THE STORM-CLOUD (1884-1888)
The sky had been a favourite subject of study with the author of "Modern
Painters." His journals for fifty years past had kept careful account of
the weather, and effects of cloud. He had noticed since 1871 a
prevalence of chilly, dark _bise_, as it would be called in France; but
different in its phenomena from anything of his earlier days. The
"plague wind," so he named it--tremulous, intermittent, blighting grass
and trees--blew from no fixed point of the compass, but always brought
the same dirty sky in place of the healthy rain-cloud of normal summers;
and the very thunder-storms seemed to be altered by its influence into
foul and powerless abortions of tempest. We should now be disposed to
call this simply "the smoke nuisance," but feeling as he did the weight
of human wrong against which it was his mission to prophesy, believing
in a Divine government of the world in all its literalness, he had the
courage to appear before a London audience,[50] like any seer of old,
and to tell them that this eclipse of heaven was--if not a judgment--at
all events a symbol of the moral darkness of a nation that had
"blasphemed the name of God deliberately and openly; and had done
iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his
brother as it was in his power to do."
[Footnote 50: "The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century," London
Institution, February 4th, 1884; repeated with variations and additions
a week later.]
In the autumn, at Oxford, he took up his parable again. His lectures on
"The Pleasures of England" he intended as a sketch of the main stream of
history from his own religious standpoint. It was a noble theme, and one
which his breadth of outlook and detailed experience would have fitted
him to handle; but he was already nearing the limit of his vital powers.
He had been suffering from depression throughout the summer, unrelieved
by the energetic work for St. George's Museum, which in other days might
have been a relaxation from more serious thought. He had been editing
Miss Alexander's "Roadside Songs of Tuscany," and recasting earlier
works of his own, incessantly busy; presuming upon the health he had
enjoyed, and taking no hints nor advice from anxious friends, who would
have been glad to have seen the summer spent in change of scene and
holiday-making.
At Oxford he was watched with concern--restless and excited, too
absorbed in his crusade against the tendencies of the modern scientific
party, too vehement and unguarded in his denunciations of colleagues,
too bitter against the new order of things which, to his horror, was
introducing vivisection in the place of the old-fashioned natural
history he loved, and speculative criticism instead of "religious and
useful learning."
He was persuaded to cancel his last three attacks on modern life and
thought--"The Pleasures of Truth," of "Sense," and of "Nonsense"--and to
substitute readings from earlier works, hastily arranged and re-written;
and his friends breathed more freely when he left Oxford without another
serious attack of brain-disease. He wrote on December 1st, 1884, to Miss
Beever:
"I gave my fourteenth, and last for this year, lecture with vigour
and effect, and am safe and well (D.G.) after such a spell of work
as I never did before."
To another correspondent, a few days later:
"Here are two lovely little songs for you to put tunes to, and sing
to me. You'll have both to be ever so good to me, for I've been
dreadfully bothered and battered here. I've bothered other people a
little, too,--which is some comfort!"
But in spite of everything, the vote was passed to establish a
physiological laboratory at the museum; to endow vivisection--which to
him meant not only cruelty to animals, but a complete misunderstanding
of the purpose of science, and defiance of the moral law. He resigned
his Professorship, with the sense that all his work had been in vain,
that he was completely out of touch with the age, and that he had best
give up the unequal fight.
In former times when he had found himself beaten in his struggles with
the world, he had turned to geology for a resource and a relief; but
geology, too, was part of the field of battle now. The memories of his
early youth and the bright days of his boyhood came back to him as the
only antidote to the distress and disappointments of his age, and he
strove to forget everything in "bygones"--"Præterita."
It was Professor Norton who had suggested that he should write his own
life. He had begun to tell the story, bit by bit, in "Fors." On the
journey of 1882 he made a point of revisiting most of the scenes of
youthful work and travel, to revive his impressions; but the meeting
with Miss Alexander gave him new interests, and his return to Oxford put
the autobiography into the background.
Now, at last he collected the scattered notes, and completed his first
volume, which brings the account up to the time of his coming of age. It
is not a connected and systematic biography; it omits many points of
interest, especially the steps of his early successes and mental
development; but it is the brightest conceivable picture of himself and
his surroundings--"scenes and thoughts perhaps worthy of memory," as the
title modestly puts it--told with inimitable ease and graphic power.
We have traced a life which was--even more than might be gathered from
"Præterita"--a battle with adversities from the beginning. Not to
discuss the influences of heredity, there was over-stimulus in
childhood; intense application to work in youth and middle-age, under
conditions of discouragement, both public and private, which would have
been fatal to many another man; and this, too, not merely hard work, but
work of an intense emotional nature, involving--in his view at
least--wide issues of life and death, in which he was another Jacob
wrestling with the angel in the wilderness, another Savonarola imploring
reconciliation between God and man.
Without a life of singular temperance, without unusual moral principle
and self-command, he would long ago have fallen like other men of genius
of his passionate type. He outlived "consumptive" tendencies in youth;
and the repeated indications of over-strain in later life, up to the
time of his first serious break-down in 1878, had issued in nothing
more than the depression and fatigue with which most busy men are
familiar. He had been accustomed to hear himself called mad--the defence
of Turner was thought by the _dilettanti_ of the time to be possible
only to a lunatic; the author of "Stones of Venice," we saw, was insane
in the eyes of his critic, the architect; it was seriously whispered
when he wrote on Political Economy that Ruskin was out of his mind; and
so on. Every new thing he put forward "made Quintilian stare and gasp,"
and _soi-disant_ friends shake their heads, until a still newer
nine-days' wonder appeared from his pen. The break-down of 1878, so
difficult to explain to his public, made it appear that the common
reproach might after all be coming true. The recurrence of a similar
illness in 1881 and 1882 made it still more to be feared. It seemed as
though his life's work was to be invalidated by his age's failure; it
seemed that the stale, shallow reproach might only too easily be
justifiable.
These attacks of mental disease, which at his recall to Oxford seemed to
have been safely distanced, after his resignation began again at more
and more frequent intervals. Crash after crash of tempest fell upon
him--clearing away for a while only to return with fiercer fury, until
they left him beaten down and helpless at last, to learn that he must
accept the lesson and bow before the storm. Like another prophet who had
been very jealous for the Lord God of Hosts, he was to feel tempest and
earthquake and fire pass over him, before hearing the still small voice
that bade him once more take courage, and live in quietness and in
confidence, for the sake of those whom he had forgotten, when he cried,
"I, even I only, am left."
From one who has been out in the storm the reader will not expect a cool
recital of its effects. The delirium of brain-fever brings strange
things to pass; and, no doubt, afforded ground for the painful gossip,
of which there has been more than enough--much of it absurdly untrue,
the romancing of ingenious newspaper-correspondents; some of it, the
lie that is half a truth. For in these times there were not wanting
parasites such as always prey upon creatures in disease, as well as weak
admirers who misunderstood their hero's natural character, and entirely
failed to grasp his situation.
Let such troubles of the past be forgotten: all that I now remember of
many a weary night and day is the vision of a great soul in torment, and
through purgatorial fires the ineffable tenderness of the real man
emerging, with his passionate appeal to justice and baffled desire for
truth. To those who could not follow the wanderings of the wearied brain
it was nothing but a horrible or a grotesque nightmare. Some, in those
trials, learnt as they could not otherwise have learnt to know him, and
to love him as never before.
There were many periods of health, or comparative health, even in those
years. While convalescent from the illness of 1885 he continued
"Præterita" and "Dilecta," the series of notes and letters illustrating
his life. In connection with early reminiscences, he amused himself by
reproducing his favourite old nursery book, "Dame Wiggins of Lee." He
edited the works of one or two friends, wrote occasionally to
newspapers--notably on books and reading, to the _Pall Mall Gazette_, in
the "Symposium" on the best hundred books. He continued his arrangements
for the Museum, and held an exhibition (June, 1886) of the drawings made
under his direction for the Guild.
He was already drifting into another illness when he sent the famous
reply to an appeal for help to pay off the debt on a chapel at Richmond.
The letter is often misquoted for the sake of raising a laugh, so that
it is not out of place to reprint it as a specimen of the more vehement
expressions of this period. The reader of his life must surely see,
through the violence of the wording, a perfectly consistent and
reasonable expression of Mr. Ruskin's views:--
"BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, LANCASHIRE.
"_May 19th_, 1886.
"SIR,
"I am scornfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the world
the precisely least likely to give you a farthing! My first word to all
men and boys who care to hear me is 'Don't get into debt. Starve and go
to heaven--but don't borrow. Try first begging,--I don't mind, if it's
really needful, stealing! But don't buy things you can't pay for!'
"And of all manner of debtors, pious people building churches they can't
pay for are the most detestable nonsense to me. Can't you preach and
pray behind the hedges--or in a sandpit--or a coal-hole--first?
"And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built iron churches are
the damnablest to me.
"And of all the sects of believers in any ruling spirit--Hindoos, Turks,
Feather Idolaters, and Mumbo Jumbo, Log and Fire worshippers, who want
churches, your modern English Evangelical sect is the most absurd, and
entirely objectionable and unendurable to me! All which they might very
easily have found out from my books--any other sort of sect
would!--before bothering me to write it to them.
"Ever, nevertheless, and in all this saying, your faithful servant,
"JOHN RUSKIN."
The recipient of the letter promptly sold it. Only three days later,
Ruskin was writing one of the most striking passages in "Præterita"
(vol. ii., chap. 5)--indeed, one of the daintiest landscape pieces in
all his works, describing the blue Rhone as it flows under the bridges
of Geneva.
This energetic letter-writing made people stare; but a more serious
result of these periods between strength and helplessness was the
tendency to misunderstanding with old friends. Ruskin had spoiled many
of them, if I may say so, by too uniform forbearance and unselfishness:
and now that he was not always strong enough to be patient, difficulties
ensued which they had not always the tact to avert. "The moment I have
to scold people they say I'm crazy," he said, piteously, one day. And
so, one hardly knows how, he found himself at strife on all sides.
Before he was fully recovered from the attack of 1886 there were
troubles about the Oxford drawing school; and he withdrew most of the
pictures he had there on loan. How little animosity he really felt
against Oxford is shown from the fact that early in the next year
(February, 1887) he was planning with his cousin, Wm. Richardson, to
give £5,000 to the drawing school, as a joint gift in memory of their
two mothers. Mr. Richardson's death, and Ruskin's want of means--for he
had already spent all his capital--put an end to the scheme. But the
remaining loans, including important and valuable drawings by himself,
he did not withdraw, and it is to be hoped they may stay there to show
not only the artist's hand but the friendly heart of the founder and
benefactor.
In April, 1887, came the news of Laurence Hilliard's death in the
Aegean, with a shock that intensified the tendency to another recurrence
of illness. For months the situation caused great anxiety. In August he
posted with Mrs. A. Severn towards the south, and took up his quarters
at Folkestone, moving soon after to Sandgate, where he remained, with
short visits to town, until the following summer--better, or worse, from
week to week--sometimes writing a little for "Præterita," or preparing
material for the continuation of unfinished books; but bringing on his
malady with each new effort. In June, 1888, he went with Mr. Arthur
Severn to Abbeville, and made his headquarters for nearly a month at the
Tête de Boeuf. Here he was arrested for sketching the fortifications and
examined at the police station, much to his amusement. At Abbeville,
too, he met Mr. Detmar Blow, a young architect, whom he asked to
accompany him to Italy. They stayed awhile at Paris,--drove, as in 1882,
over the Jura, and up to Chamouni, where Ruskin wrote the epilogue to
the reprint of "Modern Painters"; then, by Martigny and the Simplon,
they went to visit Mrs. and Miss Alexander at Bassano; and thence to
Venice. They returned by the St. Gothard, reaching Herne Hill early in
December.
But this journey did not, as it had been hoped, put him in possession of
his strength like the journey of 1882. Then, he had returned to public
life with new vigour; now, his best hours were hours of feebleness and
depression; and he came home to Brantwood in the last days of the year,
wearied to death, to wait for the end.