ST. GEORGE AND ST. MARK (1875-1877)
In the book his Bertha of Canterbury was reading at twilight on the Eve
of St. Mark, Keats might have been describing "Fors." Among its pages,
fascinating with their golden broideries of romance and wit, perplexing
with mystic vials of wrath as well as all the Seven Lamps and Shekinah
of old and new Covenants commingled, there was gradually unfolded the
plan of "St. George's Work."
The scheme was not easy to apprehend; it was essentially different from
anything then known, though superficially like several bankrupt Utopias.
Ruskin did not want to found a phalanstery, or to imitate Robert Owen
or the Shakers. That would have been practicable--and useless.
He wanted much more. He aimed at the gradual introduction of higher aims
into ordinary life: it giving true refinement to the lower classes, true
simplicity to the upper. He proposed that idle hands should reclaim
waste lands; that healthy work and country homes should be offered to
townsfolk who would "come out of the gutter." He asked land-owners and
employers to furnish opportunities for such reforms;--which would
involve no elaborate organization nor unelastic rules;--simply the one
thing needful, the refusal of Commercialism.
As before, he scorned the idea that real good could be done by political
agitation. Any government would work, he said, if it were an efficient
government. No government was efficient unless it saw that every one had
the necessaries of life, for body and soul; and that every one earned
them by some work or other. Capital--that is, the means and material of
labour, should therefore be in the hands of the Government, not in the
hands of individuals: this reform would result easily and necessarily
from the forbidding of loans on interest. Personal property would still
be in private hands; but as it could not be invested and turned into
capital, it would necessarily be restricted to its actual use, and great
accumulation would be valueless.
This is, of course, a very sketchy statement of the ground-work of
"Fors," but to most readers nowadays as comprehensible as, at the time
of its publication, it was incomprehensible. For when, long after "Fors"
had been written, Ruskin found other writers advocating the same
principles and calling themselves Socialists, he said that he too was a
Socialist.
But the Socialists of various sects have complicated, and sometimes
confused, their simple fundamental principles with various ways and
means; to which he could not agree. He had his own ways and means. He
had his private ideals of life, which he expounded, along with his main
doctrine. He thought, justifiably, that theory was useless without
practical example; and so he founded St. George's Company (in 1877
called St. George's Guild) as his illustration.
The Guild grew out of his call, in 1871, for adherents: and by 1875
began to take definite form. Its objects were to set the example of a
common capital as opposed to a National debt, and of co-operative labour
as opposed to competitive struggle for life. Each member was required to
do some work for his living--without too strict limits as to the
kind--and to practice certain precepts of religion and morality, broad
enough for general acceptance. He was also required to obey the
authority of the Guild, and to contribute a tithe of his income to a
common fund, for various objects. These objects were--first: to buy land
for the agricultural members to cultivate, paying their rent, not to the
other members, but to the company; not refusing machinery, but
preferring manual labour. Next, to buy mills and factories, to be
likewise owned by the Guild and worked by members--using water power in
preference to steam (steam at first not forbidden)--and making the lives
of the people employed as well spent as might be, with a fair wage,
healthy work, and so forth. The loss on starting was to be made up from
the Guild store, but it was anticipated that the honesty of the goods
turned out would ultimately make such enterprises pay, even in a
commercial world. Then, for the people employed and their families,
there would be places of recreation and instruction, supplied by the
Guild, and intended to give the agricultural labourer or mill-hand,
trained from infancy in Guild schools, some insight into Literature,
Science and Art--and tastes which his easy position would leave him free
to cultivate.
So far the plan was simple. It was not a _colony_--but merely the
working of existing industries in a certain way. Anticipating further
development of the scheme, Ruskin looked forward to a guild coinage, as
pretty as the Florentines had; a costume as becoming as the Swiss: and
other Platonically devised details, which were not the essentials of the
proposal, and never came into operation. But some of his plans were
actually realised.
The chief objects of "St. George" come under three heads, as we have
just noticed: agricultural, industrial, and educational. The actual
schools would not be needed until the farms and mills had been so far
established as to secure a permanent attendance. But meanwhile provision
was being made for them, both in literature and in art. The "Bibliotheca
Pastorum," was to be a comprehensive little library--far less than the
100 books of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--and yet bringing before the St.
George's workman standard and serious writing of all times. It was to
include, in separate volumes, the Books of Moses and the Psalms of David
and the Revelation of St. John. Of Greek, the Economist of Xenophon, and
Hesiod, which Ruskin undertook to translate into prose. Of Latin the
first two Georgics and sixth Æneid of Virgil, in Gawain Douglas'
translation. Dante; Chaucer, excluding the "Canterbury Tales"--but
including the "Romance of the Rose"; Gotthelf's "Ulric the Farmer," from
the French version which Ruskin had loved ever since his father used to
read it him on their first tours in Switzerland; and an early English
history by an Oxford friend. Later were published Sir Philip Sidney's
psalter, and Ruskin's own biography of Sir Herbert Edwardes, under the
title of "A Knight's Faith."
These books were for the home library; reference works were bought to be
deposited in central libraries, along with objects of art and science.
It was not intended to keep the Guild property centralised; but rather
to spread it, as its other work was spread, broad-cast. A number of
books and other objects were bought with the Guild money, and lent or
given to various schools and colleges and institutions where work akin
to the objects of the Guild was being done. But for the time Ruskin
fixed upon Sheffield as the place of his first Guild Museum--being the
home of the typical English industry--central to all parts of England,
near beautiful hill-country, and yet not far from a number of
manufacturing towns in which, if St. George's work went on, supporters
and recruits might be found.
The people of Sheffield were already, in 1875, building a museum of
their own, and naturally thought that the two might be conveniently
worked together. But that was not at all what Ruskin wished. Not only
was his museum to be primarily the storehouse of the Guild, rather than
one among many means of popular education; but the objects which he
intended to place there were not such as the public expected to see. He
had no interest in a vast accumulation of articles of all kinds. He
wanted to provide for his friends' common treasury a few definitely
valuable and interesting examples--interesting to the sort of people
that he hoped would join the Guild or be bred up in it; and valuable
according to his own standard and experience.
In September 1875, Ruskin stayed a couple of days at Sheffield to
inspect a cottage at Walkley, in the outskirts of the town, and to make
arrangements for founding the museum--humbly to begin with, but hoping
for speedy increase. He engaged as curator, at a salary of £40 a year
and free lodging on the premises, his former pupil at the Working Men's
College, Henry Swan, who had done occasional work for him in drawing and
engraving. Swan was a Quaker, and a remarkable man in his way;
enthusiastic in his new vocation, and interested in the social questions
which were being discussed in "Fors." Under his care the Museum remained
at Walkley, accumulating material in the tiny and hardly accessible
cottage--being so to speak in embryo, until the way should be clear for
its removal or enlargement, which took place in 1890.
When Ruskin came back on his posting tour of April 1876, he stayed
again at Sheffield, to meet a few friends of Swan's--Secularists,
Unitarians, and Quakers, who professed Communism. They had an interview
(reported in the Sheffield _Daily Telegraph_, April 28th, 1876), which
brought out rather curiously the points of difference between their
opinions and his. They refused to join the Guild because they would not
promise obedience, and help in its objects. Ruskin, however, was willing
to advance theirs. A few weeks afterwards he invited them to choose a
piece of ground for their Communist experiment. They chose a farm of
over thirteen acres at Abbeydale, which the Guild bought in 1877 at a
cost of £2,287 16s.6d. for their use--the communists agreeing to pay the
money back in instalments, without interest, by the end of seven years:
when the farm should be their own.
When it was actually in their hands they found that they knew nothing of
farming--and besides, were making money at trades they did not really
care to abandon. They engaged a man to work the farm for them: and then
another. They were told that the land they had chosen was--for farming
purposes--worthless. Their capital ran short; and they tried to make
money by keeping a tea-garden. The original proposer of the scheme wrote
to Ruskin, who sent £100:--the others returned the money. Ruskin
declined to take it back, and began to perceive that the Communists were
trifling. They had made no attempt to found the sort of community they
had talked about; neither their plans nor his were being carried out. So
when the original proposer and a friend of his named Riley approached
Ruskin again, they found little difficulty in persuading him to try them
as managers. The rest, finding themselves turned out by Riley, vainly
demanded "explanations" from Ruskin, who then was drifting into his
first attack of brain fever. So they declined further connection with
the farm; the Guild accepted their resignation, and undertook for the
time nothing more than to get the land into good condition again.
This was not the only land held by the St. George's Guild. It acquired
the acre of ground on which the Sheffield Museum stood, and a cottage
with a couple of acres near Scarborough. Two acres of rock and moor at
Barmouth had been given by Mrs. Talbot in 1872; and in 1877 Mr. George
Baker, then Mayor of Birmingham, gave twenty acres of woodland at
Bewdley in Worcestershire, to which at one time Mr. Ruskin thought of
moving the museum, before the present building was found for it by the
Sheffield Corporation at Meersbrook Park. On the resignation of the
original Trustees, in 1877, Mr. Q. Talbot and Mr. Baker were offered the
trust: and on the death of Mr. Talbot the trust was accepted by Mr. John
Henry Chamberlain. After he died it was taken by Mr. George Thomson of
Huddersfield, whose woollen mills, transformed into a co-operative
concern, though not directly in connection with the Guild, have given a
widely known example of the working of principles advocated in "Fors."
In the middle of 1876, Egbert Rydings, the auditor of the accounts
which, in accordance with his principles of "glass pockets," Ruskin
published in "Fors," proposed to start a homespun woollen industry at
Laxey, in the Isle of Man, where the old women who formerly spun with
the wheel had been driven by failure of custom to work in the mines. The
Guild built him a water mill, and in a few years the demand for a pure,
rough, durable cloth, created by this and kindred attempts, justified
the enterprise. Ruskin set the example, and had his own grey clothes
made of Laxey stuffs--whose chief drawback was that they never wore out.
A little later a similar work was done, with even greater success, by
Mr. Albert Fleming, another member of the Guild; who introduced
old-fashioned spinning and hand-loom weaving at Langdale.
The story of Ruskin's posting tour was told many years afterwards, at
the opening of the new Sheffield museum, by Mr. Arthur Severn, a famous
_raconteur_, whose description of the adventures of their cruise upon
wheels includes so bright a picture of Ruskin, that I must use his words
as they were reported on the occasion in the magazine _Igdrasil_:
"... With the Professor, who dislikes railways very much, it was
not a question of travelling by rail. He said, 'I will take you in
a carriage and with horses, and we will drive the whole way from
London to the North of England. And I will not only do that, but I
will do the best in my power to get a postilion to ride, and we
will go quite in the old-fashioned way ...' The Professor went so
far that he actually built a carriage for this drive. It was a
regular posting carriage, with good strong wheels, a place behind
for the luggage, and cunning drawers inside it for all kinds of
things that we might require on the journey. We started off one
fine morning from London--I must say without a postilion--but when
we arrived at the next town, about twenty miles off, having
telegraphed beforehand that we were coming, there was a gorgeous
postilion ready with the fresh horses, and we started off in a
right style, according to the Professor's wishes.
"After many pleasant days of travelling, we at last arrived at
Sheffield, and I well remember that we created no small sensation
as we clattered up to the old posting inn. I think it was the
King's Head. We stayed a few days, and visited the old Museum at
Walkley; and I remember the look of regret on the Professor's face
when he saw how cramped the space was there for the things he had
to show. However, with his usual kindliness, he did not say much
about it at the time, and he did not complain of the considerable
amount of room it was necessary for the curator and his family to
take up in that place. We stayed about two days looking at the
beautiful country,--and I am glad to say there was a good deal
still left,--and then the Professor gave orders that the carriage
should be got ready to take us on our journey, and that a postilion
should be forthcoming, if possible. I remember leaving the luncheon
table and going outside to see if the necessary arrangements were
complete. Sure enough, there was the carriage at the door, and a
still more gorgeous postilion than any we had had so far on our
journey. His riding breeches were of the tightest and whitest I
ever saw; his horses were an admirable pair, and looked like going.
A very large crowd had assembled outside the inn, to see what
extraordinary kind of mortals could be going to travel in such a
way.
"I went to the room where the Professor was still at luncheon, and
told him that everything was ready, but that there was a very large
crowd at the door. He seemed rather amused; and I said, 'You know,
Professor, I really don't know what the people expect--whether it
is a bride and bridegroom, or what.' He said, 'Well, Arthur, you
and Joan shall play at being bride and bridegroom inside the
carriage, and I will get on the box.' He got Mrs. Severn on his
arm, and had to hold her pretty tightly as he left the door,
because when she saw the crowd outside she tried to beat a retreat.
At last he got her into the carriage, I was put in afterwards, and
he jumped up on the box. The crowd closed in, and looked at us as
if we were a sort of menagerie. I was much amused when I thought
how little these eager people knew that the real attraction was on
the box; I felt inclined to put my head out of the window, and say,
'My good people, there is the man you should look at,--not us.' I
did not like to do so; and the Professor gave the word to be off,
the postilion cracked his whip, and we went off in grand style,
amidst the cheers of the crowd...."
On one of these posting excursions, they came to Hardraw; Mrs. Alfred
Hunt tells the story in her edition of Turner's "Richmondshire"; Mr.
Severn's account is somewhat different. After examining the Fall, Mrs.
Severn and Mr. Ruskin left Mr. Severn to sketch, and went away to Hawes
to order their tea. When they were gone, a man who had been standing by
came up and asked if that were Professor Ruskin. "Yes," said Mr. Severn,
"it was; he is very fond of the Fall, and much puzzled to know why the
edge of the cliff is not worn away by the water, as he expected to find
it after so many years." "Oh," said the other, "there are twelve feet of
masonry up there to protect the rock. I'm a native of the place, and
know all about it." "I wish," said Mr. Severn, absently, as he went on
drawing, "Mr. Ruskin knew that; he would be so interested." And the
stranger ran off. When the sketcher came in to tea he felt there was
something wrong. "You're in for it!" said his wife. "Let us look at his
sketch first," said Mr. Ruskin; and luckily it was a very good one. By
and by it all came out;--how the Yorkshireman had caught the Professor,
and eagerly described the horrible Vandalism, receiving in reply some
very emphatic language. Upon which he took off his hat and bowed low:
"But, sir," he faltered, "the gentleman up there said I was to tell you,
and you would be so interested!" The Professor, suddenly mollified, took
off his hat in turn, and apologised for his reception of the news:
"but," said he, "I shall never care for Hardraw Waterfall again."
"The Professor," said Mr. Severn, "dislikes railways very much:" and on
his arrival at Brantwood after that posting journey he wrote a preface
to "A Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District,"
by Mr. Robert Somervell. Ruskin's dislike of railways has been the text
of a great deal of misrepresentation, and his use of them, at all, has
been often quoted as an inconsistency. As a matter of fact, he never
objected to main lines of railway communication; but he strongly
objected, in common with a vast number of people, to the introduction of
railways into districts whose chief interest is in their scenery;
especially where, as in the English Lake district, the scenery is in
miniature, easily spoiled by embankments and viaducts, and by the rows
of ugly buildings which usually grow up round a station; and where the
beauty of the landscape can only be felt in quiet walks or drives
through it. Many years later, after he had said all he had to say on the
subject again and again, and was on the brink of one of his illnesses,
he wrote in violent language to a correspondent who tried to "draw" him
on the subject of another proposed railway to Ambleside. But his real
opinions were simple enough, and consistent with a practicable scheme of
life.
In August 1876 he left England for Italy. He travelled alone,
accompanied only by his new servant Baxter, who had lately taken the
place vacated by Crawley, Mr. Ruskin's former valet of twenty years'
service. He crossed the Simplon to Venice, where he was welcomed by an
old friend, Rawdon Brown, and a new friend, Prof. C.H. Moore, of
Harvard. He met two Oxford pupils, Mr. J. Reddie Anderson, whom he set
to work on Carpaccio; and Mr. Whitehead--"So much nicer they all are," he
wrote in a private letter, "than I was at their age;"--also his pupil
Mr. Bunney, at work on copies of pictures and records of architecture,
the legacy of St. Mark to St. George. Two young artists were brought
into his circle, during that winter--both Venetians, and both singularly
interesting men: Giacomo Boni, now a celebrated antiquary, then capo
d'opera of the Ducal Palace, and doing his best to preserve, instead of
"restoring," the ancient sculptures; and Angelo Alessandri, a painter of
more than usual seriousness of aim and sympathy with the fine qualities
of the old masters.
Ruskin had been engaged on a manual of drawing for his Oxford schools,
which he now meant to complete in two parts: "The Laws of
Fésole"--teaching the principles of Florentine draughtsmanship; and "The
Laws of Rivo Alto"--about Venetian colour. Passages for this second part
were written. But he found himself so deeply interested in the evolution
of Venetian art, and in tracing the spirit of the people as shown by the
mythology illustrated in the pictures and sculptures, that his practical
manual became a sketch of art history, "St. Mark's Rest"--as a sort of
companion to "Mornings in Florence," which he had been working at during
his last visit to Italy. His intention was to supersede "Stones of
Venice" by a smaller book, giving more prominence to the ethical side of
history, which should illustrate Carpaccio as the most important figure
of the transition period, and do away with the exclusive Protestantism
of his earlier work.
He set himself to this task, with Tintoret's motto--_Sempre si fa il
mare maggiore_, and worked with feverish energy, recording his progress
in letters home.
"13 _Nov_.--I never was yet, in my life, in such a state of hopeless
confusion of letters, drawings, and work: chiefly because, of course,
when one is old, one's _done_ work seems all to tumble in upon one, and
want rearranging, and everything brings a thousand old as well as new
thoughts. My head seems less capable of accounts every year. I can't
_fix_ my mind on a sum in addition--it goes off, between seven and nine,
into a speculation on the seven deadly sins or the nine muses. My table
is heaped with unanswered letters,--MS. of four or five different books
at six or seven different parts of each,--sketches getting rubbed
out,--others getting smudged in,--parcels from Mr. Brown unopened,
parcels _for_ Mr. Moore unsent; my inkstand in one place,--too probably
upset,--my pen in another; my paper under a pile of books, and my last
carefully written note thrown into the waste-paper basket.
"3 _Dec_.--I'm having nasty foggy weather just now,--but it's better
than fog in London,--and I'm really resting a little, and trying not to
be so jealous of the flying days. I've a most _cumfy_ room [at the Grand
Hotel]--I've gone out of the very expensive one, and only pay twelve
francs a day; and I've two windows, one with open balcony and the other
covered in with glass. It spoils the look of the window dreadfully, but
gives me a view right away to Lido, and of the whole sunrise. Then the
bed is curtained off from rest of room like that [sketch of window and
room] with fine flourishing white and gold pillars--and the black place
is where one goes out of the room beside the bed.
"9 _Dec_.--I hope to send home a sketch or two which will show I'm not
quite losing my head yet.... I must show at Oxford some reason for my
staying so long in Venice."
Beside studies in the Chapel of St. George, he copied Carpaccio's "Dream
of St. Ursula" which was taken down--it had been "skied" at the Academy
until then--and placed in the sculpture gallery; and be laboured to
produce a facsimile.
"24 _Dec_.--I do think St. Ursula's lips are coming pretty--and her
eyelids--but oh me, her hair. Toni, Mr. Brown's gondolier, says she's
all right--and he's a grave and close looking judge, you know."
Christmas Day was a crisis in his life. He was attacked by illness;
severe pain, followed by a dreamy state in which the vividly realized
presence of St. Ursula mingled with memories of his dead lady, whose
"spirit" had been shown him a year before by a "medium" met at a country
house. Since then he had watched eagerly for evidences of another life:
and the sense of its conceivability grew upon him, in spite of the
doubts which he had entertained of the immortality of the soul. At last,
after a year's earnest desire for some such assurance, it seemed to come
to him. What others call coincidences, and accidents, and states of mind
flashed, for him, into importance; times and seasons, names and symbols,
took a vivid meaning. His intense despondency changed for a while into a
singular happiness--it seemed a renewed health and strength: and instead
of despair, he rejoiced in the conviction of guarding Providences and
helpful influences.
Readers of "Fors" had traced for some years back the re-awakening of a
religious tone, now culminating in a pronounced mysticism which they
could not understand, and in a recantation of the sceptical judgments of
his middle period. He found, now, new excellences in the early Christian
painting; he depreciated Turner and Tintoret, and denounced the
frivolous art of the day. He searched the Bible more diligently than
ever for its hidden meanings; and in proportion as he felt its
inspiration, he recoiled from the conclusions of modern science, and
wrapped the prophet's mantle more closely round him, as he denounced
with growing fervour the crimes of our unbelieving age.