint well before we went to Dover! I

should have such sea-pieces...."

In March 1834, Runciman was encouraging him in his oil-painting; but a

year later he wrote to his father:

"I cannot bear to paint in oil,

C. Fielding's tints alone for me!

The other costs me double toil,

And wants some fifty coats to be

Splashed on each spot successively.

Faugh, wie es stinckt! I can't bring out,

With all, a picture fit to see.

My bladders burst; my oils are out--

And then, what's all the work about?"

After a few lessons he could rival Mary when they went for their summer

excursion. He set to work at once at Sevenoaks to draw cottages; at

Dover and Battle he attempted castles. It may be that these first

sketches are of the pre-Runciman period; but the Ruskins made the round

of Kent in 1831, and though the drawings are by no means in the master's

style, they show some practice in using the pencil.

The journey was extended by the old route, conditioned by business as

before, round the South Coast to the West of England, and then into

Wales. There his powers of drawing failed him; moonlight on Snowdon was

too vague a subject for the blacklead point but a hint of it could be

conveyed in rhyme:

"Folding like an airy vest,

The very clouds had sunk to rest;

Light gilds the rugged mountain's breast,

Calmly as they lay below;

Every hill seemed topped with snow,

As the flowing tide of light

Broke the slumbers of the night."

Harlech Castle was too sublime for a sketch, but it was painted with

the pen:

"So mighty, so majestic, and so lone;

And all thy music, now, the ocean's murmuring."

And the enthusiasm of mountain glory, a sort of ecstacy of

uncontrollable passion, strives for articulate deliverance in the

climbing song, "I love ye, ye eternal hills."

It was hard to come back to the daily round, the common task, especially

when, in this autumn of 1831, to Dr. Andrews' Latin and Greek, the

French grammar and Euclid were added, under Mr. Rowbotham. And the new

tutor had no funny stories to tell; he was not so engaging a man as the

"dear Doctor," and his memory was not sweet to his wayward pupil. But

the parents had chosen for the work one who was favourably known by his

manuals, and capable of interesting even a budding poet in the

mathematics; for our author tells that at Oxford, and ever after, he

knew his Euclid without the figures, and that he spent all his spare

time in trying to trisect an angle. An old letter from Rowbotham informs

Mr. J.J. Ruskin that an eminent mathematician had seen John's attempt,

and had said that it was the cleverest he knew. In French, too, he

progressed enough to be able to find his way alone in Paris two years

later. And however the saucy boy may have satirized his tutor in the

droll verses on "Bedtime," Mr. Rowbotham always remembered him with

affection, and spoke of him with respect.

In spite of these tedious tutorships, he managed to scribble

energetically all this winter, writing with amazing rapidity, as his

mother notes: attempts at Waverley novels, which never got beyond the

first chapter, imitations of "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" and scraps

in the style of everybody in turn. No wonder his mother sent him to bed

at nine punctually, and kept him from school, in vain efforts to quiet

his brain. The lack of companions was made up to him in the friendship

of Richard Fall, son of a neighbour on "the Hill," a boy without

affectation or morbidity of disposition whose complementary character

suited him well. An affectionate comradeship sprang up between the two

lads, and lasted, until in middle life they drifted apart, in no

ill-will, but each going on his own course to his own destiny.

Some real advance was made this winter (1831-32) with his Shelleyan

"Sonnet to a Cloud" and his imitations of Byron's "Hebrew Melodies,"

from which he learnt how to concentrate expression, and to use rich

vowel-sounds and liquid consonants with rolling effect. A deeper and

more serious turn of thought, that gradually usurped the place of the

first boyish effervescence, has been traced by him to the influence of

Byron, in whom, while others saw nothing more than wit and passion,

Ruskin perceived an earnest mind and a sound judgment.

But the most sincere poem--if sincerity be marked by unstudied phrase

and neglected rhyme--the most genuine "lyrical cry" of this period, is

that song in which our boy-poet poured forth his longing for the "blue

hills" he had loved as a baby, and for those Coniston crags over which,

when he became old and sorely stricken, he was still to see the morning

break. When he wrote these verses he was nearly fourteen, or just past

his birthday. It had been eighteen months since he had been in Wales,

and all the weary while he had seen no mountains; but in his regrets he

goes back a year farther still, to fix upon the Lakeland hills, less

majestic than Snowdon, but more endeared, and he describes his

sensations on approaching the beloved objects in the very terms that

Dante uses for his first sight of Beatrice:

"I weary for the fountain foaming,

For shady holm and hill;

My mind is on the mountain roaming,

My spirit's voice is still.

"The crags are lone on Coniston

And Glaramara's dell;

And dreary on the mighty one,

The cloud-enwreathed Sea-fell...."

"There is a thrill of strange delight

That passes quivering o'er me,

When blue hills rise upon the sight,

Like summer clouds before me."

Judge, then, of the delight with which he turned over the pages of a new

book, given him this birthday by the kind Mr. Telford, in whose carriage

he had first seen those blue hills--a book in which all his mountain

ideals, and more, were caught and kept enshrined--visions still, and of

mightier peaks and ampler valleys, romantically "tost" and sublimely

"lost," as he had so often written in his favourite rhymes. In the

vignettes to Rogers' "Italy," Turner had touched the chord for which

John Ruskin had been feeling all these years. No wonder that he took

Turner for his leader and master, and fondly tried to copy the wonderful

"Alps at Daybreak" to begin with, and then to imitate this new-found

magic art with his own subjects and finally to come boldly before the

world in passionate defence of a man who had done such great things for

him.

This mountain-worship was not inherited from his father, who never was

enthusiastic about peaks and clouds and glaciers, though he was

interested in all travelling in a general way. So that it was not

Rogers' "Italy" that sent the family off to the Alps that summer; but,

fortunately for John, his father's eye was caught by the romantic

architecture of Prout's "Sketches in Flanders and Germany," when it came

out in April, 1853, and his mother proposed to make both of them happy

in a tour on the Continent. The business-round was abandoned, but they

could see Mr. Domecq on their way back through Paris, and not wholly

lose the time.

They waited to keep papa's birthday on May 10, and early next morning

drove off--father and mother, John and Mary, Nurse Anne, and the

courier Salvador. They crossed to Calais, and posted, as people did in

the old times, slowly from point to point; starting betimes, halting at

the roadside inns, where John tried to snatch a sketch, reaching their

destination early enough to investigate the cathedral or the citadel,

monuments of antiquity or achievements of modern civilisation, with

impartial eagerness; and before bedtime John would write up his journal

and work up his sketches just as if he were at home.

So they went through Flanders and Germany, following Prout's lead by the

castles of the Rhine; but at last, at Schaffhausen one Sunday

evening--"suddenly--behold--beyond!"--they had seen the Alps.

Thenceforward Turner was their guide as they crossed the Splügen, sailed

the Italian lakes, wondered at Milan Cathedral, and the Mediterranean at

Genoa, and then roamed through the Oberland and back to Chamouni. All

this while a great plan shaped itself in the boy's head, no less than to

make a Rogers' "Italy" for himself, just as he tried to make a "Harry

and Lucy" or a "Dictionary of Minerals." On every place they passed he

would write verses and prose sketches, to give respectively the romance

and the reality or ridicule; for he saw the comic side of it all,

keenly; and he would illustrate the series with Turneresque vignettes,

drawn with the finest crowquill pen, to imitate the delicate engravings.

By this he learnt more drawing in two or three years than most amateur

students do in seven. For the first year he had the "Watchtower of

Andernach" and the "Jungfrau from Interlaken" to show, with others of

similar style, and thenceforward alternated between Turner and Prout,

until he settled into something different from either.

But Turner and Prout were not the only artists he knew; at Paris he

found his way into the Louvre, and got leave from the directors, though

he was under the age required, to copy. The picture he chose was a

Rembrandt.

Between this foreign tour and the next, his amusement was to draw these

vignettes, and to write the poems suggested by the scenes he had

visited. He had outgrown the evening lessons with Dr. Andrews, and as he

was fifteen, it was time to think more seriously of preparing him for

Oxford, where his name was put down at Christ Church. His father hoped

he would go into the Church, and eventually turn out a combination of a

Byron and a bishop--something like Dean Milman, only better. For this,

college was a necessary preliminary; for college, some little schooling.

So they picked the best day-school in the neighbourhood, that of the

Rev. Thomas Dale (afterwards Dean of Rochester), in Grove Lane, Peckham.

John Ruskin worked there rather less than two years. In 1835 he was

taken from school in consequence of an attack of pleurisy, and lost the

rest of that year from regular studies.

More interesting to him than school was the British Museum collection of

minerals, where he worked occasionally with his Jamieson's Dictionary.

By this time he had a fair student's collection of his own, and he

increased it by picking up specimens at Matlock, or Clifton, or in the

Alps, wherever he went, for he was not short of pocket-money. He took

the greatest pains over his catalogues, and wrote elaborate accounts of

the various minerals in a shorthand he invented out of Greek letters and

crystal forms.

Grafted on this mineralogy, and stimulated by the Swiss tour, was a new

interest in physical geology, which his father so far approved as to

give him Saussure's "Voyages dans les Alpes" for his birthday in 1834.

In this book he found the complement of Turner's vignettes, something

like a key to the "reason why" of all the wonderful forms and marvellous

mountain-architecture of the Alps. He soon wrote a short essay on the

subject, and had the pleasure of seeing it in print, in Loudon's

_Magazine of Natural History_ for March, 1834, along with another bit

of his writing, asking for information on the cause of the colour of the

Rhine-water.

He had already some acquaintance with J.C. Loudon, F.L.S., H.S., etc.,

and he was on the staff of that versatile editor not long afterwards,

and took a lion's share of the writing in the _Magazine of

Architecture_. Meanwhile he had been introduced to another editor, and

to the publishers with whom he did business for many a year to come. The

acquaintance was made in a curious, accidental manner. His cousin

Charles Richardson, clerk to Smith, Elder, and Co., had the opportunity

of mentioning the young poet's name to Thomas Pringle, editor of the

"Friendship's Offering" which John had admired and imitated. Mr. Pringle

came out to Herne Hill, and was hospitably entertained as a brother

Scot, as not only an editor, but a poet himself--not _only_ a poet, but

a man of respectability and piety, who had been a missionary in South

Africa. In return for this hospitality he gave a good report of John's

verses, and, after getting him to re-write two of the best passages in

the last tour, carried them off for insertion in his forthcoming number.

He did more: he carried John to see the actual Samuel Rogers, whose

verses had been adorned by the great Turner's vignettes.

After the pleurisy of April, 1835, his parents took him abroad again,

and he made great preparations to use the opportunity to the utmost. He

would study geology in the field, and took Saussure in his trunk he

would note meteorology: he made a cyanometer--a scale of blue to measure

the depth of tone, the colour whether of Rhine-water or of Alpine skies.

He would sketch. By now he had abandoned the desire to make MS. albums,

after seeing himself in print, and so chose rather to imitate the

imitable, and to follow Prout, this time with careful outlines on the

spot, than to idealize his notes in mimic Turnerism. He kept a prose

journal, chiefly of geology and scenery, as well as a versified

description, written in a metre imitated from "Don Juan," but more

elaborate, and somewhat of a _tour de force_ in rhyming. But that

poetical journal was dropped after he had carried it through France,

across the Jura, and to Chamouni. The drawing crowded it out, and for

the first time he found himself as ready with his pencil as he had been

with his pen.

His route is marked by the drawings of that year, from Chamouni to the

St. Bernard and Aosta, back to the Oberland and up the St. Gothard; then

back again to Lucerne and round by the Stelvio to Venice and Verona, and

finally through the Tyrol and Germany homewards. The ascent of the St.

Bernard was told in a dramatic sketch of great humour and power of

characterization, and a letter to Richard Fall records the night on the

Rigi, when he saw the splendid sequence of storm, sunset, moonlight, and

daybreak, which forms the subject of one of the most impressive passages

of "Modern Painters."

It happened that Pringle had a plate of Salzburg which he wanted to

print in order to make up the volume of "Friendship's Offering" for the

next Christmas. He seems to have asked John Ruskin to furnish a copy of

verses for the picture, and at Salzburg, accordingly, a bit of rhymed

description was written and re-written, and sent home to the editor.

Early in December the Ruskins returned, and at Christmas there came to

Herne Hill a gorgeous gilt morocco volume, "To John Ruskin, from the

Publishers." On opening it there were his "Andernach" and "St. Goar,"

and his "Salzburg" opposite a beautifully-engraved plate, all hills,

towers, boats, and figures moving picturesquely under the sunset, in

Turner's manner more or less, "Engraved by E. Goodall from a drawing by

W. Purser." It was almost like being Mr. Rogers himself.

CHAPTER V

THE GERM OF "MODERN PAINTERS" (1836)

He was now close upon seventeen, and it was time to think seriously of

his future. His father went to Oxford early in the year to consult the

authorities about matriculation. Meantime they sent him to Mr. Dale for

some private lessons, and for the lectures on logic, English literature,

and translation, which were given on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at

King's College, London. John enjoyed his new circumstances heartily.

From voluminous letters, it is evident that he was in high spirits and

in pleasant company. He was a thorough boy among boys--Matson,

Willoughby, Tom Dale and the rest. He joined in their pranks, and

contributed to their amusement with his ready good-humour and unflagging

drollery.

Mr. Dale told him there was plenty of time before October, and no fear

about his passing, if he worked hard. He found the work easy, except

epigram-writing, which he thought "excessively stupid and laborious,"

but helped himself out, when scholarship failed, with native wit. Some

of his exercises remain, not very brilliant Latinity; some he saucily

evaded, thus:

"Subject: _Non sapere maximum est malum._

"Non sapere est grave; sed, cum dura epigrammata oportet

Scribere, tunc sentis præcipue esse malum."

In Switzerland and Italy, during the autumn of 1835, he had made a great

many drawings, carefully outlined in pencil or pen on gray paper, and

sparsely touched with body colour, in direct imitation of the Prout

lithographs. Prout's original coloured sketches he had seen, no doubt,

in the exhibition; but he does not seem to have thought of imitating

them, for his work in this kind was all intended to be for illustration

and not for framing. The "Italy" vignettes likewise, with all their

inspiration, suggested to him only pen-etching; he was hardly conscious

that somewhere there existed the tiny, coloured pictures that Turner had

made for the engraver. Still, now that he could draw really well, his

father, who painted in water-colours himself, complied with the demand

for better teaching than Runciman's, went straight to the President of

the Old Water-Colour Society, and engaged him for the usual course of

half a dozen lessons at a guinea a piece. Copley Fielding could draw

mountains as nobody else but Turner could, in water-colour; he had

enough mystery and poetry to interest the younger Ruskin, and enough

resemblance to ordinary views of Nature to please the elder. So they

both went to Newman Street to his painting-room, and John worked through

the course, and a few extra lessons, but, after all, found Fielding's

art was not what he wanted. Some sketches exist, showing the influence

of the spongy style; but his characteristic way of work remained for him

to devise for himself.

At the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1836 Turner showed the first striking

examples of his later style in "Juliet and her Nurse," "Mercury and

Argus," and "Rome from Mount Aventine." The strange idealism, the

unusualness, the mystery, of these pictures, united with evidence of

intense significance and subtle observation, appealed to young Ruskin as

it appealed to few other spectators. Public opinion regretted this

change in its old favourite, the draughtsman of Oxford colleges, the

painter of shipwrecks and castles. And _Blackwood's Magazine_, which the

Ruskins, as Edinburgh people and admirers of Christopher North, read

with respect, spoke about Turner, in a review of the picture-season,

with that freedom of speech which Scotch reviewers claim as a heritage

from the days of Jeffrey. Young Ruskin at once dashed off an answer.

The critic had found that Turner was "out of nature"; Ruskin tried to

show that the pictures were full of facts, but treated with poetical

license. The critic pronounced Turner's colour bad, his execution

neglected, and his chiaroscuro childish; in answer to which Ruskin

explained that Turner's reasoned system was to represent light and shade

by the contrast of warm and cold colour, rather than by the opposition

of white and black which other painters used. He denied that his

execution was other than his aims necessitated, and maintained that the

critic had no right to force his cut-and-dried academic rules of

composition on a great genius; at the same time admitting that:

"The faults of Turner are numerous, and perhaps more egregious than

those of any other great existing artist; but if he has greater

faults, he has also greater beauties.

"His imagination is Shakespearian in its mightiness. Had the scene

of 'Juliet and her Nurse' risen up before the mind of a poet, and

been described in 'words that burn,' it had been the admiration of

the world.... Many-coloured mists are floating above the distant

city, but such mists as you might imagine to be ethereal spirits,

souls of the mighty dead breathed out of the tombs of Italy into

the blue of her bright heaven, and wandering in vague and infinite

glory around the earth that they have loved. Instinct with the

beauty of uncertain light, they move and mingle among the pale

stars, and rise up into the brightness of the illimitable heaven,

whose soft, sad blue eye gazes down into the deep waters of the sea

for ever--that sea whose motionless and silent transparency is

beaming with phosphor light, that emanates out of its sapphire

serenity like bright dreams breathed into the spirit of a deep

sleep. And the spires of the glorious city rise indistinctly bright

into those living mists, like pyramids of pale fire from some vast

altar; and amidst the glory of the dream there is, as it were, the

voice of a multitude entering by the eye, arising from the

stillness of the city like the summer wind passing over the leaves

of the forest, when a murmur is heard amidst their multitudes.

"This, O Maga, is the picture which your critic has pronounced to

be 'like models of different parts of Venice, streaked blue and

white, and thrown into a flour-tub'!"

Before sending his reply to the editor of _Blackwood_, as had been

intended, it was thought only right that Turner should be consulted. The

MS. was enclosed to his address in London, with a courteous note from

Mr. John James Ruskin, asking his permission to publish. Turner replied,

expressing the scorn he felt for anonymous attacks, and jestingly

hinting that the art-critics of the old Scotch school found their

"meal-tub" in danger from his "flour-tub"; but "he never moved in such

matters," so he sent on the MS. to Mr. Munro of Novar, who had bought

the picture.

Ten days or so after this episode John Ruskin was matriculated at Oxford

(October 18, 1836). He told the story of his first appearance as a

gownsman in one of his gossiping letters in verse:

"A night, a day past o'er--the time drew near--

The morning came--I felt a little queer;

Came to the push; paid some tremendous fees;

Past; and was capped and gowned with marvellous ease.

Then went to the Vice-Chancellor to swear

Not to wear boots, nor cut or comb my hair

Fantastically--to shun all such sins

As playing marbles or frequenting inns;

Always to walk with breeches black or brown on;

When I go out, to put my cap and gown on;

With other regulations of the sort, meant

For the just ordering of my comportment.

Which done, in less time than I can rehearse it, I

Found myself member of the University!"

In pursuance of his plan for getting the best of everything, his father

had chosen the best college, as far as he knew, that in which social and

scholastic advantages were believed to be found in pre-eminent

combination, and he had chosen what was thought to be the best position

in the college; so that it was as gentleman-commoner of Christ Church

that John Ruskin made his entrance into the academic world.

After matriculation, the Ruskins made a fortnight's tour to Southampton

and the coast, and returned to Herne Hill. John went back to King's

College, and in December was examined in the subjects of his lectures.

He wrote to his father on Christmas Eve about the examination in English

literature:

"The students were numerous, and so were the questions; the room

was hot, the papers long, the pens bad, the ink pale, and the

interrogations difficult. It lasted only three hours. I wrote

answers in very magnificent style to all the questions except three

or four; gave in my paper and heard no more of the matter: _sic

transeunt bore-ia mundi_."

He went on to mention his "very longitudinal essay," which, since no

other essays are reported in his letters about King's College, must be

the paper published in 1893, in answer to the question. "Does the

perusal of works of fiction act favourably or unfavourably on the moral

character?"

At his farewell interview with Mr. Dale he was asked, as he writes to

his father, what books he had read, and replied with a pretty long list,

including Quintilian and Grotius. Mr. Dale inquired what "light books"

he was taking to Oxford: "Saussure, Humboldt, and other works on natural

philosophy and geology," he answered. "Then he asked if I ever read any

of the modern fashionable novels; on this point I thought he began to

look positive, so I gave him a negative, with the exception of Bulwer's,

and now and then a laughable one of the Theodore Hook's or Captain

Marryat's." And so, with much excellent advice about exercise and sleep,

and the way to win the Newdigate, he parted from Mr. Dale.

This Christmas was marked by his first introduction to the scientific

world. Mr. Charlesworth, of the British Museum, invited him to a meeting

of the Geological Society (January 4, 1837), with promise of

introduction to Buckland and Lyell. The meeting, as he wrote, was

"amusing and interesting, and very comfortable for frosty weather, as

Mr. Murchison got warm and Mr. Greenau _(sic)_ witty. The warmth,

however, got the better of the wit."

The Meteorological Society also claimed his attention, and in this month

he contributed a paper which "Richard [Fall] says will frighten them out

of their meteorological wits, containing six close-written folio pages,

and having, at its conclusion, a sting in its tail, the very agreeable

announcement that it only commences the subject."

CHAPTER VI

A LOVE-STORY (1836-1839)

Early in 1836 the quiet of Herne Hill was fluttered by a long-promised,

long-postponed visit. Mr. Domecq at last brought his four younger

daughters to make the acquaintance of their English friends. The eldest

sister had lately been married to a Count Maison, heir to a peer of

France; for Mr. Domecq, thanks in great measure to his partner's energy

and talents, was prosperous and wealthy, and moved in the enchanted

circles of Parisian society.

To a romantic schoolboy in a London suburb the apparition was dazzling.

Any of the sisters would have charmed him, but the eldest of the four,

Adèle Clotilde, bewitched him at once with her graceful figure and that

oval face which was so admired in those times. She was fair,

too--another recommendation. He was on the brink of seventeen, at the

ripe moment, and he fell passionately in love with her. She was only

fifteen, and did not understand this adoration, unspoken and unexpressed

except by intensified shyness; for he was a very shy boy in the

drawing-room, though brimming over with life and fun among his

schoolfellows. His mother's ideals of education did not include French

gallantry; he felt at a loss before these Paris-bred, Paris-dressed

young ladies, and encumbered by the very strength of his new-found

passion.

And yet he possessed advantages, if he had known how to use them. He was

tall and active, light and lithe in gesture, not a clumsy hobbledehoy.

He had the face that caught the eye, in Rome a few years later, of

Keats' Severn, no mean judge, surely, of faces and poet's faces. He was

undeniably clever; he knew all about minerals and mountains; he was

quite an artist, and a printed poet. But these things weigh little with

a girl of fifteen who wants to be amused; and so she only laughed at

John.

He tried to amuse her, but he tried too seriously. He wrote a story to

read her, "Leoni, a Legend of Italy," for of course she understood

enough English to be read to, no doubt to be wooed in, seeing her mother

was English. The story was of brigands and true lovers, the thing that

was popular in the romantic period. The costumery and mannerisms of the

little romance are out of date now, and seem ridiculous, though Mr.

Pringle and the public were pleased with it then, when it was printed in

"Friendship's Offering." But the girl of fifteen only laughed the more.

When they left, he had no interest in his tour-book; even the mountains,

for the time, had lost their power, and all his plans of great works

were dropped for a new style of verse--the love-poems of 1836.

His father, from whom he kept nothing, approved the verses, and did not

disapprove his views on the young lady. Indeed, it is quite plain, from

the correspondence of the two gentlemen, that Mr. Domecq intended his

friend and partner's son to become his own son-in-law. He had the

greatest respect for the Ruskins, and every reason for desiring to link

their fortunes still more closely with those of his own family. But to

Mrs. Ruskin, with her religious feelings, it was intolerable,

unbelievable, that the son whom she had brought up in the nurture and

admonition of the strictest Protestantism should fix his heart on an

alien in race and creed. The wonder is that their relations were not

more strained; there are few young men who would have kept unbroken

allegiance to a mother whose sympathy failed them at such a crisis.

As the year went on his passion seemed to grow in the absence of the

beloved object. His only plan of winning her was to win his spurs first;

but as what? Clearly his forte, it seemed, was in writing. If he could

be a successful writer of romances, of songs, of plays, surely she would

not refuse him. And so he began another romantic story, "Velasquez, the

Novice," opening with the Monks of St. Bernard, among whom had been, so

the tale ran, a mysterious member, whose papers, when discovered, made

him out the hero of adventures in Venice. He began a play, which was to

be another great work, "Marcolini." He had no playwright's eye for

situations, but the conversation is animated, and the characters finely

drawn, with more discrimination than one would expect from so young an

author.

This work was interrupted at the end of Act III. by pressing calls to

other studies. But it was not that he had forgotten Adèle. From time to

time he wrote verses to her or about her; and as in 1838 she was sent to

school with her sisters at Newhall, near Chelmsford, to "finish" her in

English, in that August he saw her again. She had lost some of her first

girlish prettiness, but that made no difference. And when the Domecqs

came to Herne Hill at Christmas, he was as deeply in love as ever. But

she still laughed at him.

His father was fond of her, liked all the sisters, and thought much of

them as girls of fine character, but he liked Adèle best. He seems to

have been fond of his partner, too, worked very hard in his interests,

and behaved very well to his heirs afterwards through many years of

responsible and difficult management of their business. And at this

time, when he went down to the convent school in Essex, as he often did,

he must have had opportunities for seeing how hopeless the case was. Mr.

Domecq recognised it, too, but thought, it seems (they manage these

things differently in France), that any of his daughters would do as

well, and early in 1839 entertained an offer from Baron Duquesne, a rich

and handsome young Frenchman. They kept this from John, fearing he would

break down at the news, so fully did they recognise the importance of

the affair. They even threw other girls in his way. It was not

difficult, for by now he had made some mark in magazine literature, and

was a steady, rising young man, with considerable expectations. But he

could not think of any other girl.

In February or March, 1839, Mr. Domecq died. The Maisons came to

England, and the marriage was proposed. Adèle stayed at Chelmsford until

September, when he wrote the long poem of "Farewell," dated the eve of

their last meeting and parting.

At twenty young men do not die of love; but I find that a fortnight

after writing this he was taken seriously ill. During the winter of

1839-40 the negotiations for the marriage in Paris went on. It took

place in March. They kept the news from him as long as they could, for

he was in the schools next Easter term, and Mr. Brown (his college

tutor) had seemed to hope he would get a First, so his mother wrote to

her husband. In May he was pronounced consumptive, and had to give up

Oxford, and all hope of the distinction for which he had laboured, and

with that any plans that might have been entertained for his distinction

in the Church. And his parents' letters of the period put it beyond a

doubt that this first great calamity of his life was the direct

consequence of that unfortunate matchmaking.

For nearly two years he was dragged about from place to place, and from

doctor to doctor, in search of health. Thanks partly to wise treatment,

more to new faces, and most to a plucky determination to employ himself

usefully with his pen and his pencil, he gradually freed himself from

the spell, and fifty years afterwards could look back upon the story as

a pretty comedy of his youthful days.

CHAPTER VII

"KATA PHUSIN" (1837-1838)

Devoted as she was to her husband, Mrs. Ruskin felt bound to watch over

her son at Oxford. It was his health she was always anxious about;

doctoring was her forte. He had suffered from pleurisy; caught cold

easily; was feared to be weak in the lungs; and nobody but his mother

understood him. So taking Mary Richardson, she went up with him

(January, 1837), and settled in lodgings at Adams' in the High. Her plan

was to make no intrusion on his college life, but to require him to

report himself every day to her. She would not be dull; she could drive

about and see the country, and to that end took her own carriage to

Oxford, the "fly" which had been set up two years before. John had been

rather sarcastic about its genteel appearance. "No one," he said, "would

sit down to draw the form of it." However, she and Mary drove to Oxford,

and reckoned that it would only mean fifteen months' absence from home

altogether, great part of which deserted papa would spend in travelling.

John went into residence in Peckwater. At first he spent every evening

with his mother and went to bed, as Mr. Dale had told him, at ten. After

a few days Professor Powell asked him to a musical evening; he excused

himself, and explained why. The Professor asked to be introduced,

whereupon says his mother, "I shall return the call, but make no

visiting acquaintances."

The "early-to-bed" plan was also impracticable. It was not long before

somebody came hammering at his "oak" just as he was getting to sleep,

and next morning he told his mother that he really ought to have a glass

of wine to give. So she sent him a couple of bottles over, and that very

night "Mr. Liddell and Mr. Gaisford" (junior) turned up. "John was glad

he had wine to offer, but they would not take any; they had come to see

sketches. John says Mr. Liddell looked at them with the eye of a judge

and the delight of an artist, and swore they were the best sketches he

had ever seen. John accused him of quizzing, but he answered that he

really thought them excellent." John said that it was the scenes which

made the pictures; Mr. Liddell knew better, and spread the fame of them

over the college. Next morning "Lord Emlyn and Lord Ward called to look

at the sketches," and when the undergraduates had dropped in one after

another, the Dean himself, even the terrible Gaisford, sent for the

portfolio, and returned it with august approval.

Liddell, afterwards Dean of Christ Church; Newton, afterwards Sir

Charles, of the British Museum; Acland, afterwards Sir Henry, the

Professor of Medicine, thus became John Ruskin's friends: the first

disputing with him on the burning question of Raphael's art, but from

the outset an admirer of "Modern Painters," and always an advocate of

its author; the second differing from him on the claims of Greek

archæology, but nevertheless a close acquaintance through many long

years; and the third for half a century the best of friends and

counsellors.

The dons of his college he was less likely to attract. Dr. Buckland, the

famous geologist, and still more famous lecturer and talker, took notice

of him and employed him in drawing diagrams for lectures. The Rev.

Walter Brown, his college tutor, afterwards Rector of Wendlebury, won

his good-will and remained his friend. His private tutor, the Rev.

Osborne Gordon, was always regarded with affectionate respect. But the

rest seem to have looked upon him as a somewhat desultory and erratic

young genius, who might or might not turn out well. For their immediate

purpose, the Schools, and Church or State preferment, he seemed hardly

the fittest man.

The gentlemen-commoners of Christ Church were a puzzle to Mrs. Ruskin;

noblemen of sporting tastes, who rode and betted and drank, and got

their impositions written "by men attached to the University for the

purpose, at 1s.6d. to 2s.6d., so you have only to reckon how much you

will give to avoid chapel." And yet they were very nice fellows. If they

began by riding on John's back round the quad, they did not give him the

cold shoulder--quite the reverse. He was asked everywhere to wine; he

beat them all at chess; and they invaded him at all hours. "It does

little good sporting _his_ oak," wrote his mother, describing how Lord

Desart and Grimston climbed in through his window while he was hard at

work. "They say midshipmen and Oxonians have more lives than a cat, and

they have need of them if they run such risks."

Once, but once only, he was guilty, as an innocent freshman, of a breach

of the laws of his order. He wrote too good an essay. He tells his

father:

"OXFORD, _February_, 1837.

"Yesterday (Saturday) forenoon the Sub-dean sent for me, took me up

into his study, sat down with me, and read over my essay, pointing

out a few verbal alterations and suggesting improvements; I, of

course, expressed myself highly grateful for his condescension.

Going out, I met Strangeways. 'So you're going to read out to-day,

Ruskin. _Do_ go it at a good rate, my good fellow. Why do you write

such devilish good ones?' Went a little farther and met March.

'Mind you stand on the top of the desk, Ruskin; gentlemen-commoners

never stand on the steps.' I asked him whether it would look more

dignified to stand head or heels uppermost. He advised heels. Then

met Desart. 'We must have a grand supper after this, Ruskin;

gentlemen-commoners always have a flare-up after reading their

themes.' I told him I supposed he wanted to 'pison my

rum-and-water.'"

And though they teased him unmercifully, he seems to have given as good

as he got. At a big wine after the event, they asked him whether his

essay cost 2s.6d. or 5s. What he answered is not reported; but they

proceeded to make a bonfire in Peckwater, while he judiciously escaped

to bed.

So for a home-bred boy, thrown into rather difficult surroundings, his

first appearance at Christ Church was distinctly a success.

"Collections" in March, 1837, went off creditably for him. Hussey,

Kynaston and the Dean said he had taken great pains with his work, and

had been a pattern of regularity; and he ended his first term very well

pleased with his college and with himself.

In his second term he had the honour of being elected to the Christ

Church Club, a very small and very exclusive society of the best men in

the college: "Simeon, Acland, and Mr. Denison proposed him; Lord Carew

and Broadhurst supported." And he had the opportunity of meeting men of

mark, as the following letter recounts. He writes on April 22, 1837:

"My Dearest Father,

"When I returned from hall yesterday--where a servitor read, or

pretended to read, and Decanus growled at him, 'Speak out!'--I

found a note on my table from Dr. Buckland, requesting the pleasure

of my company to dinner, at six, to meet two celebrated geologists,

Lord Cole and Sir Philip Egerton. I immediately sent a note of

thanks and acceptance, dressed, and was there a minute after the

last stroke of Tom. Alone for five minutes in Dr. B.'s

drawing-room, who soon afterwards came in with Lord Cole,

introduced me, and said that as we were both geologists he did not

hesitate to leave us together while he did what he certainly very

much required--brushed up a little. Lord Cole and I were talking

about some fossils newly arrived from India. He remarked in the

course of conversation that his friend Dr. B.'s room was cleaner

and in better order than he remembered ever to have seen it. There

was not a chair fit to sit upon, all covered with dust, broken

alabaster candlesticks, withered flower-leaves, frogs cut out of

serpentine, broken models of fallen temples, torn papers, old

manuscripts, stuffed reptiles, deal boxes, brown paper, wool, tow

and cotton, and a considerable variety of other articles. In came

Mrs. Buckland, then Sir Philip Egerton and his brother, whom I had

seen at Dr. B.'s lecture, though he is not an undergraduate. I was

talking to him till dinner-time. While we were sitting over our

wine after dinner, in came Dr. Daubeny, one of the most celebrated

geologists of the day--a curious little animal, looking through its

spectacles with an air very _distinguée_--and Mr. Darwin, whom I

had heard read a paper at the Geological Society. He and I got

together, and talked all the evening."

The long vacation of 1837 was passed in a tour through the North, during

which his advanced knowledge of art was shown in a series of admirable

drawings. Their subjects are chiefly architectural, though a few

mountain drawings are found in his sketch-book for that summer.

The interest in ancient and picturesque buildings was no new thing, and

it seems to have been the branch of art-study which was chiefly

encouraged by his father. During this tour among Cumberland cottages and

Yorkshire abbeys, a plan was formed for a series of papers on

architecture, perhaps in answer to an invitation from his friend Mr.

Loudon, who had started an architectural magazine. In the summer he

began to write "The Poetry of Architecture; or, The Architecture of the

Nations of Europe considered in its Association with Natural Scenery and

National Character," and the papers were worked off month by month from

Oxford, or wherever he might be, only terminating with the termination

of the magazine in January, 1839. They parade a good deal of classical

learning and travelled experience; readers of the magazine took their

author for some dilettante Don at Oxford. The editor did not wish the

illusion to be dispelled, so John Ruskin had to choose a _nom de

plume_. He called himself "Kata Phusin" ("according to nature"), for he

had begun to read some Aristotle. No phrase would have better expressed

his point of view, that of commonsense extended by experience, and

confirmed by the appeal to matters of fact, rather than to any

authority, or tradition, or committee of taste, or abstract principles.

While these papers were in process of publication "Kata Phusin" plunged

into his first controversy, as an opponent of "Parsey's Convergence of

Perpendiculars," according to which vertical lines should have a

vanishing point, even though they are assumed to be parallel to the

plane of the picture.

During this controversy, and just before the summer tour of 1838 to

Scotland, John Ruskin was introduced to Miss Charlotte Withers, a young

lady who was as fond of music as he was of drawing. They discussed their

favourite studies with eagerness, and, to settle the matter, he wrote a

long essay on "The Comparative Advantages of the Studies of Music and

Painting," in which he set painting as a means of recreation and of

education far above music.

Already at nineteen, then, we see him a writer on art, not full-fledged,

but attracting some notice. Towards the end of 1838 a question arose as

to the best site for the proposed Scott memorial at Edinburgh, and a

writer in the _Architectural Magazine_ quoted "Kata Phusin" as the

authority in such matters, saying that it was obvious, after those

papers of his, that design and site should be simultaneously considered;

on which the editor "begs the favour of 'Kata Phusin' to let our readers

have his opinion on the subject, which we certainly think of

considerable importance."

So he discussed the question of monuments in general, and of this one in

particular, in a long paper, coming to no very decided opinion, but

preferring, on the whole, a statue group with a colossal Scott on a

rough pedestal, to be placed on Salisbury Crags, "where the range gets

low and broken towards the north at about the height of St. Anthony's

Chapel." His paper did not influence the Edinburgh Committee, but it was

not without effect, as the following extract shows.

"BAYSWATER, _November_ 30, 1838.

"DEAR SIR,--... Your son is certainly the greatest natural genius

that ever it has been my fortune to become acquainted with, and I

cannot but feel proud to think that at some future period, when

both you and I are under the turf, it will be stated in the

literary history of your son's life that the first article of his

which was published was in _London's Magazine of Natural

History._--Yours very sincerely,

"J.C. LOUDON"

CHAPTER VIII

SIR ROGER NEWDIGATE'S PRIZE (1837-1839)

Of all the prizes which Oxford could bestow, the Newdigate used to be

the most popular. Its fortunate winner was an admitted poet in an age

when poetry was read, and he appeared in his glory at Commemoration,

speaking what the ladies could understand and admire. The honour was

attainable without skill in Greek particles or in logarithms; and yet it

had a real value to an intending preacher, for the successful reciter

might be felt to have put his foot on the pulpit stairs. John Ruskin was

definitely meant for the Church, and he went to Oxford in the avowed

hope of getting the Newdigate, if nothing else. His last talk with Mr.

Dale was chiefly about ways and means to this end; and before he went up

he had begun "The Gipsies" for March, 1837.

The prize was won that year by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, afterwards Dean

of Westminster. Our candidate and his old schoolfellow, Henry Dart, of

Exeter College, set to work on the next subject, "The Exile of St.

Helena," and after the long vacation read their work to each other,

accepting the hints and corrections of a friendly rivalry.

Meantime his old nurse Anne (it is trivial, but a touch of nature),

being at Oxford in attendance on the ladies, and keen, as she always

was, for Master John's success, heard from the keeper of the

Reading-room of criticisms on his published verses. She brought the news

to his delighted mother. "He was pleased," she writes, "but says that he

forms his own estimate of his poems, and reviews don't alter it; but

'How my father will be delighted! How he will crow!'" Which historiette

repeated itself many a time in the family annals.

In Lent term, 1838, he was hard at work on the new poem. He wrote:

"I must give an immense time every day to the Newdigate, which I

must have, if study will get it. I have much to revise. You find

many faults, but there are hundreds which have escaped your notice,

and many lines must go out altogether which you and I should wish

to stay in. The thing must be remodelled, and I must finish it

while it has a freshness on it, otherwise it will not be written

well. The old lines are hackneyed in my ears, even as a very soft

Orleans plum, which your Jewess has wiped and re-wiped with the

corner of her apron, till its polish is perfect, and its

temperature elevated."

In this March he got through his "Smalls."

"Nice thing to get over; quite a joke, as everybody says when

they've got through with the feathers on. It's a kind of

emancipation from freshness--a thing unpleasant in an egg, but

dignified in an Oxonian--very. Lowe very kind; Kynaston ditto--nice

fellows--urbane. How they _do_ frighten people! There was one man

all but crying with mere fear. Kynaston had to coax him like a

child. Poor fellow! he had some reason to be afraid; did his logic

shockingly. People always take up logic because they fancy it

doesn't require a good memory, and there is nothing half so

productive of pluck; they _never_ know it. I was very cool when I

got into it; found the degree of excitement agreeable; nibbled the

end of my pen and grinned at Kynaston over the table as if _I_ had

been going to pluck _him_. They always smile when they mean pluck."

The Newdigate for 1838, for all his care and pains, was won by Dart. He

was, at any rate, beaten by a friend, and with a poem which his own

honourable sympathy and assistance had helped to perfect.

Another trifling incident lets us get a glimpse of the family life of

our young poet. The Queen's coronation in June, 1838, was a great event

to all the world, and Mr. Ruskin was anxious for his son to see it. Much

correspondence ensued between the parents, arranging everything for him,

as they always did--which of the available tickets should be accepted,

and whether he could stand the fatigue of the long waiting, and so

forth. Mrs. Ruskin did not like the notion of her boy sitting perched on

rickety scaffolding at dizzy altitudes in the Abbey. Mr. Ruskin,

evidently determined to carry his point, went to Westminster, bribed the

carpenters, climbed the structure, and reported all safe to stand a

century, "though," said he, "the gold and scarlet of the decorations

appeared very paltry compared with the Wengern Alp." But he could not

find No. 447, and wrote to the Heralds' Office to know if it was a place

from which a good view could be got. Blue-mantle replied that it was a

very good place, and Lord Brownlow had just taken tickets for his sons

close by. Then there was the great question of dress. He went to Owen's

and ordered a white satin waistcoat with gold sprigs, and a high

dress-coat with bright buttons, and asked his wife to see about white

gloves at Oxford--a Court white neck-cloth or a black satin would do.

Picture, then, the young Ruskin in those dressy days. A portrait was

once sent to Brantwood of a dandy in a green coat of wonderful cut,

supposed to represent him in his youth, but suggesting Lord Lytton's

"Pelham" rather than the homespun-suited seer of Coniston. "Did you ever

wear a coat like that?" I asked. "I'm not so sure that I didn't," said

he.

After that, they went to Scotland and the North of England for the

summer, and more fine sketches were made, some of which hang now in his

drawing-room, and compare not unfavourably with the Prouts beside them.

In firmness of line and fulness of insight they are masterly, and mark a

rapid progress, all the more astonishing when it is recollected how

little time could have been spared for practice. The subjects are

chiefly architectural--castles and churches and Gothic details--and one

is not surprised to find him soon concerned with the Oxford Society for

Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture. "They were all reverends,"

says a letter of the time, "and wanted somebody to rouse them."

Science, too, progressed this year. We read of geological excursions to

Shotover with Lord Carew and Lord Kildare--one carrying the hammer and

another the umbrella--and actual discoveries of saurian remains; and

many a merry meeting at Dr. Buckland's, in which, at intervals of

scientific talk, John romped with the youngsters of the family. After a

while the Dean took the opportunity of a walk through Oxford to the

Clarendon to warn him not to spend too much time on science. It did not

pay in the Schools nor in the Church, and he had too many irons in the

fire.

Drawing, and science, and the prose essays mentioned in the last

chapter, and poetry, all these were his by-play. Of the poetry, the

Newdigate was but a little part. In "Friendship's Offering" this autumn

he published "Remembrance," one of many poems to Adèle, "Christ Church,"

and the "Scythian Grave." In this last he gave free rein to the morbid

imaginations to which his unhappy _affaire de coeur_ and the mental

excitement of the period predisposed him. Harrison, his literary

Mentor, approved these poems, and inserted them in "Friendship's

Offering," along with love-songs and other exercises in verse. One had a

great success and was freely copied--the sincerest flattery--and the

preface to the annual for 1840 publicly thanked the "gifted writer" for

his "valuable aid."

At the beginning of 1839 he went into new rooms vacated by Mr. Meux, and

set to work finally on "Salsette and Elephanta." He ransacked all

sources of information, coached himself in Eastern scenery and

mythology, threw in the Aristotelian ingredients of terror and pity, and

wound up with an appeal to the orthodoxy of the examiners, of whom Keble

was the chief, by prophesying the prompt extermination of Brahminism

under the teaching of the missionaries.

This third try won the prize. Keble sent for him, to make the usual

emendations before the great work could be given to the world with the

seal of Oxford upon it. John Ruskin seems to have been somewhat

refractory under Keble's hands, though he would let his fellow-students,

or his father, or Harrison, work their will on his MSS. or proofs; being

always easier to lead than to drive. Somehow he came to terms with the

Professor, and then the Dean, taking an unexpected interest, was at

pains to see that his printed copy was flawless, and to coach him for

the recitation of it at the great day in the Sheldonian (June 12, 1839).

And now that friends and strangers, publishers in London and professors

in Oxford, concurred in their applause, it surely seemed that he had

found his vocation, and was well on the high-road to fame as a poet.

CHAPTER IX

THE BROKEN CHAIN (1840-1841)

That 8th of February, 1840, when John Ruskin came of age, it seemed as

though all the gifts of fortune had been poured into his lap. What his

father's wealth and influence could do for him had been supplemented by

a personal charm, which found him friends among the best men of the best

ranks. What his mother's care had done in fortifying his health and

forming his character, native energy had turned to advantage. He had won

a reputation already much wider and more appreciable, as an artist and

student of science, and as a writer of prose and verse, than

undergraduates are entitled to expect; and, for crowning mercy, his head

was not turned. He was reading extremely hard--"in" for his degree

examination next Easter term. His college tutor hoped he would get a

First. From that it was an easy step to Holy Orders, and with his

opportunities preferment was certain.

On his twenty-first birthday, his father, who had sympathized with his

admiration for Turner enough to buy two pictures--the "Richmond Bridge"

and the "Gosport"--for their Herne Hill drawing-room, now gave him a

picture all to himself for his new rooms in St. Aldate's--the

"Winchelsea," and settled on him a handsome allowance of pocket-money.

The first use he made of his wealth was to buy another Turner. In the

Easter vacation he met Mr. Griffith, the dealer, at the private view of

the old Water-colour Society, and hearing that the "Harlech Castle" was

for sale, he bought it there and then, with the characteristic disregard

for money which has always made the vendors of pictures and books and

minerals find him extremely pleasant to deal with. But as his

love-affair had shown his mother how little he had taken to heart her

chiefest care for him, so this first business transaction was a painful

awakening to his father, the canny Scotch merchant, who had heaped up

riches hoping that his son would gather them.

This "Harlech Castle" transaction, however, was not altogether unlucky.

It brought him an introduction to the painter, whom he met when he was

next in town, at Mr. Griffith's house. He knew well enough the popular

idea of Turner as a morose and niggardly, inexplicable man. As he had

seen faults in Turner's painting, so he was ready to acknowledge the

faults in his character. But while the rest of the world, with a very

few exceptions, dwelt upon the faults, Ruskin had penetration to discern

the virtues which they hid. Few passages in his autobiography are more

striking than the transcript from his journal of the same evening,

recording his first impression:

"'I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered,

matter-of-fact, English-minded--gentleman; good-natured evidently,

bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps

a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of the mind not

brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention

of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look.'

Pretty close that," he adds later, "and full, to be set down at the

first glimpse, and set down the same evening."

Turner was not a man to make an intimate of, all at once; the

acquaintanceship continued, and it ripened into as close a confidence as

the eccentric painter's habits of life permitted. He seems to have been

more at home with the father than with the son; but even when the young

man took to writing books about him, he did not, as Carlyle is reported

to have done in a parallel case, show his exponent to the door.

The occasion of John Ruskin's coming to town this time was not a

pleasant one--nothing less than the complete breakdown of his health. It

is true that he was working very hard during this spring; but hard

reading does not of itself kill people, only when it is combined with

real and prolonged mental distress, acting upon a sensitive temperament.

The case was thought serious; reading was stopped, and the patient was

ordered abroad for the winter.

For that summer there was no hurry to be gone; rest was more needed than

change, at first. Late in September the same family-party crossed the

sea to Calais. How different a voyage for them all from the merry

departures of bygone Maytides! Which way should they turn? Not to Paris,

for _there_ was the cause of all these ills; so they went straight

southwards, through Normandy to the Loire, and saw the châteaux and

churches from Orleans to Tours, famous for their Renaissance

architecture and for the romance of their chivalric history. Amboise

especially made a strong impression upon the languid and unwilling

invalid. It stirred him up to write, in easy verse, the tale of love and

death that his own situation too readily suggested. In "The Broken

Chain" he indulged his gloomy fancy, turning, as it was sure to do, into

a morbid nightmare of mysterious horror, not without reminiscence of

Coleridge's "Christabel." But through it all he preserved, so to speak,

his dramatic incognito; his own disappointment and his own anticipated

death were the motives of the tale, but treated in such a manner as not

to betray his secret, nor even to wound the feelings of the lady who now

was beyond appeal from an honourable lover--taking his punishment like a

man.

This poem lasted him, for private writing, all through that journey--a

fit emblem of the broken life which it records. A healthier source of

distraction was his drawing, in which he had received a fresh impetus

from the exhibition of David Roberts' sketches in the East. More

delicate than Prout's work, entering into the detail of architectural

form more thoroughly, and yet suggesting chiaroscuro with broad washes

of quiet tone and touches of light, cleverly introduced--"that

marvellous _pop_ of light across the foreground," Harding said of the

picture of the Great Pyramid--these drawings were a mean between the

limited manner of Prout and the inimitable fulness of Turner Ruskin took

up the fine pencil and the broad brush, and, with that blessed habit of

industry which has helped so many a one through times of trial, made

sketch after sketch on the half-imperial board, finished just so far as

his strength and time allowed, as they passed from the Loire to the

mountains of Auvergne; and to the valley of the Rhone, and thence

slowly round the Riviera to Pisa and Florence and Rome.

He was not in a mood to sympathize readily with the enthusiasms of other

people. They expected him to be delighted with the scenery, the

buildings, the picture-galleries of Italy, and to forget himself in

admiration. He did admire Michelangelo; and he was interested in the

back-streets and slums of the cities. Something piquant was needed to

arouse him; the mild ecstasies of common connoisseurship hardly appeal

to a young man between life and death. He met the friends to whom he had

brought introductions--Mr. Joseph Severn, who had been Keats' companion,

and was afterwards to be the genial Consul at Rome, and the two Messrs.

Richmond, then studying art in the regular professional way; one of them

to become a celebrated portrait-painter, and the father of men of mark.

But his views on art were not theirs; he was already too independent and

outspoken in praise of his own heroes, and too sick in mind and body to

be patient and to learn.

They had not been a month in Rome before he took the fever. As soon as

he was recovered, they went still farther South, and loitered for a

couple of months in the neighbourhood of Naples, visiting the various

scenes of interest--Sorrento, Amalfi, Salerno. The adventures of this

journey are partly told in letters to Mr. Dale, and in the "Letters

addressed to a College Friend."

On the way to Naples he had noted and sketched the winter scene at La

Riccia, which he afterwards used for a glowing passage in "Modern

Painters"; and he had ventured into a village of brigands to draw such a

castle as he had once imagined in his "Leoni." From Naples he wrote an

account of a landslip near Giagnano, and sent it home to the Ashmolean

Society. He seemed better; they turned homewards, when suddenly he was

seized with all the old symptoms worse than ever. After another month at

Rome, they travelled slowly northwards from town to town; spent ten

days of May at Venice, and passed through Milan and Turin, and over the

Mont Cenis to Geneva.

At last he was among the mountains again--the Alps that he loved. It was

not only that the air of the Alps braced him, but the spirit of

mountain-worship stirred him as nothing else could. At last he seemed

himself, after more than a year of intense depression; and he records

that one day, in church at Geneva, he resolved to _do_ something, to

_be_ something useful. That he could make such a resolve was a sign of

returning health; but if, as I find, he had just been reading Carlyle's

lately-published lectures on "Heroes," though he did not then accept

Carlyle's conclusions nor admire his style, might he not, in spite of

his criticism, have been spurred the more into energy by that

enthusiastic gospel of action?

They travelled home by Basle and Laon; but London in August, and the

premature attempt to be energetic, brought on a recurrence of the

symptoms of consumption, as it was called. He wished to try the

mountain-cure again, and set out with his friend Richard Fall for a tour

in Wales. But his father recalled him to Leamington to try iron and

dieting under Dr. Jephson, who, if he was called a quack, was a sensible

one, and successful in subduing for several years to come the more

serious phases of the disease. The patient was not cured; he suffered

from time to time from his chest, and still more from a weakness of the

spine, which during all the period of his early manhood gave him

trouble, and finished by bending his tall and lithe figure into

something that, were it not for his face, would be deformity. In 1847 he

was again at Leamington under Jephson, in consequence of a relapse into

the consumptive symptoms, after which we hear no more of it. He outgrew

the tendency, as so many do. But nevertheless the alarm had been

justifiable, and the malady had left traces which, in one way and

another, haunted him ever after; for one of the worst effects of

illness is to be marked down as an invalid.

At Leamington, then, in September, 1841, he was finding a new life under

the doctor's dieting, and new aims in life, which were eventually to

resolder for a while the broken chain. Among the Scotch friends of the

Ruskins there was a family at Perth whose daughter came to visit at

Herne Hill--the Effie Gray whom afterwards he married. She challenged

the melancholy John, engrossed in his drawing and geology, to write a

fairytale, as the least likely task for him to fulfil. Upon which he

produced, at a couple of sittings, "The King of the Golden River," a

pretty medley of Grimm's grotesque and Dickens' kindliness and the true

Ruskinian ecstasy of the Alps.

CHAPTER X

THE GRADUATE OF OXFORD (1841-1842)

Ready for work again, and in reasonable health of mind and body, John

Ruskin sat down in his little study at Herne Hill in November, 1841,

with his private tutor, Osborne Gordon. There was eighteen months'

leeway to make up, and the dates of ancient history, the details of

schematized Aristotelianism, soon slip out of mind when one is sketching

in Italy. But he was more serious now about his work, and aware of his

deficiencies. To be useful in the world, is it not necessary first to

understand all possible Greek constructions? So said the voice of

Oxford; but our undergraduate was saved, both now and afterwards, from

this vain ambition. "I think it would hardly be worth your while," said

Gordon.

He could not now go in for honours, for the lost year had superannuated

him. So in April he went up for a pass. In those times, when a pass-man

showed unusual powers, they could give him an honorary class; not a high

class, because the range of the examination was less than in the

honour-school. This candidate wrote a poor Latin prose, it seems; but

his divinity, philosophy, and mathematics were so good that they gave

him the best they could--an honorary double fourth--upon which he took

his B.A. degree, and could describe himself as "A Graduate of Oxford."

The continued weakness of his health kept him from taking steps to enter

the Church; and his real interest in art was not crowded out even by the

last studies for his examination. While he was working with Gordon, in

the autumn of 1841, he was also taking lessons from J.D. Harding; and

the famous study of ivy, his first naturalistic sketching, to which we

must revert, must have been done a week or two before going up for his

examination.

The lessons from Harding were a useful counter-stroke to the excessive

and exaggerated Turnerism in which he had been indulging through his

illness. The drawings of Amboise, the coast of Genoa, and the Glacier

des Bois, though published later, were made before he had exchanged

fancy for fact; and they bear, on the face of them, the obvious marks of

an unhealthy state of mind. Harding, whose robust common-sense and

breezy mannerism endeared him to the British amateur of his generation,

was just the man to correct any morbid tendency. He had religious views

in sympathy with his pupil, and he soon inoculated Ruskin with his

contempt for the minor Dutch school--those bituminous landscapes, so

unlike the sparkling freshness that Harding's own water-colour

illustrated, and those vulgar tavern scenes, painted, he declared, by

sots who disgraced art alike in their works and in their lives.

Until this epoch, John Ruskin had found much that interested him in the

Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century. He had classed

them all together as the school of which Rubens, Vandyck and Rembrandt

were the chief masters, and those as names to rank with Raphael and

Michelangelo and Velasquez. He was a humorist, not without boyish

delight in a good Sam-Wellerism, and so could be amused with the

"drolls," until Harding appealed to his religion and morality against

them. He was a chiaroscurist, and not naturally offended by their

violent light and shade, until George Richmond showed him the more

excellent way in colour, the glow of Venice, first hinting it at Rome in

1840, and then proving it in London in the spring of 1842 from Samuel

Rogers' treasures, of which the chief (now in the National Gallery) was

the "Christ appearing to the Magdalen."

Much as the author of "Modern Painters" owed to these friends and

teachers, and to the advantages of his varied training, he would never

have written his great work without a further inspiration. Harding's

especial forte was his method of drawing trees. He looked at Nature with

an eye which, for his period, was singularly fresh and unprejudiced; he

had a strong feeling for truth of structure as well as for picturesque

effect, and he taught his pupils to observe as well as to draw. But in

his own practice he rested too much on _having observed_; formed a

style, and copied himself if he did not copy the old masters; Hence he

held to rules of composition and conscious graces of arrangement; and

while he taught naturalism in study, he followed it up with teaching

artifice in practice.

Turner, who was not a drawing-master, lay under no necessity to

formulate his principles and stick to them. On the contrary, his style

developed like a kaleidoscope. He had been in Switzerland and on the

Rhine in 1841, "painting his impressions," making water-colour notes

from memory of effects that had struck him. From one of these,

"Splügen," he had made a finished picture, and now wished to get

commissions for more of the same class. Ruskin was greatly interested in

this series, because they were not landscapes of the ordinary type,

scenes from Nature squeezed into the mould of recognised artistic

composition, nor, on the other hand, mere photographic transcripts; but

dreams, as it were, of the mountains and sunsets, in which Turner's

wealth of detail was suggested, and his knowledge of form expressed,

together with the unity which comes of the faithful record of a single

impression.

The lesson was soon enforced upon Ruskin's mind by example. One day,

while taking his student's constitutional, he noticed a tree-stem with

ivy upon it, which seemed not ungraceful, and invited a sketch. As he

drew he fell into the spirit of its natural arrangement, and soon

perceived how much finer it was as a piece of design than any

conventional rearrangement would be. Harding had tried to show him how

to generalize foliage; but in this example he saw that not

generalization was needed to get its beauty, but truth.

At Fontainebleau soon after, in much the same circumstances, a study of

an aspen-tree, idly begun, but carried out with interest and patience,

confirmed the principle. At Geneva, once more in the church where he had

formed such resolutions the year before, the desire came over him with

renewed force; now not only to be definitely employed, but to be

employed in the service of a definite mission, which was, in art,

exactly what Carlyle had preached in every other sphere of life in that

book of "Heroes": the gospel of sincerity.

The design took shape. At Chamouni he studied plants and rocks and

clouds, not as an artist to make pictures out of them, nor as a

scientist to class them and analyze them; but to learn their aspects and

enter into the spirit of their growth and structure. And though on his

way home through Switzerland and down the Rhine he made a few drawings

in his old style for admiring friends, they were the last of the kind

that he attempted. Thenceforward his path was marked out; he had found a

new vocation. He was not to be a poet--that was too definitely bound up

with the past which he wanted to forget, and with conventionalities

which he wished to shake off; not to be an artist, strugging with the

rest to please a public which he felt himself called upon to teach; not

a man of science, for his botany and geology were to be the means, and

not the ends, of his teaching; but the mission was laid upon him to tell

the world that Art, no less than other spheres of life, had its Heroes;

that the mainspring of their energy was Sincerity, and the burden of

their utterance, Truth.

BOOK II

THE ART CRITIC

(1842-1860)

CHAPTER I

"TURNER AND THE ANCIENTS" (1842-1844)

The neighbour, or the Oxonian friend, who climbed the steps of the Herne

Hill house and called upon Mrs. Ruskin, in the autumn and winter of

1842, would learn that Mr. John was hard at work in his own study

overhead. Those were its windows, on the second-floor, looking out upon

the front-garden; the big dormer-window above was his bedroom, from

which he had his grand view of lowland, and far horizon, and unconfined

sky, comparatively clear of London smoke. In the study itself, screened

from the road by russet foliage and thick evergreens, great things were

going on. But Mr. John could be interrupted, would come running lightly

downstairs, with both hands out to greet the visitor; would show the

pictures, eagerly demonstrating the beauties of the last new Turners,

"Ehrenbreitstein" and "Lucerne," just acquired, and anticipating the

sunset glories and mountain gloom of the "Goldau" and "Dazio Grande,"

which the great artist was "realizing" for him from sketches he had

chosen at Queen Anne Street. He was very busy--but never too busy to see

his friends--writing a book. And, the visitor gone, he would run up to

his room and his writing.

In the afternoon his careful mother would turn him out for a tramp round

the Norwood lanes; he might look in at the Poussins and Claudes of the

Dulwich Gallery, or, for a longer excursion, go over to Mr. Windus, and

his roomful of Turner drawings, or sit to George Richmond for the

portrait at full length with desk and portfolio, and Mont Blanc in the

background. Dinner over, another hour or two's writing, and early to

bed, after finishing his chapter with a flourish of eloquence, to be

read next morning at breakfast to father and mother and Mary. The vivid

descriptions of scenes yet fresh in their memory, or of pictures they

treasured, the "thoughts" as they used to be called, allusions to

sincere beliefs and cherished hopes, never failed to win the praise that

pleased the young writer most, in happy tears of unrestrained emotion.

These old-fashioned folk had not learnt the trick of _nil admirari._

Quite honestly they would say, with the German musician, "When I hear

good music, then must I always weep."

We can look into the little study and see what this writing was that

went on so busily and steadily. It was the long-meditated defence of

Turner, provoked by _Blackwood's Magazine_ six years before, encouraged

by Carlyle's "Heroes," and necessitated by the silence, on this topic,

of the more enlightened leaders of thought in an age of connoisseurship

and cant.

And as the winter ran out, he was ending his work, happy in the applause

of his little domestic circle, and conscious that he was preaching the

crusade of Sincerity, the cause of justice for the greatest landscape

artist of any age, and justice, at the hands of a heedless public, for

the glorious works of the supreme Artist of the universe. Let our young

painters, he concluded, go humbly to Nature, "rejecting nothing,

selecting nothing, and scorning nothing," in spite of Academic

theorists, and in time we should have a school of landscape worthy of

the inspiration they would find.

There was his book; the title of it, "Turner and the Ancients." Before

publishing, to get more experienced criticism than that of the

breakfast-table, he submitted it to his friend, W.H. Harrison. The

title, it seemed, was not explicit enough, and after debate they

substituted "Modern Painters: their Superiority in the Art of Landscape

Painting to all the Ancient Masters proved by Examples of the True, the

Beautiful, and the Intellectual, from the Works of Modern Artists,

especially from those of J.M.W. Turner, Esq., R.A." And as the severe

tone of many remarks was felt to be hardly supported by the age and

standing of so young an author, he was content to sign himself "A

Graduate of Oxford." The book was spoken of, but no part of the copy

shown, to John Murray, who said he would prefer something about German

art. It found immediate acceptance with Messrs. Smith and Elder. Young

Ruskin had been doing business for seven years past with that firm; he

was well known to them as one of the most "rising" youths of the time,

and their own literary editor, Mr. Harrison, was his private Mentor, who

revised his proofs and inserted the punctuation, which he usually

indicated only by dashes. His dealings with the publishers were

generally conducted through his father, who made very fair terms for

him, as things went then.

In May, 1843, "Modern Painters," vol. i., was published, and it was soon

the talk of the art-world. It was meant to be audacious, and naturally

created a storm. The free criticisms of public favourites made an

impression, not because they were put into strong language, for the tone

of the press was stronger then than it is now, as a whole, but because

they were backed up by illustration and argument. It was evident that

the author knew something of his subject, even if he were all wrong in

his conclusions. He could not be neglected, though he might be protested

against, decried, controverted. Artists especially, who do not usually

see their works as others see them, and are not accustomed to think of

themselves and their school as mere dots and spangles in a perspective

of history, could not be entirely content to be classed as Turner's

satellites. And while the book contained something that promised to suit

every kind of reader everyone found something to shock him. Critics were

scandalized at the depreciation of Claude; the religious were outraged

at the comparison of Turner, in a passage omitted from later editions,

to the Angel of the Sun in the Apocalypse.

But the descriptive passages were such as had never appeared before in

prose; and the obvious usefulness of the analyses of natural form and

effect made many an artist read on, while he shook his head. Some

readily owned their obligation to the new teacher. Holland, for one,

wrote to Harrison that he meant to paint the better for the snubbing he

had got. Of such as reviewed the book adversely in _Blackwood_ and the

_Athenæum_, not one undertook to refute it seriously. They merely

attacked a detail here and there, which the author discussed in two or

three replies, with a patience that showed how confident he was in his

position.

He had the good word of some of the best judges of literature. "Modern

Painters" lay on Rogers' table; and Tennyson, who a few years before had

beaten young Ruskin out of the field of poetry, was so taken with it

that he wrote to his publisher to borrow it for him, "as he longed very

much to see it," but could not afford to buy it. Sir Henry Taylor wrote

to Aubrey de Vere, the poet, begging him to read:

"A book which seems to me to be far more deeply founded in its

criticism of art than any other that I have met with ... written

with great power and eloquence, and a spirit of the most diligent

investigation.... I am told that the author's name is Ruskin, and

that he was considered at college as an odd sort of man who would

never do anything."

A second edition appeared within 12 months. When the secret of the

"Oxford Graduate" leaked out, as it did very soon, through the proud

father, Mr. John was lionized. During the winter of 1843 he met

celebrities at fashionable dinner-tables; and now that his parents were

established in their grander house on Denmark Hill,[1] they could duly

return the hospitalities of the great world.

[Footnote 1: To which they removed in October, 1842.]

It was one very satisfactory result of the success that the father was

more or less converted to Turnerism, and lined his walls with Turner

drawings, which became the great attraction of the house, far outshining

its seven acres of garden and orchard and shrubbery, and the ampler air

of cultured ease. For a gift to his son he bought "The Slave Ship," one

of Turner's latest and most disputed works; and he was all eagerness to

see the next volume in preparation.

It was intended to carry on the discussion of "Truth," with further

illustrations of mountain-form, trees and skies. And so in May, 1844,

they all went away again, that the artist-author might prepare drawings

for his plates. He was going to begin with the geology and botany of

Chamouni, and work through the Alps, eastward.

At Chamouni they had the good fortune to meet with Joseph Coutet, a

superannuated guide, whom they engaged to accompany the eager but

inexperienced mountaineer. Coutet was one of those men of natural

ability and kindliness whose friendship is worth more than much

intercourse with worldly celebrities, and for many years afterwards

Ruskin had the advantage of his care--of something more than mere

attendance. At any rate, under such guidance, he could climb where he

pleased, free from the feeling that people at home were anxious about

him.

He was not unadventurous in his scramblings, but with no ambition to get

to the top of everything. He wanted to observe the aspects of

mountain-form; and his careful outlines, slightly coloured, as his

manner then was, and never aiming at picturesque treatment, record the

structure of the rocks and the state of the snow with more than

photographic accuracy. A photograph often confuses the eye with

unnecessary detail; these drawings seized the leading lines, the

important features, the interesting points. For example, in his

Matterhorn (a drawing of 1849), as Whymper remarks in "Scrambles among

the Alps," there are particulars noted which the mere sketcher neglects,

but the climber finds out, on closer intercourse, to be the essential

facts of the mountain's anatomy. All this is not picture-making, but it

is a valuable contribution and preliminary to criticism.

From Chamouni this year they went to Simplon, and met J.D. Forbes, the

geologist, whose "viscous theory" of glaciers Ruskin adopted and

defended with warmth later on, and to the Bell' Alp, long before it had

been made a place of popular resort by Professor Tyndall's notice. The

"Panorama of the Simplon from the Bell' Alp" is to be found in the St.

George's (Ruskin) Museum at Sheffield, as a record of his

draughtsmanship in this period. Thence to Zermatt with Osborne Gordon;

Zermatt, too, unknown to the fashionable tourist, and innocent of hotel

luxuries. It is curious that, at first sight, he did not care for the

Matterhorn. It was entirely unlike his ideal of mountains. It was not at

all like Cumberland. But in a very few years he had come to love the

Alps for their own sake, and we find him regretting at Ambleside the

colour and light of Switzerland, the mountain glory which our humbler

scenery cannot match. And yet he came back to it for a home, not

ill-content.

After another visit to Chamouni, he crossed France to Paris, where

something awaited him that upset all his plans, and turned his energies

into an unexpected channel.

CHAPTER II

CHRISTIAN ART (1845-1847)

At Paris, on the way heme in 1844, he had spent some days in studying

Titian and Bellini and Perugino. They were not new to him; but now that

he was an art-critic, it behoved him to improve his acquaintance with

the old masters. "To admire the works of Pietro Perugino" was one thing;

but to understand them was another, a thing which was hardly attempted

by "the Landscape Artists of England" to whom the author of "Modern

Painters" had so far dedicated his services. He had been extolling

modernism, and depreciating "the Ancients" because they could not draw

rocks and clouds and trees; and he was fresh from his scientific

sketching in the happy hunting-ground of the modern world. A few days in

the Louvre made him the devotee of ancient art, and taught him to lay

aside his geology for history.

In one way the development was easy. The patient attempt to copy

mountain-form had made him sensitive to harmony of line; and in the

great composers of Florence and Venice he found a quality of abstract

design which tallied with his experience of what was beautiful in

Nature. Aiguilles and glaciers, drawn as he drew them, and the

figure-subjects of severe Italian draughtsmen, are beautiful by the same

laws of composition, however different the associations they suggest.

But _he_ had been learning these laws of beauty from Turner and from the

Alps; how did the ancients come by them? This could be found only in a

thorough study of their lives and times, to begin with, to which he

devoted his winter, with Rio and Lord Lindsay and Mrs. Jameson for his

authorities. He found that his foes, Caspar Poussin and Canaletto, and

the Dutch landscapists, were not the real old masters; that there had

been a great age of art before the era of Vandyck and Rubens--even before

Michelangelo and Raphael; and that, towards setting up as a critic of

the present, he must understand the past out of which it had grown. So

he determined to go to Florence and Venice, and to study the religious

painters at first hand.

Mountain-study and Turner were not to be dropped. For example, to

explain the obvious and notorious licences which Turner took with

topography, it was necessary to see in what these licences consisted. Of

the later Swiss drawings, one of the wildest and most impressive was the

"St. Gothard"; Ruskin wanted to find Turner's point of view, and to see

what alterations he had made. He told Turner so, and the artist, who

knew that his picture had been realized from a very slight sketch, was

naturally rather opposed to this test, as being, from his point of view,

merely a waste of time and trouble. He tried to persuade the Ruskins

that the Swiss Sonderbund war, then going on, made travelling unsafe,

and so forth. But in vain. Mr. John was allowed to go, for the first

time alone, without his parents, taking only a servant, and meeting the

trustworthy Coutet at Geneva.

With seven months at his own disposal, he did a vast amount of work,

especially in drawing. The studies of mountain-form and Italian design,

in the year before, had given him a greater interest in the "Liber

Studiorum," Turner's early book of Essays in Composition. He found there

that use of the pure line, about which he has since said so much,

together with a thoughtfully devised scheme of light-and-shade in

mezzotint, devoted to the treatment of landscape in the same spirit as

that in which the Italian masters treated figure-subjects in their

pen-and-bistre studies. And just as he had imitated the Rogers vignettes

in his boyhood, now in his youth he tried to emulate the fine abstract

flow and searching expressiveness of the etched line, and the studied

breadth of shade, by using the quill-pen with washes. At first he kept

pretty closely to monochrome. His object was form, and his special

talent was for draughtsmanship rather than for colour. But it was this

winter's study of the "Liber Studiorum" that started him on his own

characteristic course; and while we have no pen-and-wash work of his

before 1845 (except a few experiments after Prout), we find him now

using the pen continually during the "Modern Painters" period.

On reaching the Lake of Geneva he wrote, or sketched, one of his

best-known pieces of verse, "Mont Blanc Revisited," and a few other

poems followed, the last of the long series which had once been his

chief interest and aim in life. With this lonely journey there came new

and deeper feelings; with his increased literary power, fresh resources

of diction; and he was never so near being a poet as when he gave up

writing verse. Too condensed to be easily understood, too solemn in

their movement to be trippingly read, the lines on "The Arve at Cluse,"

on "Mont Blanc," and "The Glacier," should not be passed over as merely

rhetorical. And the reflections on the loungers at Conflans ("Why Stand

ye here all the Day Idle?") are full of the spirit in which he was

gradually approaching the great problems of his life, to pass through

art into the earnest study of human conduct and its final cause.

He was still deeply religious--more deeply so than before, and found the

echo of his own thoughts in George Herbert, with whom he "communed in

spirit" while he travelled through the Alps. But the forms of outward

religion were losing their hold over him in proportion as his inward

religion became more real and intense. It was only a few days after

writing these lines that he "broke the Sabbath" for the first time in

his life, by climbing a hill after church. That was the first shot fired

in a war, in one of the strangest and saddest wars between conscience

and reason that biography records; strange because the opposing forces

were so nearly matched, and sad because the struggle lasted until their

field of battle was desolated before either won a victory.

Later on we have to tell how he dwelt in Doubting Castle, and how he

escaped. But the pilgrim had not yet met Giant Despair; and his progress

was very pleasant in that spring of 1845, the year of fine weather, as

he drove round the Riviera, and the cities of Tuscany opened out their

treasures to him. There was Lucca, with San Frediano and the glories of

Romanesque architecture; Fra Bartolommeo's picture of the Madonna with

the Magdalen and St. Catherine of Siena, his initiation into the

significance of early religious painting: and, taking hold of his

imagination, in her marble sleep, more powerfully than any flesh and

blood, the dead lady of St. Martin's Church, Ilaria di Caretto. There

was Pisa, with the Campo Santo and the jewel shrine of Sta. Maria della

Spina, then undestroyed; the excitement of street sketching among a

sympathetic crowd of fraternizing Italians; the Abbé Rosini, Professor

of Fine Arts, whom he made friends with, endured as lecturer, and

persuaded into scaffold-building in the Campo Santo for study of the

frescoes. And there was Florence, with Giotto's campanile and Santa

Maria Novella, where the young Protestant frequented monasteries, made

hay with monks, sketched with his new-found friends Rudolf Durheim of

Berne and Dieudonné the French purist; and spent long days copying

Angelico and annotating Ghirlandajo, fevered with the sun of Italy at

its strongest, and with the rapture of discovery, "which turns the

unaccustomed head like Chianti wine."

Coutet got him away, at last, to the Alps; worn out and in despondent

reaction after all this excitement. He spent a month at Macugnaga,

reading Shakespeare and trying to draw boulders; drifting gradually back

into strength enough to attack the next piece of work, the study of

Turner sites on the St. Gothard, where he made the drawings afterwards

engraved in "Modern Painters." In August, J.D. Harding was going to

Venice, and arranged for a meeting at Baveno, on the Lago Maggiore.

Gossip had credited him with a share in "Modern Painters"; now the

tables were turned, and Griffith, the picture-dealer, wanted to know if

it was true that John Ruskin had helped Harding with his new book, just

out. They sketched together, Ruskin perhaps emulating his friend's

slap-dash style in the "Sunset" reproduced in his "Poems," and

illustrating his own in the "Water-mill." And so they drove together to

Verona and thence to Venice.

At Venice they stayed in Danieli's Hotel, on the Riva dei Schiavoni, and

began by studying picturesque canal-life. Mr. Boxall, R.A., and Mrs.

Jameson, the historian of Sacred and Legendary Art, were their

companions. Another old friend, Joseph Severn, had in 1843 gained one of

the prizes at the Westminster Hall Cartoons Competition; and a letter

from Ruskin, referring to the work there, shows how he still pondered on

the subject that had been haunting him in the Alps:

"With your hopes for the elevation of English art by means of

fresco I cannot sympathize.... It is not the material nor the space

that can give us thoughts, passions, or power. I see on our Academy

walls nothing but what is ignoble in small pictures, and would be

disgusting in large ones.... It is not the love of fresco that we

want; it is the love of God and His creatures; it is humility, and

charity, and self-denial, and fasting, and prayer; it is a total

change of character. We want more faith and less reasoning, less

strength and more trust. You want neither walls, nor plaster, nor

colours--_ça ne fait rien à l'affaire_; it is Giotto, and

Ghirlandajo, and Angelico that you want, and that you will and must

want until this disgusting nineteenth century has--I can't say

breathed, but steamed its last."

So early he had taken up and wrapped round him the mantle of Cassandra.

But he was suddenly to find the sincerity of Ghirlandajo and the

religious significance of Angelico united with the matured power of art.

Without knowing what they were to meet, Harding and he found themselves

one day in the Scuola di S. Rocco, and face to face with Tintoret.

It was the fashion earlier, and it has been the fashion since, to

undervalue Tintoret. He is not pious enough for the purists, nor

decorative enough for the Pre-Raphaelites. The ruin or the restoration

of almost all his pictures makes it impossible for the ordinary amateur

to judge them; they need reconstruction in the mind's eye, and that is a

dangerous process. Ruskin himself, as he grew older, found more interest

in the playful industry of Carpaccio than in the laborious games, the

stupendous Titan feats of Tintoret. But at this moment, solemnized

before the problems of life, he found these problems hinted in the

mystic symbolism of the School of S. Rocco; with eyes now opened to

pre-Reformation Christianity, he found its completed outcome in

Tintoret's interpretation of the life of Christ and the types of the Old

Testament; fresh from the stormy grandeur of the St. Gothard, he found

the lurid skies and looming giants of the Visitation, or the Baptism, or

the Crucifixion, re-echoing the subjects of Turner as "deep answering to

deep"; and, with Harding of the Broad Brush, he recognised the mastery

of landscape execution in the Flight into Egypt, and the St. Mary in the

Desert.

He devoted the rest of his time chiefly to cataloguing and copying

Tintoret. The catalogue appeared in "Stones of Venice," which was

suggested by this visit, and begun by some sketches of architectural

detail, and the acquisition of daguerreotypes--a new invention which

delighted him immensely, as it had delighted Turner, with trustworthy

records of detail which sometimes eluded even his industry and accuracy.

At last his friends were gone; and, left alone, he overworked himself,

as usual, before leaving Venice with crammed portfolios and

closely-written notebooks. At Padua he was stopped by a fever; all

through France he was pursued by what, from his account, appears to have

been some form of diphtheria, averted only, as he believed, in direct

answer to earnest prayer. At last his eventful pilgrimage was ended, and

he was restored to his home and his parents. It was not long before he

was at work again in his new study, looking out upon the quiet meadow

and grazing cows of Denmark Hill, and rapidly throwing into form the

fresh impressions of the summer. He was strongly influenced by the

sermons of Canon Melvill--the same preacher whom Browning in his youth

admired--a good orator and sound analytic expositor, though not a great

or independent thinker. Osborne Gordon had recommended him to read

Hooker, and he caught the tone and style of the "Ecclesiastical Polity"

only too readily, so that much of his work of that winter, the more

philosophical part of vol. ii., was damaged by inversions, and

Elizabethan quaintness as of ruff and train, long epexegetical

sentences, and far-sought pomposity of diction. It was only when he had

waded through the chaos which he set himself to survey, that he could

lay aside his borrowed stilts, and stand on his own feet in the Tintoret

descriptions--rather stiff, yet, from foregone efforts.

This volume, like the first, was completed in the winter, in one long

spell of hard work, broken only by a visit to Oxford in January as the

guest of Dr. Greswell, Head of Worcester, at a conference for the

promotion of art. Smith and Elder accepted the book on Mr. J.J. Ruskin's

terms (so his wife wrote), for they had already reported it as called

for by the public. The first volume was going into a third edition.

When his book came out he was away again in Italy, trying to show his

father all that he had seen in the Campo Santo and Giotto's Tower, and

to explain "why it more than startled him." The good man hardly felt the

force of it all at once. And there were little passages of arms and some

heart-quaking and head-shaking, until Mr. Dale, the old schoolmaster,

wrote that he had heard no less a man than Sydney Smith mention the new

book in public, in the presence of "distinguished literary characters,"

as a work of "transcendent talent, presenting the most original views,

in the most elegant and powerful language, which would work a complete

revolution in the world of taste." When he returned home it was to find

a respectful welcome. His word on matters of Art was now really worth

something, and before long it was called for. The National Gallery was

comparatively in its infancy. It had been established less than

twenty-five years, and its manager, Mr. Eastlake (afterwards Sir

Charles), had his hands full, what with rascally dealers in forged old

masters, and incompetent picture-cleaners; and an economical Government,

and a public that neither knew its own mind nor trusted his judgment. A

great outcry was set up against him for buying bad works, and spoiling

the best by restoration. Ruskin wrote very temperately to _The Times_,

pointing out that the damage had been slight compared with what was

being done everywhere else, and suggesting that, prevention being better

than cure, the pictures should be put under glass, for then they would

not need the recurring attentions of the restorer. But he blamed the

management for spending large sums on added examples of Guido and

Rubens, while they had no Angelico, no Ghirlandajo, no good Perugino,

only one Bellini, and, in a word, left his new friends, the early

Christian artists, unrepresented. He suggested that pictures might be

picked up for next to nothing in Italy; and he begged that the

collection might be made historical and educational by being fully

representative, and chronologically arranged.

CHAPTER III

"THE SEVEN LAMPS"

"Have you read an Oxford Graduate's letters on art?" wrote Miss Mitford,

of "Our Village," on January 27, 1847. "The author, Mr. Ruskin, was here

last week, and is certainly the most charming person that I have ever

known." The friendship thus begun lasted until her death. She encouraged

him in his work; she delighted in his success; and, in the grave

reverses which were to befall him, he found her his most faithful

supporter and most sympathetic consoler. In return, "his kindness

cheered her closing days; he sent her every book that would interest and

every delicacy that would strengthen her, attentions which will not

surprise those who have heard of his large and thoughtful

generosity."[2]

[Footnote 2: "The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford," edited by the

Rev. A.G. L'Estrange.]

It was natural that a rising man, so closely connected with Scotland,

should be welcomed by the leaders of the Scottish school of literature.

Sydney Smith, a former Edinburgh professor, had praised the new volume.

John Murray, as it seems from letters of the period, made overtures to

secure the author as a contributor to his Italian guide-books. Lockhart

employed him to write for the _Quarterly Review_.

Lockhart was a person of great interest for young Ruskin, who worshipped

Scott; and Lockhart's daughter, even without her personal charm, would

have attracted him as the actual grandchild of the great Sir Walter. It

was for her sake, he says, rather than for the honour of writing in the

famous _Quarterly_, that he undertook to review Lord Lindsay's

"Christian Art."

He was known to be a suitor for Miss Lockhart's hand. His father, in

view of the success he desired, had been in February looking out for a

house in the Lake District; hoping, no doubt, to see him settled there

as a sort of successor to Wordsworth and Christopher North. In March,

John Ruskin betook himself to the Salutation at Ambleside, with his

constant attendant and amanuensis George, for quiet after a tiring

winter in London society, and for his new labour of reviewing. But he

did not find himself so fond of the Lakes as of old. He wrote to his

mother (Sunday, March 28, 1847):

"I finished--and sealed up--and addressed--my last bit of work,

last night by ten o'clock--ready to send by to-day's post--so that

my father should receive it with this. I could not at all have done

it had I stayed at home: for even with all the quiet here, I have

had no more time than was necessary. For exercise, I find the

rowing very useful, though it makes me melancholy with thinking of

1838,--and the lake, when it is quite calm, is wonderfully sad and

quiet:--no bright colours--no snowy peaks. Black water--as still as

death;--lonely, rocky islets--leafless woods,--or worse than

leafless--the brown oak foliage hanging dead upon them; gray

sky;--far-off, wild, dark, dismal moorlands; no sound except the

rustling of the boat among the reeds.

"_One o'clock._--I have your kind note and my father's, and am very

thankful that you like what I have written, for I did not at all

know myself whether it were good or bad."

In the early summer he went to Oxford, for a meeting of the British

Association. He said (June 27, 1847):

"I am not able to write a full account of all I see, to amuse you,

for I find it necessary to keep as quiet as I can, and I fear it

would only annoy you to be told of all the invitations I refuse,

and all the interesting matters in which I take no part. There is

nothing for it but throwing one's self into the stream, and going

down with one's arms under water, ready to be carried anywhere, or

do anything. My friends are all busy, and tired to death. All the

members of my section, but especially (Edward) Forbes, Sedgwick,

Murchison, and Lord Northampton--and of course Buckland, are as

kind to me as men can be; but I am tormented by the perpetual sense

of my unmitigated ignorance, for I know no more now than I did when

a boy, and I have only one perpetual feeling of being in

everybody's way. The recollections of the place, too, and the being

in my old rooms, make me very miserable. I have not one moment of

profitably spent time to look back to while I was here, and much

useless labour and disappointed hope; and I can neither bear the

excitement of being in the society where the play of mind is

constant, and rolls _over_ me like heavy wheels, nor the pain of

being alone. I get away in the evenings into the hayfields about

Cumnor, and rest; but then my failing sight plagues me. I cannot

look at anything as I used to do, and the evening sky is covered

with swimming strings and eels. My best time is while I am in the

Section room, for though it is hot, and sometimes wearisome, yet I

have nothing to _say_,--little to do,--nothing to look at, and as

much as I like to hear."

He had to undergo a second disappointment in love; his health broke down

again, and he was sent to Leamington to his former doctor, Jephson, once

more a "consumptive" patient. Dieted into health, he went to Scotland

with a new-found friend, William Macdonald Macdonald of Crossmount. But

he had no taste for sport, and could make little use of his

opportunities for distraction and relaxation. One battue was enough for

him, and the rest of the visit was spent in morbid despondency, digging

thistles, and brooding over the significance of the curse of Eden, so

strangely now interwoven with his own life--"Thorns a also and

Thistles."

At Bower's Well, Perth, where his grandparents had spent their later

years, and where his parents had been married, lived Mr. George Gray, a

lawyer, and an old acquaintance of the Ruskin family. His daughter

Euphemia used to visit at Denmark Hill. It was for her that, some years

earlier, "The King of the Golden River" had been written. She had grown

up into a perfect Scotch beauty, with every gift of health and spirits

which would compensate--the old folk thought--for his retiring and

morbid nature. They were anxious, now more than ever, to see him

settled. They pressed him, in letters still extant, to propose. We have

seen how he was situated, and can understand how he persuaded himself

that fortune, after all, was about to smile upon him. Her family had

their own reasons for promoting the match, and all united in hastening

on the event.

In the Notes to Exhibitions added to a new edition of "Modern Painters,"

then in the Press, the author mentions a "hurried visit to Scotland in

the spring" of 1848. This was the occasion of his marriage at Perth, on

April 10. The young couple spent rather more than a fortnight on the way

South, among Scotch and English lakes, intending to make a more extended

tour in the summer to the cathedrals and abbeys.

The pilgrimage began with Salisbury, where a few days' sketching in the

damp and draughts of the cathedral laid the bridegroom low, and brought

the tour to an untimely end. In August, the young people were seen

safely off to Normandy, where they went by easy stages from town to

town, studying the remains of Gothic building. In October they returned

and settled in a house of their own, at 31, Park Street, where during

the winter he wrote "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," and, as a bit of

by-work, a notice of Samuel Prout for the _Art Journal._

This was Ruskin's first illustrated volume. The plates were engraved by

himself in soft-ground etching, such as Prout had used, from drawings he

had made in 1846 and 1848. Some are scrappy combinations of various

detail, but others, such as the Byzantine capital, the window in

Giotto's Campanile, the arches from St. Lo in Normandy, from St. Michele

at Lucca, and from the Ca' Foscari at Venice, are effective studies of

the actual look of old buildings, seen as they are shown us in Nature,

with her light and the shade added to all the facts of form, and her own

last touches in the way of weather-softening, and settling-faults, and

tufted, nestling plants.

Revisiting the Hôtel de la Cloche at Dijon in later years, Ruskin showed

me the room where he had "bitten" the last plate in his wash-hand basin,

as a careless makeshift for the regular etcher's bath. He was not

dissatisfied with his work himself; the public of the day wanted

something more finished. So the second edition appeared with the

subjects elaborately popularized in fashionable engraving. More recently

they have undergone reduction for a cheap issue. But any book lover

knows the value of the original "Seven Lamps" with its San Miniato cover

and autograph plates.

As to its reception, or at least the anticipation of it. Charlotte

Bronte bears witness in a letter to the publishers.

"I congratulate you on the approaching publication of Mr. Ruskin's new

work. If 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture' resemble their predecessor,

'Modern Painters,' they will be no lamps at all, but a new

constellation,--seven bright stars, for whose rising the reading world

ought to be anxiously agape."

The book was announced for his father's birthday, May 10, 1849, and it

appeared while they were among the Alps. The earlier part of this tour

is pretty fully described in "Præterita," II. xi., and "Fors," letter

xc., and so the visit of Richard Fall, the meeting with Sibylla Dowie,

and the death of cousin Mary need not be dwelt on here. From the letters

that passed between father and son we find that Mr. John had been given

a month's leave from July 26 to explore the Higher Alps, with Coutet his

guide and George his valet. The old people stayed at the Hôtel des

Bergues, and thought of little else but their son and his affairs,

looking eagerly from day to day for the last news, both of him and of

his book.

Mr. Ruskin, senior, writes from Geneva on July 29:

"Miss Tweddale says your book _has made a great sensation._" On

August 4: "The _Spectator_, which Smith sets great value on, has an

elaborate favourable notice on 'Seven Lamps,' only ascribing an

_infirmity_ of temper, quoting railroad passage in proof. Anne was

told by American family servant that you were in American Paper,

and got it for us, the _New York Tribune_ of July 13; first article

is your book. They say they are willing to be learners from, rather

than critics of, such a book, etc. The _Daily News_ (some of the

_Punch_ people's paper) has a capital notice. It begins: 'This is a

masked battery of seven pieces, which blaze away to the total

extinction of the small architectural lights we may boast of, etc.,

etc.'" On August 5: "I have, at a shameful charge of ten francs,

got August magazine and Dickens, quite a prohibition for parcels

from England. In _British Quarterly_, under æsthetics of Gothic

architecture they take four works, you first.... As a critic they

almost rank you with Goethe and Coleridge, and in style with Jeremy

Taylor."

The qualified encouragement of these remarks was further qualified with

detailed advice about health; and warnings against the perils of the

way, to which Mr. John used to answer on this wise:

"CORMAYEUR, _Sunday afternoon (July_ 29, 1849).

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"(Put the three sheets in order first, 1, 2, 3, then read this,

front and _back_, and then 2, and then 3, front and back.) You and

my mother were doubtless very happy when you saw the day clear up

as you left St. Martin's. Truly it was impossible that any day

could be more perfect towards its close. We reached Nant Bourant at

twelve o'clock, or a little before, and Coutet having given his

sanction to my wish to get on, we started again soon after one--and

reached the top of the Col de Bonhomme about five. You would have

been delighted with that view--it is one upon those lovely seas of

blue mountain, one behind the other, of which one never

tires--this, fortunately, westward--so that all the blue ridges and

ranges above Conflans and Beaufort were dark against the afternoon

sky, though misty with its light; while eastward a range of snowy

crests, of which the most important was the Mont Iseran, caught the

sunlight full upon them. The sun was as warm, and the air as mild,

on the place where the English travellers sank and perished, as in

our garden at Denmark Hill on the summer evenings. There is,

however, no small excuse for a man's losing courage on that pass,

if the weather were foul. I never saw one so literally pathless--so

void of all guide and help from the lie of the ground--so

embarrassing from the distance which one has to wind round mere

brows of craggy precipice without knowing the direction in which

one is moving, while the path is perpetually lost in heaps of

shale or among clusters of crags, even when it is free of snow.

All, however, when I passed was serene, and even beautiful--owing

to the glow which the red rocks had in the sun. We got down to

Chapiu about seven--itself one of the most desolately-placed

villages I ever saw in the Alps. Scotland is in no place that I

have seen, so barren or so lonely. Ever since I passed Shapfells,

when a child, I have had an excessive love for this kind of

desolation, and I enjoyed my little square chalet window and my

chalet supper exceedingly (mutton with garlic)."

He then confesses that he woke in the night with a sore throat, but

struggled on next day down the Allée Blanche to Cormayeur.

"I never saw such a mighty heap of stones and dust. The glacier

itself is quite invisible from the road (and I had no mind for

extra work or scrambling), except just at the bottom, where the ice

appears in one or two places, being exactly of the colour of the

heaps of waste coal at the Newcastle pits, and admirably adapted

therefore to realize one's brightest anticipations of the character

and style of the Allée _Blanche_.

"The heap of its moraine conceals, for the two miles of its extent,

the entire range of Mont Blanc from the eye. At last you weather

the mighty promontory, cross the torrent which issues from its

base, and find yourself suddenly at the very foot of the vast slope

of torn granite, which from a point not 200 feet lower than the

summit of Mont Blanc, sweeps down into the valley of Cormayeur.

"I am quite unable to speak with justice--or think with

clearness--of this marvellous view. One is so unused to see a mass

like that of Mont Blanc without any snow that all my ideas and

modes of estimating size were at fault. I only felt overpowered by

it, and that--as with the porch of Rouen Cathedral--look as I

would, I could not _see_ it. I had not mind enough to grasp it or

meet it. I tried in vain to fix some of its main features on my

memory; then set the mules to graze again, and took my sketch-book,

and marked the outlines--but where is the use of marking contours

of a mass of endless--countless--fantastic rock--12,000 feet sheer

above the valley? Besides, one cannot have sharp sore-throat for

twelve hours without its bringing on some slight feverishness; and

the scorching Alpine sun to which we had been exposed without an

instant's cessation from the height of the col till now--i.e., from

half-past ten to three--had not mended the matter; my pulse was now

beginning slightly to quicken and my head slightly to ache--and my

impression of the scene is feverish and somewhat painful; I should

think like yours of the valley of Sixt."

So he finished his drawing, tramped down the valley after his mule, in

dutiful fear of increasing his cold, and found Cormayeur crowded, only

an attic _au quatrième_ to be had. After trying to doctor himself with

gray pill, kali, and senna, Coutet cured his throat with an alum gargle,

and they went over the Col Ferret.

The courier Pfister had been sent to meet him at Martigny, and bring

latest news and personal report, on the strength of which several days

passed without letters, but not without a remonstrance from

headquarters. On August 8 he writes from Zermatt:

"I have your three letters, with pleasant accounts of critiques,

etc., and painful accounts of your anxieties. I certainly never

thought of putting in a letter at Sion, as I arrived there about

three hours after Fister left me, it being only two stages from

Martigny; and besides, I had enough to do that morning in thinking

what I should want at Zermatt, and was engaged at Sion, while we

changed horses, in buying wax candles and rice. It was unlucky that

I lost post at Visp," etc.

A few days later he says:

"On Friday I had such a day as I have only once or twice had the

like of among the Alps. I got up to a promontory projecting from

the foot of the Matterhorn, and lay on the rocks and drew it at my

ease. I was about three hours at work as quietly as if in my study

at Denmark Hill, though on a peak of barren crag above a glacier,

and at least 9,000 feet above sea. But the Matterhorn, after all,

is not so fine a thing as the aiguille Dru, nor as any one of the

aiguilles of Chamouni: for one thing, it is all of secondary rock

in horizontal beds, quite rotten and shaly; but there are other

causes of difference in impressiveness which I am endeavouring to

analyze, but find considerable embarrassment in doing so. There

seems no sufficient reason why an isolated obelisk, one-fourth

higher than any of them, should not be at least as sublime as they

in their dependent grouping; but it assuredly is not. For this

reason, as well as because I have not found here the near studies

of primitive rock I expected,--for to my great surprise, I find the

whole group of mountains, mighty as they are, except the

inaccessible Monte Rosa, of secondary limestones or slates,--I

should like, if it were possible, to spend a couple of days more on

the Montanvert, and at the bases of the Chamouni aiguilles,

sleeping at the Montanvert."

And so on, apologetically begging (as other sons beg money) for _time_,

to gather the material of "Modern Painters," volume iv.

"I hope you will think whether the objects you are after are worth risks

of sore throats or lungs," replied his father, for he had "personified a

perpetual influenza" until they got him to Switzerland, and they were

very anxious; indeed, Pfister's news from Martigny had scared his

mother--not very well herself--into wild plans for recapturing him.

However, Osborne Gordon was going to Chamouni with Mr. Pritchard, and so

they gave him a little longer; and he made the best use of his time:

"_Monday evening (August_ 20, 1849).

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"I have to-night a packet of back letters from Viège ... but I have

really hardly time to read them to-night, I had so many notes to

secure when I came from the hills. I walk up every day to the base

of the aiguilles without the slightest sense of fatigue; work there

all day hammering and sketching; and down in the evening. As far as

days by myself can be happy they are so, for I love the place with

all my heart. I have no over-fatigue or labour, and plenty of time.

By-the-by, though in most respects they are incapable of

improvement, I recollect that I thought to-day, as I was breaking

last night's ice away from the rocks of which I wanted a specimen,

with a sharpish wind and small pepper and salt-like sleet beating

in my face, that a hot chop and a glass of sherry, if they were to

be had round the corner, would make the thing more perfect. There

was however nothing to be had round the corner but some Iceland

moss, which belonged to the chamois, and an extra allowance of

north wind."

This next is scribbled on a tiny scrap of paper:

"GLACIER or GREPPOND, _August_ 21.

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"I am sitting on a gray stone in the middle of the glacier, waiting

till the fog goes away. I believe I _may_ wait. I write this line

in my pocket-book to thank my mother for hers which I did not

acknowledge last night. I am glad and sorry that she depends so

much on my letters for her comfort. I am sending them now every day

by the people who go down, for the diligence is stopped. You may

run the chance of missing one or two therefore. I am quite well,

and very comfortable--sitting on Joseph's knapsack laid on the

stone. The fog is about as thick as that of London in

November,--only white; and I see nothing near me but fields of

dampish snow with black stones in it."

And then:

"MONTANVERT, _August_ 22.

"I cannot say that on the whole the aiguilles have treated me well.

I went up Saturday, Monday and Tuesday to their feet, and never

obtained audience until to-day, and then they retired at twelve

o'clock; but I have got a most valuable memorandum."

The parental view was put thus:

GENEVA, _Monday, August_ 20, 1849.

"MY DEAREST JOHN,

"I do not know if you have got all my letters, fully explaining to

you in what way the want of a _single_ letter, on two occasions,

did _so_ much mischief--made such havoc in our peace. I think my

last Thursday's letter entered on it. We are grateful for many

letters--that have come. It was merely the accident of the moment

when first by illness and then by precipices we were most

anxious--being exactly the moment the letters took it into their

heads to be not forthcoming. Not writing so often would only keep

us more in the dark, with little less anxiety. Please say if you

get a letter every day...."

Space can hardly be afforded for more than samples of this voluminous

correspondence, or interesting quotations might be given about the

"ghost-hunt yesterday and a crystal-hunt to-day," and life at the

Montanvert, until at last (August 28):

"I have taken my place in diligence for Thursday, and hope to be

with you in good time. But I quite feel as if I were leaving home

to go on a journey. I shall not be melancholy, however, for I have

really had a good spell of it.... Dearest love to my mother. I

don't intend to write again.

"Ever, my dearest father,

"Your most affectionate son,

"J. RUSKIN."

CHAPTER IV

"STONES OF VENICE" (1849-1851)

A book about Venice had been planned in 1845, during Ruskin's first long

working visit. He had made so many notes and sketches both of

architecture and painting that the material seemed ready to hand;

another visit would fill up the gaps in his information; and two or

three months' hard writing would work the subject off, and set him free

to continue "Modern Painters." So before leaving home in 1849, he had

made up his mind that the next work would be "The Stones of Venice,"

which, on the appearance of "The Seven Lamps," was announced by the

publishers as in preparation.

He left home again early in October; by the end of November he was

settled with his wife at Hôtel Danieli, Venice, for the winter. He

expected to find without much trouble all the information he wanted as

to the dates, styles and history of Venetian buildings; but after

consulting and comparing all the native writers, it appeared that the

questions he asked of them were just the questions they were unprepared

to answer, and that he must go into the whole matter afresh. So he laid

himself out that winter for a thorough examination of St. Mark's and the

Ducal Palace and the other remains--drawing, and measuring, and

comparing their details.

His father had gone back to England in September out of health, and the

letters from home did not report improvement. His mother, too, was

beginning to fear the loss of her sight; and he could not stay away from

them any longer. In February, 1850, he broke off his work in the middle

of it, and returned to London. The rest of the year he spent in writing

the first volume of "Stones of Venice," and in preparing the

illustrations, together with "Examples of the Architecture of Venice," a

portfolio of large lithographs and engravings in mezzotint and line, to

accompany the work. It was most fortunate for Ruskin that his drawings

could be interpreted by such men as Armytage and Cousen, Cuff and Le

Keux, Boys and Lupton, and not without advantage to them that their

masterpieces should be preserved in his works, and praised as they

deserved in his prefaces. But these plates for "Stones of Venice" were

in advance of the times. The publisher thought them "caviare to the

general," so Mr. J.J. Ruskin told his son; but gave it as his own belief

that "some dealers in Ruskins and Turners in 1890 will get great prices

for what at present will not sell."

Early in 1850, his father, at his mother's desire, and with the help of

W.H. Harrison, collected and printed his poems, with a number of pieces

that still remained in MS., the author taking no part in this revival of

bygones, which, for the sake of their associations, he was not anxious

to recall--though his father still believed that he _might_ have been a

poet, and _ought_ to have been one. This is the volume of "Poems J.R.,

1850," so highly valued by collectors.

Another resurrection was "The King of the Golden River," which had lain

hidden for the nine years of the Ars Poetica. He allowed it to be

published, with woodcuts by the famous "Dicky" Doyle. The little book

ran through three editions that year. The first issue must have been

torn to rags in the nurseries of the last generation, since copies are

so rare as to have brought ten guineas apiece instead of the six

shillings at which they were advertised in 1850.

A couple of extracts from letters of 1850 will give some idea of

Ruskin's impressions of London society and the Drawing Room:

"MY DEAREST MOTHER,

"Horrible party last night--stiff--large--dull--fidgety--strange,

--run-against-everybody-know-nobody sort of party. Naval people.

Young lady claims acquaintance with me--I know as much of her as

of Queen Pomare--Talk: get away as soon as I can--ask who she

is--Lady (----);--as wise as I was before. Introduced to a black

man with chin in collar. Black man condescending--I abuse

different things to black man: chiefly the House of Lords. Black

man says he lives in it--asks where I live--don't want to tell

him--obliged--go away and ask who he is--(----); as wise as I was

before. Introduced to a young lady--young lady asks if I like

drawing--so away and ask who she is--Lady(----). Keep away, with

back to wall and look at watch. Get away at last. Very sulky this

morning--hope my father better--dearest love to you both."

"PARK STREET, _4 o'clock, (May, 1850)_.

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"We got through gloriously, though at one place there was the most

awkward crush I ever saw in my life--the pit at the Surrey, which I

never saw, may perhaps show the like--nothing else. The floor was

covered with the ruins of ladies' dresses, torn lace and fallen

flowers. But Effie was luckily out of it, and got through

unscathed--and heard people saying 'What a beautiful dress!' just

as she got up to the Queen. It was fatiguing enough but not so

_awkward_ as I expected....

"The Queen looked much younger and prettier than I expected--very

like her pictures, even like those which are thought to flatter

most--but I only saw the profile--I could not see the front face as

I knelt to her, at least without an upturning of the eyes which I

thought would be unseemly--and there were but some two or three

seconds allowed for the whole affair....

"The Queen gave her hand very graciously: but looked bored; poor

thing, well she might be, with about a quarter of a mile square of

people to bow to.

"I met two people whom I have not seen for many a day, Kildare and

Scott Murray--had a chat with the former and a word with Murray,

but nothing of interest...."

As one of the chief literary figures of the day, Ruskin could not avoid

society, and, as he tells in "Præterita," he was rewarded for the

reluctant performance of his duties by meeting with several who became

his lifelong friends. Chief among these he mentions Mr. and Mrs.

Cowper-Temple, afterwards Lord and Lady Mount Temple. The acquaintance

with Samuel Rogers, inauspiciously begun many years before, now ripened

into something like friendship; Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) and

other men of letters were met at Rogers' breakfasts. A little later a

visit to the Master of Trinity, Whewell, at Cambridge, brought him into

contact with Professer Willis, the authority on Gothic architecture, and

other notabilities of the sister University. There also he met Mr. and

Mrs. Marshall of Leeds (and Coniston); and he pursued his journey to

Lincoln, with Mr. Simpson, whom he had met at Lady Davy's, and to

Farnley for a visit to Mr. F.H. Fawkes, the owner of the celebrated

collection of Turners (April, 1851).

In London he was acquainted with many of the leading artists and persons

interested in art. Of the "teachers" of the day he was known to men so

diverse as Carlyle--and Maurice, with whom he corresponded in 1815 about

his "Notes on Sheepfolds"--and C.H. Spurgeon, to whom his mother was

devoted. He was as yet neither a hermit, nor a heretic: but mixed freely

with all sorts and conditions, with one exception, for Puseyites and

Romanists were yet as heathen men and publicans to him; and he noted

with interest, while writing his review of Venetian history, that the

strength of Venice was distinctly Anti-Papal, and her virtues Christian

but not Roman. Reflections on this subject were to have formed part of

his great work, but the first volume was taken up with the _à priori_

development of architectural forms; and the treatment in especial of

Venetian matters had to be indefinitely postponed, until another visit

had given him the opportunity of gathering his material.

Meanwhile, his wide sympathy had turned his mind toward a subject which

then had received little attention, though since then loudly

discussed--the reunion of (Protestant) Christians.

He put together his thoughts in a pamphlet on the text "There shall be

one fold and one Shepherd," calling it, in allusion to his architectural

studies, "Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds." He proposed a

compromise, trying to prove that the pretensions to priesthood on the

high Anglican side, and the objections to episcopacy on the

Presbyterian, were alike untenable; and hoped that, when once these

differences--such little things he thought them--were arranged, a united

Church of England might become the nucleus of a world-wide federation of

Protestants, a _civitas Dei_, a New Jerusalem.

There were many who agreed with his aspirations: he received shoals of

letters from sympathizing readers, most of them praising his aims and

criticising his means. Others objected rather to his manner than to his

matter; the title savoured of levity, and an art-critic writing on

theology was supposed to be wandering out of his province. Tradition

says that the "Notes" were freely bought by Border farmers under a

rather laughable mistake; but surely it was no new thing for a Scotch

reader to find a religious tract under a catching title. There were a

few replies; one by Mr. Dyce, who defended the Anglican view with mild

persiflage and the usual commonplaces. And there the matter ended, for

the public. For Ruskin, it was the beginning of a train of thought

which led him far. He gradually learnt that his error was not in asking

too much, but in asking too little. He wished for a union of

Protestants, forgetting the sheep that are not of _that_ fold, and

little dreaming of the answer he got, after many days, in "Christ's Folk

in the Apennine."

Meanwhile the first volume of "Stones of Venice" had appeared, March,

1851. Its reception was indirectly described in a pamphlet entitled

"Something on Ruskinism, with a 'Vestibule' in Rhyme, by an Architect"

complaining bitterly of the "ecstasies of rapture" into which the

newspapers had been thrown by the new work:

"Your book--since reviewers so swear--may be rational,

Still, 'tis certainly not either loyal or national;"

for it did not join in the chorus of congratulation to Prince Albert and

the British public on the Great Exhibition of 1851, the apotheosis of

trade and machinery. The "Architect" finds also--what may surprise the

modern reader who has not noticed that many an able work has been

thought unreadable on its first appearance--that he cannot understand

the language and ideas:

"Your style is so soaring--and some it makes sore--

That plain folks can't make out your strange mystical lore."

He will allow the author to be quite right, when he finds something to

agree upon; but the moment a sore point is touched, then Ruskin is

"insane." In one respect the "Architect" hit the nail on the head:

"Readers who are not reviewers by profession can hardly fail to perceive

that Ruskinism is violently inimical to _sundry existing interests_."

The best men, we said, were the first to recognise Ruskin's genius. Let

us throw into the opposite scale an opinion of more weight than the

"Architect's," in a transcript of the original letter from Carlyle.

"CHELSEA, _March_ 9, 1851.

"DEAR RUSKIN,

"I did not know yesterday till your servant was gone that there was

any note in the parcel; nor at all what a feat you had done! A loan

of the gallant young man's Memoirs was what I expected; and here,

in the most chivalrous style, comes a gift of them. This, I think,

must be in the style _prior_ to the Renaissance! What can I do but

accept your kindness with pleasure and gratitude, though it is far

beyond my deserts? Perhaps the next man I meet will use me as much

below them; and so bring matters straight again! Truly I am much

obliged, and return you many hearty thanks.

"I was already deep in the 'Stones'; and clearly purpose to hold on

there. A strange, unexpected, and I believe, most true and

excellent _Sermon_ in Stones--as well as the best piece of

schoolmastering in Architectonics; from which I hope to learn much

in a great many ways. The spirit and purport of these critical

studies of yours are a singular sign of the times to me, and a very

gratifying one. Right good speed to you, and victorious arrival on

the farther shore! It is a quite new 'Renaissance,' I believe, we

are getting into just now: either towards new, _wider_ manhood,

high again as the eternal stars; or else into final death, and the

(marsh?) of Gehenna for evermore! A dreadful process, but a needful

and inevitable one; nor do I doubt at all which way the issue will

be, though which of the extant nations are to get included in it,

and which is to be trampled out and abolished in the process, may

be very doubtful. God is great: and sure enough, the changes in the

'Construction of Sheepfolds' as well as in other things, will

require to be very considerable.

"We are still labouring under the foul kind of influenza here, I

not far from emancipated, my poor wife still deep in the business,

though I hope past the deepest. Am I to understand that you too are

seized? In a day or two I hope to ascertain that you are well

again. Adieu; here is an interruption, here also is the end of the

paper.

"With many thanks and regards."

[Signature cut away.]

As soon as the first volume of "Stones of Venice" and the "Notes on the

Construction of Sheepfolds" were published, Ruskin took a short Easter

holiday at Matlock, and set to work at a new edition of "Modern

Painters." This was the fifth reprint of the first volume, and the third

of vol. ii. They were carefully and conscientiously revised, and the

Postscript indulged in a little triumph at the changed tone of public

criticism upon Turner.

But it was too late to have been much service to the great artist

himself. In 1845--after saying good-bye and "Why _will_ you go to

Switzerland? there will be such a _fidge_ about you when you're

gone"--Turner lost his health, and was never himself again. The last

drawings he did for Ruskin (January, 1848), the "Brünig" and the

"Descent from the St. Gothard to Airolo," showed his condition

unmistakably; and the lonely restlessness of the last, disappointing

years were, for all his friends, a melancholy ending to a brilliant

career. Ruskin wrote:

"This year (1851) he has no picture on the walls of the Academy;

and the _Times_ of May 3 says: 'We miss those works of

INSPIRATION'!"

"_We_ miss! Who misses? The populace of England

rolls by to weary itself in the great bazaar of Kensington,[3]

little thinking that a day will come when those veiled vestals and

prancing amazons, and goodly merchandise of precious stones and

gold, will all be forgotten as though they had not been; but that

the light which has faded from the walls of the Academy is one

which a million Koh-i-noors could not rekindle; and that the year

1851 will, in the far future, be remembered less for what it has

displayed, than for what it has withdrawn."

[Footnote 3: The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.]

CHAPTER V

PRE-RAPHAELITISM (1851-1853)

The _Times_, in May 1851, missed "those works of inspiration," as Ruskin

had at last taught people to call Turner's pictures. But the

acknowledged mouthpiece of public opinion found consolation in

castigating a school of young artists who had "unfortunately become

notorious by addicting themselves to an antiquated style and an affected

simplicity in painting.... We can extend no toleration to a mere servile

imitation of the cramped style, false perspective, and crude colour of

remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery 'snapped

instead of folded'; faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated into

skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's shop, and

expression forced into caricature.... That morbid infatuation which

sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity

deserves no quarter at the hands of the public."

Ruskin knew nothing personally of these young innovators, and had not at

first sight wholly approved of the apparently Puseyite tendency of

Rossetti's "Ecce Ancilla Domini," Millais' "Carpenter's Shop," and

Holman Hunt's "Early Christian Missionary," exhibited the year before.

All these months he had been closely kept to his "Sheepfolds" and

"Stones of Venice"; but now he was correcting the proofs of "Modern

Painters," vol. i., as thus:

"Chapter the last, section 21: _The duty and after privileges of

all students_.... Go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk

with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but

how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction;

rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing;

believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in

the truth."

And at Coventry Patmore's request he went to the Academy to look at the

pictures in question. Yes; the faces were ugly: Millais' "Mariana" was a

piece of idolatrous Papistry, and there was a mistake in the

perspective. Collins' "Convent Thoughts"--more Popery; but very

careful--"the tadpole too small for its age"; but what studies of

plants! And there was his own "Alisma Plantago," which he had been

drawing for "Stones of Venice" (vol. i., plate 7) and describing: "The

lines through its body, which are of peculiar beauty, mark the different

expansions of its fibres, and are, I think, exactly the same as those

which would be traced by the currents of a river entering a lake of the

shape of the leaf, at the end where the stalk is, and passing out at its

point." Curvature was one of the special subjects of Ruskin, the one he

found most neglected by ordinary artists. The "Alisma" was a test of

observation and draughtsmanship. He had never seen it so thoroughly or

so well drawn, and heartily wished the study were his.

Looking again at the other works of the school, he found that the one

mistake in the "Mariana" was the only error in perspective in the whole

series of pictures; which could not be said of any twelve works,

containing architecture, by popular artists in the exhibition; and that,

as studies both of drapery and of every other minor detail, there had

been nothing in art so earnest or so complete as these pictures since

the days of Albert Dürer.

He went home, and wrote his verdict in a letter to _The Times_ (May 9,

1851). Next day he asked the price of Hunt's "Two Gentlemen of Verona,"

and Millais' "Return of the Dove." On the 13th his letter appeared in

_The Times_, and on the 26th he wrote again, pointing out beauties, and

indications of power in conception, and observation of Nature, and

handling, where at first he, like the rest of the public, had been

repelled by the wilful ugliness of the faces. Meanwhile the

Pre-Raphaelites wrote to tell him that they were neither Papists nor

Puseyites. The day after his second letter was published he received an

ill-spelt missive, anonymously abusing them. This was the sort of thing

to interest his love of poetical justice. He made the acquaintance of

several of the Brethren. "Charley" Collins, as his friends

affectionately called him, was the son of a respected R.A., and the

brother of Wilkie Collins; himself afterwards the author of a delightful

book of travel in France, "A Cruise upon Wheels." Millais turned out to

be the most gifted, charming and handsome of young artists. Holman Hunt

was already a Ruskin-reader, and a seeker after truth, serious and

earnest in his religious nature as in his painting.

The Pre-Raphaelites were not, originally, Ruskin's pupils, nor was their

movement, directly, of his creation. But it was the outcome of a general

tendency which he, more than any man, had helped to set in motion; and

it was the fulfilment, though in a way he had not expected, of his

wishes.

His attraction to Pre-Raphaelitism was none the less real because it was

sudden, and brought about partly by personal influence. And in

re-arranging his art-theory to take them in, he had before his mind

rather what he hoped they would become than what they were. For a time,

his influence over them was great; their first three years were their

own; their next three years were practically his; and some of them, the

weaker brethren, leaned upon him until they lost the command of their

own powers. No artist can afford to use another man's eyes; still less,

another man's brain and heart. Ruskin, great as an exponent, was in no

sense a master of artists; and if he cheered on the men, who, he

believed, were the best of the time, it did not follow that he should be

saddled with the responsibility of directing them.

The famous pamphlet on "Pre-Raphaelitism" of August, 1851, showed that

the same motives of Sincerity impelled both the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren

and Turner and, in a degree, men so different as Prout, old Hunt, and

Lewis. All these were opposed to the Academical School who worked by

rule of thumb; and they differed among one another only in differences

of physical power and moral aim. Which was all perfectly true, and much

truer than the cheap criticism which could not see beyond superficial

differences, or the fossil theories of the old school. But

Pre-Raphaelitism was an unstable compound, liable to explode upon the

experimenter, and its component parts to return to their old antithesis

of crude naturalism on the one hand, and affectation of piety or poetry

or antiquarianism, on the other. And _that_ their new champion did not

then foresee. All he knew was that, just when he was sadly leaving the

scene, Turner gone and night coming on, new lights arose. It was really

far more noteworthy that Millais and Rossetti and Hunt were _men of

genius_, than that the "principles" they tried to illustrate were sound,

and that Ruskin divined their power, and generously applauded them.

Immediately after finishing the pamphlet on "Pre-Raphaelitism," he left

for the Continent with his wife and friends, the Rev. and Mrs. Daniel

Moore; spent a fortnight in his beloved Savoy, with the Pritchards; and

then crossed the Alps with Charles Newton. On the 1st of September he

was at Venice, for a final spell of labour on the palaces and churches.

After spending a week with Rawdon Brown he settled at Casa Wetzler,

Campo Sta. Maria Zobenigo, and during the autumn and winter not only

worked extremely hard at his architecture, but went with his wife into

Austrian and Italian society and saw many distinguished visitors. One of

them, whom he lectured on the shortcomings of the Renaissance, was Dean

Milman. "I am amused at your mode of ciceronizing the Dean of St.

Paul's," wrote his father, who kept up the usual close correspondence,

and made himself useful in looking up books of reference and consulting

authorities like Mr. James Fergusson--for these chapters of easy

eloquence were not written without a world of pains. The engravers and

the business department of the new publications also required his

co-operation, for they were now becoming large ventures. During the

three and a half years preceding the summer of 1851 Ruskin seems to have

spent £1,680 of profits from his books, making by his writings at this

period only about a third of his annual outlay; so that the estimated

cost of these great illustrated volumes, some £1,200, was a matter of

anxiety to his father, who, together with the publisher, deprecated

large plates and technical details, and expressed some impatience to

see results from this visit to Venice. He looked eagerly for every new

chapter or drawing as it was sent home for criticism. Some passages,

such as the description of the Calle San Moise ("Stones of Venice," II.

iv,) were unfavourably received by him. Another time he says, "You have

a very great difficulty now in writing any more, which is to write up to

yourself": or again,--"Smith reports slow sale of 'Stones of Venice'

(vol. I.) and 'Pre-Raphaelitism.' The times are sorely against you. The

Exhibition has impoverished the country, and literature of a saleable

character seems chiefly confined to shilling books in green paper, to be

had at railway stations. Smith will have an account against us." He

always sent adverse press-notices, on the principle that it was good for

John: and every little discouragement or annoyance was discussed in

full.

The most serious news, threatening complete interruption of the work

rapidly progressing in spite of all, was of Turner's death (December 19,

1851). Old Mr. Ruskin heard of it on the 21st, a "dismal day" to him,

spent in sad contemplation of the pictures his son had taught him to

love. Soon it came out that John Ruskin was one of the executors named

in the will, with a legacy of _£20_ for a mourning ring:--"Nobody can

say you were paid to praise," says his father. It was gossipped that he

was expected to write Turner's biography--"five years' work for you,"

says the old man, full of plans for gathering material. But when one

scandal after another reached his ears, he changed his tone, and

suggested dropping personal details, and giving a "Life of his Art," in

the intended third and final volume of "Modern Painters." Something of

the sort was done in the Edinburgh Lectures and at the close of vol. v.

of "Modern Painters": and the official life was left to Walter

Thornbury, with which Mr. Ruskin perhaps did not wish to interfere. But

he collected a mass of then unpublished material about Turner, which

goes far to prove that the kindly view he took of the strange man's

morbid and unhappy life was not without justification. At the time, so

many legal complications developed that Ruskin was advised to resign his

executorship; later on he was able to fulfil its duties as he conceived

them, in arranging Turner's sketches for the National Gallery.

Others of his old artist-friends were now passing away. Early in January

Mr. J.J. Ruskin called on William Hunt and found him feeble: "I like the

little Elshie," he says, nicknaming him after the Black Dwarf, for Hunt

was somewhat deformed:

"He is softened and humanized. There is a gentleness and a greater

_bonhomie_--less reserve. I had sent him 'Pre-Raphaelitism.' He had

marked it very much with pencil. He greatly likes your notice of

people not keeping to their last. So many clever artists, he says,

have been ruined by not acting on your principles. I got a piece of

advice from Hunt,--never to commission a picture. He could not have

done my pigeon so well had he felt he was doing it for anybody."

The pigeon was a drawing he had just bought; in later years at

Brantwood.

In February 1852 a dinner-party was given to celebrate in his absence

John Ruskin's thirty-third birthday.

"On Monday, 9th, we had Oldfield (Newton was in Wales), Harrison,

George Richmond, Tom, Dr. Grant, and Samuel Prout. The latter I

never saw in such spirits, and he went away much satisfied.

Yesterday at church we were told that he came home very happy,

ascended to his painting-room, and in a quarter of an hour from his

leaving our cheerful house was a corpse, from apoplexy. He never

spoke after the fit came on. He had always wished for a sudden

death."

Next year, in November, 1853, he tells of a visit paid, by John's

request, to W.H. Deverell, the young Pre-Raphaelite, whom he found "in

squalor and sickness--with his Bible open--and not long to live--while

Howard abuses his picture at Liverpool."

Early in 1852 Charles Newton was going to Greece on a voyage of

discovery, and wanted John Ruskin to go with him. But the parents would

not hear of his adventuring himself at sea "in those engine-vessels." So

Newton went alone, and "dug up loads of Phoenician antiquities." One

cannot help regretting that Ruskin lost this opportunity of

familiarizing himself with the early Greek art which, twenty years later

he tried to expound. For the time he was well enough employed on the

"Stones of Venice." He tells the story of this ten months' stay in a

letter to his venerable friend Rogers the poet, dated June 23 (1852).

"I was out of health and out of heart when I first got here. There

came much painful news from home, and then such a determined course

of bad weather, and every other kind of annoyance, that I never was

in a temper fit to write to anyone: the worst of it was that I lost

all _feeling_ of Venice, and this was the reason both of my not

writing to you and of my thinking of you so often. For whenever I

found myself getting utterly hard and indifferent I used to read

over a little bit of the 'Venice' in the 'Italy' and it put me

always into the right tone of thought again, and for this I cannot

be enough grateful to you. For though I believe that in the summer,

when Venice is indeed lovely, when pomegranate blossoms hang over

every garden-wall, and green sunlight shoots through every wave,

custom will not destroy, or even weaken, the impression conveyed at

first; it is far otherwise in the length and bitterness of the

Venetian winters. Fighting with frosty winds at every turn of the

canals takes away all the old feelings of peace and stillness; the

protracted cold makes the dash of the water on the walls a sound of

simple discomfort, and some wild and dark day in February one

starts to find oneself actually balancing in one's mind the

relative advantages of land and water carriage, comparing the Canal

with Piccadilly, and even hesitating whether for the rest of one's

life one would rather have a gondola within call or a hansom."

He then goes on to lament the decay of Venice, the idleness and

dissipation of the populace, the lottery gambling; and to forebode the

"destruction of old buildings and erection of new" changing the place

"into a modern town--a bad imitation of Paris." Better than that he

thinks would be utter neglect; St. Mark's Place would again be, what it

was in the early ages, a green field, and the front of the Ducal Palace

and the marble shafts of St. Mark's would be rooted in wild violets and

wreathed with vines:

"She will be beautiful again then, and I could almost wish that the

time might come quickly, were it not that so many noble pictures

must be destroyed first.... I love Venetian pictures more and more,

and wonder at them every day with greater wonder; compared with all

other paintings they are so easy, so instinctive, so natural;

everything that the men of other schools did by rule and called

composition, done here by instinct and only called truth.

"I don't know when I have envied anybody more than I did the other

day the directors and clerks of the Zecca. There they sit at inky

deal desks, counting out rolls of money, and curiously weighing the

irregular and battered coinage of which Venice boasts; and just

over their heads, occupying the place which in a London

countinghouse would be occupied by a commercial almanack, a

glorious Bonifazio--'Solomon and the Queen of Sheba'; and in a less

honourable corner three _old_ directors of the Zecca, very

mercantile-looking men indeed, counting money also, like the living

ones, only a little _more_ living, painted by Tintoret; not to

speak of the scattered Palma Vecchios, and a lovely Benedetto Diana

which no one ever looks at. I wonder when the European mind will

again awake to the great fact that a noble picture was not painted

to be _hung_, but to be _seen_? I only saw these by accident,

having been detained in Venice by soma obliging person who

abstracted some [of his wife's jewels] and brought me thereby into

various relations with the respectable body of people who live at

the wrong end of the Bridge of Sighs--the police, whom, in spite of

traditions of terror, I would very willingly have changed for some

of those their predecessors whom you have honoured by a note in the

'Italy.' The present police appear to act on exactly contrary

principles; yours found the purse and banished the loser; these

_don't_ find the jewels, and won't let me go away. I am afraid no

punishment is appointed in Venetian law for people who steal

_time_."

Mr. Ruskin returned to England in July, 1852, and settled next door to

his old home on Herne Hill. He said he could not live any more in Park

Street, with a dead brick wall opposite his windows. And so, under the

roof where he wrote the first volume of "Modern Painters," he finished

"Stones of Venice." These latter volumes give an account of St. Mark's

and the Ducal Palace and other ancient buildings; a complete catalogue

of Tintoret's pictures--the list he had begun in 1845; and a history of

the successive styles of architecture, Byzantine, Gothic, and

Renaissance, interweaving illustrations of the human life and character

that made the art what it was.

The kernel of the work was the chapter on the Nature of Gothic; in which

he showed, more distinctly than in the "Seven Lamps," and connected with

a wider range of thought, suggested by Pre-Raphaelitism, the doctrine

that art cannot be produced except by artists; that architecture, in so

far as it is an art, does not mean mechanical execution, by

unintelligent workmen, from the vapid working-drawings of an architect's

office; and, just as Socrates postponed the day of justice until

philosophers should be kings and kings philosophers, so Ruskin postponed

the reign of art until workmen should be artists, and artists workmen.

CHAPTER VI

THE EDINBURGH LECTURES (1853-1854)

By the end of June, 1853, "Stones of Venice" was finished, as well as a

description of Giotto's works at Padua, written for the Arundel Society.

The social duties of the season were over; Ruskin and his wife went

north to spend a well-earned holiday. At Wallington in Northumberland,

staying with Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan, he met Dr. John Brown at

Edinburgh, author of "Pet Marjorie" and other well-known works, who

became his lifelong friend. Ruskin invited Millais, by this time an

intimate and heartily-admired friend,[4] to join them at Glenfinlas.

Ruskin devoted himself first to foreground studies, and made careful

drawings of rock-detail; and then, being asked to give a course of

lectures before the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, he was soon busy

writing once more, and preparing the cartoon-sketches, "diagrams" as he

called them, to illustrate his subjects. Dr. Acland had joined the

party; and he asked Millais to sketch their host as he stood

contemplatively on the rocks with the torrent thundering beside him. The

picture with additional work in the following winter, became the

well-known portrait in the possession of Sir Henry Acland, much the best

likeness of this early period.

[Footnote 4: "What a beauty of a man he is!" wrote old Mr. Ruskin, "and

high in intellect.... Millais' sketches are 'prodigious'! Millais is the

painter of the age." "Capable, it seems to me, of almost everything, if

his life and strength be spared," said the younger Ruskin to Miss

Mitford.]

Another portrait was painted--in words--by one of his audience at

Edinburgh on November 1, when he gave the opening lecture of his course,

his first appearance on the platform. The account is extracted from the

_Edinburgh Guardian_ of November 19, 1853:

"Before you can see the lecturer, however, you must get into the

hall, and that is not an easy matter, for, long before the doors

are opened, the fortunate holders of season tickets begin to

assemble, so that the crowd not only fills the passage, but

occupies the pavement in front of the entrance and overflows into

the road. At length the doors open, and you are carried through the

passage into the hall, where you take up, of course, the best

available position for seeing and hearing.... After waiting a weary

time ... the door by the side of the platform opens, and a thin

gentleman with light hair, a stiff white cravat, dark overcoat with

velvet collar, walking, too with a slight stoop, goes up to the

desk, and looking round with a self-possessed and somewhat formal

air, proceeds to take off his great-coat, revealing thereby, in

addition to the orthodox white cravat, the most orthodox of white

waistcoats.... 'Dark hair, pale face, and massive marble brow--that

is my ideal of Mr. Ruskin,' said a young lady near us. This proved

to be quite a fancy portrait, as unlike the reality as could well

be imagined, Mr. Ruskin has light sand-coloured hair; his face is

more red than pale; the mouth well-cut, with a good deal of

decision in its curve, though somewhat wanting in sustained dignity

and strength; an aquiline nose; his forehead by no means broad or

massive, but the brows full and well bound together; the eye we

could not see, in consequence of the shadows that fell upon his

countenance from the lights overhead, but we are sure it must be

soft and luminous, and that the poetry and passion we looked for

almost in vain in other features must be concentrated there.[5]

After sitting for a moment or two, and glancing round at the sheets

on the wall as he takes off his gloves, he rises, and leaning

slightly over the desk, with his hands folded across, begins at

once,--'You are proud of your good city of Edinburgh,' etc.

[Footnote 5: "Mary Russell Mitford found him as a young man 'very

eloquent and distinguished-looking, tall, fair, and slender, with a

gentle playfulness, and a sort of pretty waywardness that was quite

charming.' Sydney Dobell, again, in 1852, discovered an earnestness

pervading every feature, giving power to a face that otherwise

would be merely lovable for its gentleness. And, finally, one who

visited him at Denmark Hill characterized him as emotional and

nervous, with a soft, genial eye, a mouth 'thin and severe,' and a

voice that, though rich and sweet, yet had a tendency to sink into

a plaintive and hopeless tone,"--_Literary World_, May 19, 1893.]

"And now for the style of the lecture.... Properly speaking, there

were two styles essentially distinct, and not well blended,--a

speaking and a writing style; the former colloquial and spoken

off-hand; the latter rhetorical and carefully read in quite a

different voice,--we had almost said intoned.... He has a

difficulty in sounding the letter 'r'; [and there is a] peculiar

tone in the rising and falling of his voice at measured intervals,

in a way scarcely ever heard except in the public lection of the

service appointed to be read in churches. These are the two things

with which, perhaps you are most surprised,--his dress and manner

of speaking--both of which (the white waistcoat notwithstanding)

are eminently clerical. You naturally expect, in one so

independent, a manner free from conventional restraint, and an

utterance, whatever may be the power of voice, at least expressive

of a strong individuality; and you find instead a Christ Church man

of ten years' standing, who has not yet taken orders; his dress and

manner derived from his college tutor, and his elocution from the

chapel-reader."

The lectures were a summing up, in popular form, of the chief topics of

Ruskin's thought during the last two years. The first (November 1)

stated, with more decision and warmth than part of his audience

approved, his plea for the Gothic Revival, for the use of Gothic as a

domestic style. The next lecture, given three days later, went on to

contrast the wealth of ornament in mediæval buildings with the poor

survivals of conventionalized patterns which did duty for decoration in

nineteenth-century "Greek" architecture; and he raised a laugh by

comparing a typical stonemason's lion with a real tiger's head, drawn in

the Edinburgh zoological gardens by Mr. Millais.

The last two lectures, on November 15 and 18, were on Painting; briefly

reviewing the history of landscape and the life and aims of Turner; and

finally, Christian art and Sincerity in imagination, which was now put

forth as the guiding principle of Pre-Raphaelitism.

Public opinion was violently divided over these lectures; and they were

the cause of much trouble at home. The fact of his lecturing at all

aroused strong opposition from his friends and remonstrances from his

parents. Before the event his mother wrote: "I cannot reconcile myself

to the thought of your bringing yourself personally before the world

till you are somewhat older and stronger." Afterwards, his father, while

apologizing for the word "degrading," is disgusted at his exposing

himself to such an interruption as occurred, and to newspaper comments

and personal references. The notion of an "itinerant lecturer"

scandalizes him. He hears from Harrison and Holding that John is to

lecture even at their very doors--in Camberwell. "I see small bills up,"

he writes, "with the lecturers' names; among them Mr. ---- who gets your

old clothes!" And he bids him write to the committee that his parents

object to his fulfilling the engagement. He postponed his lecture--for

ten years; but accepted the Presidency of the Camberwell Institute,

which enabled him to appear at their meetings without offence to any.

While staying at Edinburgh, Mr. Ruskin met the various celebrities of

modern Athens, some of them at the table of his former fellow-traveller

in Venice, Mrs. Jameson. He then returned home to prepare the lectures

for printing.

These lectures as published in April, 1854 were fiercely assailed by the

old school; but a more serious blow fell on him before that month was

out. His wife returned to her parents and instituted a suit against him,

to which he made no answer. The marriage was annulled in July. A year

later she married Millais.

In May (1854) the Pre-Raphaelites again needed his defence. Mr. Holman

Hunt exhibited the "Light of the World" and the "Awakening Conscience."

Ruskin made them the theme of two more letters to _The Times_;

mentioning, by the way, the "spurious imitations of Pre-Raphaelite work"

which were already becoming common. Starting for his summer tour on the

Continent, in the Simmenthal he wrote a pamphlet on the opening of the

Crystal Palace. There had been much rejoicing over the "new style of

architecture" in glass and iron, and its purpose as a palace of art.

Ruskin who had declined, in the last chapter of the "Seven Lamps," to

join in the cry for a new style, was not at all ready to accept this as

any real artistic advance; and took the opportunity to plead again for

the great buildings of the past, which were being destroyed or

neglected, while the British public was glorifying its gigantic

greenhouse. The pamphlet practically suggested the establishment of the

Society for the preservation of ancient buildings, which has since come

into operation.

This summer of 1854 he projected a study of Swiss history: to tell the

tale of six chief towns--Geneva, Fribourg, Basle, Thun, Baden and

Schaffhausen, to which in 1858 he added Rheinfelden and Bellinzona. He

intended to illustrate the work with pictures of the places described.

He began with his drawing of Thun, a large bird's-eye view of the town

with its river and bridges, roofs and towers, all exquisitely defined

with the pen, and broadly coloured in fluctuating tints that seem to

melt always into the same aerial blue; the blue, high up the picture,

beyond the plain, deepening into distant mountains.

But his father wanted to see "Modern Painters" completed, and so he

began his third volume at Vevey, with the discussion of the grand style,

in which he at last broke loose from Reynolds, as was inevitable, after

his study of Pre-Raphaelitism, and all the varied experiences of the

last ten years. The lesson of the Tulse Hill ivy had been brought home

to him in many ways: he had found it to be more and more true that

Nature is, after all, the criterion of art, and that the greatest

painters were always those whose aim, so far as they were conscious of

an aim, was to take fact for their starting-point. Idealism, beauty,

imagination, and the rest, though necessary to art, could not, he felt,

be made the object of study; they were the gift of heredity, of

circumstances, of national aspirations and virtues; not to be produced

by the best of rules, or achieved by the best of intentions.

What his own view of his own work was can be gathered from a letter to

an Edinburgh student, written on August 6, 1854:

"I am sure I never said anything to dissuade you from trying to

excel or to do great things. I only wanted you to be sure that your

efforts were made with a substantial basis, so that just in the

moment of push your footing might not give way beneath you; and

also I wanted you to feel that long and steady effort made in a

contented way does more than violent effort made from some strong

motive and under some enthusiastic impulse. And I repeat--for of

this I am perfectly sure--that the best things are only to be done

in this way. It is very difficult thoroughly to understand the

difference between indolence and reserve of strength, between

apathy and severity, between palsy and patience; but there is all

the difference in the world; and nearly as many men are ruined by

inconsiderate exertions as by idleness itself. To do as much as you

can heartily and happily do each day in a well-determined

direction, with a view to far-off results, with present enjoyment

of one's work, is the only proper, the only essentially profitable

way."

CHAPTER VII

THE WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE (1854-1855)

Philanthropic instincts, and a growing sense of the necessity for social

reform, had led Ruskin for some years past towards a group of liberal

thinkers with whom he had little otherwise in common. At Venice, in

1852, he had written several articles on education, taxation, and so

forth, with which he intended to plunge into active politics. His

father, like a cautious man of business who knew his son's powers and

thought he knew their limitations, was strongly opposed to this

attempt, and used every argument against it. He appealed to his son's

sensitiveness, and assured him that he would be "flayed" unless he

wrapped himself in the hide of a rhinoceros. He assured him that,

without being on the spot to follow the discussions of politicians, it

was useless to offer them any opinions whatsoever. And he ended by

declaring that it would be the ruin of his business and of his peace of

mind if the name of Ruskin were mixed up with Radical electioneering:

not that he was unwilling to suffer martyrdom for a cause in which he

believed, but he did not believe in the movements afoot--neither the

Tailors' Cooperative Society, in which their friend F.J. Furnivall was

interested, nor in any outcome of Chartism or Chartist principles. And

so for a time the matter dropped.

In 1854, the Rev. F.D. Maurice founded the Working Men's College. Mr.

Furnivall sent the circulars to John Ruskin; who thereupon wrote to

Maurice, and offered his services. At the opening lecture on October 31,

1854, at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, Furnivall distributed to all

comers a reprint of the chapter "On the Nature of Gothic," which we have

already noticed as a statement of the conclusions drawn from the study

of art respecting the conditions under which the life of the workman

should be regulated. Ruskin thus appeared as contributing, so to say,

the manifesto of the movement.

He took charge from the commencement of the drawing-classes--first at 31

Red Lion Square, and afterwards at Great Ormond Street; also

super-intending classes taught by Messrs. Jeffery and E. Cooke at the

Working Women's (afterwards the Working Men and Women's) College, Queen

Square.

In this labour he had two allies; one a friend of Maurice's, Lowes

Dickinson, the well-known artist, whose portrait of Maurice was

mentioned with honour in the "Notes on the Academy"; his portrait of

Kingsley hangs in the hall of the novelist-professor's college at

Cambridge. The other helper was new friend.

To people who know him only as the elegant theorist of art, sentimental

and egotistic, as they will have it, there must be something strange,

almost irreconcilable, in his devotion, week after week and year after

year, to these night-classes. Still more must it astonish them to find

the mystic author of the "Blessed Damozel," the passionate painter of

the "Venus Verticordia," working by Ruskin's side in this rough

navvy-labour of philanthropy.

It was early in 1854 that a drawing of D.G. Rossetti was sent to Ruskin

by a friend of the painter's. The critic already knew Millais and Hunt

personally, but not Rossetti. He wrote kindly, signing himself "yours

respectfully," which amused the young painter. He made acquaintance, and

in the appendix to his Edinburgh Lectures placed Rossetti's name with

those of Millais and Hunt, especially praising their imaginative power,

as rivalling that of the greatest of the old masters.

He did more than this. He agreed to buy, up to a certain sum every year,

any drawings that Rossetti brought him, at their market price; and his

standard of money-value for works of art has never been niggardly. This

sort of help, the encouragement to work, is exactly what makes progress

possible to a young and independent artist; it is better for him than

fortuitous exhibition triumphs--much better than the hack-work which

many have to undertake, to eke out their livelihood. And the mere fact

of being bought by the eminent art-critic was enough to encourage other

patrons.

"He seems in a mood to make my fortune," said Rossetti in the spring of

1854; and early in 1855 Ruskin wrote:

"It seems to me that, of all the painters I know, you on the whole

have the greatest genius; and you appear to me also to be--as far

as I can make out--a very good sort of person, I see that you are

unhappy, and that you can't bring out your genius as you should.

It seems to me then the proper and _necessary_ thing, if I can, to

make you more happy; and that I shall be more really useful in

enabling you to paint properly, and keep your room in order, than

in any other way."

He did his best to keep that room in order in every sense. Anxious to

promote the painter's marriage with Miss Siddal--"Princess Ida," as

Ruskin called her--he offered a similar arrangement to that which he had

made with Rossetti; and began in 1855 to give her £150 a year in

exchange for drawings up to that value. Rossetti's poems also found a

warm admirer and advocate. In 1856, "The Burden of Nineveh" was

published anonymously in the _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_; Ruskin

wrote to Rossetti that it was "glorious" and that he wanted to know who

was the author,--perhaps not without a suspicion that he was addressing

the man who could tell. In 1861 he guaranteed, or advanced, the cost of

"The Early Italian Poets," up to £100, with Smith and Elder; and

endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to induce Thackeray to find a place for

other poems in _The Cornhill Magazine._

Mr. W.M. Rossetti, in his book on his brother "as Designer and Writer"

and in his "Family Letters," draws a pleasant picture of the intimacy

between the artist and the critic. "At one time," he says, "I am sure

they even loved one another." But in 1865 Rossetti, never very tolerant

of criticism and patronage, took in bad part his friend's remonstrances

about the details of "Venus Verticordia." Eighteen months later, Ruskin

tried to renew the old acquaintance. Rossetti did not return his call;

and further efforts on Ruskin's part, up to 1870, met with little

response. But the lecture on Rossetti in "The Art of England" shows that

on one side at least "their parting," as Mr. W.M. Rossetti says, "was

not in anger;" and the portrait of 1861, now in the Oxford University

Galleries, will remain as a memorial of the ten years' friendship of the

two famous men.

At Red Lion Square, during Lent term, 1855, the three teachers worked

together every Thursday evening. With the beginning of the third term,

March 29, the increase of the class made it more convenient to divide

their forces. Rossetti thenceforward taught the figure on another night

of the week; while the elementary and landscape class continued to meet

on Thursdays under Ruskin and Lowes Dickinson. In 1856 the elementary

and landscape class was further divided, Mr. Dickinson taking Tuesday

evenings, and Ruskin continuing the Thursday class, with the help of

William Ward as under-master. Later on, G. Allen, J. Bunney, and W.

Jeffrey were teachers. Burne-Jones, met in 1856 at Rossetti's studio,

was also pressed into the service for a time.

There were four terms in the Working Men's College year, the only

vacation, except for the fortnight at Christmas, being from the

beginning of August to the end of October. Ruskin did not always attend

throughout the summer term, though sometimes his class came down to him

into the country to sketch. He kept up the work without other

intermission until May, 1858, after which the completion of "Modern

Painters" and many lecture-engagements took him away for a time. In the

spring of 1860 he was back at his old post for a term; but after that he

discontinued regular attendance, and went to the Working Men's College

only at intervals, to give addresses or informal lectures to students

and friends. On such occasions the "drawing-room" or first floor of the

house in which the College was held would be always crowded, with an

audience who heard the lecturer at his best; speaking freely among

friends out of a full treasure-house "things new and old"--accounts of

recent travel, lately-discovered glories of art, and the growing burden

of the prophecy that in those years was beginning to take more definite

shape in his mind.

As a teacher, Ruskin spared no pains to make the work interesting. He

provided--Mr. E. Cooke informs me that he was the first to

provide--casts from natural leaves and fruit in place of the ordinary

conventional ornament; and he sent a tree to be fixed in a corner of the

class-room for light and shade studies. Mr. W. Ward in the preface to

the volume of letters already quoted says that he used to bring his

minerals and shells, and rare engravings and drawings, to show them.

"His delightful way of talking about these things afforded us most

valuable lessons. To give an example: he one evening took for his

subject a cap, and with pen and ink showed us how Rembrandt would have

etched, and Albert Dürer engraved it. This at once explained to us the

different ideas and methods of the two masters. On another evening he

would take a subject from Turner's 'Liber Studiorum,' and with a large

sheet of paper and some charcoal, gradually block in the subject,

explaining at the same time the value and effect of the lines and

masses."

And for sketching from nature he would take his class out into the

country, and wind up with tea and talk. "It was a treat to hear and see

him with his men," writes Dr. Furnivall.

His object in the work, as he said before the Royal Commission on

National Institutions, was _not to make artists_, but to make the

workmen better men, to develop their powers and feelings,--to educate

them, in short. He always has urged young people intending to study art

as a profession to enter the Academy Schools, as Turner and the

Pre-Raphaelites did, or to take up whatever other serious course of

practical discipline was open to them. But he held very strongly that

everybody could learn drawing, that their eyes could be brightened and

their hands steadied, and that they could be taught to appreciate the

great works of nature and of art, without wanting to make pictures or to

exhibit and sell them.

It was with this intention that he wrote the "Elements of Drawing" in

1856, supplemented by the "Elements of Perspective" in 1859; the

illustrations for the book were characteristic sketches by the author,

beautifully cut by his pupil, W.H. Hooper, who was one of a band of

engravers and copyists formed by these classes at the Working Men's

College. In spite of the intention not to make artists by his teaching,

Ruskin could not prevent some of his pupils from taking up art as a

profession; and those who did so became, in their way, first-rate men.

George Allen as a mezzotint engraver, Arthur Burgess as a draughtsman

and wood-cutter, John Bunney as a painter of architectural detail, W.

Jeffery as an artistic photographer, E. Cooke as a teacher, William Ward

as a facsimile copyist, have all done work whose value deserves

acknowledgment, all the more because it was not aimed at popular effect,

but at the severe standard of the greater schools. But these men were

only the side issue of the Working Men's College enterprise. Its real

result was in the proof that the labouring classes could be interested

in Art; and that the capacity shown by the Gothic workman had not

entirely died out of the nation, in spite of the interregnum, for a full

century, of manufacture. And the experience led Ruskin forward to wider

views on the nature of the arts, and on the duties of philanthropic

effort and social economy.

CHAPTER VIII

"MODERN PAINTERS" CONTINUED (1855-1856)

It was in the year 1855 that Ruskin first published "Notes on the Royal

Academy and other Exhibitions." He had been so often called upon to

write his opinion of Pre-Raphaelite pictures, either privately or to

the newspapers, or to mark his friends' catalogues, that he found at

last less trouble in printing his notes once for all. The new plan was

immediately popular; three editions of the pamphlet were called for

between June 1 and July 1. Next year he repeated the "Notes" and six

editions were sold.

In spite of a dissentient voice here and there, he was really by that

time recognised as the leading authority upon taste in painting. He was

trusted by a great section of the public, who had not failed to notice

how completely he and his friends were winning the day. The proof of it

was in the fact that they were being imitated on all sides; Ruskinism in

writing and Pre-Raphaelitism in painting were becoming fashionable.

But at the same time the movement gave rise to the Naturalist-landscape

school, a group of painters who threw overboard the traditions of Turner

and Prout, Constable and Harding, and the rest, just as the

Pre-Raphaelite Brethren threw over the Academical masters. For such men

their study was their picture; they devised tents and huts in wild glens

and upon waste moors, and spent weeks in elaborating their details

directly from nature, instead of painting at home from sketches on the

spot.

This was the fulfilment of his advice to young artists; and so far as

young artists worked in this way, for purposes of study, he encouraged

them. But he did not fail to point out that this was not all that could

be required of them. Even such a work as Brett's "Val d'Aosta,"

marvellous as it was in observation and finish, was only the beginning

of a new era, not its consummation. It was not the painting of detail

that could make a great artist; but the knowledge of it, and the

masterly use of such knowledge. A great landscapist would know the facts

and effects of nature, just as Tintoret knew the form of the human

figure; and he would treat them with the same freedom, as the means of

expressing great ideas, of affording by the imagination noble grounds

for noble emotion, which, as Ruskin had been writing at Vevey in 1854,

was poetry. Meanwhile the public and the critic ought to become familiar

with the aspects of nature, in order to recognise the difference between

the true poetry of painting, and the mere empty sentimentalism which was

only the rant and bombast of landscape art.

With such feelings as these he wrote the third and fourth volumes of

"Modern Painters," (published respectively January 15 and April 14,

1856). The work was afterwards interrupted only by a recurrence of his

old cough, in the exceptionally cold summer of 1855. He went down to

Tunbridge Wells, where his cousin, William Richardson of Perth, was

practising as a doctor; it was not long before the cough gave way to

treatment, and he was as busy as ever. About October of that year he

wrote to Mrs. Carlyle as follows, in a letter printed by Professor C.E.

Norton, conveniently summing up his year:

"Not that I have not been busy--and very busy, too. I have written,

since May, good six hundred pages, had them rewritten, cut up,

corrected, and got fairly ready for press--and am going to press

with the first of them on Gunpowder Plot day, with a great hope of

disturbing the Public Peace in various directions. Also, I have

prepared above thirty drawings for engravers this year, retouched

the engravings (generally the worst part of the business), and

etched some on steel myself. In the course of the six hundred pages

I have had to make various remarks on German Metaphysics, on

Poetry, Political Economy, Cookery, Music, Geology, Dress,

Agriculture, Horticulture, and Navigation,[6] all of which subjects

I have had to 'read up' accordingly, and this takes time. Moreover,

I have had my class of workmen out sketching every week in the

fields during the summer; and have been studying Spanish proverbs

with my father's partner, who came over from Spain to see the

Great Exhibition. I have also designed and drawn a window for the

Museum at Oxford; and have every now and then had to look over a

parcel of five or six new designs for fronts and backs to the said

Museum.

[Footnote 6: Most of these subjects will be easily recognised in

"Modern Painters," Vols. III. and IV. The "Navigation" refers to

the "Harbours of England."]

"During my above-mentioned studies of horticulture, I became

dissatisfied with the Linnæan, Jussieuan, and Everybody-elseian

arrangement of plants, and have accordingly arranged a system of my

own; and unbound my botanical book, and rebound it in brighter

green, with all the pages through-other, and backside foremost--so

as to cut off all the old paging numerals; and am now printing my

new arrangement in a legible manner, on interleaved foolscap. I

consider this arrangement one of my great achievements of the year.

My studies of political economy have induced me to think also that

nobody knows anything about that; and I am at present engaged in an

investigation, on independent principles, of the natures of money,

rent, and taxes, in an abstract form, which sometimes keeps me

awake all night. My studies of German metaphysics have also induced

me to think that the Germans don't know anything about _them_; and

to engage in a serious enquiry into the meaning of Bunsen's great

sentence in the beginning of the second volume of the 'Hippolytus,'

about the Finite realization of Infinity; which has given me some

trouble.

"The course of my studies of Navigation necessitated my going to

Deal to look at the Deal boats; and those of geology to rearrange

all my minerals (and wash a good many, which, I am sorry to say, I

found wanted it). I have also several pupils, far and near, in the

art of illumination; an American young lady to direct in the study

of landscape painting, and a Yorkshire young lady to direct in the

purchase of Turners,--and various little bye things besides. But I

am coming to see you."

The tone of humorous exaggeration of his discoveries and occupations was

very characteristic. But he was then growing into the habit of leaving

the matter in hand, as he often did afterwards, to follow side issues,

and to take up new studies with a hasty and divided attention; the

result of which was seen in his sub-title for the third volume of

"Modern Painters"--"Of Many Things"; which amused his readers not a

little. But that he still had time for his friends is seen in the

account of a visit to Denmark Hill, written this year by James Smetham.

"I walked there through the wintry weather, and got in about dusk.

One or two gossiping details will interest you before I give you

what I care for; and so I will tell you that he has a large house

with a lodge, and a valet and footman and coachman, and grand rooms

glittering with pictures, chiefly Turner's, and that his father and

mother live with him, or he with them.... His father is a fine old

gentleman, who has a lot of bushy gray hair, and eyebrows sticking

up all rough and knowing, with a comfortable way of coming up to

you with his hands in his pockets, and making _you_ comfortable,

and saying, in answer to your remark, that 'John's' prose works are

pretty good. His mother is a ruddy, dignified, richly dressed old

gentlewoman of seventy-five, who knows Chamonix better than

Camberwell; evidently a _good_ old lady, with the 'Christian

Treasury'tossing about on the table. She puts 'John' down, and

holds her own opinions, and flatly contradicts him; and he receives

all her opinions with a soft reverence and gentleness that is

pleasant to witness....

"I wish I could reproduce a good impression of 'John' for you, to

give you the notion of his 'perfect gentleness and lowlihood.' He

certainly bursts out with a remark, and in a contradictious way,

but only because he believes it, with no air of dogmatism or

conceit. He is different at home from that which he is in a lecture

before a mixed audience, and there is a spiritual sweetness in the

half-timid expression of his eyes; and in bowing to you, as in

taking wine, with (if I heard aright) 'I drink to thee,' he had a

look that has followed me, a look bordering on tearful.

"He spent some time in this way. Unhanging a Turner from the wall

of a distant room, he brought it to the table and put it in my

hands; then we talked; then he went up into his study to fetch down

some illustrative print or drawing; in one case, a literal view

which he had travelled fifty miles to make, in order to compare

with the picture. And so he kept on gliding all over the house,

hanging and unhanging, and stopping a few minutes to talk."

And yet there were many with whom he had to deal who did not look at

things in his light; who took his criticism as personal attack, and

resented it with bitterness. There is a story told (but not by himself)

about one of the "Notes on the Academy," which he was then

publishing--how he wrote to an artist therein mentioned that he

regretted he could not speak more favourably of his picture, but he

hoped it would make no difference in their friendship. The artist

replied (so they say) in these terms: "Dear Ruskin,--Next time I meet

you, I shall knock you down; but I hope it will make no difference in

our friendship." "Damn the fellow! why doesn't he stand up for his

friends?" said another disappointed acquaintance. Perhaps Ruskin, secure

in his "house with a lodge, and a valet and footman and coachman,"

hardly realized that a cold word from his pen sometimes meant the

failure of an important Academy picture, and serious loss of

income--that there was bitter truth underlying _Punch's_ complaint of

the Academician:

"I paints and paints.

Hears no complaints,

And sells before I'm dry;

Till savage Ruskin

Sticks his tusk in,

And nobody will buy."

Against these incidents should be set such an anecdote as the following,

told by Mr. J.J. Ruskin in a letter of June 3, 1858:

"Vokins wished me to name to you that Carrick, when he read your

criticism on 'Weary Life,' came to him with the cheque Vokins had

given, and said your remarks were all right, and that he could not

take the price paid by Vokins the buyer; he would alter the

picture. Vokins took back the money, only agreeing to see the

picture when it was done."

John Ruskin in reply said he did not see why Carrick should have

returned the cheque.

A letter from Mrs. Browning describes a visit to Denmark Hill, and

ends,--"I like Mr. Ruskin very much, and so does Robert; very gentle,

yet earnest--refined and truthful. I like him very much. We count him

one among the valuable acquaintances made this year in England." This

has been dated 1855; but Ruskin, writing to Miss Mitford from

Glenfinlas, 17th August, 1853, says, "I had the pleasure this spring, of

being made acquainted with your dear Elizabeth Browning, as well as with

her husband. I was of course prepared to like _her_, but I did not

expect to like _him_ as much as I did. I think he is really a very fine

fellow, and _she_ is the only sensible woman I have yet met with on the

subject of Italian politics. Evidently a noble creature in all things."

In June, 1850, he had met Robert Browning, on the invitation of Coventry

Patmore, and said: "He is the only person whom I have ever heard talk

ration-ally about the Italians, though on the Liberal side."

In these volumes of "Modern Painters" he had to discuss the Mediæval and

Renaissance spirit in its relation to art, and to illustrate from

Browning's poetry, "unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle

Ages, always vital and right and profound; so that in the matter of art

there is hardly a principle connected with the mediæval temper that he

has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged lines of

his." This was written twenty-five years before the Browning Society was

heard of, and at a time when the style of Browning was an offence to

most people. To Ruskin, also, it had been some, thing of a puzzle; and

he wrote to the poet, asking him to explain himself; which the poet

accordingly did.

That Ruskin was open to conviction and conversion could be shown from

the difference in his tone of thought about poetry before and after this

period; that he was the best of friends with the man who took him to

task for narrowness, may be seen from the following letter, written on

the next Christmas Eve:

"MY DEAR MR. RUSKIN,

"Your note having just arrived, Robert deputes me to write for him

while he dresses to go out on an engagement. It is the evening. All

the hours are wasted, since the morning, through our not being

found at the Rue de Grenelle, but here--and our instinct of

self-preservation or self-satisfaction insists on our not losing a

moment more by our own fault.

"Thank you, thank you for sending us your book, and also for

writing my husband's name in it. It will be the same thing as if

you had written mine--except for the pleasure, as you say, which is

greater so. How good and kind you are!

"And not well. That is worst. Surely you would be better if you had

the summer in winter we have here. But I was to write only a

word--Let it say how affectionately we regard you.

"ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

"3, RUE DU COLYSÉE,

"_Thursday Evening, 24th" (December_, 1855).

CHAPTER IX

"THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART" (1857-1858)

The humble work of the drawing-classes at Great Ormond Street was

teaching Ruskin even more than he taught his pupils. It was showing him

how far his plans were practicable; how they should be modified; how

they might be improved; and especially what more, beside

drawing-classes, was needed to realize his ideal. He was anxiously

willing to co-operate with every movement, to join hands with any kind

of man, to go anywhere, do anything that might promote the cause he had

at heart.

Already at the end of 1854 he had given three lectures, his second

course, at the Architectural Museum, specially addressed to workmen in

the decorative trades. His subjects were design and colour, and his

illustrations were chiefly drawn from mediæval illumination, which he

had long been studying. These were informal, quasi-private affairs,

which nevertheless attracted notice owing to the celebrity of the

speaker. It would have been better if his addresses had been carefully

prepared and authentically published; for a chance word here and there

raised replies about matters of detail in which his critics thought they

had gained a technical advantage, adding weight to his father's desire

not to see him "expose himself" in this way. There were no more lectures

until the beginning of 1857.

On January 23rd, 1857, he spoke before the Architectural Association

upon "The Influence of Imagination in Architecture," repeating and

amplifying what he had said at Edinburgh about the subordinate value of

proportion, and the importance of sculptured ornament based on natural

forms. This of course would involve the creation of a class of

stone-carvers who could be trusted with the execution of such work. Once

grant the value of it, and public demand would encourage the supply, and

the workmen would raise themselves in the effort.

A louder note was sounded in an address at the St. Martin's School of

Art, Castle Street, Long Acre (April 3rd, 1857), where, speaking after

George Cruikshank, his old friend--practically his first master--and an

enthusiastic philanthropist and temperance advocate, Ruskin gave his

audience a wider view of art than they had known before: "the kind of

painting they most wanted in London was painting cheeks red with

health." This was anticipating the standpoint of the Oxford Lectures,

and showed how the inquiry was beginning to take a much broader aspect.

Another work in a similar spirit, the North London School of Design,

had been prosperously started by a circle of men under Pre-Raphaelite

influence, and led by Thomas Seddon. He had given up historical and

poetic painting for naturalistic landscape, and had returned from the

East with the most valuable studies completed, only to break down and

die prematurely. His friends, among them Holman Hunt, were collecting

money to buy from the widow his picture of Jerusalem from the Mount of

Olives, to present it to the National Gallery as a memorial of him; and

at a meeting for the purpose, Ruskin spoke warmly of his labours in the

cause of the working classes.

In the summer of 1857 the Art Treasures Exhibition was held at

Manchester, and Ruskin was invited to lecture. The theme he chose was

"The Political Economy of Art." He had been studying political economy

for some time back, but, as we saw from his letter to Carlyle, he had

found no answer in the ordinary text-books for the questions he tried to

put. He wanted to know what Bentham and Ricardo and Mill, the great

authorities, would advise him as to the best way of employing artists,

of educating workmen, of elevating public taste, of regulating

patronage; but these subjects were not in their programme. And so he put

together his own thoughts into two lectures upon Art considered as

Wealth: first, how to get it; next, how to use it.[7]

[Footnote 7: July 10 and 13, 1857. He went to Manchester from Oxford,

where he had been staying with the Liddells, writing enthusiastically of

the beauty of their children and the charm of their domestic life.]

There were very few points in these lectures that were not vigorously

contested at the moment, and conceded in the sequel--in some form or

other. The paternal function of government, the right of the state to

interfere in matters beyond its traditional range, its duty with regard

to education--all this was quite contrary to the prevailing habits of

thought of the time, especially at Manchester, the headquarters of the

_laissez faire_ school; but to Ruskin, who, curiously enough, had just

then been referring sarcastically to German philosophy, knowing it only

at second-hand, and unaware of Hegel's political work--to him this

Platonic conception of the state was the only possible one, as it is to

most people nowadays. In the same way, his practical advice has been

accepted, perhaps unwittingly, by our times. We do now understand the

difference between artistic decoration and machine-made wares; we do now

try to preserve ancient monuments, and to use art as a means of

education. And we are in a fair way, it seems, of lowering the price of

modern pictures, as he bids us, to "not more than £500 for an oil

picture and £100 for a water-colour."

After a visit to the Trevelyans at Wallington he went with his parents

to Scotland; for his mother, now beginning to grow old, wanted to

revisit the scenes of her youth. They went to the Highlands and as far

north as the Bay of Cromarty, and then returned by way of the Abbeys of

the Lowlands, to look up Turner sites, as he had done in 1845 on the St.

Gothard. From the enjoyment of this holiday he was recalled to London by

a letter from Mr. Wornum saying that he could arrange the Turner

drawings at the National Gallery.

His first letter on the National Gallery, in 1847, has been noticed. He

had written again to _The Times_ (December 29th, 1852), pressing the

same point--namely, that if the pictures were put under glass no

cleaning nor restoring would be needed; and that the Gallery ought not

to be considered as a grand hall, decorated with pictures, but as a

convenient museum, with a chronological sequence of the best works of

all schools,--every picture hung on the line and accompanied by studies

for it, if procurable, and engravings from it.

Now--in 1857--question was raised of removing the National Gallery from

Trafalgar Square. The South Kensington Museum was being formed, and the

whole business of arranging the national art treasures was gone into by

a Royal Commission, consisting of Lord Broughton (in the chair), Dean

Milman, Prof. Faraday, Prof. Cockerell, and George Richmond. Ruskin was

examined before them on April 6th, and re-stated the opinions he had

written to _The Times_, adding that he would like to see two National

Galleries--one of popular interest, containing such works as would catch

the public eye and enlist the sympathy of the untaught; and another

containing only the cream of the collections, in pictures, sculpture and

the decorative crafts, arranged for purposes of study. This was

suggested as an ideal; of course, it would involve more outlay, and less

display, than any Parliamentary vote would sanction, or party leader

risk.

Another question of importance was the disposal of the pictures and

sketches which Turner had left to the nation. Ruskin was one of the

executors under the will; but, on finding that, though Turner's

intention was plain, there were technical informalities which would make

the administration anything but easy, he declined to act. It was not

until 1856 that the litigation was concluded, and Turner's pictures and

sketches were handed to the Trustees of the National Gallery. Ruskin,

whose want of legal knowledge had made his services useless before, now

felt that he could carry out the spirit of Turner's will by offering to

arrange the sketches; which were in such a state of confusion that only

some person with knowledge of the artist's habits of work and subjects

could, so to speak, _edit_ them; and the editor would need no ordinary

skill, patience and judgment, into the bargain.

Meanwhile, for that winter (1856-7) a preliminary exhibition was held of

Turner's oil-paintings, with a few water-colours, at Marlborough House,

then the headquarters of the Department of Science and Art, soon

afterwards removed to South Kensington. Ruskin wrote a catalogue, with

analysis of Turner's periods of development and characteristics; which

made the collection intelligible and interesting to curious sight-seers.

They showed their appreciation by taking up five editions in rapid

succession.

Just before lecturing at Manchester, he wrote again on the subject to

_The Times_; and in September his friend R.N. Wornum, Director of the

National Gallery in succession to Eastlake and Uwins, wrote--as we

saw--that he might arrange the sketches as he pleased. He returned from

Scotland, and set to work on October 7th.

It was strange employment for a man of his powers; almost as removed

from the Epicurean Olympus of "cultured ease" popularly assigned to him,

as night-school teaching and lecturing to workmen. But, beside that it

was the carrying out of Turner's wishes, he always had a certain love

for experimenting in manual toil; and this was work in which his extreme

neatness and deftness of hand was needed, no less than his knowledge and

judgment. During the winter for full six months, he and his two

assistants worked, all day and every day, among the masses of precious

rubbish that had been removed from Queen Anne Street to the National

Gallery.

Mr. J.J. Ruskin wrote, on February 19 and 21, 1852:

"I have just been through Turner's house with Griffith. His labour

is more astonishing than his genius. There are £80,000 of oil

pictures done and undone--Boxes half as big as your Study Table,

filled with Drawings and Sketches. There are Copies of Liber

Studiorum to fill all your Drawers and more, and House Walls of

proof plates in Reams--they may go at 1/-each....

"Nothing since Pompeii so impressed me as the interior of Turner's

house; the accumulated dust of 40 years partially cleared off;

Daylight for the first time admitted by opening a window on the

finest productions of art buried for 40 years. The Drawing Room

has, it is reckoned, £25,000 worth of proofs, and sketches, and

Drawings, and Prints. It is amusing to hear Dealers saying there

can be no Liber Studiorums--when I saw neatly packed and well

labelled as many Bundles of Liber Studiorum as would fill your

entire Bookcase, and England and Wales proofs in packed and

labelled Bundles like Reams of paper, as I told you, piled nearly

to Ceiling ...

"The house must be dry as a Bone--the parcels were apparently quite

uninjured. The very large pictures were spotted, but not much. They

stood leaning against another in the large low Rooms. Some

_finished_ go to Nation, many unfinished _not_: no frames. Two are

given unconditional of Gallery Building--_very fine_: if (and this

is a condition) _placed beside Claude._ The style much like the

laying on in Windmill Lock in Dealer's hands, which, now it is

cleaned, comes out a real Beauty. I believe Turner loved it. The

will desires all to be framed and repaired and put into the best

showing state; as if he could not release his money to do this till

he was dead. The Top of his Gallery is one ruin of Glass and

patches of paper, now only just made weather-proof ...

"I saw in Turner's Rooms, _Geo. Morlands_ and _Wilsons_ and

_Claudes_ and _portraits_ in various stiles _all by Turner._ He

copied every man, was every man first, and took up his own style,

casting all others away. It seems to me you may keep your money and

revel for ever and for nothing among Turner's Works."

Among the quantities so recklessly thrown aside for dust, damp, soot,

mice and worms to destroy--some 15,000 Ruskin reckoned at first, 19,000

later on--there were many fine drawings, which had been used by the

engravers, and vast numbers of interesting and valuable studies in

colour and in pencil. Four hundred of these were extricated from the

chaos, and with infinite pains cleaned, flattened, mounted, dated and

described, and placed in sliding frames in cabinets devised by Ruskin,

or else in swivel frames, to let both sides of the paper be seen. The

first results of the work were shown in an Exhibition at Marlborough

House during the winter, for which he wrote another catalogue. Of the

whole collection he began a more complete account, which was too

elaborate to be finished in that form; but in 1881 he published a

"Catalogue of the Drawings and Sketches of J M.W. Turner, R.A., at

present exhibited in the National Gallery," so that his plan was

practically fulfilled.

During 1858 Ruskin continued to lecture at various places on subjects

connected with his Manchester addresses--the relation of art to

manufacture, and especially the dependence of all great architectural

design upon sculpture or painting of organic form. The first of the

series was given at the opening of the Architectural Museum at South

Kensington, January 13th, 1858, entitled "The Deteriorative Power of

Conventional Art over Nations;" in which he showed that naturalism, as

opposed to meaningless pattern-making, was always a sign of life. For

example, the strength of the Greek, Florentine and Venetian art arose

out of the search for truth, not, as it is often supposed, out of

striving after an ideal of beauty; and as soon as nature was superseded

by recipe, the greatest schools hastened to their fall. From which he

concluded that modern design should always be founded on natural form,

rather than upon the traditional patterns of the east or of the

mediævals.

On February 16th he spoke on "The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art and

Policy," at Tunbridge Wells; a subject similar to that of his address to

the St. Martin's School of the year before, but amplified into a plea

for the use of wrought-iron ornament, as in the new Oxford Museum, then

building, and on April 25th he again addressed St. Martin's School.

The Oxford Museum was an experiment in the true Gothic revival. The

architects, Sir Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward, had allowed their

workmen to design parts of the detail, such as capitals and spandrils,

quite in the spirit of Ruskin's teaching, and the work was accordingly

of deep interest to him. So far back as April, 1856, he had given an

address to the men employed at the Museum, whom he met, on Dr. Acland's

invitation, at the Workmen's Reading Rooms. He said that his object was

not to give some labouring men the chance of becoming masters of other

labouring men, and to help the few at the expense of the many, but to

lead them to those sources of pleasure, and power over their own minds

and hands, that more educated people possess. He did not sympathize with

the socialism that had been creeping into vogue since 1848. He thought

existing social arrangements good, and he agreed with his friends, the

Carlyles, who had found that it was only the incapable who could not get

work. But it was the fault of the wealthy and educated that working

people were not better trained; it was not the working-men's fault, at

bottom. The modern architect used his workman as a mere tool; while the

Gothic spirit set him free as an original designer, to gain--not more

wages and higher social rank, but pleasure and instruction, the true

happiness that lies in good work well done.

To explain the design of the Oxford Museum and to enlist support, he

wrote two letters to Dr. Acland (May 25th, 1858, and January 20th,

1859), which formed part of a small book, reporting its aims and

progress, illustrated with an engraving of one of the workmen's

capitals. Ruskin himself contributed both time and money to the work,

and his assistance was not unrecognised. In 1858 "Honorary Studentships"

(i.e., fellowships) were created at Christ Church by the Commissioners'

ordinances. At the first election held, December 6th, 1858, there were

chosen for the compliment Ruskin, Gladstone, Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, Dr.

(Sir) H.W. Acland, and Sir F.H. Gore Ouseley. At the second, December

15th, 1858, were elected Henry Hallam, the Earl of Stanhope, the Earl of

Elgin, the Marquis of Dalhousie and Viscount Canning.

Parallel with this movement for educating the "working-class," there was

the scheme for the improvement of middle-class education, which was then

going on at Oxford--the beginning of University Extension--supported by

the Rev. F. Temple (later Archbishop of Canterbury), and Mr. (afterwards

Sir) Thomas Dyke Acland. Ruskin was heartily for them; and in a letter

on the subject, he tried to show how the teaching of Art might be made

to work in with the scheme. He did not think that in this plan, any more

than at the Working Men's College, there need be an attempt to teach

drawing with a view to forming artists; but there were three objects

they might hold in view: the first, to give every student the advantage

of the happiness and knowledge which the study of Art conveys; the next,

to enforce some knowledge of Art amongst those who were likely to become

patrons or critics; and the last, _to leave no Giotto lost among hill

shepherds._

CHAPTER X

"MODERN PAINTERS" CONCLUDED (1838-1860)

Oxford and old friends did not monopolise Ruskin's attention: he was

soon seen at Cambridge--on the same platform with Richard Redgrave,

R.A., the representative of Academicism and officialism--at the opening

of the School of Art for workmen on October 29th, 1858. His Inaugural

Address struck a deeper note, a wider chord, than previous essays; it

was the forecast of the last volume of "Modern Painters," and it

sketched the train of thought into which he had been led during his tour

abroad, that summer.

The battles between faith and criticism, between the historical and the

scientific attitudes, which had been going on in his mind, were taking a

new form. At the outset, we saw, naturalism overpowered respect for

tradition--in the first volume of "Modern Painters;" then the historical

tendency won the day, in the second volume. Since that time, the

critical side had been gathering strength, by his alliance with liberal

movements and by his gradual detachment from associations that held

him to the older order of thought. As in his lonely journey of 1845

he first took independent ground upon questions of religion and social

life, so in 1858, once more travelling alone, he was led by his

meditations,--freed from the restraining presence of his parents--to

conclusions which he had been all these years evading, yet finding at

last inevitable.

He went abroad for a third attempt to write and illustrate his History

of Swiss Towns. He spent part of May on the Upper Rhine between Basle

and Schaffhausen, June and half of July on the St. Gothard route and at

Bellinzona. In reflecting over the sources of Swiss character, as

connected with the question of the nature of art and its origin in

morality, he was struck with the fact that all the virtues of the Swiss

did not make them artistic. Compared with most nations they were as

children in painting, music and poetry. And, indeed, they ranked with

the early phases of many great nations--the period of pristine

simplicity "uncorrupted by the arts."

From Bellinzona he went to Turin on his way to the Vaudois Valleys,

where he meant to compare the Waldensian Protestants with the Swiss.

Accidentally he saw Paul Veronese's "Queen of Sheba" and other Venetian

pictures; and so fell to comparing a period of fully ripened art with

one of artlessness; discovering that the mature art, while it appeared

at the same time with decay in morals, did not spring from that decay,

but was rooted in the virtues of the earlier age. He grasped a clue to

the puzzle, in the generalisation that Art is the product of human

happiness; it is contrary to asceticism; it is the expression of

pleasure. But when the turning point of national progress is once

reached, and art is regarded as the laborious incitement to

pleasure,--no longer the spontaneous blossom and fruit of it,--the

decay sets in for art as for morality. Art, in short, is created _by_

pleasure, not _for_ pleasure. The standard of thought, the attitude of

mind, of the Waldensians, he now perceived to be quite impossible for

himself. He could not look upon every one outside their fold as heathens

and publicans; he could not believe that the pictures of Paul Veronese

were works of iniquity, nor that the motives of great deeds in earlier

ages were lying superstitions. He took courage to own to himself and

others that it was no longer any use trying to identify his point of

view with that of Protestantism. He saw both Protestants and Roman

Catholics, in the perspective of history, converging into a primitive,

far distant, ideal unity of Christianity, in which he still believed;

but he could take neither side, after this.

The first statement of the new point of view was, as we said, the

Inaugural Lecture of the Cambridge School of Art. The next important

utterance was at Manchester, February 22nd, 1859, where he spoke on the

"Unity of Art," by which he meant--not the fraternity of handicrafts

with painting, as the term is used nowadays--but that, in whatever

branch of Art, the spirit of Truth or Sincerity is the same. In this

lecture there is a very important passage showing how he had at last got

upon firm ground in the question of art and morality: "_I do_ NOT _say

in the least that in order to be a good painter you must be a good man_;

but I do say that in order to be a good natural painter there must be

strong elements of good in the mind, however warped by other parts of

the character." So emphatic a statement deserves more attention than it

has received from readers and writers who assume to judge Ruskin's views

after a slight acquaintance with his earlier works. He was well aware

himself that his mind had been gradually enlarging, and his thoughts

changing; and he soon saw as great a difference between himself at forty

and at twenty-five, as he had formerly seen between the Boy poet and the

Art critic. He became as anxious to forget his earlier books, as he had

been to forget his verse-writing; and when he came to collect his

"Works," these lectures, under the title of "The Two Paths," were (with

"The Political Economy of Art") the earliest admitted into the library.

After this Manchester lecture he took a driving tour in

Yorkshire--posting in the old-fashioned way--halting at Bradford for the

lecture on "Modern Manufacture and Design" (March 1st), and ending with

a visit to the school at Winnington, of which more in a later chapter.

In 1859 the last Academy Notes, for the time being, were published. The

Pre-Raphaelite cause had been fully successful, and the new school of

naturalist landscape was rapidly asserting itself. Old friends were

failing, such as Stanfield, Lewis, and Roberts: but new men were growing

up, among whom Ruskin welcomed G.D. Leslie, F. Goodall, J.C. Hook,--who

had come out of his "Pre-Raphaelite measles" into the healthy naturalism

of "Luff Boy!"--Clarence Whaite, Henry Holiday, and John Brett, who

showed the "Val d'Aosta." Millais' "Vale of Rest" was the picture which

attracted most notice: something of the old rancour against the school

was revived in the _Morning Herald_, which called his works

"impertinences," "contemptible," "indelible disgrace," and so on. It was

the beginning of a transition from the delicacy of the Pre-Raphaelite

Millais to his later style; and as such the preacher of "All great art

is delicate" could not entirely defend it. But the serious strength of

the imagination and the power of the execution he praised with

unexpected warmth.

He then started on the last tour abroad with his parents. He had been

asked, rather pointedly, by the National Gallery Commission, whether he

had seen the great German museums, and had been obliged to reply that he

had not. Perhaps it occurred to him or to his father that he ought to

see the pictures at Berlin and Dresden and Munich, even though he

heartily disliked the Germans with their art and their language and

everything that belonged to them,--except Holbein and Dürer. By the end

of July the travellers were in North Switzerland; and they spent

September in Savoy, returning home by October 7th.

Old Mr. Ruskin was now in his seventy-fifth year and his desire was to

see the great work finished before he died. There had been some attempt

to write this last volume of "Modern Painters" in the previous winter,

but it had been put off until after the visit to Germany had completed a

study of the great Venetian painters--especially Titian and Veronese.

Now at last, in the autumn of 1859, he finally set to work on the

writing.

The assertion of Turner's genius had been necessary in 1843, but Turner

was long since dead; his fame was thoroughly vindicated; his bequest to

the nation dealt with, so far as possible. Early Christian Art was

recognised--almost beyond its claims. The Pre-Raphaelites and

naturalistic landscapists no longer needed the hand which "Modern

Painters" had held out to them by the way. Of the great triad of Venice,

Tintoret had been expounded, Veronese and Titian were now taken up and

treated with tardy, but ample recognition.

And now, after twenty years of labour, Ruskin had established himself as

the recognised leader of criticism and the exponent of painting and

architecture. He had created a department of literature all his own. He

had enriched the art of England with examples of a new and beautiful

draughtsmanship, and the language with passages of poetic description

and eloquent declamation, quite, in their way, unrivalled. He had built

up a theory of art, so far uncontested; and thrown new light on the

Middle Ages and Renaissance, illustrating, in a way then novel, their

chronicles by their remains. He had beaten down opposition, risen above

detraction, and won the prize of honour--only to realise, as he received

it, that the fight had been but a pastime tournament, after all; and to

hear, through the applause, the enemy's trumpet sounding to battle. For

now, without the camp, there were realities to face; as to Art--"the

best in this kind are but shadows."

BOOK III

HERMIT AND HERETIC

(1860-1870)

CHAPTER I

"UNTO THIS LAST" (1860-1861)

At forty years of age Ruskin finished "Modern Painters." From that time

art was sometimes his text, rarely his theme. He used it as the

opportunity, the vehicle, so to say, for teachings of wider range and

deeper import; teachings about life as a whole, conclusions in ethics

and economics and religion, to which he sought to lead others, as he was

led, by the way of art.

During the time when he was preaching his later doctrines, he wished to

suppress the interfering evidences of the earlier. He let his works on

art run out of print, not for the benefit of second-hand booksellers,

but in the hope that he could fix his audience upon the burden of his

prophecy for the time being. But the youthful works were still read;

high prices were paid for them, or they were smuggled in from America.

And when the epoch of "Fors" had passed, he agreed to the reprinting of

all that early material. He called it obsolete and trivial; others find

it interestingly biographical--perhaps even classical.

This year, then, 1860, the year of the Italian Kingdom, of Garibaldi,

and of the beginning of the American war, marks his turning point, from

the early work, summed up in the old "Selections," to the later work.

Until he was forty, Mr. Ruskin was a writer on art; after that his art

was secondary to ethics. Until he was forty he was a believer in English

Protestantism; afterwards he could not reconcile current beliefs with

the facts of life as he saw them, and had to reconstruct his creed from

the foundations. Until he was forty he was a philanthropist, working

heartily with others in a definite cause, and hoping for the amendment

of wrongs, without a social upheaval. Even in the beginning of 1860, in

his evidence before the House of Commons Select Committee on Public

Institutions, he was ready with plans for amusing and instructing the

labouring classes, and noting in them a "thirsty desire" for

improvement. But while his readiness to make any personal sacrifice, in

the way of social and philanthropic experiment, and his interest in the

question were increasing, he became less and less sanguine about the

value of such efforts as the Working Men's College, and less and less

ready to co-operate with others in their schemes. He began to see that

no tinkering at social breakages was really worth while; that far more

extensive repairs were needed to make the old ship seaworthy.

So he set himself, by himself, to sketch the plans for the repairs.

Naturally sociable, and accustomed to the friendly give-and-take of a

wide acquaintance, he withdrew from the busy world into a busier

solitude. During the next few years he lived much alone among the Alps,

or at home, thinking out the problem; sometimes feeling, far more

acutely than was good for clear thought, the burden of the mission that

was laid upon him. In March, 1863, he wrote from his retreat at Mornex

to Norton:

"The loneliness is very great, and the peace in which I am at

present is only as if I had buried myself in a tuft of grass on a

battlefield wet with blood--for the cry of the earth about me is in

my ears continually, if I do not lay my head to the very ground."

And a few months later:

"I am still very unwell, and tormented between the longing for rest

and lovely life, and the sense of this terrific call of human crime

for resistance and of human misery for help, though it seems to me

as the voice of a river of blood which can but sweep me down in the

midst of its black clots, helpless."

Sentences like these, passages here and there in the last volume of

"Modern Painters," and still more, certain passages omitted from that

volume, show that about 1860 something of a cloud had been settling over

him,--a sense of the evil of the world, a horror of great darkness. In

his earlier years, his intense emotion and vivid imagination had enabled

him to read into pictures of Tintoret or Turner, into scenes of nature

and sayings of great books, a meaning or a moral which he so vividly

communicated to the reader as to make it thenceforward part and parcel

of the subject, however it came there to begin with. It is useless to

wonder whether Turner, for instance, consciously meant what Ruskin found

in his works. A great painter does not paint without thought, and such

thought is apt to show itself whether he will or no. But it needs

imaginative sympathy to detect and describe the thought. And when that

sympathy was given to suffering, to widespread misery, to crying wrongs;

joined also with an intense passion for justice, which had already shown

itself in the defence of slighted genius and neglected art; and to the

Celtic temperament of some highstrung seer and trance-prophesying bard;

it was no wonder that Ruskin became like one of the hermits of old, who

retreated from the world to return upon it with stormy messages of

awakening and flashes of truth more impressive, more illuminating than

the logic of schoolmen and the state-craft of the wise.

And then he began to take up an attitude of antagonism to the world, he

who had been the kindly helper and minister of delightful art. He began

to call upon those who had ears to hear to come out and be separate

from the ease and hypocrisy of Vanity Fair. Its respectabilities, its

orthodoxies, he could no longer abide. Orthodox religion, orthodox

morals and politics, orthodox art and science, alike he rejected; and

was rejected by each of them as a brawler, a babbler, a fanatic, a

heretic. And even when kindly Oxford gave him a quasi-academical

position, it did not bring him, as it brings many a heretic, back to the

fold.

In this period of storm and stress he stood alone. The old friends of

his youth were one by one passing away, if not from intercourse, still

from full sympathy with him in his new mood. His parents were no longer

the guides and companions they had been; they did not understand the

business he was about. And so he was left to new associates, for he

could not live without some one to love,--that was the nature of the

man, however lonely in his work and wanderings.

The new friends of this period were, at first, Americans; as the chief

new friends of his latest period (the Alexanders) were American, too.

Charles Eliot Norton, after being introduced to him in London in 1855,

met him again by accident on the Lake of Geneva--the story is prettily

told in "Præterita." Ruskin adds:

"Norton saw all my weaknesses, measured all my narrownesses, and,

from the first, took serenely, and as it seemed of necessity, a

kind of paternal authority over me, and a right of guidance.... I

was entirely conscious of his rectorial power, and affectionately

submissive to it, so that he might have done anything with me, but

for the unhappy difference in our innate, and unchangeable,

political faiths."

So, after all, he stood alone.

Another friend about this time was Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe, to whom he

wrote on June 18th, 1860, from Geneva:

"It takes a great deal, when I am at Geneva, to make me wish myself

anywhere else, and, of all places else, in London; nevertheless, I

very heartily wish at this moment that I were looking out on the

Norwood Hills, and were expecting you and the children to breakfast

to-morrow.

"I had very serious thoughts, when I received your note, of running

home; but I expected that very day an American friend, Mr.

Stillman, who, I thought, would miss me more here than you in

London, so I stayed.

"What a dreadful thing it is that people should have to go to

America again, after coming to Europe! It seems to me an inversion

of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of 'United'

States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once

delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world,

should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably

ungrammatical), particularly when they have been making themselves

cruelly pleasant to friends here. My friend Norton, whom I met

first on this very blue lake water, had no business to go back to

Boston again, any more than you....

"So you have been seeing the Pope and all his Easter performances!

I congratulate you, for I suppose it is something like 'Positively

the last appearance on any stage.' What was the use of thinking

about _him_? You should have had your own thoughts about what was

to come after him. I don't mean that Roman Catholicism will die out

so quickly. It will last pretty nearly as long as Protestantism,

which keeps it up; but I wonder what is to come next. That is the

main question just now for everybody."

W.J. Stillman had been a correspondent about 1851,--"involved in

mystical speculations, partly growing out of the second volume of

'Modern Painters,'" as he said of himself in an article on "John Ruskin"

in the _Century_ Magazine (January, 1888). With him Ruskin spent July

and August of 1860 at Chamouni. He did but little drawing, and in the

few sketches that remain of that summer there is evidence that his mind

was far away from its old love of mountains and of streamlets. His

lonely walks in the pinewoods of the Arveron were given to meditation on

a great problem which had been set, as it seemed, for him to solve, ever

since he had written that chapter on "The Nature of Gothic." Now at

last, in the solitude of the Alps, he could grapple with the questions

he had raised; and the outcome of the struggle was "Unto this Last."

The year before, from Thun and Bonneville and Lausanne (August and

September, 1859) he had written letters to E.S. Dallas, suggested by the

strikes in the London building trade. In these he appears to have

sketched the outline of a new conception of social science, which he was

now elaborating with more attempt at system and brevity than he had been

accustomed to use.

These new papers, painfully thought out and carefully set down in his

room at the Hôtel de l'Union, he used--as long before he read his daily

chapter to the breakfast party at Herne Hill--to read to Stillman: and

he sent them to the _Cornhill Magazine_, started the year before by

Smith and Elder. Ruskin had already contributed to it a paper on "Sir

Joshua and Holbein," a stray chapter from Vol. V., "Modern Painters."

His reputation as a writer and philanthropist, together with the

friendliness of editor and publisher, secured the insertion of the first

three,--from August to October. The editor then wrote to say that they

were so unanimously condemned and disliked, that, with all apologies, he

could only admit one more. The series was brought hastily to a

conclusion in November: and the author, beaten back as he had never been

beaten before, dropped the subject, and "sulked," so he called it, all

the winter.

It is pleasant to notice that neither Thackeray, the editor nor Smith,

the publisher quarrelled with the author who had laid them open to the

censure of their public,--nor he with them. On December 21st, he wrote

to Thackeray, in answer apparently, to a letter about lecturing for a

charitable purpose: and continued:

"The mode in which you direct your charity puts me in mind of a

matter that has lain long on my mind, though I never have had the

time or face to talk to you of it. In somebody's drawing-room,

ages ago, you were speaking accidentally of M. de Marvy.[8] I

expressed my great obligation to him; on which you said that I

could prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow,--which choice I

then not accepting, have ever since remembered the circumstance as

one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the general

impression on your mind of the hollowness of people's sayings and

hardness of their hearts. The fact is, I give what I give almost in

an opposite way to yours. I think there are many people who will

relieve hopeless distress for one who will help at a hopeful pinch;

and when I have the choice I nearly always give where I think the

money will be fruitful rather than merely helpful. I would lecture

for a school when I would _not_ for a distressed author; and would

have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but not--unless I

had no other object--his widow after he was gone. In a word, I like

to prop the falling more than to feed the fallen."

[Footnote 8: Louis Marvy, an engraver, and political refugee after the

French Revolution of 1848. He produced the plates, and Thackeray the

text, of "Landscape Painters of England, in a series of steel

engravings, with short Notices."]

The winter passed without any great undertaking. G.F. Watts proposed to

add Ruskin's portrait to his gallery of celebrities; but he was in no

mood to sit. Rossetti did, however, sketch him this year. In March he

presented eighty-three Turner drawings to Oxford, and twenty-five to

Cambridge. The address of thanks with the great seal of Oxford

University is dated March 23rd, 1861; the Catalogue of the Cambridge

collection is dated May 28th.

On April 2nd he addressed the St. George's Mission Working Men's

Institute, and shortly afterwards, though at this time in a much

enfeebled state of health, gave a lecture before "a most brilliant

audience," as the _London Review_ reported, at the Royal Institution

(April 19th, 1861). Carlyle wrote to his brother John:

"Friday last I was persuaded--in fact had inwardly compelled myself

as it were--to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, Albemarle

Street, Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral,

symbolical objects. A crammed house, but tolerable even to me in

the gallery. The lecture was thought to 'break down,' and indeed it

quite did '_as a lecture_'; but only did from _embarras de

richesses_--a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder

explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial;

and in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any

neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one."

Papers on "Illuminated Manuscripts" (read before the Society of

Antiquaries on June 6th) and on "The Preservation of Ancient Buildings"

(read to the Ecclesiological Society a fortnight later) show that old

interests were not wholly forgotten, even in the stress of new pursuits,

by this man of many-sided activity.

During May, 1861, he paid a visit to the school girls at Winnington, in

June and July he took a holiday at Boulogne with the fisher folk, in

August he went to Ireland as guest of the Latouches of Harristown,

County Kildare, and in September he returned to the Alps, spending the

rest of the year at Bonneville and Lucerne.

CHAPTER II

"MUNERA PULVERIS" (1862)

After an autumn among the Alps, hearing that the Turner drawings in the

National Gallery had been mildewed, he ran home to see about them in

January 1862; and was kept until the end of May. He found that his

political economy work was not such a total failure as it had seemed.

Froude, then editor of _Fraser's Magazine_, thought there was something

in it, and would give him another chance. So, by way of a fresh start,

he had his four _Cornhill_ articles published in book form; and almost

simultaneously, in June 1862 the first of the new series appeared.

The author had then returned to Lucerne with Mr. and Mrs. Burne-Jones,

with whom he crossed the St. Gothard to Milan, where he tried to forget

the harrowing of hell in a close study of Luini, and in copying the "St.

Catherine" now at Oxford. Ruskin has never said so much about Luini as,

perhaps, he intended. A short notice in the "Cestus of Aglaia," and

occasional references scattered up and down his later works, hardly give

the prominence in his writings that the painter held in his thoughts. It

was about this time that he was made an Hon. Member of the Florentine

Academy.

He re-crossed the Alps, and settled to his work on political economy at

Mornex, where he spent the winter except for a short run home, which

gave him the opportunity of addressing the Working Men's College on

November 29.

His retreat is described in one of his letters home:

"MORNEX, _August_ 31 (1862).

"MY DEAREST MOTHER,

"This ought to arrive on the evening before your birthday: it is

not possible to reach you in the morning, not even by telegraph as

I once did from Mont Cenis, for--(may Heaven be devoutly thanked

therefore)--there are yet on Mont Salève neither rails nor

wires....

"The place I have got to is at the end of all carriage-roads, and I

am not yet strong enough to get farther, on foot, than a five or

six miles' circle, within which is assuredly no house to my mind. I

cast, at first, somewhat longing eyes on a true Savoyard

château--notable for its lovely garden and orchard--and its

unspoiled, unrestored, arched gateway between two round turrets,

and Gothic-windowed keep. But on examination of the

interior--finding the walls, though six feet thick, rent to the

foundation--and as cold as rocks, and the floors all sodden through

with walnut oil and rotten-apple juice--heaps of the farm stores

having been left to decay in the ci-devant drawing room, I gave up

all medieval ideas, for which the long-legged black pigs who lived

like gentlemen at ease in the passage, and the bats and spiders who

divided between them the corners of the turret-stair, have

reason--if they knew it--to be thankful.

"The worst of it is that I never had the gift, nor have I now the

energy, to _make_ anything of a place; so that I shall have to put

up with almost anything I can find that is healthily habitable in a

good situation. Meantime, the air here being delicious and the

rooms good enough for use and comfort, I am not troubling myself

much, but trying to put myself into better health and humour; in

which I have already a little succeeded."

After describing the flowers of the Salève he continues:

"My Father would be quite wild at the 'view' from the garden

terrace--but he would be disgusted at the shut in feeling of the

house, which is in fact as much shut in as our old Herne Hill one;

only to get the 'view' I have but to go as far down the garden as

to our old 'mulberry tree.' By the way there's a magnificent

mulberry tree, as big as a common walnut, covered with black and

red fruit on the other side of the road. Coutet and Allen are very

anxious to do all they can now that Crawley is away; and I don't

think I shall manage very badly," etc.

A little later he took in addition a cottage in which the Empress of

Russia had once stayed: it commanded a finer view than the larger house,

which has since been turned into a hotel (Hôtel et Pension des

Glycines). This place was for some time the hermitage in which he wrote

his political economy. Of his lonely rambles he wrote later on:

"If I have a definite point to reach, and common work to do at

it--I take people--anybody--with me; but all my best _mental_ work

is necessarily done alone; whenever I wanted to think, in Savoy, I

used to leave Coutet at home. Constantly I have been alone on the

Glacier des Bois--and far among the loneliest aiguille recesses. I

found the path up the Brezon above Bonneville in a lonely walk one

Sunday; I saw the grandest view of the Alps of Savoy I ever

gained, on the 2nd of January, 1862, alone among the snow wreaths

on the summit of the Salève. You need not fear for me on 'Langdale

Pikes' after that."

In September the second article appeared in _Fraser._ "Only a genius

like Mr. Ruskin could have produced such hopeless rubbish," says a

newspaper of the period. Far worse than any newspaper criticism was the

condemnation of Denmark Hill. His father, whose eyes had glistened over

early poems and prose eloquence, strongly disapproved of this heretical

economy. It was a bitter thing that his son should become prodigal of a

hardly earned reputation, and be pointed at for a fool. And it was

intensely painful for a son "who had never given his father a pang that

could be avoided," as old Mr. Ruskin had once written, to find his

father, with one foot in the grave, turning against him. In December the

third paper appeared. History repeated itself, and with the fourth paper

the heretic was gagged. A year after, his father died; and these

_Fraser_ articles were laid aside until the end of 1871, when they were

taken up again, and published on New Year's Day 1872, as "Munera

Pulveris."

From the outset, however, he was not without supporters. Carlyle wrote

on June 30, 1862:

"I have read, a month ago, your _First_ in _Fraser_, and ever since

have had a wish to say to it and you, _Euge macte nova virtute._ I

approved in every particular; calm, definite, clear; rising into

the sphere of _Plato_ (our almost best), wh'h in exchange for the

sphere of _Macculloch, Mill and Co._ is a mighty improvement! Since

that, I have seen the little _green_ book, too; reprint of your

_Cornhill_ operations,--about 2/3 of wh'h was read to me (_known_

only from what the contradict'n of sinners had told me of it);--in

every part of wh'h I find a high and noble sort of truth, not one

doctrine that I can intrinsically dissent from, or count other than

salutary in the extreme, and pressingly needed in Engl'd above

all."

Erskine of Linlathen wrote to Carlyle, August 7th, 1862:

"I am thankful for any unveiling of the so-called science of

political economy, according to which, avowed selfishness is the

Rule of the World. It is indeed most important preaching--to preach

that there is not one God for religion and another God for human

fellowship--and another God for buying and selling--that pestilent

polytheism has been largely and confidently preached in our time,

and blessed are those who can detect its mendacities, and help to

disenchant the brethren of their power...."

J.A. Froude, then editor of _Fraser_, and to his dying day Mr. Ruskin's

intimate and affectionate friend, wrote to him on October 24 (1862?):

"The world talks of the article in its usual way. I was at

Carlyle's last night.... He said that in writing to your father as

to subject he had told him that when Solomon's temple was building

it was credibly reported that at least 10,000 sparrows sitting on

the trees round declared that it was entirely wrong--quite contrary

to received opinion--hopelessly condemned by public opinion, etc.

Nevertheless it got finished and the sparrows flew away and began

to chirp in the same note about something else."

CHAPTER III

THE LIMESTONE ALPS (1863)

Our hermit among the Alps of Savoy differed in one respect from his

predecessors. They, for the most part, saw nothing in the rocks and

stones around them except the prison walls of their seclusion; he could

not be within constant sight of the mountains without thinking over the

wonders of their scenery and structure. And it was well for him that it

could be so. The terrible depression of mind which his social and

philanthropic work had brought on, found a relief in the renewal of his

old mountain-worship. After sending off the last of his _Fraser_ papers,

in which, when the verdict had twice gone against him, he tried to show

cause why sentence should not be passed, the strain was at its severest.

He felt, as few others not directly interested felt, the sufferings of

the outcast in English slums and Savoyard hovels; and heard the cry of

the oppressed in Poland and in Italy: and he had been silenced. What

could he do but, as he said in the letters to Norton, "lay his head to

the very ground," and try to forget it all among the stones and the

snows?

He wandered about geologizing, and spent a while at Talloires on the

Lake of Annecy, where the old Abbey had been turned into an inn, and one

slept in a monk's cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery,

St. Bernard of Menthon's memory haunting the place, and St. Germain's

cave close by in the rocks above. At the end of May he came back to

England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Institution. The

subject he chose was "The Stratified Alps of Savoy."

At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the

Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in

papers embedded in Transactions of various societies. Professor Alphonse

Favre's great work did not appear until 1867, and the "Mechanismus der

Gebirgsbildung" of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English

public the subject was a fresh one. To Ruskin it was familiar: he had

been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of

twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly

thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the

intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer

and note-book. In the field he had compared Studer's meagre sections,

and consulted the available authorities on physical geology, though he

had never entered upon the more popular sister-science of palaeontology.

He left the determination of strata to specialists: his interest was

fixed on the structure of mountains--the relation of geology to scenery;

a question upon which he had some right to be heard, as knowing more

about scenery than most geologists, and more about geology than most

artists.

As examples of Savoy mountains this lecture described in detail the

Salève, on which he had been living for two winters, and the Brezon, the

top of which he had tried to buy from the commune of Bonneville--one of

his many plans for settling among the Alps. The commune thought he had

found a gold-mine up there, and raised the price out of all reason.

Other attempts to make a home in the châteaux or chalets of Savoy were

foiled, or abandoned, like his earlier idea to live in Venice. But his

scrambles on the Salève led him to hesitate in accepting the explanation

given by Alphonse Favre of the curious north-west face of steeply

inclined vertical slabs, which he suspected to be created by cleavage,

on the analogy of other Jurassic precipices. The Brezon--_brisant_,

breaking wave--he took as type of the billowy form of limestone Alps in

general, and his analysis of it was serviceable and substantially

correct.

This lecture was followed in 1864 by desultory correspondence with Mr.

Jukes and others in _The Reader_, in which he merely restated his

conclusions, too slightly to convince. Had he devoted himself to a

thorough examination of the subject--but this is in the region of what

might have been. He was more seriously engaged in other pursuits, of

more immediate importance. Three days after his lecture he was being

examined before the Royal Academy Commission, and after a short summer

visit to various friends in the north of England, he set out again for

the Alps, partly to study the geology of Chamouni and North Switzerland,

partly to continue his drawings of Swiss towns at Baden and Lauffenburg,

with his pupil John Bunney. But even there the burden of his real

mission could not be shaken off, and though again seeking health and a

quiet mind, he could not quite keep silence, but wrote letters to

English newspapers on the depreciation of gold (repeating his theory of

currency), and on the wrongs of Poland and Italy; and he put together

more papers, not then published, in continuation of his "Munera

Pulveris."

Since about 1850, Carlyle had been gradually becoming more and more

friendly with John Ruskin; and now that this social and economical work

had been taken up, he began to have a real esteem for him, though always

with a patronizing tone, which the younger man's open and confessed

discipleship accepted and encouraged. This letter especially shows both

men in an unaccustomed light: Ruskin, hating tobacco, sends his "master"

cigars; Carlyle, hating cant, replies rather in the tone of the

temperance advocate, taking a little wine for his stomach's sake:

"CHELSEA, 22 _Feby_, 1865

"DEAR RUSKIN,

"You have sent me a munificent Box of Cigars; for wh'h what can I

say in ans'r? It makes me both sad and glad. _Ay de mi._

"We are such stuff,

Gone with a puff--Then

think, and smoke Tobacco!'

"The Wife also has had her Flowers; and a letter wh'h has charmed

the female mind. You forgot only the first chapter of

'Aglaia';--don't forget; and be a good boy for the future.

"The Geology Book wasn't _Jukes_; I found it again in the

Magazine,--reviewed there: 'Phillips,'[9] is there such a name? It

has ag'n escaped me. I have a notion to come out actually some day

soon; and take a serious Lecture from you on what you really know,

and can give me some intelligible outline of, ab't the

Rocks,--_bones_ of our poor old Mother; wh'h have always been

venerable and strange to me. Next to nothing of rational could I

ever learn of the subject....

[Footnote 9: "Jukes,"--Mr. J.B. Jukes, F.R.S., with whom Ruskin had

been discussing in _The Reader_. "Phillips," the Oxford Professor

of Geology, and a friend of Ruskin's.]

"Yours ever,

"T. CARLYLE."

CHAPTER IV

"SESAME AND LILIES" (1864)

Wider aims and weaker health had not put an end to Ruskin's connection

with the Working Men's College, though he did not now teach a

drawing-class regularly. He had, as he said, "the satisfaction of

knowing that they had very good masters in Messrs. Lowes Dickinson,

Jeffery and Cave Thomas," and his work was elsewhere. He was to have

lectured there on December 19th, 1863; but he did not reach home until

about Christmas; better than he had been; and ready to give the promised

address on January 30th, 1864. Beside which he used to visit the place

occasionally of an evening to take note of progress, and some of his

pupils were now more directly under his care.

It was from one of these visits to the College, on February 27th, that

he returned, past midnight, and found his father waiting up for him, to

read some letters he had written. Next morning the old man, close upon

seventy-nine years of age, was struck with his last illness; and died on

March 3rd. He was buried at Shirley Church, near Addington, in Surrey,

not far from Croydon; and the legend on his tomb records: "He was an

entirely honest merchant, and his memory is, to all who keep it, dear

and helpful. His son, whom he loved to the uttermost, and taught to

speak truth, says this of him."

Mr. John James Ruskin, like many other of our successful merchants, had

been an open-handed patron of art, and a cheerful giver, not only to

needy friends and relatives, but also to various charities. For example,

as a kind of personal tribute to Osborne Gordon, his son's tutor, he

gave £5,000 toward the augmentation of poor Christ-Church livings. His

son's open-handed way with dependants and servants was learned from the

old merchant, who, unlike many hard-working money-makers, was always

ready to give, though he could not bear to lose. In spite of which he

left a considerable fortune behind him,--considerable when it is

understood to be the earnings of his single-handed industry and steady

sagacity in legitimate business, without indulgence in speculation. He

left £120,000 with various other property, to his son. To his wife he

left his house and £37,000, and a void which it seemed at first nothing

could fill. For of late years the son had drifted out of their horizon,

with ideas on religion and the ordering of life so very different from

theirs; and had been much away from home--he sometimes said, selfishly,

but not without the greatest of all excuses, necessity. And so the two

old people had been brought closer than ever together; and she had lived

entirely for her husband. But, as Browning said,--"Put a stick in

anywhere, and she will run up it"--so the brave old lady did not faint

under the blow, and fade away, but transferred her affections and

interests to her son. Before his father's death the difference of

feeling between them, arising out of the heretical economy, had been

healed. Old Mr. Ruskin's will treated his son with all confidence in

spite of his unorthodox views and unbusiness-like ways. And for nearly

eight years longer his mother lived on, to see him pass through his

probation-period into such recognition as an Oxford Professorship

implied, and to find in her last years his later books "becoming more

and more what they always ought to have been" to her.

At the same time, her failing sight and strength needed a constant

household companion. Her son, though he did not leave home yet awhile

for any long journeys, could not be always with her. Only six weeks

after the funeral he was called away for a time to fulfil a

lecture-engagement at Bradford. Before going he brought his pretty young

Scotch cousin. Miss Joanna Ruskin Agnew, to Denmark Hill for a week's

visit. She recommended herself at once to the old lady, and to Carlyle,

who happened to call, by her frank good-nature and unquenchable spirits;

and her visit lasted seven years, until she was married to Arthur

Severn, son of the Ruskins' old friend, Joseph Severn, British Consul at

Rome. Even then she was not allowed far out of their sight, but settled

in the old house at Herne Hill: "nor virtually," said Ruskin in the last

chapter of "Præterita," "have she and I ever parted since."

All through that year he remained at home, except for short necessary

visits, and frequent evenings with Carlyle. And when, in December, he

gave those lectures in Manchester which afterwards, as "Sesame and

Lilies," became his most popular work, we can trace his better health of

mind and body in the brighter tone of his thought. We can hear the echo

of Carlyle's talk in the heroic, aristocratic, Stoic ideals, and in the

insistence on the value of books and free public libraries,[10]--Carlyle

being the founder of the London Library. And we may suspect that his

thoughts on women's influence and education had been not a little

directed by those months in the company of "the dear old lady and ditto

young" to whom Carlyle used to send his love.

[Footnote 10: The first lecture, "Of Kings' Treasuries," was given,

December 6th, 1864, at Rusholme Town Hall, Manchester, in aid of a

library fund for the Rusholme Institute. The second, "Queens' Gardens,"

was given December 14th, at the Town Hall, King Street, now the Free

Reference Library, Manchester, in aid of schools for Ancoats.]

In 1864 a new series of papers on Art was begun, the only published

work upon Art of all these ten years. The papers ran in _The Art

Journal_ from January to July, 1865, and from January to April. 1866,

under the title of "The Cestus of Aglaia," by which was meant the

Girdle, or restraining law, of Beauty, as personified in the wife of

Hephaestus, "the Lord of Labour." Their intention was to suggest, and to

evoke by correspondence, "some laws for present practice of art in our

schools, which may be admitted, if not with absolute, at least with a

sufficient consent, by leading artists." As a first step the author

asked for the elementary rules of drawing. For his own contribution he

showed the value of the "pure line," such as he had used in his own

early drawings. Later on, he had adopted a looser and more picturesque

style of handling the point; and in the "Elements of Drawing" he had

taught his readers to take Rembrandt's etchings as exemplary. But now he

felt that this "evasive" manner, as he called it, had its dangers. And

so these papers attempted to supersede the amateurish object lesson of

the earlier work by stricter rules for a severer style; prematurely, as

it proved, for the chapters came to an end before the promised code was

formulated. The same work was taken up again in "The Laws of Fésole";

but the use of the pure line, which Ruskin's precepts failed to enforce,

was, in the end, taught to the public by the charming practice of Mr.

Walter Crane and Miss Greenaway.

A lecture at the Camberwell Working Men's Institute on "Work and Play"

was given on January 24th, 1865; which, as it was printed in "The Crown

of Wild Olive," we will notice further on. Various letters and papers on

political and social economy and other subjects hardly call for separate

notice: with the exception of one very important address to the Royal

Institution of British Architects, given May 15th, "On the Study of

Architecture in our Schools."

CHAPTER V

"ETHICS OF THE DUST" (1865)

Writing to his father from Manchester about the lecture of February 22,

1859--"The Unity of Art"--Ruskin mentions, among various people of

interest whom he was meeting, such as Sir Elkanah Armitage and Mrs.

Gaskell, how "Miss Bell and four young ladies came from Chester to hear

me, and I promised to pay them a visit on my way home, to their apparent

great contentment."

The visit was paid on his way back from Yorkshire. He wrote:

"WINNINGTON, NORTHWICH, CHESHIRE.

"12 _March_, 1859.

"This is such a nice place that I am going to stay till Monday: an

enormous old-fashioned house--full of galleries and up and down

stairs--but with magnificently large rooms where wanted: the

drawing-room is a huge octagon--I suppose at least forty feet

high--like the tower of a castle (hung half way up all round with

large and beautiful Turner and Raphael engravings) and with a

baronial fireplace:--and in the evening, brightly lighted, with the

groups of girls scattered round it, it is a quite beautiful scene

in its way. Their morning chapel, too, is very interesting:--though

only a large room, it is nicely fitted with reading desk and seats

like a college chapel, and two pretty and rich stained-glass

windows--and well-toned organ. They have morning prayers with only

one of the lessons--and without the psalms: but singing the Te Deum

or the other hymn--and other choral parts: and as out of the

thirty-five or forty girls perhaps twenty-five or thirty have

really available voices, well trained and divided, it was

infinitely more beautiful than any ordinary church service--like

the Trinita di Monte Convent service more than anything else, and

must be very good for them, quite different in its effect on their

minds from our wretched penance of college chapel.

"The house stands in a superb park, full of old trees and sloping

down to the river; with a steep bank of trees on the other side;

just the kind of thing Mrs. Sherwood likes to describe;--and the

girls look all healthy and happy as can be, down to the little

six-years-old ones, who I find know me by the fairy tale as the

others do by my large books:--so I am quite at home.

"They have my portrait in the library with three others--Maurice,

the Bp. of Oxford, and Archdeacon Hare,--so that I can't but stay

with them over the Sunday."

The principles of Winnington were advanced; the theology--Bishop

Colenso's daughter was among the pupils; the Bishop of Oxford had

introduced Ruskin to the managers, who were pleased to invite the

celebrated art-critic to visit whenever he travelled that way, whether

to lecture at provincial towns, or to see his friends in the north, as

he often used. And so between March 1859 and May 1868, after which the

school was removed, he was a frequent visitor; and not only he, but

other lions whom the ladies entrapped:--mention has been made in print

(in "The Queen of the Air") of Charles Halle, whom Ruskin met there in

1863, and greatly admired.

"I like Mr. and Mrs. Halle so very much," he wrote home, "and am

entirely glad to know so great a musician and evidently so good and

wise a man. He was very happy yesterday evening, and actually sat

down and played quadrilles for us to dance to--which is, in its

way, something like Titian sketching patterns for ball-dresses. But

afterwards he played Home, sweet Home, with three

variations--_quite_ the most wonderful thing I have ever heard in

music. Though I was close to the piano, the motion of the fingers

was entirely invisible--a mere _mist_ of rapidity; the _hands_

moving slowly and softly, and the variation, in the ear, like a

murmur of a light fountain, far away. It was beautiful too to see

the girls' faces round, the eyes all wet with feeling, and the

little coral mouths fixed into little half open gaps with utter

intensity of astonishment."

Ruskin could not be idle on his visits; and as he was never so happy as

when he was teaching somebody, he improved the opportunity by

experiments in education permitted there for his sake. Among other

things, he devised singing dances for a select dozen of the girls, with

verses of his own writing; one, a maze to the theme of "Twist ye, twine

ye," based upon the song in "Guy Mannering," but going far beyond the

original motive in its variations weighted with allegoric thought. Deep

as the feeling of this little poem is, there is a nobler chord struck in

the Song of Peace, the battle-cry of the good time coming; in the

faith--who else has found it?--that looks forward to no selfish victory

of narrow aims, but to the full reconciliation of hostile interests and

the blind internecine struggle of this perverse world, in the clearer

light of the millennial morning.

Ruskin's method of teaching, as illustrated in "Ethics of the Dust," has

been variously pooh-poohed by his critics. It has seemed to some absurd

to mix up Theology, and Crystallography, and Political Economy, and

Mythology, and Moral Philosophy, with the chatter of school-girls and

the romps of the playground. But it should be understood, before reading

this book, which is practically the report of these Wilmington talks,

that it is printed as an illustration of a method. It showed that

play-lessons need not want either depth or accuracy; and that the

requirement was simply capacity on the part of the teacher.

The following letter from Carlyle was written in acknowledgment of an

early copy of the book, of which the preface is dated Christmas, 1865.

"CHELSEA,

"_20 Decr, 1865._

"The 'Ethics of the Dust,' wh'h I devoured with't pause, and intend

to look at ag'n, is a most shining Performance! Not for a long

while have I read anything tenth-part so radiant with talent,

ingenuity, lambent fire (sheet--and _other_ lightnings) of all

commendable kinds! Never was such a lecture on _Crystallography_

before, had there been nothing else in it,--and there are all

manner of things. In power of _expression_ I pronounce it to be

supreme; never did anybody who had _such_ things to explain explain

them better. And the bit of Egypt'n mythology, the cunning _Dreams_

ab't Pthah, Neith, etc., apart from their elucidative quality,

wh'h is exquisite, have in them a _poetry_ that might fill any

Tennyson with despair. You are very dramatic too; nothing wanting

in the stage-direct'ns, in the pretty little indicat'ns: a very

pretty stage and _dramatis personæ_ altogeth'r. Such is my first

feeling ab't y'r Book, dear R.--Come soon, and I will tell you all

the _faults_ of it, if I gradually discover a great many. In fact,

_come_ at any rate!

"Y'rs ever,

"T. CARLYLE."

The Real Little Housewives, to whom the book was dedicated, were not

quite delighted--at least, they said they were not--at the portraits

drawn of them, in their pinafores, so to speak, with some little hints

at failings and faults which they recognised through the mask of

_dramatis personæ._ Miss "Kathleen" disclaimed the singing of "Vilikins

and his Dinah," and so on. It is difficult to please everybody. The

public did not care about the book; the publisher hoped Mr. Ruskin would

write no more dialogues: and so it remained, little noticed, for twelve

years. In 1877 it was republished and found to be interesting, and in

1905 the 31st thousand (authorised English edition) had been issued. At

that time, however, Sesame and Lilies had run to 160,000 copies.

Winnington Hall, the scene of these pastimes, is now, I understand, used

by Messrs. Brunner, Mond & Co. as a commonroom or clubhouse for the

staff in their great scientific industry.

CHAPTER VI

"THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE" (1865-1866)

Mention has been made of an address to working men at the Camberwell

Institute, January 24th, 1865. This lecture was published in 1866,

together with two others,[11] under the title of "The Crown of Wild

Olive"--that is to say, the reward of human work, a reward "which should

have been of gold, had not Jupiter been so poor," as Aristophanes said.

[Footnote 11: Republished in 1873, with a fourth lecture added, and a

Preface and notes on the political growth of Prussia, from Carlyle's

"Frederick."]

True work, he said, meant the production (taking the word production in

a broad sense) of the means of life; every one ought to take some share

in it, according to his powers: some working with the head, some with

the hands; but all acknowledging idleness and slavery to be alike

immoral. And, as to the remuneration, he said, as he had said before in

"Unto this Last," Justice demands that equal energy expended should

bring equal reward. He did not consider it justice to cry out for the

equalization of incomes, for some are sure to be more diligent and

saving than others; some work involves a great preliminary expenditure

of energy in qualifying the worker, as contrasted with unskilled labour.

But he did not allow that the possession of capital entitled a man to

unearned increment; and he thought that, in a community where a truly

civilized morality was highly developed, the general sense of society

would recognise an average standard of work and an average standard of

pay for each class.

In the next two lectures he spoke of the two great forms of Play, the

great Games of Money-making and War. He had been invited to lecture at

Bradford, in the hope that he would give some useful advice towards the

design of a new Exchange which was to be built; in curious

forgetfulness, it would appear, of his work during the past ten years

and more. Indeed, the picture he drew them of an ideal "Temple to the

Goddess of Getting-on" was as daring a sermon as ever prophet preached.

But when he came to tell them that the employers of labour might be true

captains and kings, the leaders and the helpers of their fellow-men,

and that the function of commerce was not to prey upon society but to

provide for it, there were many of his hearers whose hearts told them

that he was right, and whose lives have shown, in some measure, that he

did not speak in vain.

Still stranger, to hearers who had not noted the conclusion of his third

volume of "Modern Painters," was his view of war, in the address to the

Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, in December 1865. The common view of

war as destroyer of arts and enemy of morality, the easy acceptance of

the doctrine that peace is an unqualified blessing, the obvious evils of

battle and rapine and the waste of resources and life throughout so many

ages, have blinded less clear-sighted and less widely-experienced

thinkers to another side of the teaching of history, which Ruskin dwelt

upon with unexpected emphasis.

But modern war, horrible, not from its scale, but from the spirit in

which the upper classes set the lower to fight like gladiators in the

arena, he denounced; and called upon the women of England, with whom, he

said, the real power of life and death lay, to mend it into some

semblance of antique chivalry, or to end it in the name of religion and

humanity.

In the _New Review_ for March 1892, there appeared a series of "Letters

of John Ruskin to his Secretary," which, as the anonymous contributor

remarked, illustrate "Ruskin the worker, as he acts away from the eyes

of the world; Ruskin the epistolographer, when the eventuality of the

printing-press is not for the moment before him Ruskin the good

Samaritan, ever gentle and open-handed when true need and a good cause

make appeal to his tender heart; Ruskin the employer, considerate,

generous--an ideal master."

Charles Augustus Howell became known to Ruskin (in 1864 or 1865) through

the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites; and, as the editor of the letters

puts it, "by his talents and assiduity" became the too-trusted friend

and _protégé_ of Ruskin, Rossetti and others of their acquaintance. It

was he who proposed and carried out the exhumation, reluctantly

consented to, of Rossetti's manuscript poems from his wife's grave, in

October, 1869; for which curious service to literature let him have the

thanks of posterity. But he was hardly the man to carry out Ruskin's

secret charities, and long before he had lost Rossetti's confidence[12]

he had ceased to act as Ruskin's secretary.

[Footnote 12: In the manner described by Mr. W.M. Rossetti at p. 351,

Vol. I., of "D.G. Rossetti, his family letters," to which the reader is

referred.]

From these letters, however, several interesting traits and incidents

may be gleaned, such as anecdotes about the canary which was anonymously

bought at the Crystal Palace Bird Show (February 1866) for the owner's

benefit: about the shopboy whom Ruskin was going to train as an artist;

and about the kindly proposal to employ the aged and impoverished

Cruikshank upon a new book of fairy tales, and the struggle between

admiration for the man and admission of his loss of power, ending in the

free gift of the hundred pounds promised.

In April, 1866, after writing the Preface to "The Crown of Wild Olive,"

and preparing the book for publication, Ruskin was carried off to the

Continent for a holiday with Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan, her niece

Miss Constance Hilliard (Mrs. Churchill), and Miss Agnew (Mrs. Severn),

for a thorough rest and change after three years of unintermitting work

in England. They intended to spend a couple of months in Italy. On the

day of starting, Ruskin called at Cheyne Walk with the usual bouquet for

Mrs. Carlyle, to learn that she had just met with her death, in trying

to save her little dog, the gift of Lady Trevelyan. He rejoined his

friends, and they crossed the Channel gaily, in spite of what they

thought was rather a cloud over him. At Paris they read the news. "Yes,"

he said, "I knew. But there was no reason why I should spoil your

pleasure by telling you."

On his arrival at Dijon he wrote to Carlyle, who in answer after giving

way to his grief--"my life all laid in ruins, and the one light of it as

if gone out,"--continued:--"Come and see me when you get home; come

oftener and see me, and speak _more_ frankly to me (for I am very true

to y'r highest interests and you) while I still remain here. You can do

nothing for me in Italy; except come home improved."

But before this letter reached Ruskin, he too had been in the presence

of death, and had lost one of his most valued friends. Their journey to

Italy had been undertaken chiefly for the sake of Lady Trevelyan's

health, as the following extracts indicate:

"PARIS, _2nd May, 1866_.

"Lady Trevelyan is much better to-day, but it is not safe to move

her yet--till to-morrow. So I'm going to take the children to look

at Chartres cathedral--we can get three hours there, and be back to

seven o'clock dinner. We drove round by St. Cloud and Sèvres

yesterday; the blossomed trees being glorious by the Seine,--the

children in high spirits. It reminds me always too much of

Turner--every bend of these rivers is haunted by him."

"DIJON, _Sunday, 6th May, 1866_.

"Lady Trevelyan is _much_ better, and we hope all to get on to

Neufchatel to-morrow. The weather is quite fine again though not

warm; and yesterday I took the children for a drive up the little

valley which we used to drive through on leaving Dijon for Paris.

There are wooded hills on each side, and we got into a sweet

valley, as full of nightingales as our garden is of thrushes, and

with slopes of broken rocky ground above, covered with the lovely

blue milk-wort, and purple columbines, and geranium, and wild

strawberry-flowers. The children were intensely delighted, and I

took great care that Constance should not run about so as to heat

herself, and we got up a considerable bit of hill quite nicely, and

with greatly increased appetite for tea, and general mischief. They

have such appetites that I generally call them 'my two little

pigs.' There is a delightful French waiting-maid at dinner

here--who says they are both 'charmantes,' but highly approves of

my title for them nevertheless."

"NEUFCHATEL, _10th May_, 1866.

"Lady Trevelyan is still too weak to move. We had (the children and

I) a delightful day yesterday at the Pierre à Bot, gathering

vetches and lilies of the valley in the woods, and picnic

afterwards on the lovely mossy grass, in view of all the

Alps--Jungfrau, Eiger, Blumlis Alp, Altels, and the rest, with

intermediate lake and farmsteads and apple-blossom--very heavenly."

Here, within a few days, Lady Trevelyan died. Throughout her illness she

had been following the progress of the new notes on wild-flowers

(afterwards to be "Proserpina") with keen interest, and Sir Walter lent

the help of botanical science to Ruskin's more poetical and artistic

observations. For the sake of this work, and for the "children," and

with a wise purpose of bearing up under the heavy blow that had fallen,

the two friends continued their journey for a while among the mountains.

From Thun they went to Interlachen and the Giessbach. Ruskin occupied

himself closely in tracing Studer's sections across the great

lake-furrow of central Switzerland--"something craggy for his mind to

break upon," as Byron said when he was in trouble. At the Giessbach

there was not only geology and divine scenery, enjoyable in lovely

weather, but an interesting figure in the foreground, the widowed

daughter of the hotel landlord, beautiful and consumptive, but brave as

a Swiss girl should be. They all seem to have fallen in love with her,

so to speak the young English girls as much as the impressionable

art-critic: and the new human interest in her Alpine tragedy relieved,

as such interests do, the painfulness of the circumstances through which

they had been passing. Her sister Marie was like an Allegra to this

Penserosa; bright and brilliant in native genius. She played piano-duets

with the young ladies; taught Alpine botany to the savants; guided them

to the secret dells and unknown points of view; and with a sympathy

unexpected in a stranger, beguiled them out of their grief, and won

their admiration and gratitude. Marie of the Giessbach was often

referred to in letters of the time, and for many years after, with

warmly affectionate remembrances.

A few bits from his letters to his mother, which I have been permitted

to copy, will indicate the impressions of this summer's tour.

"HÔTEL DU GIESBACH, _6th June, 1866_,

"MY DEAREST MOTHER,

"Can you at all fancy walking out in the morning in a garden full

of lilacs just in rich bloom, and pink hawthorn in masses; and

along a little terrace with lovely pinks coming into cluster of

colour all over the low wall beside it; and a sloping bank of green

sward from it--and below that, the Giesbach! Fancy having a real

Alpine waterfall in one's garden,--seven hundred feet high. You

see, we are just in time for the spring, here, and the strawberries

are ripening on the rocks. Joan and Constance have been just

scrambling about and gathering them for me. Then there's the

blue-green lake below, and Interlaken and the lake of Thun in the

distance. I think I never saw anything so beautiful. Joan will

write to you about the people, whom she has made great friends

with, already."

"_7th June, 1866_.

"I cannot tell you how much I am struck with the beauty of this

fall: it is different from everything I have ever seen in torrents.

There are so many places where one gets near it without being wet,

for one thing; for the falls are, mostly, not vertical so as to fly

into mere spray, but over broken rock, which crushes the water into

a kind of sugar-candy-like foam, white as snow, yet glittering; and

composed, not of bubbles, but of broken-up water. Then I had

forgotten that it plunged straight into the lake; I got down to the

lake shore on the other side of it yesterday, and to see it plunge

clear into the blue water, with the lovely mossy rocks for its

flank, and for the lake edge, was an unbelievable kind of thing; it

is all as one would fancy cascades in fairyland. I do not often

endure with patience any cockneyisms or showings off at these

lovely places. But they do one thing here so interesting that I can

forgive it. One of the chief cascades (about midway up the hill)

falls over a projecting rock, so that one can walk under the

torrent as it comes over. It leaps so clear that one is hardly

splashed, except at one place. Well, when it gets dark, they burn,

for five minutes, one of the strongest steady fireworks of a

crimson colour, behind the fall. The red light shines right

through, turning the whole waterfall into a torrent of fire."

"_11th June, 1866._

"We leave, according to our programme, for Interlachen

to-day,--with great regret, for the peace and sweetness of this

place are wonderful and the people are good; and though there is

much drinking and quarrelling among the younger men, there appears

to be neither distressful poverty, nor deliberate crime: so that

there is more of the sense I need, and long for, of fellowship with

human creatures, than in any place I have been at for years. I

believe they don't so much as lock the house-doors at night; and

the faces of the older peasantry are really very beautiful. I have

done a good deal of botany, and find that wild-flower botany is

more or less inexhaustible, but the cultivated flowers are infinite

in their caprice. The forget-me-nots and milkworts are singularly

beautiful here, but there is quite as much variety in English

fields as in these, as long as one does not climb much--and I'm

very lazy, compared to what I used to be,"

"_LAUTERBRUNNEN, 13th June, 1866._

"We had a lovely evening here yesterday, and the children enjoyed

and understood it better than anything they have yet seen among the

Alps. Constance was in great glory in a little walk I took her in

the twilight through the upper meadows: the Staubbach seen only as

a grey veil suspended from its rock, and the great Alps pale above

on the dark sky. She condescended nevertheless to gather a great

bunch of the white catchfly,--to make 'pops' with,--her friend

Marie at the Giesbach having shown her how a startling detonation

may be obtained, by skilful management, out of its globular calyx.

"This morning is not so promising,--one of the provoking ones which

will neither let you stay at home with resignation, nor go anywhere

with pleasure. I'm going to take the children for a little quiet

exploration of the Wengern path, to see how they like it, and if

the weather betters--we may go on. At all events I hope to find an

Alpine rose or two."

In June, 1866, the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford was vacant; and

Ruskin's friends were anxious to see him take the post. He, however,

felt no especial fitness or inclination for it, and did not stand. Three

years later he was elected to a Professorship that at this time had not

been founded.

After spending June in the Oberland, he went homewards through Berne,

Vevey and Geneva, to find his private secretary with a bundle of begging

letters, and his friend Carlyle busy with the defence of Governor Eyre.

In 1865 an insurrection of negroes at Morant Bay, Jamaica, had

threatened to take the most serious shape, when it was stamped out by

the high-handed measures of Mr. Eyre. After the first congratulations

were over another side to the question called for a hearing. The Baptist

missionaries declared that among the negroes who were shot and hanged

_in terrorem_ were peaceable subjects, respectable members of their own

native congregations, for whose character they could vouch; they added

that the gravity of the situation had been exaggerated by private enmity

and jealousy of their work and creed. A strong committee was formed

under Liberal auspices, supported by such men as John Stuart Mill and

Thomas Hughes, the author of "Tom Brown's Schooldays"--men whose motive

was above suspicion--to bring Mr. Eyre to account.

Carlyle, who admired the strong hand, and had no interest in Baptist

missionaries, accepted Mr. Eyre as the saviour of society in his West

Indian sphere; and there were many, both in Jamaica and at home, who

believed that, but for his prompt action, the white population would

have been massacred with all the horrors of a savage rebellion. Ruskin

had been for many years the ally of the Broad Church and Liberal party.

But he was now coming more and more under the personal influence of

Carlyle; and when it came to the point of choosing sides, declared

himself, in a letter to the _Daily Telegraph_ (December 20th, 1865), a

Conservative and a supporter of order; and joined the Eyre Defence

Committee with a subscription of £100. The prominent part he took, for

example, in the meeting of September, 1866, was no doubt forced upon him

by his desire to save Carlyle, whose recent loss and shaken nerves made

such business especially trying to him. Letters of this period remain,

in which Carlyle begs Ruskin to "be diligent, I bid you!"--and so on,

adding, "I must absolutely _shut up_ in that direction, to save my

sanity." And so it fell to the younger man to work through piles of

pamphlets and newspaper correspondence, to interview politicians and men

of business, and--what was so very foreign to his habits--to take a

leading share in a party agitation.

But in all this he was true to his Jacobite instincts. He had been

brought up a Tory; and though he had drifted into an alliance with the

Broad Church and philosophical Liberals, he was never one of them. Now

that his father was gone, perhaps he felt a sort of duty to own himself

his father's son; and the failure of liberal philanthropy to realise his

ideals, and of liberal philosophy to rise to his economic standards,

combined with Carlyle to induce him to label himself Conservative. But

his conservatism could not be accepted by the party so called.

Fortunately, he did not need or ask their recognition. He took no

interest in party politics, and never in his life voted at a

Parliamentary election. He only meant to state in the shortest terms

that he stood for loyalty and order.

CHAPTER VII

"TIME AND TIDE" (1867)

The series of letters published as "Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne"

were addressed[13] to Thomas Dixon, a working cork-cutter of Sunderland,

whose portrait by Professor Legros is familiar to visitors at the South

Kensington Museum. He was one of those thoughtful, self-educated working

men in whom, as a class, Ruskin had been taking a deep interest for the

past twelve years, an interest which had purchased him a practical

insight into their various capacities and aims, and the right to speak

without fear or favour. At this time there was an agitation for

Parliamentary reform, and the better representation of the working

classes; and it was on this topic that the letters were begun, though

the writer went on to criticise the various social ideals then popular,

and to propose his own. He had already done something of the sort in

"Unto this Last"; but "Time and Tide" is much more complete, and the

result of seven years' further thought and experience. His "Fors

Clavigera" is a continuation of these letters, but written at a time

when other work and ill health broke in upon his strength. "Time and

Tide" is not only the statement of his social scheme as he saw it in his

central period, but, written as these letters were--at a stroke, so to

speak--condensed in exposition and simple in language, they deserve the

most careful reading by the student of Ruskin.

[Footnote 13: During February, March and April, 1867, and published in

the _Manchester Examiner_ and _Leeds Mercury_.]

Before this work was ended, Carlyle had come back from Mentone to

Chelsea, and was begging his friend, in the warmest terms, to come and

see him. Shortly afterward, a passage which Ruskin would not retract

gave offence to Carlyle. But the difference was healed, and later years

reveal the sage of Chelsea as kindly and affectionate as ever. This

friendship between the two greatest writers of their age, between two

men of vigorous individuality, outspoken opinions, and widely different

tastes and sympathies, is a fine episode in the history of both.

In May, Ruskin was invited to Cambridge to receive the honorary degree

of LL.D., and to deliver the Rede Lecture. The _Cambridge Chronicle_ of

May 24th, 1867, says: "The body of the Senate House was quite filled

with M.A.'s and ladies, principally the latter, whilst there was a large

attendance of undergraduates in the galleries, who gave the lecturer a

most enthusiastic reception." A brief report of the lecture was printed

in the newspaper; but it was not otherwise published, and the manuscript

seems to have been mislaid for thirty years. I take the liberty of

copying the opening sentences as a specimen of that Academical oratory

which Mr. Ruskin then adopted, and used habitually in his earlier

lectures at Oxford.

The title of the discourse was "The Relation of National Ethics to

National Arts."

"In entering on the duty to-day entrusted to me, I should hold it

little respectful to my audience if I disturbed them by expression

of the diffidence which they know that I must feel in first

speaking in this Senate House; diffidence which might well have

prevented me from accepting such duty, but ought not to interfere

with my endeavour simply to fulfil it. Nevertheless, lest the

direction which I have been led to give to my discourse, and the

narrow limits within which I am compelled to confine the treatment

of its subject may seem in anywise inconsistent with the purpose of

the founder of this Lecture--or with the expectations of those by

whose authority I am appointed to deliver it, let me at once say

that I obeyed their command, not thinking myself able to teach any

dogma in the philosophy of the arts, which could be of any new

interest to the members of this University: but only that I might

obtain the sanction of their audience, for the enforcement upon

other minds of the truth, which--after thirty years spent in the

study of art, not dishonestly, however feebly--is manifest to me as

the clearest of all that I have learned, and urged upon me as the

most vital of all I have to declare."

He then distinguished between true and false art, the true depending

upon sincerity, whether in literature, music or the formative arts: he

reinforced his old doctrine of the dignity of true imagination as the

attribute of healthy and earnest minds; and energetically attacked the

commercial art-world of the day, and the notion that drawing-schools

were to be supported for the sake of the gain they would bring to our

manufacturers.

In this lecture we see the germ of the ideas, as well as the beginning

of the style, of the Oxford Inaugural course, and the "Eagle's Nest";

something quite different in type from the style and teaching of the

addresses to working men, or to mixed popular audiences at Edinburgh or

Manchester, or even at the Royal Institution. At this latter place, on

June 4th, Sir Henry Holland in the chair, he lectured on "The Present

State of Modern Art, with reference to advisable arrangement of the

National Gallery," repeating much of what he had said in "Time and Tide"

about the taste for the horrible and absence of true feeling for pure

and dignified art in the theatrical shows of the day, and in the

admiration for Gustave Doré, then a new fashion. Mr. Ruskin could never

endure that the man who had illustrated Balzac's "Contes Drôlatiques"

should be chosen by the religious public of England as the exponent of

their sacred ideals.

In July after a short visit to Huntly Burn near Abbotsford, he went to

Keswick for a few weeks, from whence he wrote the rhymed letters to his

cousin at home, quoted (with the date wrongly given as 1857) in

"Præterita" to illustrate his "heraldic character" of "Little Pigs" and

to shock exoteric admirers. Like, for example, Rossetti and Carlyle,

Ruskin was fond of playful nicknames and grotesque terms of endearment.

He never stood upon his dignity with intimates; and was ready to allow

the liberties he took, much to the surprise of strangers.

He reached Keswick by July 4, and spent his time chiefly in walks upon

the hills, staying at the Derwentwater Hotel. He wrote:

"Keswick, _19th July, '67, Afternoon, 1/2 past 3_.

"My dearest Mother,

"As this is the last post before Sunday I send one more line to say

I've had a delightful forenoon's walk--since 1/2 past ten--by St.

John's Vale, and had pleasant thoughts, and found one of the most

variedly beautiful torrent beds I ever saw in my life; and I feel

that I gain strength, slowly but certainly, every day. The great

good of the place is that I can be content without going on great

excursions which fatigue and do me harm (or else worry me with

problems;)--I am _content_ here with the roadside hedges and

streams; and this contentment is the great thing for health,--and

there is hardly anything to annoy me of absurd or calamitous human

doing; but still this ancient cottage life--very rude and miserable

enough in its torpor--but clean, and calm, not a vile cholera and

plague of bestirred pollution, like back streets in London. There

is also much more real and deep beauty than I expected to find, in

some of the minor pieces of scenery, and in the cloud effects."

"_July 16_.

"I have the secret of extracting sadness from all things, instead

of joy, which is no enviable talisman. Forgive me if I ever write

in a way that may pain you. It is best that you should know, when I

write cheerfully, it is no pretended cheerfulness; so when I am

sad--I think it right to confess it."

"_30th July._

"Downes[14] arrived yesterday quite comfortably and in fine

weather. It is not bad this morning, and I hope to take him for a

walk up Saddleback, which, after all, is the finest, to my mind, of

all the Cumberland hills--though that is not saying much; for they

are much lower in effect, in proportion to their real height, than

I had expected. The beauty of the country is in its quiet roadside

bits, and rusticity of cottage life and shepherd labour. Its

mountains are sorrowfully melted away from my old dreams of them."

[Footnote 14: The gardener at Denmark Hill.]

Next day he "went straight up the steep front of Saddleback by the

central ridge to the summit. It is the finest thing I've yet seen,

there being several bits of real crag-work, and a fine view at the

top over the great plains of Penrith on one side, and the

Cumberland hills, as a chain, on the other. Fine fresh wind

blowing, and plenty of crows. Do you remember poor papa's favourite

story about the Quaker whom the crows ate on Saddleback? There were

some of the biggest and hoarsest-voiced ones about the cliff that

I've ever had sympathetic croaks from;--and one on the top, or near

it, so big that Downes and Crawley, having Austrian tendencies in

politics, took it for a 'black eagle.' Downes went up capitally,

though I couldn't get him down again, because he _would_ stop to

gather ferns. However, we did it all and came down to Threlkeld--of

the Bridal of Triermain,

"'The King his way pursued

By lonely Threlkeld's waste and wood,'

"in good time for me to dress and, for a wonder, go out to dinner

with Acland's friends the Butlers."

As an episode in this visit to Keswick, ten days were given to the

neighbourhood of Ambleside, "to show Downes Windermere."

"Waterhead, Windermere,

"_10th August, 1867, Evening_.

"I was at Coniston to-day. Our old Waterhead Inn, where I was so

happy playing in the boats, _exists_ no more.--Its place is grown

over with smooth Park grass--the very site of it forgotten! and, a

quarter of a mile down the lake, a vast hotel built in the railroad

station style--making up, I suppose, its fifty or eighty beds, with

coffee-room--smoking-room--and every pestilent and devilish

Yankeeism that money can buy, or speculation plan.

"The depression, whatever its cause, does not affect my strength. I

walked up a long hill on the road to Coniston to-day (gathering

wild raspberries)--then from this new Inn, two miles to the foot of

Coniston Old Man; up it; down again--(necessarily!)--and back to

dinner, without so much as warming myself--not that there was much

danger of doing that at the top; for a keen west wind was blowing

drifts of cloud by at a great pace, and one was glad of the

shelter of the pile of stones, the largest and _oldest_ I ever saw

on a mountain top. I suppose the whole mountain is named from it.

It is of the shape of a beehive, strongly built, about 15 feet high

(so that I made Downes follow me up it before I would allow he had

been at the top of the Old Man) and covered with lichen and short

moss. Lancaster sands and the Irish sea were very beautiful, and so

also the two lakes of Coniston and Windermere, lying in the vastest

space of sweet cultivated country I have ever looked over,--a great

part of the view from the Rigi being merely over black pine forest,

even on the plains. Well, after dinner, the evening was very

beautiful, and I walked up the long hill on the road back from

Coniston--and kept ahead of the carriage for two miles: I was sadly

vexed when I had to get in: and now--I don't feel as if I had been

walking at all--and shall probably lie awake for an hour or

two--and feeling as if I had not had exercise enough to send me to

sleep."

"LANGDALE, _13th August, Evening._

"It is perfectly calm to-night, not painfully hot--and the full

moon shining over the mountains, opposite my window, which are the

scene of Wordsworth's 'Excursion.' It was terribly hot in the

earlier day, and I did not leave the house till five o'clock. Then

I went out, and in the heart of Langdale Pikes found the loveliest

rock-scenery, chased with silver waterfalls, that I ever set foot

or heart upon. The Swiss torrent-beds are always more or less

savage, and ruinous, with a terrible sense of overpowering strength

and danger, lulled. But here, the sweet heather and ferns and star

mosses nestled in close to the dashing of the narrow

streams;--while every cranny of crag held its own little placid

lake of amber, trembling with falling drops--but quietly

trembling--not troubled into ridgy wave or foam--the rocks

themselves, _ideal_ rock, as hard as iron--no--not quite that, but

_so_ hard that after breaking some of it, breaking solid white

quartz seemed like smashing brittle loaf sugar, in comparison--and

cloven into the most noble masses; not grotesque, but majestic and

full of harmony with the larger mountain mass of which they formed

a part. Fancy what a place! for a hot afternoon after five, with no

wind--and absolute solitude; no creature--except a lamb or two--to

mix any ruder sound or voice with the plash of the innumerable

streamlets."

It was during this tour that he looked at a site on the hill above

Bowness-on-Windermere, where Mr. T. Richmond, the owner, proposed

building him a house. He liked the view, but found it too near the

railway station.

After spending September with his mother at Norwood under the care of

Dr. Powell, he was able to return home, prepare "Time and Tide" for

publication, and write the preface on Dec. 14th. On the 19th the book

was out, and immediately bought up. A month later the second edition was

issued.

CHAPTER VIII

AGATES, AND ABBEVILLE (1868)

Of less interest to the general reader, though too important a part of

Ruskin's life and work to be passed over without mention, are his

studies in Mineralogy. We have heard of his early interest in spars and

ores; of his juvenile dictionary in forgotten hieroglyphics; and of his

studies in the field and at the British Museum. He had made a splendid

collection, and knew the various museums of Europe as familiarly as he

knew the picture-galleries. In the "Ethics of the Dust" he had chosen

Crystallography as the subject in which to exemplify his method of

education; and in 1867, after finishing the letters to Thomas Dixon, he

took refuge, as before, among the stones, from the stress of more

agitating problems.

In the lecture on the Savoy Alps in 1863 he had referred to a hint of

Saussure's that the contorted beds of the limestones might possibly be

due to some sort of internal action, resembling on a large scale that

separation into concentric or curved bands which is seen in calcareous

deposits. The contortions of gneiss were similarly analogous, it was

suggested, to those of the various forms of silica. Ruskin did not adopt

the theory, but put it by for examination in contrast with the usual

explanation of these phenomena, as the simple mechanical thrust of the

contracting surface of the earth.

In 1863 and 1866 he had been among the Nagelflüh of Northern

Switzerland, studying the puddingstones and breccias. He saw that the

difference between these formations, in their structural aspect, and the

hand-specimens in his collection of pisolitic and brecciated minerals

was chiefly a matter of size; and that the resemblances in form were

very close. And so he concluded that if the structure of the minerals

could be fully understood a clue might be found to the very puzzling

question of the origin of mountain structure.

Hence his attempt to analyze the structure of agates and similar banded

and brecciated minerals, in the series of papers in the _Geological

Magazine_;[15] an attempt which though it was never properly completed,

and fails to come to any general conclusion, is extremely interesting as

an account of beautiful and curious natural forms till then little

noticed by mineralogists.

[Footnote 15: August and November, 1867, January, April and May, 1868,

December, 1869, and January, 1870, illustrated with very fine mezzotint

plates and woodcuts.]

A characteristic anecdote of this period is preserved in "Arrows of the

Chace."

"The _Daily Telegraph_ of January 21st, 1868, contained a leading

article upon the following facts. It appeared that a girl, named Matilda

Griggs, had been nearly murdered by her seducer, who, after stabbing her

in no less than thirteen places, had then left her for dead. She had,

however, still strength enough to crawl into a field close by, and there

swooned. The assistance she met with in this plight was of a rare kind.

Two calves came up to her, and disposing themselves on either side of

her bleeding body, thus kept her warm and partly sheltered from cold

and rain. Temporarily preserved, the girl eventually recovered, and

entered into recognizances, under a sum of forty pounds, to prosecute

her murderous lover. But 'she loved much,' and failing to prosecute,

forfeited her recognizances, and was imprisoned by the Chancellor of the

Exchequer for her debt. 'Pity the poor debtor,' wrote the _Daily

Telegraph_, and in the next day's issue appeared the following letter,

probably not intended for the publication accorded to it. 'Sir,--Except

in 'Gil Blas,' I never read of anything Astræan on the earth so perfect

as the story in your fourth article to-day. I send you a cheque for the

Chancellor. If forty, in legal terms, means four hundred, you must

explain the farther requirements to your impulsive public.

"'I am, Sir, your faithful servant, 'J. RUSKIN.'"

The writer of letters like this naturally had a large correspondence,

beside that which a circle of private friends and numberless admirers

and readers elicited. About this time it grew to such a pitch that he

was obliged to print a form excusing him from letter-writing on the

ground of stress of work. And indeed, this year, though he did not

publish his annual volume, as usual, he was fully occupied with frequent

letters to newspapers, several lectures and addresses, a preface to the

reprint of his old friend Cruikshank's "Grimm," and the beginning of a

new botanical work, "Proserpina," in addition to the mineralogy, and a

renewed interest in classical studies. Of the public addresses the most

important was that on "The Mystery of Life and its Arts," delivered in

the theatre of the Royal College of Science, Dublin (May 13th), and

printed in "Sesame and Lilies."

After this visit to Ireland he spent a few days at Winnington; and late

in August crossed the Channel, for rest and change at Abbeville. For the

past five years he had found too little time for drawing; it was twenty

years since his last sketching of French Gothic, except for a study (now

at Oxford), of the porch at Amiens, in 1856. He took up the old work

where he had left it, after writing the "Seven Lamps," with fresh

interest and more advanced powers of draughtsmanship as shown in the

pencil study of the Place Amiral Courbet, now in the drawing school at

Oxford.

The following are extracts from the usual budget of home letters;

readers of "Fors" will need no further introduction to their old

acquaintance, the tallow-chandler.

"ABBEVILLE, _Friday, 18th Sept._, 1868

"You seem to have a most uncomfortable time of it, with the

disturbance of the house. However, I can only leave you to manage

these things as you think best--or feel pleasantest to yourself. I

am saddened by another kind of disorder, France is in everything so

fallen back, so desolate and comfortless, compared to what it was

twenty years ago--the people so much rougher, clumsier, more

uncivil--everything they do, vulgar and base. Remnants of the old

nature come out when they begin to know you. I am drawing at a nice

tallow-chandler's door, and to-day, for the first time had to go

inside for rain. He was very courteous and nice, and warned me

against running against the candle-ends--or bottoms, as they were

piled on the shelves, saying--'You must take care, you see, not to

steal any of my candles'--or 'steal _from_ my candles,' meaning not

to rub them off on my coat. He has a beautiful family of cats--papa

and mamma and two superb kittens--half Angora."

"_22nd Sept._

"I am going to my cats and tallow-chandler.... I was very much

struck by the superiority of manner both in him and in his two

daughters who serve at the counter, to persons of the same class in

England. When the girls have weighed out their candles, or written

down the orders that are sent in, they instantly sit down to their

needlework behind the counter, and are always busy, yet always

quiet; and their father, though of course there may be vulgar

idioms in his language which I do not recognize, has entirely the

manners of a gentleman."

_30th Sept_.

"I have the advantage here I had not counted on. I see by the

papers that the weather in England is very stormy and bad. Now,

though it is showery here, and breezy, it has always allowed me at

some time of the day to draw. The air is tender and soft,

invariably--even when blowing with force; and to-day, I have seen

quite the loveliest sunset I ever yet saw,--one at Boulogne in '61

was richer; but for delicacy and loveliness nothing of past sight

ever came near this."

Earlier on the same day he had written:

"I am well satisfied with the work I am doing, and even with my own

power of doing it, if only I can keep myself from avariciously

trying to do too much, and working hurriedly. But I can do _very_

little quite _well_, each day: with that however it is my bounden

duty to be content.

"And now I have a little piece of news for you. Our old Herne Hill

house being now tenantless, and requiring some repairs before I can

get a tenant, I have resolved to keep it for myself, for my rougher

mineral work and mass of collection; keeping only my finest

specimens at Denmark Hill. My first reason for this, is affection

for the old house:--my second, want of room;--my third, the

incompatibility of hammering, washing, and experimenting on stones

with cleanliness in my stores of drawings. And my fourth is the

power I shall have, when I want to do anything very quietly, of

going up the hill and thinking it out in the old garden, where your

greenhouse still stands, and the aviary--without fear of

interruption from callers.

"It may perhaps amuse you, in hours which otherwise would be

listless, to think over what may be done with the old house. I have

ordered it at once to be put in proper repair by Mr. Snell; but for

the furnishing, I can give no directions at present: it is to be

very simple, at all events, and calculated chiefly for museum work

and for stores of stones and books: and you really must not set

your heart on having it furnished like Buckingham Palace.

"I have bought to-day, for five pounds, the front of the porch of

the Church of St. James. It was going to be entirely destroyed. It

is worn away, and has little of its old beauty; but as a remnant of

the Gothic of Abbeville--as I happen to be here--and as the church

was dedicated to my father's patron saint (as distinct from mine)

I'm glad to have got it. It is a low arch--with tracery and

niches, which ivy, and the Erba della Madonna, will grow over

beautifully, wherever I rebuild it."

At Abbeville he had with him as usual his valet Crawley; and as before

he sent for Downes the gardener, to give him a holiday, and to enjoy his

raptures over every new sight. C.E. Norton came on a short visit, and

Ruskin followed him to Paris, where he met the poet Longfellow (October

7). At last on Monday, 19th October, he wrote:

"Only a line to-day, for I am getting things together, and am a

little tired, but very well, and glad to come home, though much

mortified at having failed in half my plans, and done nothing

compared to what I expected. But it is better than if I were

displeased with all I _had_ done. It isn't Turner--and it isn't

Correggio--it isn't even Prout--but it isn't bad."

Returning home, he gave an account of his autumn's work in the lecture

at the Royal Institution, January 29th, 1869, on the "Flamboyant

Architecture of the Valley of the Somme." This lecture was not then

published in full: but part of the original text is printed in the third

chapter of the work we have next to notice, "The Queen of the Air."

CHAPTER IX

"THE QUEEN OF THE AIR" (1869)

In spite of a "classical education" and the influence of Aristotle upon

the immature art-theories of his earlier works, Ruskin was known, in his

younger days, as a Goth, and the enemy of the Greeks. When he began

life, his sense of justice made him take the side of Modern Painters

against classical tradition. Later on, when considering the great

questions of education and the aims of life, he entirely set aside the

common routine of Greek and Latin grammar as the all-in-all of culture.

But this was not because he shared Carlyle's contempt for classical

studies.

In "Modern Painters," Vol. III., he had followed out the indications of

nature-worship, and tried to analyse in general terms the attitude of

the Greek spirit towards landscape scenery, as betrayed in Homer and

Aristophanes and the poets usually read. Since that time his interest in

Greek literature had been gradually increasing. He had made efforts to

improve his knowledge of the language; and he had spent many days in

sketching and studying the terra-cottas and vases and coins at the

British Museum. He had also taken up some study of Egyptology, through

Champollion, Bunsen and Birch, in the hope of tracing the origin of

Greek decorative art. Comparative mythology, at that time, was a

department of philology, introduced to the English public chiefly by Max

Müller. Under his influence Ruskin entered step by step upon an inquiry

which afterwards became of singular importance in his life and thought.

In 1865 he had told his hearers at Bradford that Greek Religion was not,

as commonly supposed, the worship of Beauty, but of Wisdom and Power.

They did not, in their great age, worship "Venus," but Apollo and

Athena. And he regarded their mythology as a sincere tradition,

effective in forming a high moral type, and a great school of art. In

the "Ethics of the Dust" he had explained the myth of Athena as parallel

to that of Neith in Egypt; and in his fable of Neith and St. Barbara he

had hinted at a comparison, on equal terms, of Ancient and Mediæval

mythology. He ended by saying that, though he would not have his young

hearers believe "that the Greeks were better than we, and that their

gods were real angels," yet their art and morals were in some respects

greater, and their beliefs were worth respectful and sympathetic study.

The "Queen of the Air" is his contribution to this study.

On March 9th, 1869, his lecture at University College, London, on "Greek

Myths of Cloud and Storm," began with an attempt to explain in popular

terms how a myth differs from mere fiction on the one hand and from

allegory on the other, being "not conceived didactically, but didactic

in its essence, as all good art is." He showed that Greek poetry dealt

with the series of Nature-myths with which were interwoven ethical

suggestions; that these were connected with Egyptian beliefs, but that

the full force of them was only developed in the central period of Greek

history, and their interpretation was to be read in a sympathetic

analysis of the spirit of men like Pindar and Æschylus. "The great

question," he said, "in reading a story is, always, not what wild hunter

dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded it; but what wise man first

perfectly told, and what strong people first perfectly lived by it. And

the real meaning of any myth is that which it has at the noblest age of

the nation among whom it was current."

In the next chapter he worked out, as a sequel to his lecture, two

groups of Animal-myths; those connected with birds, and especially the

dove, as type of Spirit, and those connected with the serpent in its

various significances. These two studies were continued, more or less,

in "Love's Meinie" and in the lecture printed in "Deucalion," as the

third group, that of Plant-myths, was carried on in "Proserpina." The

volume contained also extracts from the lecture on the Architecture of

the Valley of the Somme, and two numbers of the "Cestus of Aglaia," and

closed with a paper on The Hercules of Camarina, read to the South

Lambeth Art School on March 15th. This study of a Greek coin had already

formed the subject of an address at the Working Men's College, and

anticipated the second course of Oxford Lectures. For the rest, "The

Queen of the Air" is marked by its statement, more clearly than before

in Ruskin's writing, of the dependence of moral upon physical life, and

of physical upon moral science. He speaks with respect of the work of

Darwin and Tyndall; but as formerly in the Rede Lecture, and afterwards

in the "Eagle's Nest," he claims that natural science should not be

pursued as an end in itself, paramount to all other conclusions and

considerations; but as a department of study subordinate to ethics, with

a view to utility and instruction.

Before this book was quite ready for publication, and after a sale of

some of his less treasured pictures at Christie's he left home for a

journey to Italy, to revisit the subjects of "Stones of Venice," as in

1868 he had revisited those of the "Seven Lamps." At Vevey, on the way,

he wrote his preface (May 1st).

By quiet stages he passed the Simplon, writing from Domo d'Ossola, 5th

May, 1869:

"I never yet had so beautiful a day for the Simplon as this has

been; though the skin of my face is burning now all over--to keep

me well in mind of its sunshine. I left Brieg at 6 exactly--light

clouds breaking away into perfect calm of blue. Heavy snow on the

col--about a league--with the wreaths in many places higher than

the carriage. Then, white crocus all over the fields, with

Soldanelle and Primula farinosa. I walked about three miles up, and

seven down, with great contentment; the waterfalls being all in

rainbows, and one beyond anything I ever yet saw; for it fell in a

pillar of spray against shadow behind, and became rainbow

altogether. I was just near enough to get the belt broad, and the

down part of the arch: and the whole fall became orange and violet

against deep shade. To-morrow I hope to get news of you all, at

Baveno."

"BAVENO, _Thursday, 6th May_, 1869.

"It is wet this morning, and very dismal, for we are in a ghastly

new Inn, the old one being shut up; and there is always a re-action

after a strong excitement like the beauty of the Simplon yesterday,

which leaves one very dull. But it is of no use growling or mewing.

I hope to be at Milan to-morrow--at Verona for Sunday. I have been

reading Dean Swift's life, and 'Gulliver's Travels' again. Putting

the delight in dirt, which is a mere disease, aside, Swift is very

like me, in most things:--in opinions exactly the same."

At Milan, next day, he went to see the St. Catherine of Luini which he

had copied, and found it wantonly damaged by the carelessness of masons

who put their ladders up against it, just as if it were a bit of common

whitewashed wall.

On the 8th he reached Verona after seventeen years' absence, and on the

10th he was in Venice. There, looking at the works of the old painters

with a fresh eye, and with feelings and thoughts far different from

those with which he had viewed them as a young man, in 1845, he saw

beauties he had passed over before, in the works of a painter till then

little regarded by connoisseurs, and entirely neglected by the public.

Historians of art like Crowe and Cavalcaselle[16] had indeed examined

Carpaccio's works and investigated his life, along with the lives and

works of many another obscure master: artists like Hook and Burne-Jones

had admired his pictures; Ruskin had mentioned his backgrounds twice or

thrice in "Stones of Venice." But no writer had noticed his

extraordinary interest as an exponent of the mythology of the Middle

Ages, as the illustrator of poetical folk-lore derived from those

antique myths of Greece, and newly presented by the genius of

Christianity.

[Footnote 16: Their "History of Painting in North Italy," containing a

detailed account of Carpaccio, was published in 1871.]

This was a discovery for which Ruskin was now ripe, He saw at once that

he had found a treasure-house of things new and old. He fell in love

with St. Ursula as, twenty-four years earlier, he had fallen in love

with the statue of Ilaria at Lucca; and she became, as time after time

he revisited Venice for her sake, a personality, a spiritual presence, a

living ideal, exactly as the Queen of the Air might have been to the

sincere Athenian in the pagan age of faith. The story of her life and

death became an example, the conception of her character, as read in

Carpaccio's picture, became a standard for his own life and action in

many a time of distress and discouragement. The thought of "What would

St. Ursula say?" led him--not always, but far more often than his

correspondents knew--to burn the letter of sharp retort upon stupidity

and impertinence, and to force the wearied brain and overstrung nerves

into patience and a kindly answer. And later on, the playful credence

which he accorded to the myth deepened into a renewed sense of the

possibility of spiritual realities, when he learnt to look, with those

mediæval believers; once more as a little child upon the unfathomable

mysteries of life.

But this anticipates the story; at the time, he found in Carpaccio the

man who had touched the full chord of his feelings and his thoughts,

just as, in his boyhood, Turner had led him, marvelling, through the

fire and cloud to the mountain-altar; and as, in his youth, Tintoret had

interpreted the storm and stress of a mind awakening to the terrible

realities of the world. It was no caprice of a changeful taste, nor love

of startling paradox, that brought him to "discover Carpaccio;" it was

the logical sequence of his studies, and widening interests, and a view

of art embracing far broader issues than the connoisseurship of "Modern

Painters," or the didacticism of "Seven Lamps," or the historical

research of "Stones of Venice."

Soon after the "Queen of the Air" was published Carlyle wrote:

"Last week I got y'r 'Queen of the Air,' and read it. _Euge,

Ettge._ No such Book have I met with for long years past. The one

soul now in the world who seems to feel as I do on the highest

matters, and speaks _mir aus dem Herzen_, exactly what I wanted to

hear!-As to the natural history of those old myths I remained here

and there a little uncert'n; but as to the meanings you put into

them, never anywhere. All these things I not only 'agree' with, but

w'd use Thor's Hammer, if I had it, to enforce and put in action on

this rotten world. Well done, well done!--and pluck up a heart, and

continue ag'n and ag'n. And don't say 'most g't tho'ts are dressed

_in shrouds_': many, many are the Phoebus Apollo celestial arrows

you still have to shoot into the foul Pythons, and poisonous

abominable Megatheriums and Plesiosaurians that go staggering ab't,

large as cathedrals, in our sunk Epoch ag'n...."

CHAPTER X

VERONA AND OXFORD (1869-1870)

The main object of this journey was, however, not to study mythology,

but to continue the revision of old estimates of architecture, and after

seventeen years to look with a fresh eye at the subjects of "Stones of

Venice."

The churches and monuments of Verona had been less thoroughly studied

than those of Venice, and now they were threatened with imminent

restoration. On May 25th he wrote:--"It is very strange that I have just

been in time--after 17 years' delay--to get the remainder of what I

wanted from the red tomb of which my old drawing hangs in the

passage"--(the Castelbarco monument). "To-morrow they put up scaffolding

to retouch, and I doubt not, spoil it for evermore." He succeeded in

getting a delay of ten days, to enable him to paint the tomb in its

original state; but before he went home it "had its new white cap on and

looked like a Venetian gentleman in a pantaloon's mask." He brought away

one of the actual stones of the old roof.

On June 3 he wrote:

"I am getting on well with all my own work; and much pleased with

some that Mr. Bunney is doing for me; so that really I expect to

carry off a great deal of Verona.... The only mischief of the

place is its being too rich. Stones, flowers, mountains--all

equally asking one to look at them; a history to every foot of

ground, and a picture on every foot of wall; frescoes fading away

in the neglected streets--like the colours of the dolphin."

As assistants in this enterprise of recording the monuments of Venice

and Verona, and of recording them more fully and in a more interesting

way than by photography, he took with him Arthur Burgess and John

Bunney, his former pupils. Mr. Burgess was the subject of a memoir by

Ruskin in the _Century Guild Hobby Horse_ (April, 1887), appreciating

his talents and lamenting his loss. Mr. Bunney, who had travelled with

Ruskin in Switzerland in 1863, and had lately lived near Florence,

thenceforward settled in Venice, where he died in 1882, after completing

his great work, the St. Mark's now in the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield. A

memoir of him by Mr. Wedderburn appeared in the catalogue of the Venice

Exhibition, at the Fine Art Society's Gallery in November, 1882.

At Venice Ruskin had met his old friend Rawdon Brown[17], and Count

Giberto Borromeo, whom he visited at Milan on his way home, with deep

interest in the Luinis and in the authentic bust of St. Carlo; so

closely resembling Ruskin himself. Another noteworthy encounter is

recorded in a letter of May 4th.[18]

[Footnote 17: Whose book on the English in Italy (from Venetian

documents) was shortly to be published, with funds supplied by Ruskin.]

[Footnote 18: This date ought to be "June 4th," as Mr. E.T. Cook notices

(Library Edn. XIX., p. liv.).]

"As I was drawing in the square this morning, in a lovely, quiet,

Italian, light, there came up the poet Longfellow with his little

daughter--a girl of 12, or 13, with _springy_-curled flaxen

hair,--curls, or waves, that wouldn't come out in damp, I mean. They

stayed talking beside me some time. I don't think it was a very vain

thought that came over me, that if a photograph could have been taken of

the beautiful square of Verona, in that soft light, with Longfellow and

his daughter talking to me at my work--some people both in England and

America would have liked copies of it."

Readers of "Fors" will recognise an incident noted on the 18th of June.

"Yesterday, it being quite cool, I went for a walk; and as I came down

from a rather quiet hillside, a mile or two out of town, I past a house

where the women were at work spinning the silk off the cocoons. There

was a sort of whirring sound as in an English mill; but at intervals

they sang a long sweet chant, all together, lasting about two

minutes--then pausing a minute and then beginning again. It was good and

tender music, and the multitude of voices prevented any sense of

failure, so that it was very lovely and sweet, and like the things that

I mean to try to bring to pass."

For he was already meditating on the thoughts that issued in the

proposals of St. George's Guild, and the daily letters of this summer

are full of allusions to a scheme for a great social movement, as well

as to his plans for the control of Alpine torrents and the better

irrigation of their valleys. On the 2nd of June he wrote:--"I see more

and more clearly every day my power of showing how the Alpine torrents

may be--not subdued--but 'educated.' A torrent is just like a human

creature. Left to gain full strength in wantonness and rage, no power

can any more redeem it: but watch the channels of every early impulse,

and fence _them_, and your torrent becomes the gentlest and most

blessing of servants."

His mother was anxious for him to come home, being persuaded that he was

overworking himself in the continued heat which his letters reported.

But he was loath to leave Italy, in which, he said, his work for the

future lay. He made two more visits to Venice, to draw some of the

sculptured details, now quickly perishing, and to make studies of

Tintoret and Carpaccio. Among other friends who met him there was Mr.

Holman Hunt, with whom he went round his favourite Scuola di San Rocco

(1st July). Two days later he wrote:

"You will never believe it; but I have actually been trying to

draw--a baby. _The_ baby which the priest is holding in the little

copy of Tintoret by Edward Jones which my father liked so much,

over the basin stand in his bedroom.[19] All the knowledge I have

gained in these 17 years only makes me more full of awe and wonder

at Tintoret. But it _is_ so sad--so sad;--no one to care for him

but me, and all going so fast to ruin. He has done that infant

Christ in about five minutes--and I worked for two hours in vain,

and could not tell _why_ in vain--the mystery of his touch is so

great."

[Footnote 19: Mr. and Mrs Burne-Jones had been in Venice in June, 1862;

the artist, then young and comparatively unknown, with a commission to

copy for Ruskin.]

Final farewell was said to Verona on the 10th August, for the homeward

journey by the St. Gothard, and Giessbach, where he found the young

friend of 1866 now near her end--and Thun, where he met Professor C.E.

Norton. On the way he wrote:

"Lugano, _Saturday, 14th August_, 1869.

"My Dearest Mother,

"Yesterday--exactly three months from the day on which I entered

Verona to begin work, I made a concluding sketch of the old

Broletto of Como, which I drew first for the 7 lamps[20]--I know

not how many years ago,--and left Italy, for this time--having been

entirely well and strong every day of my quarter of a year's

sojourn there.

[Footnote 20: "Stones of Venice," Vol. I., plate 5.]

"This morning, before breakfast, I was sitting for the first time

before Luini's Crucifixion: for all religious-art qualities the

greatest picture south of the Alps--or rather, in Europe.

"And just after breakfast I got a telegram from my cousin George

announcing that I am Professor of Art--the first--at the University

of Oxford.

"Which will give me as much power as I can well use--and would have

given pleasure to my poor father--and therefore to me--once.... It

will make no difference in my general plans, about travel, etc. I

shall think quietly of it as I drive up towards St. Gothard to-day.

"Ever, my dearest mother, ever your loving son,

"J. Ruskin."

Six years earlier, while being examined before the Royal Academy

commission, he had been asked: "Has it ever struck you that it would be

advantageous to art if there were at the universities professors of art

who might give lectures and give instruction to young men who might

desire to avail themselves of it, as you have lectures on geology and

botany?" To which he had replied: "Yes, assuredly. The want of interest

on the part of the upper classes in art has been very much at the bottom

of the abuses which have crept into all systems of education connected

with it. If the upper classes could only be interested in it by being

led into it when young, a great improvement might be looked for,

therefore I feel the expediency of such an addition to the education of

our universities." His interest in the first phase of University

Extension, and his gifts of Turners to Oxford and Cambridge, had shown

that he was ready to go out of his way to help in the cause he had

promoted. His former works on art, and reputation as a critic, pointed

to him as the best qualified man in the country for such a post. He had

been asked by his Oxford friends, who were many and influential, to

stand for the Professorship of Poetry, three years earlier. There was no

doubt that the election would be a popular one, and creditable to the

University. On the other hand, Ruskin as Professor would have a certain

sanction for his teaching, he believed; the title and the salary of £358

a year were hardly an object to him; but the position, as accredited

lecturer and authorised instructor of youth, opened up new vistas of

usefulness, new worlds of work to conquer; and he accepted the

invitation. On August 10th he was elected Slade Professor.

He returned home by the end of August to prepare himself for his new

duties. During the last period he had been giving, on an average, half

a dozen lectures a year, which amply filled his annual volume. Twelve

lectures were required of the professor. Many another man would have

read his twelve lectures and gone his way; but he was not going to work

in that perfunctory manner. He undertook to revise his whole teaching;

to write for his hearers a completely new series of treatises on art,

beginning with first principles and broad generalisations, and

proceeding to the different departments of sculpture, engraving,

landscape-painting and so on; then taking up the history of art:--an

encyclopædic scheme. He took this Oxford work not as a substitute for

other occupation, exonerating him from further claims upon his energy

and time; nor as a bye-play that could be slurred. He tried to do it

thoroughly, and to do it in addition to the various work already in

hand, under which, as it was, he used to break down, yearly, after each

climax of effort.

This autumn and winter, with his first and most important course in

preparation, he was still writing letters to the _Daily Telegraph_;

being begged by Carlyle to come--"the sight of your face will be a

comfort," says the poor old man--and undertaking lectures at the Royal

Artillery Institution, Woolwich, and at the Royal Institution, London.

The Woolwich lecture, given on December 14th, was that added to later

editions of the "Crown of Wild Olive," under the title of "The Future of

England." The other, February 4th, 1870, on "Verona and its Rivers,"

involved not only a lecture on art and history and contemporary

political economy, but an exhibition of the drawings which he and his

assistants had made during the preceding summer.

Four days later he opened a new period in his career with his inaugural

Lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford.

BOOK IV

PROFESSOR AND PROPHET (1870-1900)

CHAPTER I

FIRST OXFORD LECTURES (1870-1871)

On Tuesday, 8th February, 1870, the Slade Professor's lecture-room was

crowded to over-flowing with members of the University, old and young,

and their friends, who flocked to hear, and to see, the author of

"Modern Painters." The place was densely packed long before the time;

the ante-rooms were filled with personal friends, hoping for some corner

to be found them at the eleventh hour; the doors were blocked open, and

besieged outside by a disappointed multitude.

Professorial lectures are not usually matters of great excitement: it

does not often happen that the accommodation is found inadequate. After

some hasty arrangements Sir Henry Acland pushed his way to the table,

announced that it was impossible for the lecture to be held in that

place, and begged the audience to adjourn to the Sheldonian Theatre. At

last, welcomed by all Oxford, the Slade Professor appeared, to deliver

his inaugural address.[21]

[Footnote 21: The inaugural course was given Feb. 8, 16, 23; March 3, 9,

16 and 23, 1870.]

It was not strictly academic, the way he used to come in, with a little

following of familiars and assistants,--exchange recognition with

friends in the audience, arrange the objects he had brought to

show,--fling off his long sleeved Master's gown, and plunge into his

discourse. His manner of delivery had not altered much since the time of

the Edinburgh Lectures. He used to begin by reading, in his curious

intonation, the carefully-written passages of rhetoric, which usually

occupied only about the half of his hour. By-and-by he would break off,

and with quite another air extemporise the liveliest interpolations,

describing his diagrams or specimens, restating his arguments,

re-enforcing his appeal. His voice, till then artificially cadenced,

suddenly became vivacious; his gestures, at first constrained, became

dramatic. He used to act his subject, apparently without premeditated

art, in the liveliest pantomime. He had no power of voice-mimicry, and

none of the ordinary gifts of the actor. A tall and slim figure, not yet

shortened from its five feet ten or eleven by the habitual stoop, which

ten years later brought him down to less than middle height; a stiff,

blue frock-coat; prominent, half-starched wristbands, and tall collars

of the Gladstonian type; and the bright blue stock which every one knows

for his heraldic bearing: no rings or gewgaws, but a long thin gold

chain to his watch:--plain old-English gentleman, neither fashionable

bourgeois nor artistic mountebank.

But he gave himself over to his subject with such unreserved intensity

of imaginative power, he felt so vividly and spoke so from the heart,

that he became whatever he talked about, never heeding his professorial

dignity, and never doubting the sympathy of his audience. Lecturing on

birds, he strutted like the chough, made himself wings like the swallow;

he was for the moment a cat, when he explained (not "in scorn") that

engraving was the "art of scratch." If it had been an affectation of

theatric display, we "emancipated school-boys," as the Master of

University used to call us, would have seen through it at once, and

scorned him. But it was so evidently the expression of his intense

eagerness for his subject, so palpably true to his purpose, and he so

carried his hearers with him, that one saw in the grotesque of the

performance only the guarantee of sincerity.

If one wanted more proof of that, there was his face, still

young-looking and beardless; made for expression, and sensitive to every

change of emotion. A long head, with enormous capacity of brain, veiled

by thick wavy hair, not affectedly lengthy but as abundant as ever, and

darkened into a deep brown, without a trace of grey; and short, light

whiskers growing high over his cheeks. A forehead not on the model of

the heroic type, but as if the sculptor had heaped his clay in handfuls

over the eyebrows, and then heaped more. A big nose, aquiline, and broad

at the base, with great thoroughbred nostrils and the "septum" between

them thin and deeply depressed; and there was a turn down at the corners

of the mouth, and a breadth of lower lip, that reminded one of his

Verona griffin, half eagle, half lion; Scotch in original type, and

suggesting a side to his character not all milk and roses. And under

shaggy eyebrows, ever so far behind, the fieriest blue eyes, that

changed with changing expression, from grave to gay, from lively to

severe; that riveted you, magnetised you, seemed to look through you and

read your soul; and indeed, when they lighted on you, you felt you had a

soul of a sort. What they really saw is a mystery. Some who had not

persuaded them to see as others see, maintained that they only saw what

they looked for; others, who had successfully deceived them, that they

saw nothing. No doubt they might be deceived; but I know now that they

often took far shrewder measurements of men--I do not say of women--than

anybody suspected.

For the Inaugural Course, he was, so to speak, on his best behaviour,

guarding against too hasty expression of individuality. He read careful

orations, stating his maturest views on the general theory of art, in

picked language, suited to the academic position. The little volume is

not discursive or entertaining, like "Modern Painters," and contains no

pictures either with pen or pencil; but it is crammed full of thought,

and of the results of thought.

The Slade Professor was also expected to organise and superintend the

teaching of drawing; and his first words in the first lecture expressed

the hope that he would be able to introduce some serious study of Art

into the University, which, he thought, would be a step towards

realising some of his ideals of education. He had long felt that mere

talking about Art was a makeshift, and that no real insight could be got

into the subject without actual and practical dealing with it. He found

a South Kensington School in existence at Oxford, with an able master,

Mr. Alexander Macdonald; and though he did not entirely approve of the

methods in use, tried to make the best of the materials to his hand,

accepting but enlarging the scope of the system. The South Kensington

method had been devised for industrial designing, primarily; Ruskin's

desire was to get undergraduates to take up a wider subject, to

familiarise themselves with the technical excellences of the great

masters, to study nature, and the different processes of art,--drawing,

painting and some forms of decorative work, such as, in especial,

goldsmiths' work, out of which the Florentine school had sprung. He did

not wish to train artists, but, as before in the Working Men's College,

to cultivate the habit of mind that looks at nature and life, not

analytically, as science does, but for the sake of external aspect and

expression. By these means he hoped to breed a race of judicious patrons

and critics, the best service any man can render to the cause of art.

And so he got together a mass of examples in addition to the Turners

which he had already given to the University galleries. He placed in the

school a few pictures by Tintoret, some drawings by Rossetti, Holman

Hunt, and Burne-Jones, and a great number of fine casts and engravings.

He arranged a series of studies by himself and others, as "copies,"

fitted, like the Turners in the National Gallery, with sliding frames

in cabinets for convenient reference and removal. After spending most of

his first Lent Term in this work, he went home for a month to prepare a

catalogue, which was published the same year: the school not being

finally opened until October, 1871. During these first visits to Oxford

he was the guest of Sir Henry Acland; on April 29, 1871, Professor

Ruskin, already honorary student of Christ Church, was elected to an

honorary fellowship at Corpus, and enabled to occupy rooms, vacated by

the Rev. Henry Furneaux, who gave up his fellowship on marrying Mr.

Arthur Severn's twin-sister.[22]

[Footnote 22: His rooms were in Fellows' buildings, No. 2 staircase,

first floor right.]

After this work well begun, he went abroad for a vacation tour with a

party of friends--as in 1866; Lady Trevelyan's sister, Mrs. Hilliard, to

chaperone the same young ladies, and three servants with them. They

started on April 27th; stayed awhile at Meurice's to see Paris; and at

Geneva, to go up the Salève, twice, in bitter black east wind. Then

across the Simplon to Milan. After a month at Venice and Verona, where

he recurred to his scheme against inundation, then ridiculed by _Punch_,

but afterwards taken up seriously by the Italians, they went to

Florence, and met Professor Norton. In the end of June they turned

homewards, by Pisa and Lucca, Milan and Como, and went to visit their

friend Marie of the Giessbach.

At the Giessbach they spent a fortnight, enjoying the July weather and

glorious walks, in the middle of which war was suddenly declared between

Germany and France. The summons of their German waiter to join his

regiment brought the news home to them, as such personal examples do,

more than columns of newspaper print; and as hostilities were rapidly

beginning, Ruskin, with the gloomiest forebodings for the beautiful

country he loved, took his party home straight across France, before the

ways should be closed.

August was a month of feverish suspense to everybody; to no one more

than to Ruskin, who watched the progress of the armies while he worked

day by day at the British Museum preparing lectures for next term.

This was the course on Greek relief-sculpture, published as "Aratra

Pentelici."[23] It was a happy thought to illustrate his subject

from coins, rather than from disputed and mutilated fragments;

and he worked into it his revised theory of the origin of art--not

Schiller's nor Herbert Spencer's, and yet akin to theirs of the

"Spieltrieb,"--involving the notion of doll-play;--man as a child,

re-creating himself, in a double sense; imitating the creation of the

world and really creating a sort of secondary life in his art, to play

with, or to worship. In the last lecture of the series (published

separately) the Professor compared--as the outcome of classic art in

Renaissance times--Michelangelo and Tintoret, greatly to the

disadvantage of Michelangelo. This heresy against a popular creed served

as text for some severe criticism; but as he said in a prefatory note to

the pamphlet, readers "must observe that its business is only to point

out what is to be blamed in Michael Angelo, and that it assumes the fact

of his power to be generally known," and he referred to Mr. Tyrwhitt's

"Lectures on Christian Art" for the opposite side of the question.

[Footnote 23: Delivered Nov. 24, 26, Dec. 1, 3, 8 and 10, 1870.]

Meanwhile the war was raging. Ruskin was asked by his friends to raise

his voice against the ravage of France; but he replied that it was

inevitable. At last, in October, he read how Rosa Bonheur and Edouard

Frère had been permitted to pass through the German lines, and next day

came the news of the bombardment of Strasburg, with anticipations of the

destruction of the Cathedral, library, and picture galleries,

foretelling, as it seemed, the more terrible and irreparable ruin of the

treasure-houses of art in Paris. His heart was with the French, and he

broke silence in the bitterness of his spirit, upbraiding their

disorder and showing how the German success was the victory of "one of

the truest monarchies and schools of honour and obedience yet organised

under heaven." He hoped that Germany, now that she had shown her power,

would withdraw, and demand no indemnity. But that was too much to ask.

Before long Paris itself became the scene of action, and in January 1871

was besieged and bombarded. So much of Ruskin's work and affection had

been given to French Gothic that he could not endure to think of his

beloved Sainte Chapelle as being actually under fire--to say nothing of

the horror of human suffering in a siege. He joined Cardinal (then

Archbishop) Manning, Professor Huxley, Sir John Lubbock and James

Knowles in forming a "Paris Food Fund," which shortly united with the

Lord Mayor's committee for the general relief of the besieged. The day

after writing on the Sainte Chapelle he attended the meeting of the

Mansion House, and gave a subscription of £50. He followed events

anxiously through the storm of the Commune and its fearful ending,

angered at the fratricide and anarchy which no Mansion House help could

avert or repair.

It was no time for talking on art, he felt: instead of the full course,

he could only manage three lectures on landscape, and these not so

completely prepared as to make them ready for printing. Before Christmas

he had been once more to Woolwich, where Colonel Brackenbury invited him

to address the cadets at the prize-giving of the Science and Art

Department, December 13, 1870, in which the Rev. W. Kingsley, an old

friend of Ruskin's and of Turner's, was one of the masters. Two of the

lectures of the "Crown of Wild Olive" had been given there, with more

than usual animation, and enthusiastically received by crowded and

distinguished audiences, among whom was Prince Arthur (the Duke of

Connaught), then at the Royal Military Academy. This time it was the

"Story of Arachne," an address on education and aims in life; opening

with reminiscences of his own childhood, and pleasantly telling the

Greek myths of the spider and the ant, with interpretations for the

times.

In the three lectures on landscape, given January 20, February 9 and 23,

1871, he dwelt on the necessity of human and historic interest in

scenery; and compared Greek "solidity and veracity" with Gothic

"spirituality and mendacity," Greek chiaroscuro and tranquil activity

with Gothic colour and "passionate rest." Botticelli's "Nativity" (now

in the National Gallery) was then being shown at the Old Master's

Exhibition, and Ruskin took it, along with the works of Cima, as a type

of one form of Greek Art.

In April, 1871, his cousin, Miss Agnew, who had been seven years at

Denmark Hill, was married to Mr. Arthur Severn. Ruskin, who had added to

his other work the additional labour of "Fors Clavigera," went for a

summer's change to Matlock. July opened with cold, dry, dark weather,

dangerous for out-of-door sketching. One morning early--for he was

always an early riser--he took a chill while painting a spray of wild

roses before breakfast (the drawing now in the Oxford Schools). He was

already overworked, and it ended in a severe attack of internal

inflammation, which nearly cost him his life. He was a difficult patient

to deal with. The local practitioner who attended him used to tell how

he refused remedies, and in the height of the disease asked what would

be _worst_ for him. He took it; and to everybody's surprise,

recovered.[24]

[Footnote 24: Mrs. Arthur Severn, in a note on the proof, says: "It was

a slice of cold roast beef he hungered for, at Matlock (to our horror,

and dear Lady Mount Temple's, who were nursing him): there was none in

the hotel, and it was late at night; and Albert Goodwin went off to get

some, somewhere, or anywhere. All the hotels were closed; but at last,

at an eating-house in Matlock Bath, he discovered some, and came back

triumphant with it, wrapped up in paper; and J.R. enjoyed his late

supper thoroughly; and though we all waited anxiously till the morning

for the result, it had done no harm! And when he was told pepper was bad

for him, he dredged it freely over his food in defiance! It was directly

after our return to Denmark Hill he got Linton's letter offering him

this place (Brantwood). There are, I believe, ten acres of moor

belonging to Brantwood." Mr. Albert Goodwin, R.W.S., the landscape

painter, travelled, about this time, in Italy with Ruskin.]

During the illness at Matlock his thoughts reverted to the old

"Iteriad" times of forty years before, when he had travelled with his

parents and cousin Mary from that same "New Bath Hotel," where he was

now lying, to the Lakes; and again he wearied for "the heights that look

adown upon the dale. The crags are lone on Coniston." If he could only

lie down there, he said, he should get well again.

He had not fully recovered before he heard that W.J. Linton, the poet

and wood-engraver, wished to sell a house and land at the very place:

£1,500, and it could be his. Without question asked he bought it at

once; and as it would be impossible to lecture at Oxford so soon after

his illness, he set off, before the middle of September, with his

friends the Hilliards to visit his new possession. They found a

rough-cast country cottage, old, damp, decayed; smoky chimneyed and

rat-riddled; but "five acres of rock and moor and streamlet; and," he

wrote, "I think the finest view I know in Cumberland or Lancashire, with

the sunset visible over the same."

The spot was not, even then, without its associations: Gerald Massey the

poet, Linton, and his wife Mrs. Lynn Linton the novelist, Dr. G.W.

Kitchin (Dean of Durham) had lived and worked there, and Linton had

adorned it outside with revolutionary mottoes--"God and the people," and

so on. It had been a favourite point of view of Wordsworth's; his "seat"

was pointed out in the grounds. Tennyson had lived for a while close by:

his "seat," too, was on the hill above Lanehead.

But the cottage needed thorough repair, and that cost more than

rebuilding, not to speak of the additions of later years, which have

ended by making it into a mansion surrounded by a hamlet. And there was

the furnishing; for Denmark Hill, where his mother lived, was still to

be headquarters. Ruskin gave carte-blanche to the London upholsterer

with whom he had been accustomed to deal; and such expensive articles

were sent that when he came down for a month next autumn, he reckoned

that, all included, his country cottage had cost him not less than

£4,000.

But he was not the man to spend on himself without sharing his wealth

with others. On November 22nd, Convocation accepted a gift from the

Slade Professor of £5,000 to endow a mastership of drawing at Oxford, in

addition to the pictures and "copies" placed in the schools; he had set

up a relative in business with £15,000, which was unfortunately lost;

and at Christmas he gave £7,000, the tithe of his remaining capital, to

the St. George's Fund; of which more hereafter.

On November 23rd he was elected Lord Rector of St. Andrew's University,

by 86 votes against 79 for Lord Lytton. After the election it was

discovered that, by the Scottish Universities Act of 1858, no one

holding a professorship at a British University was eligible. Professor

Ruskin was disqualified, and gave no address; and Lord Neaves was chosen

in his place.

Mrs. Ruskin was now ninety years of age; her sight was nearly gone, but

she still retained her powers of mind, and ruled with severe kindliness

her household and her son. Her old servant Anne had died in March. Anne

had nursed John Ruskin as a baby, and had lived with the family ever

since, devoted to them, and ready for any disagreeable task--

"So that she was never quite in her glory," "Præterita" says, "unless

some of us were ill. She had also some parallel speciality for _saying_

disagreeable things, and might be relied upon to give the extremely

darkest view of any subject, before proceeding to ameliorative action

upon it. And she had a very creditable and republican aversion to doing

immediately, or in set terms, as she was bid; so that when my mother and

she got old together, and my mother became very imperative and

particular about having her teacup set on one side of her little round

table, Anne would observantly and punctiliously put it always on the

other: which caused my mother to state to me, every morning after

breakfast, gravely, that if ever a woman in this world was possessed by

the Devil, Anne was that woman."

But this gloomy Calvinism was tempered with a benevolence quite as

uncommon. It was from his parents that Ruskin learned never to turn off

a servant, and the Denmark Hill household was as easy-going as the

legendary "baronial" retinue of the good old times. A young friend asked

Mrs. Ruskin, in a moment of indiscretion, what such a one of the ancient

maids did--for there were several without apparent occupation about the

house. Mrs. Ruskin drew herself up and said, "She, my dear, puts out the

dessert."

And yet, in her blindness, she could read character unhesitatingly. That

was, no doubt, why people feared her. When Mr. Secretary Howell, in the

days when he was still the oracle of the Ruskin-Rossetti circle, had

been regaling them with his wonderful tales, after dinner, she would

throw her netting down and say, "How _can you_ two sit there and listen

to such a pack of lies?" She objected strongly, in these later years, to

the theatre; and when sometimes her son would wish to take a party into

town to see the last new piece, her permission had to be asked, and was

not readily granted, unless to Miss Agnew, who was the ambassadress in

such affairs of diplomacy. But while disapproving of some of his worldly

ways, and convinced that she had too much indulged his childhood, the

old lady loved him with all the intensity of the strange fierce lioness

nature, which only one or two had ever had a glimpse of. And when

(December 5th, 1871) she died, trusting to see her husband again--not to

be near him, not to be so high in heaven but content if she might only

_see_ him, she said--her son was left "with a surprising sense of

loneliness." He had loved her truly, obeyed her strictly and tended her

faithfully; and even yet hardly realized how much she had been to him.

He buried her in his father's grave, and wrote upon it, "Here beside my

father's body I have laid my mother's: nor was dearer earth ever

returned to earth, nor purer life recorded in heaven."