"FORS" RESUMED (1880-1881)
Retirement at Brantwood was only partial. Ruskin's habits of life made
it impossible for him to be idle, much as he acknowledged the need of
thorough rest. He could not be wholly ignorant of the world outside
Coniston; though sometimes for weeks together he tried to ignore it, and
refused to read a newspaper. The time when General Gordon went out to
Khartoum was one of these periods of abstraction, devoted to mediæval
study. Somebody talked one morning at breakfast about the Soudan. "And
who _is_ the Soudan?" he earnestly inquired, connecting the name, as it
seemed, with the Soldan of Babylon, in crusading romance.
"Don't you know," he wrote to a friend (January 8th, 1880):
"That I am entirely with you in this Irish misery, and have been
these thirty years?--only one can't speak plain without distinctly
becoming a leader of Revolution? I know that Revolution _must come_
in all the world--but I can't act with Dan ton or Robespierre, nor
with the modern French Republican or Italian one. I _could_ with
you and your Irish, but you are only at the beginning of the end. I
have spoken,--and plainly too,--for all who have ears, and hear."
The author of "Fors" had tried to show that the nineteenth-century
commercialist spirit was not new; that the tyranny of capital was the
old sin of usury over again; and he asked why preachers of religion did
not denounce it--why, for example, the Bishop of Manchester did not, on
simply religious grounds, oppose the teaching of the "Manchester
School," who were the chief supporters of the commercialist economy. Not
until the end of 1879 had Dr. Fraser been aware of the challenge; but at
length he wrote, justifying his attitude. The popular and able bishop
had much to say on the expediency of the commercial system and the error
of taking the Bible literally; but he seemed unaware of the revolution
in economical thought which "Unto this Last" and "Fors" had been
pioneering.
"I'm not gone to Venice yet," wrote Ruskin to Miss Beever, "but thinking
of it hourly. I'm very nearly done with toasting my bishop; he just
wants another turn or two, and then a little butter." The toasting and
the buttering appeared in the _Contemporary Review_ for February 1880;
and this incident led him to feel that the mission of "Fors" was not
finished. If bishops were still unenlightened, there was yet work to do.
He gave up Venice, and resumed his crusade.
Brantwood life was occasionally interrupted by short excursions to
London or elsewhere. In the autumn he had heard Professor Huxley on the
evolution of reptiles; and this suggested another treatment of the
subject, from his own artistic and ethical point of view, in a lecture
oddly called "A Caution to Snakes," given at the London Institution,
March 17th, 1880 (repeated March 23rd, and printed in "Deucalion"). He
was not merely an amateur zoologist and F.Z.S., but a devoted lover and
keen observer of animals. It would take long to tell the story of all
his dogs, from the spaniel Dash, commemorated in his earliest poems, and
Wisie, whose sagacity is related in "Præterita," down through the long
line of bulldogs, St. Bernards, and collies, to Bramble, the reigning
favourite; and all the cats who made his study their home, or were
flirted with abroad. To Miss Beever, from Bolton Abbey (January 24th,
1875) he describes the Wharfe in flood, and then continues: "I came home
(to the hotel) to quiet tea, and a black kitten called Sweep, who lapped
half my cream-jugful (and yet I had plenty), sitting on my shoulder."
Grip, the pet rook at Denmark Hill, is mentioned in "My First Editor,"
as celebrated in verse by Mr. W.H. Harrison.
Ruskin had not Thoreau's intimate acquaintance with the details of wild
life, but his attitude towards animals and plants was the same; hating
the science that murders to dissect; resigning his Professorship at
Oxford, finally, because vivisection was introduced into the University;
and supporting the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals with
all his heart. But, as he said at the Annual Meeting in 1877, he
objected to the sentimental fiction and exaggerated statements which
some of its members circulated. "They had endeavoured to prevent cruelty
to animals," he said, "but they had not enough endeavoured to promote
affection for animals. He trusted to the pets of children for their
education, just as much as to their tutors."
It was to carry out this idea (to anticipate a little) that he founded
the Society of Friends of Living Creatures, which he addressed, May
23rd, 1885, at the club, Bedford Park, in his capacity of--not
president--but "papa." The members, boys and girls from seven to
fifteen, promised not to kill nor hurt any animal for sport, nor tease
creatures; but to make friends of their pets and watch their habits, and
collect facts about natural history.
I remember, on one of the rambles at Coniston in the early days, how we
found a wounded buzzard--one of the few creatures of the eagle kind that
our English mountains still breed. The rest of us were not very ready to
go near the beak and talons of the fierce-looking, and, as we supposed,
desperate bird. Ruskin quietly took it up in his arms, felt it over to
find the hurt, and carried it, quite unresistingly, out of the way of
dogs and passers-by, to a place where it might die in solitude or
recover in safety. He often told his Oxford hearers that he would rather
they learned to love birds than to shoot them; and his wood and moor
were harbours of refuge for hunted game or "vermin;" and his windows the
rendezvous of the little birds.
He had not been abroad since the spring of 1877, and in August 1880 felt
able to travel again. He went for a tour among the northern French
cathedrals, staying at old haunts,--Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais,
Chartres, Rouen,--and then returned with Mr. A. Severn and Mr. Brabazon
to Amiens, where he spent the greater part of October. He was writing a
new book--the "Bible of Amiens"--which was to be to the "Seven Lamps"
what "St. Mark's Rest" was to "Stones of Venice."
Before he returned, the secretary of the Chesterfield Art School had
written to ask him to address the students. Mr. Ruskin, travelling
without a secretary, and in the flush of new work and thronging ideas,
put the letter aside; he carried his letters about in bundles in his
portmanteau, as he said in his apology, "and looked at them as Ulysses
at the bags of Aeolus." Some wag had the impudence to forge a reply,
which was actually read at the meeting in spite of its obviously
fictitious style and statements:
"HARLESDEN(!), LONDON, _Friday_.
"MY DEAR SIR,
"Your letter reaches me here. Have just returned [commercial
English, not Ruskin] from Venice [where he had meant to go, but did
not go] where I have ruminated(!) in the pasturages of the home of
art(!); the loveliest and holiest of lovely and holy cities, where
the very stones cry out, eloquent in the elegancies of
iambics" (!!)--and so forth.
However, it deceived the newspapers, and there was a fine storm, which
Mr. Ruskin rather enjoyed. For though the forgery was clumsy enough, it
embodied some apt plagiarism from a letter to the Mansfield Art School
on a similar occasion.
Not long before, a forgery of a more serious kind had been committed by
one of the people connected with St. George's Guild, who had put Mr.
Ruskin's name to cheques. The bank authorities were long in tracing the
crime. They even sent a detective to Brantwood to watch one of the
assistants, who never knew--nor will ever know--that he was honoured
with such attentions; and none of his friends for a moment believed him
guilty. He had sometimes imitated Mr. Ruskin's hand; a dangerous jest.
The real culprit was discovered at last, and Mr. Ruskin had to go to
London as a witness for the prosecution. "Being in very weak health,"
the _Times_ report said (April 1st, 1879), "he was allowed to give
evidence from the bench." He had told the Sheffield communists that "he
thought so strongly on the subject of the repression of crime that he
dare not give expression to his ideas for fear of being charged with
cruelty"; but no sooner was the prisoner released than he gave the help
needed to start him again in a better career.
Though he did not feel able to lecture to strangers at Chesterfield, he
visited old friends at Eton, on November 6th, 1880, to give an address
on Amiens. For once he forgot his MS., but the lecture was no less
brilliant and interesting. It was practically the first chapter of his
new work, the "Bible of Amiens,"--itself intended as the first volume of
"Our Fathers have Told us: Sketches of the History of Christendom, for
Boys and Girls who have been held at its Fonts." The distinctly
religious tone of the work was noticed as marking, if not a change, a
strong development of a tendency which had been strengthening for some
time past.
Early in 1879 the Rev. F.A. Malleson, vicar of Broughton, near Coniston,
had asked him to write, for the Furness Clerical Society's Meetings, a
series of letters on the Lord's Prayer. In them he dwelt upon the need
of living faith in the Fatherhood of God, and childlike obedience to the
commands of old-fashioned religion and morality. He criticised the
English liturgy as compared with mediæval forms of prayer; and pressed
upon his hearers the strongest warnings against evasion, or explaining
away of stern duties and simple faiths. He concluded:
"No man more than I has ever loved the place where God's honour
dwells, or yielded truer allegiance to the teaching of His evident
servants. No man at this time grieves more for the damage of the
Church which supposes him her enemy, while she whispers
procrastinating _pax vobiscum_ in answer to the spurious kiss of
those who would fain toll curfew over the last fires of English
faith, and watch the sparrows find nest where she may lay her
young, around the altars of the Lord."
But if the Anglican Church refused him, the Roman Church was eager to
claim him. His interest in mediævalism seemed to point him out as ripe
for conversion. Cardinal Manning, an old acquaintance, showed him
special attention, and invited him to charming _tête-à-tête_ luncheons.
It was commonly reported that he had gone over, or was going. But two
letters (of a later date) show that he was not to be caught. To a
Glasgow correspondent he wrote in 1887:
"I shall be entirely grateful to you if you will take the trouble
to contradict any news gossip of this kind, which may be disturbing
the minds of any of my Scottish friends. I was, am, and can be,
only a Christian Catholic in the wide and eternal sense. I have
been that these five-and-twenty years at least. Heaven keep me from
being less as I grow older! But I am no more likely to become a
Roman Catholic than a Quaker, Evangelical, or Turk."
To another, next year, he wrote:
"I fear you have scarcely read enough of 'Fors' to know the breadth
of my own creed or communion. I gladly take the bread, water, wine,
or meat of the Lord's Supper with members of my own family or
nation who obey Him, and should be equally sure it was His giving,
if I were myself worthy to receive it, whether the intermediate
mortal hand were the Pope's, the Queen's, or a hedge-side gipsy's."
At Coniston he was on friendly terms with Father Gibson, the Roman
Catholic priest, and gave a window to the chapel, which several of the
Brantwood household attended. But though he did not go to Church, he
contributed largely to the increase of the poorly-endowed curacy, and to
the charities of the parish. The religious society of the neighbourhood
was hardly of a kind to attract him, unless among the religious society
should be included the Thwaite, where lived the survivors of a family
long settled at Coniston--Miss Mary Beever, scientific and political;
and Miss Susanna, who won Mr. Ruskin's admiration and affection by an
interest akin to his own in nature and in poetry, and by her love for
animals, and bright, unfailing wit. Both ladies were examples of
sincerely religious life, "at once sources and loadstones of all good to
the village," as he wrote in the preface to "Hortus Inclusus," the
collection of his letters to them since first acquaintance in the autumn
of 1873. The elder Miss Beever died at an advanced age on the last day
of 1883; Miss Susanna survived until October, 29, 1893.
In children he took a warm and openly-expressed interest. He used to
visit the school often, and delighted to give them a treat. On January
13th, 1881, he gave a dinner to 315 Coniston youngsters, and the tone of
his address to his young guests is noteworthy as taken in connection
with the drift of his religious tendency during this period. He dwelt on
a verse of the Sunday School hymn they had been singing: "Jesu, here
from sin deliver." "That is what we want," he said; "to be delivered
from our sins. We must look to the Saviour to deliver us from our sin.
It is right we should be punished for the sins which we have done; but
God loves us, and wishes to be kind to us, and to help us, that we may
not wilfully sin."
At this time he used to take the family prayers himself at Brantwood:
preparing careful notes for a Bible-reading, which sometimes, indeed,
lasted longer than was convenient to the household; and writing collects
for the occasion, still existing in manuscript, and deeply interesting
as the prayers of a man who had passed through so many wildernesses of
thought and doubt, and had returned at last--not to the fold of the
Church, but to the footstool of the Father.