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RUSKIN RELICS
RUSKIN RELICS
BY
W. G. COLLINGWOOD
AUTHOR OF
"THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN," ETC.
WITH FIFTY ILLUSTRATIONS BY
JOHN RUSKIN AND OTHERS
NEW YORK
T. Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS
1904
_Twelve chapters are here reprinted, with some additions, from "Good
Words," by the courtesy of the Editor and Publishers. Another, on
Ruskin's Drawings, is adapted, by permission, from the author's
"Prefatory Notes to the Catalogue of the Ruskin Exhibition at the
Gallery of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours" in 1901. The
first chapter is newly written for this book._
_W. G. C._
_Coniston, September 1903_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Ruskin's Chair 1
II. Ruskin's "Jump" 13
III. Ruskin's Gardening 29
IV. Ruskin's Old Road 45
V. Ruskin's "Cashbook" 63
VI. Ruskin's Ilaria 83
VII. Ruskin's Maps 105
VIII. Ruskin's Drawings 119
IX. Ruskin's Hand 133
X. Ruskin's Music 149
XI. Ruskin's Jewels 165
XII. Ruskin's Library 179
XIII. Ruskin's Bibles 193
XIV. Ruskin's "Isola" 213
Index 299
ILLUSTRATIONS
_Page_
_Ruskin's Study at Brantwood_ 5
_Brantwood Harbour in the Seventies_ 17
_Coniston Hall and Boathouse_ 18
_Ruskin's "Jump" adrift off Brantwood_ 19
_The Ruskin Museum, Coniston_ 22
_Trial Model for the Jumping Jenny_ 25
_The Waterfall at Brantwood Door_ 33
_Ruskin's Reservoir, Brantwood_ 37
_Ruskin's Moorland Garden_ 41
_On Ruskin's Old Road, between Morez and Les Rousses, 1882_ 53
_Lake of Geneva and Dent d'Oches under the Smoke-cloud_ 57
_The Gorge of Monnetier and Buttresses of the Saleve, 1882_ 61
_Mont Blanc clearing; Sallenches, Sept. 1882_ 67
_The Head of the Lake of Annecy_ 71
_The Mont Cenis Tunnel in Snow, Nov. 11, 1882_ 75
_A Savoy Town in Snow, Nov. 1882_ 79
_The Palace of Paolo Guinigi, Lucca_ 87
_Ilaria del Carretto; head of the Effigy_ 91
_Thunderstorm clearing, Lucca_ 95
_The Marble Mountains of Carrara from the Lucca Hills_ 99
_Ruskin's first Map of Italy_ 108
_Geology on the Old Road, by John Ruskin_ 109
_Sketch of Spain, by John Ruskin_ 112
_Physical Sketch of Savoy, by John Ruskin_ 113
_The History of France, by John Ruskin_ 117
_Early Journal at Coniston, by John Ruskin_ 137
_Ruskin's Handwriting in 1836_ 139
_Ruskin's Handwriting in 1837_ 141
_Notes for "Stones of Venice," by John Ruskin_ 143
_Ruskin's Handwriting in 1875_ 145
_Ruskin's Piano in Brantwood Drawing-room_ 153
_John Ruskin in the Seventies, by Prof. B. Creswick_ 157
_At Marmion's Grave; air by John Ruskin_ (_two pages of Music_) 160
_"Trust Thou Thy Love," facsimile of music by John Ruskin_ 163
_Gold as it Grows_ 169
_Native Silver, by John Ruskin_ 170
_Page from an early Mineral Catalogue, by John Ruskin_ 171
_Letter on Snow Crystals, by John Ruskin_ 174
_Diamond Diagrams, by John Ruskin_ 175
_Ruskin's Swiss Figure_ 185
_His "Nuremberg Chronicle" and Pocket "Horace"_ 189
_The Bible from which John Ruskin learnt in Childhood_ 197
_Sermon-book written by Ruskin as a Boy_ 199
_Greek Gospels with Annotations by Ruskin_ 201
_King Hakon's Bible, owned by Ruskin_ 203
_An Illuminated Page of King Hakon's Bible_ 207
_Lady Mount Temple, portrait by Edward Clifford_ 217
_Lady Mount Temple, chalk drawing by G. F. Watts, R.A_ 221
_Lady Mount Temple, 1886_ 223
_Lady Mount Temple, 1889_ 224
I
RUSKIN'S CHAIR
I
RUSKIN'S CHAIR
"This is all very well," said a visitor, after looking over the
sketches and books of the Ruskin Museum at Coniston, "but what the
public would prefer is to see the chair he sat in." Something tangible,
that brings before us the person, rather than his work, is what we
all like; for though successful workers are continually asking us to
judge them by what they have done, we know there is more. We want
to see their portraits; their faces will tell us--better than their
books--whether we can trust them. We want to know their lives by signs
and tokens unconsciously left, before we fall down and worship them for
what, after all, may be only a lucky accident of success. They cry out
indignantly that this should not be; but so it is.
Relics of heroes even the ancient Romans treasured. Relics of saints
our forefathers would fight for and die for. Relics of those who in
modern times have made our lives better and brighter we need not
be ashamed of preserving. And among relics I count all the little
incidents, the by-play of life, the anecdotes which betray character,
so long as they are truly told and "lovingly," as George Richmond said
about his portrait of Ruskin. "Have not you flattered him?" asked the
severe parents. "No; it is only the truth lovingly told."
In his study you see two chairs; one, half-drawn from the table, with
pen and ink laid out before it, where he used to sit at his writing;
the light from the bay window coming broadly in at his left hand, and
the hills, when he lifted his eyes, for his help. The other, by the
fireside, was the arm chair into which he migrated for those last ten
years of patience, no longer with his own books but others' books
before him. Then, turning to the chapter on his Music, you can see the
chair by the drawing-room table, in which, making a pulpit of it, he
preached his baby sermon--"People, be dood!"
[Illustration: (_Miss Brickhill, photographer_)
RUSKIN'S STUDY AT BRANTWOOD]
But it is about another kind of chair that I have more to say in this
first chapter, if you will forgive the pun; the metaphorical chair
which professors are supposed to fill at the University. Ruskin's
was nominally that of Fine Art, but he was really a sort of teaching
Teufelsdroeckh, Professor of Things in General. His chair stood on four
legs, or even more, like some antique settles of carved oak; very
unlike the Swiss milking-stool of the modern specialist. Not that
it stood more firmly; good business-folk, whose sons fell under his
influence, and dons with an eye to college successes in the schools,
thought his teaching deplorable; and from their point of view much was
to be said. It cannot be denied, also, that like the born teacher he
was, he sometimes tried to make silk purses out of sows' ears.
He taught none of us to paint saleable pictures nor to write popular
books. A pupil once asked him outright to do so. "I hope you're not
serious," he replied. To learn the artist's trade he definitely advised
going to the Royal Academy schools; his drawing school at Oxford was
meant for an almost opposite purpose--to show the average amateur
that really Fine Art is a worshipful thing, far beyond him; to be
appreciated (and that alone is worth while) after a course of training,
but never to be attained unless by birth-gift.
At the start this school, provided by the Professor at his own cost of
time, trouble and money, was well attended; in the second year there
were rarely more than three pupils. It was in 1872 that I joined it,
having seen him before, introduced by Mr. Alfred W. Hunt, R.W.S.,
the landscape painter. Ruskin asked to see what I had been doing, and
I showed him a niggled and panoramic bit of lake-scenery. "Yes, you
have been looking at Hunt and Inchbold." I hoped I had been looking
at Nature. "You must learn to draw." Dear me! thought I, and I have
been exhibiting landscapes. "And you try to put in more than you can
manage." Well, I supposed he would have given me a good word for that!
So he set me to facsimile what seemed like a tangle of scrabbles in
charcoal, and I bungled it. Whereupon I had to do it again, and was a
most miserable undergraduate. But the nice thing about him was that he
did not say, "Go away; you are no good"; but set me something drier
and harder still. I had not the least idea what it was all coming to;
though there was the satisfaction of looking through the sliding cases
between whiles at "Liber Studiorum" plates--rather ugly, some of them,
I whispered to myself--and little scraps of Holbein and Burne-Jones,
quite delicious, for I had the pre-Raphaelite measles badly just then,
in reaction from the water-colour landscape in which I had been brought
up. Only I was too ignorant to see, till he showed me, that the virtue
of real pre-Raphaelite draughtsmanship was in faithfulness to natural
form, and resulting sensitiveness to harmony of line; nothing to do
with sham mediaevalism and hard contours.
By-and-by he promoted me to Burne-Jones's "Psyche received into
Heaven." What rapture at the start, and what trials before that
facsimile was completed! And when all was done, "That's not the way to
draw a foot," said a popular artist who saw the copy. But that was the
way to use the pure line, and who but Ruskin taught it at the time?
Later, he set painful tasks of morsels from Turner, distasteful at
first, but gradually fascinating; for he would not let one off before
getting at the bottom of the affair, whether it was merely a knock-in
of the balanced colour-masses or the absolute imitation of the little
wavy clouds, an eighth of an inch long, left apparently ragged by
the mezzotinter's scraper. All this does not make a professional
picture-painter, but such teaching must have opened many pupils' eyes
to certain points in art not universally perceived.
That was one leg of the chair; another was the literary leg. He
contemplated his "Bibliotheca Pastorum," anticipating in a different
form the best hundred books, only there were to be far less. The
first, as suited in his mind for country readers on St. George's
farms, was the "Economist" of Xenophon, and two of his undergraduate
friends undertook the translation. Of these, Wedderburn of Balliol,
now K.C., and Ruskin's literary executor, was one; and the other was
Montefiore of Balliol, who was already in weak health (he did not
live long after those days) and passed on his share in the work to
me. That was the beginning of many interesting afternoons in Ruskin's
rooms, where I read my bit of translation to him, and he compared it
with the Greek, revising and Ruskinising the schoolboy exercise. His
method of translation was quite new to me. The Greek was not to be so
turned into English as to lose its Greek flavour; one should know it
for a rendering out of a foreign tongue. The same word in Greek was
to be represented by the same word in English. He would have no more
"freedom" in this than in anything else. But he came down heavily on
all the catchwords and commonplaces dear to Bohn's cribs, and for a
phrase like "to boot" had no mercy. On the other hand, he invented
quaint renderings of his own, such as "courtesy" for _philanthropia_.
The book is still in print for the curious to read; he gave his
translators the profits: "It will keep you in raspberry jam," he said,
and I have had a postal order for my share regularly these nearly
thirty years. But the lesson one learns at school in Latin, how to make
mosaic of words and decorative patterns of phrases, no master ever
tried to teach me in English, as Ruskin taught it over the tea-cups in
those afternoons at Corpus.
There was a third leg to the chair, which we might call the dignity of
labour. When his first group of men would not draw, he made them dig
at Hinksey. I was slack at the Hinksey diggings, but he made me dig
at Coniston. When the Xenophon was nearly ready, the translators were
asked to Brantwood in the summer of 1875 to finish it. At my earliest
visit, two years before, he had no harbour; the boats were exposed
to the big waves from the south-west storms, and it was an almost
daily task for the gardeners to keep them aground on the shore and to
bale them. In '74 he began some harbour-works, which we were set to
complete. We dug and built every afternoon, and enjoyed it, though we
had not time to finish the job. After us the local mason was called in,
so that the harbour you now see is professional work. But he bade them
leave three of my steps standing as a monument of that summer's doings,
and there they are to this day.
It seemed a kind of joke to make Oxford men dig, and I think the
Hinksey work was devised partly in despair of otherwise holding his
class together. But he had reasons for accustoming them to the labour
by which far the greater part of humanity has to live. Not to make
them into navvies, but to give them a respect for the skilled use of a
pick and a trowel, was his intention; just as the drawing school was
not to make them artists, but to show them how hard it was. In his
own undergraduate days the yokel and the mob were outside the pale of
the gownsman's interests. There was condescending charity, of course,
and comradeship in sport with the keeper and the groom; but "your
real gentleman," said Byron, "never perspires." On the contrary, said
Ruskin, when Adam delved, in the sweat of his brow, life was nearest
to Eden-gates. "To draw hard breath over ploughshare and spade" was
the glory of living. And so, to make these youngsters dig was an
object-lesson in ethics, the first rudiments of human fellowship, which
branched upward into all the moralities.
A fourth leg to his chair was nature study. In those days "science" was
supposed to be the only true natural history: Gilbert White was out of
date. Ruskin's teaching was a protest, and it has prevailed.
From any master we learn no more than we are capable of learning, and
he never gave me many of the tasks he put upon others of his pupils.
Less for any use he made of it, but always with the suggestion that
it was for a practical end, he set me to draw glaciers and glaciated
rocks at Chamouni; on the Coniston fells demonstrated his method
of taking dip and strike from any bit of rock showing cleavage and
stratification, and on his own piece of moor made me survey and
elaborate a model to scale. It was treated as a form of sport,
enjoyable as any game; but not to be scamped. There was always the
insistence on accuracy above all things, and fulness of observation,
with care about trifles which I had not dreamed of before, and never
expected from him. It was only much later that I understood, from his
note-books and sketch-books, what an immense amount of dry, hard work
underlay the easy eloquence of his paragraphs. For instance, "Love's
Meinie" seems to be a slight performance; but to serve for it he had
a vast collection of unstuffed bird-skins, and to get at the secret
of flight planned and commissioned from a skilled artificer sets of
quill-feathers, enormously magnified, in exact imitation of the true
forms and proportions in the bird's wing. One of these is on view in
the Coniston museum, which holds so many of his relics; a complete set
are still at Brantwood. To show the village children how the wheels of
heaven go round, and how the stars have been grouped into pictures of
the world--old myths of nature, he planned a revolving globe into which
you could climb and see a blue sky pierced for the greater and the
lesser lights, and painted with the constellation figures. The globe
has perished, but the object-lesson in education remains.
I have mentioned four lines of his teaching, four legs to his chair.
Other traits of his many-sided mind are given in the following
chapters, and even these are not exhaustive. They will serve to show
him as he was seen at close quarters, not merely through the medium
of print--the last of the sages, lingering into an era of specialists.
I do not rate him as an infallible authority, neither in taste, nor
in ethics, nor in anything. But he was a great teacher, because he
took you by the hand as he went on his voyage of discovery through the
world; he made you see what he saw, and taught you to look for yourself.
One thing he never taught me was to keep a diary. He used to lament how
many beautiful sunsets he had not sketched, and how many interesting
facts he had lost for want of the scratch of a pencil. In trying to
recall these bygones one begins to perceive their loss: so little one
can save from the wreckage of time. Once, when his talk was rather
confidential, I said, "Never mind, I'm not Boswell taking notes." "I
think," he replied, "you might do worse."
II
RUSKIN'S "JUMP"
II
RUSKIN'S "JUMP"
"Jump" was the Brantwood vernacular for "Jumping Jenny"; and she was
Ruskin's own private, particular "water sulky," as the Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table put it. There is hardly any need to say that she was
named after the famous though somewhat disreputable brig, commanded
and partly owned by the late Anthony Ewart, not unknown to readers of
Ruskin's favourite novel "Redgauntlet." I do not mean to commit myself
to any statement of literary criticism in calling "Redgauntlet" his
favourite novel, or to imply that he thought it the best book ever
written: but it was one which he continually quoted in conversation
and discussed with pleasure in his autobiography. Of all the novels
he read in those evenings of "auld lang syne," when he pulled the
four candles close to him at the drawing-room table, and we sketched
furtively in corners, Laurence Hilliard and I, and the ladies plied
their needles--no novel was read with more delight and effect. It was
a pretty way of passing the evening, but not so easy to imitate unless
you have a Ruskin to read to you. He had a trick of suggesting the
dramatic variety of the conversations without trying to be stagey, and
a skill in "cutting" the long paragraphs of Scott's descriptions which
made it all as good as a play. He did not make you hot and ready to
scream, as many readers do in their anxiety to act the scene.
Ruskin was no sailor, and never went for a real voyage; but he was
very fond of boats and shipping, and all that came from the sea. One
of his grandfathers had been a sailor. As far as I can make out,
this grandfather was an East-coast skipper of small craft, very much
like one of the captains of "Many Cargoes" and "Sea Urchins." He had
passed out of this world before John Ruskin came into it, and the
little genius never had the luck to hear sea-stories and to learn
the mysteries of reef-knots and clove-hitch from an old captain
grandfather. It would have been so good for him! But one must not
forget that in the making of John Ruskin there was a quarter of the
blood of a seafarer. It is a rather curious fact, also, and one which
has not, I believe, been mentioned in print, that the earliest Ruskin
of all was a sea captain. Mr. W. Hutton Brayshay tells me that he has
found in the Record Office a notice of the name in the fourteenth
century; this mediaeval Ruskin was captain of one of Edward III.'s
ships. We cannot connect him with John Ruskin's family, any more than
we can connect the Ruskins of Dalton-in-Furness in the sixteenth
century; but this identity of name suggests that they may have been
ancestors. It is a problem which can only be solved by research, but it
should be possible, if one had time and money to work out the pedigree
from wills and registers.
Turner was his real teacher in seafaring matters, giving him, if
nothing more, a true interest in the look of waves and ships. It was
for Turner's sake that he wrote the fine essay on "the boat in art and
poetry" which forms the introduction to "Harbours of England"; and this
glorification of the coast fishing-craft and the old ship of the line
was not merely a literary man's concoction, but the outcome of much
study and sketching at Deal, where he spent the summer of 1855 to steep
himself in the subject. In the early sixties, again, he stayed for some
time at Boulogne in lodgings under the sandhills north of the pier,
and made friends with a French pilot and mackerel fisher who, after
due apprenticeship, actually promoted him to the tiller--an honour of
which he was really prouder than that election to the membership of a
foreign Academy which he forgot to answer until it was too late to say
any more about it.
[Illustration: (_Sutcliffe, photographer, Whitby_)
BRANTWOOD HARBOUR IN THE SEVENTIES]
[Illustration: (_Herbert Severn, Esq., photographer_)
CONISTON HALL AND BOATHOUSE]
So when he came to Coniston, and had his own house on his own lake,
he could not be without boats. There was a landing-place on the shore
beneath Brantwood, shown in our photograph as it was in the earlier
stages of its development, with Mrs. Arthur Severn and Miss Constance
Hilliard (Mrs. W. H. Churchill) on the first primitive breakwater,
and Mr. Severn's sailboat in the distance. Ruskin did not care for
lake-sailing; a busy man hardly has time to wait for the moving of the
water; and he got one of the indigenous tubs for the diversion of
rowing. He did not fish, and he had the greatest scorn for rowing as
it is done at Oxford. "That's not rowing; that's galley-slaves' work!"
he used to tell us. "To bend to the stroke, and time your oars to the
beat of the waves," was his ideal: he liked going out when there was
a little sea on, and white horses; and he would paddle away before
the wind with great enjoyment. But when there is a little sea on, at
Coniston, it means a good deal of wind; though the waves are not very
high they gather a fair amount of force in their four or five miles'
career up the long waterway; and the fun of riding with them is quite
different from the struggle of getting your boat home again. Now Ruskin
was a very practical man in some things. "When you have too much to do,
don't do it," he used to say. So after a wild water-gallop, he simply
landed and walked home. When the wind changed he could bring back
his boat. There was no use in making a pain of a pleasure.
[Illustration: (_From a Sketch by W. G. Collingwood_)
RUSKIN'S "JUMP" ADRIFT OFF BRANTWOOD]
The Lake district rowing-boat is built for the Lake fisherman, and it
is as neatly adapted to its purpose as the Windermere yacht which, for
the peculiar winds and waters of the place, is pretty nearly perfect.
The fishers used to have two chief requirements, whether they netted or
trolled; the boat must travel easily in lumpy but not violent water,
for the men had far to go in reaching their "drawing-up spots," and in
taking their fish to market of an evening; and it must carry a good
deal of tackle. In netting, there were always two partners, and so two
thwarts and two pairs of sculls were used; in trolling, one went out
alone, but there were rods and lines which needed space for convenient
stowage. Consequently the boats were rather long, and rather low in the
water; the sculls were fixed on pins, so that you could drop them when
you got a bite, or landed hastily to take the hair-rope at your end
of the net in drawing up. Feathering the oar was quite unknown; great
speed unnecessary; great stability desirable; but not what a sailor
would call seaworthiness. On the whole, for pleasure-boating on the
lakes, these boats are safe and convenient; accidents are extremely
rare, though hundreds and perhaps thousands of hopelessly unskilled
people every summer try their hands at rowing, and do everything you
ought not to do in a boat. It is impossible to insist on an experienced
boatman going out with every party, and not always possible to prevent
overcrowding. Local authorities have no powers, except to hang
life-buoys (at their own personal expense) on convenient points along
the shore. You will see one of the Coniston parish council's buoys on
the boathouse in our photograph of the Hall: but you will be glad to
know that it has hung there for years without being wanted for a rescue.
[Illustration: (_Hargreaves, photographer_)
THE RUSKIN MUSEUM, CONISTON]
After some seasons' trial of the local boat, Ruskin thought he could
improve upon it for his own purpose. He wanted something less cumbrous
and more seaworthy, and he was always trying experiments, uprooting
notions to find how they grew, planting them upside down to see what
happened, grafting one idea upon another, to the bewilderment of
onlookers. In the matter of boats he had a very willing and capable
helper in Laurence Hilliard, who was the cleverest and neatest-fingered
boy that ever rigged a model; and many were the models he designed and
finished with exquisite perfection of detail in the outhouse-workshop
at Brantwood. Laurie, as every one called him, was deep in Scott
Russell at that time, working away on the ponderous (and now
discredited) folio as if he were getting it up for an examination, and
covering sheets of cartridge-paper with sections and calculations. He
was only too pleased to have a hand in a real job, and turned out the
drawings and the model for the new boat in workmanlike fashion. This
was in 1879 or 1880.
Just opposite Brantwood, across the lake, is the old Coniston Hall,
built in the fifteenth century as the home of the Flemings of Coniston,
but nearly two hundred years ago abandoned and left to ruin. Mrs.
Radcliffe, who wrote the "Mysteries of Udolpho"--known to most readers
nowadays less for itself than as the book that so excited the heroine
of "Northanger Abbey"--about 1794 came to Coniston, and mistook the
old Coniston Hall for Conishead Priory, as it seems: and with an odd
fallacy of romance described the "solemn vesper that once swelled
along the lake from those consecrated walls, and awakened, perhaps,
the enthusiasm of the voyager, while evening stole upon the scene."
But she was right enough in being charmed with the spot, as Ruskin was
in his boyish visits, long before he dreamed of living--and dying--in
view of the old round chimneys among the trees, with the ripple of lake
below and the peak of the Old Man rising above. Early in the nineteenth
century the ruins were fitted up as a farm, and, somewhat later,
the boathouse close by came to be the workshop of the man who built
Ruskin's "Jump."
Mr. William Bell was one of the celebrities of this dale. In his youth
he had been a sort of right-hand man of John Beever of the Thwaite,
brother to the ladies of "Hortus Inclusus," and author of "Practical
Fly-Fishing." On the death of his father, William Bell became the
leading carpenter of the place, and the leading Liberal, and during Mr.
Gladstone's last Administration he was nominated for a Justice of the
Peace. Ruskin was told of his neighbour, and sent word that he would
like to come and have a talk about politics. Now the carpenter was used
to Conservative orators and Liberal arguers, but he knew that Ruskin
was a different sort of man; and all day long before the hour fixed
for the visit he was in a greatly perturbed state of mind, walking
up and down and wondering--a new thing for him--how he should tackle
this unknown personality. At last the distinguished guest arrived. He
was solemnly welcomed and shown into the parlour. The door was shut
upon the twain. The son (Mr. John Bell), who felt he had brought into
contact the irresistible force and the irremovable post, waited about
hoping it would be all right, but in much trepidation as the sound of
talk inside rose from a murmur to a rumble, and from a rumble to a
roar. At last his father's well-known voice came through the partition
in no trembling accents: "Ye're wrong to rags, Mr. Ruskin!" Then he
knew it _was_ all right, and went about his work. And after that Ruskin
and "ald Will Bell" were firm friends in spite of differences.
So Will Bell built the "Jump"--or, to be accurate, was master-builder,
employing at this job Mont. Barrow, well known to boat-owners on
Windermere for one of the most skilful of craftsmen, as his father
was before him--and one fine day in spring she was launched at the
boat-house with great ceremony. A wreath of daffodils was hung round
her bows, and Miss Martha Gale christened her, with this little
versicle which Ruskin made for the occasion:
Waves give place to thee!
Heaven send grace to thee!
Fortune to ferry
Kind hearts and merry!
There was one strange face in the group, one uninvited visitor. The
people then at the Hall were not successful managers, though they
had interested Ruskin, perhaps more through the idyllic prettiness of
their homestead than otherwise. He had helped to stave off the failure
by lending them L300, which they proposed to pay in geese! And the
stranger at the launch was the man in possession. Alas! for "these
consecrated walls," and the disillusionments of our Arcadia. Perhaps it
is wise to add, in plain words, that twenty years have wrought changes
at the Hall, and that the present tenants are quite different people.
[Illustration: (_Hargreaves, photographer_)
TRIAL MODEL FOR THE "JUMPING JENNY"]
The "Jump," so launched at last, was always Ruskin's own boat, for his
private particular use. Sometimes as a special honour the favoured
guest was sent across the lake in her, rather than in a common boat;
but to say the truth, if it wasn't for the honour of the thing, as the
Irishman remarked when the bottom of the sedan-chair came out, we had
as soon walk round. She rode the waves beautifully, but you didn't
seem to get forrarder with her. Perhaps it was the fallacy of the
Scott Russell lines that made her heavy, or must we put all the blame
upon Ruskin? He tried to build a boat that would sail and row equally
well, and that is not easy. She was never sailed, though the model,
now in the Coniston Museum, is rigged. The "Jump," still on the water
and often used, is treasured, I think, chiefly as a relic--Ruskin's
flagship. When she is repainted, the old pattern round the gunwale,
his device, and the brilliant blue, his favourite colour, are always
reproduced, and she looks sound enough to outlast us all.
At a later time, when he was staying at Sandgate (1887-88), he reverted
to his fondness for boating, and had several very beautiful models
built and rigged by Charles Dalby, of Folkestone, a past-master in the
mystery. These models--the old Dover packet, old-style cutter and yawl,
and so forth--are still at Brantwood.
In the spring of 1882, during a visit to London, Mr. Froude described
to him the discovery of a Viking ship, which roused great interest.
Writing home, he sketched it endwise and sidewise, with notes of its
construction, and--"Froude told me she had a horse at the head."
To most of his readers Ruskin has been exclusively the arm-chair
philosopher, the dilettante of prints and pictures; but there was
a vein of the old blood in him, as in the rest of us, which warmed
to the rough sea-life that created Venice (read his prose poem
thereon in "Modern Painters," vol. v., "The Wings of the Lion"), and
England:--"Bare head, bare fist, bare foot, and blue jacket. If these
will not save us, nothing will." He has told me of talks with Carlyle,
who regretted he had not taken up the Kings of Norway earlier in life,
instead of Frederick the Great, and spent his better strength upon the
better subject; and Ruskin himself, though too late for evidences of
the taste to appear in his writings, liked to hear of our seafaring
ancestors of the North. It was a touch of this feeling that made him
so scornful of "sailing-machines," not calling them boats at all. He
would not even have a boat-house for his "Jump"; it would be too like
yachting, and she must lie on the beach, in open harbour, in the good
old way. When we used to laugh at Laurence Hilliard's "Snail," a
Morecambe Bay fisherman's craft that wouldn't go, Ruskin always took
her part. "You boys can't be content unless you are going fast. I won't
have her called the 'Snail'; she is--" and this with his own peculiar
lifting emphasis--"a Real Sea Boat."
III
RUSKIN'S GARDENING
III
RUSKIN'S GARDENING
There are two quite different sorts of garden lovers--those who raise
flowers, and those who look for the landscape effect. I shall be
scolded for saying so, but the first often make their gardens into
museums; very interesting, no doubt, but not so pleasant to live with
as the half-wild bit of ground--lawn, trees and shrubbery, without a
pane of glass in evidence--where there are just enough flowers, hardy
perennials perhaps, to give a touch of colour in their season, but in
the main a sense of green repose. I think the garden which the Lord
planted eastward in Eden was like that; a pleasance, where He could
walk in the cool of the evening with Adam, and Adam had no need to run
away, every minute, to look for slugs.
Ruskin, though he wrote about botany, and tried to be his own Linnaeus,
and though he loved well enough to see flowers (especially wild ones)
on his table and outside his window, yet in his practical gardening
was quite the landscapist. He liked making paths and contriving pretty
nooks, building steps and bridges, laying out beds, woodcutting and so
forth; but I never remember him potting and grafting and layering and
budding; and as to the rarity of any plants in his garden, I believe he
took far more pleasure in the wood-anemone--Silvia, he called it--than
in anything buyable from the nurseryman's catalogue.
The Brantwood gardens as they now are, enlarged and tended by a
mistress who loves and understands flowers, and glorified by their
charming position on the shore of a mountain lake, are as near the
perfect blend of detailed interest and picturesque beauty as anything
can be in this northern climate. But they are not Ruskin's gardens.
When the first glass-house went up, he used to apologise for it to his
visitors; it was to please Mrs. Severn; it was to grow a few grapes for
his friends; he did not believe in hot-houses: and he would take you
up the steps he had contrived at the back of the house and point out
the tiny wild growths in their crannies, as he led the way to his own
private plot.
Sir Edwin Arnold, in a pleasant essay on Japanese rock-gardens,
quoting Ruskin on the beauty of stones, wonders whether he would not
have sympathised in these quaint tastes of the Far East. Ruskin had
little to say in praise of Japanese art as he knew it, because they
could not draw pretty figures, and he had no admiration for dwarfs
or monsters; but one cannot help thinking that if he had seen Japan,
and if it is all that travellers tell us, he might have written some
enthusiastic passages on a people who love stones for their own sake
and tub themselves daily. To him, his rock gardens were a joy for
ever; and in his working years he set an example of Lake-district
landscape-gardening which still, for all I know, remains unfollowed,
and is worth a few paragraphs of record. You can see little of it now.
During that last decade, when he wandered about his small domain like
the ghost of his former self, no one could carry on his work. The paths
he made and tended gradually became overgrown, the rocky watercourses
were choked with stones, his private plot filled with weeds, for he
could no longer dig in it; and now you can only trace what it has been
in the little solitude left sacred to memory.
[Illustration: THE WATERFALL AT BRANTWOOD DOOR. BY L. J. HILLIARD, 1885]
It was in the heart of the wood, approached by the steps and winding
path--not gravelled, but true woodland track. About as large as a
cottager's kitchen-garden, it was fenced on two sides with a wooden
paling, and an old stone wall, mossy and ivied, kept off the trees
and their undergrowth on the higher side, up the hill. The trees, when
he came, were the coppice of the country, oak and hazel, periodically
cut down to the stubs, and used for turning bobbins and burning
charcoal. This clearance is always a sad thing for the moment, when
the leafy thicket is rased away, leaving bare earth and hacked stumps
and the toppings strewn about to rot into soil; but next spring there
are sure to be galaxies of primroses, if not daffodils and bluebells
to follow, and foxgloves as the summer goes on; and so the kindness
of nature heals the wound. Next year there are shoots from the stubs,
a miniature forest which might even attract a Japanese; and as the
saplings grow the flowers thin out, until in two or three seasons the
children wonder why there are no primroses in the primrose-wood, and
cannot believe they are gone to sleep for ten years. In the plantations
of larch and timber trees the great bracken takes the place of this
aftergrowth of flowerets, shooting up six or eight feet high where a
clearing gives it a chance, and then again dwindles as the trees regain
their strength, until under a well-grown larchwood there is nothing but
a soft, deep, tressy grass, not rank and full tinted like the sward of
the meadows, but grey-green and delicate and dry, though so thick and
rich that there is no easier couch for a woodland dreamer.
When Ruskin came to Brantwood he would have his coppice cut no more.
He let it grow, only taking off the weaker shoots and dead wood. It
spindled up to great tall stems, slender and sinuous, promising no
timber, and past the age for all commercial use or time-honoured wont.
Neighbours shook their heads, but they did not know the pictures of
Botticelli, and Ruskin had made his coppice into an early Italian
altar-piece. Among those slender-pillared aisles you would not be
surprised to see goddesses appear out of the green depths; and looking
westward, the sun-dazzle of the lake and the dark blue of the mountains
gazed in between the leaves. It was what the old Venetians had seen in
landward holidays and tried to remember for their backgrounds. That in
itself was one form of Ruskin's gardening. To keep his forest at this
delightful point of mystery, his billhook and gloves were always lying
on the hall table, and after the morning's writing he would go up to
the Brant (steep) Wood and chop for half an hour before luncheon. It
was not the heroic axe-work of Mr. Gladstone, but such pruning as a
Garden of Eden required to dress it and to keep it.
Then in that private plot he had his espalier of apples and a little
gooseberry patch and a few standard fruit-trees and some strawberries,
mixed with flowers. In one corner there were beehives in the
old-fashioned penthouse, trailed over with creepers. The fourth side
was unfenced, but parted from the wood by a deep and steep watercourse,
a succession of cascades (unless the weather were dry, which is not
often the case at Coniston) over hard slate rock. He used sometimes
humorously to complain of the trouble it cost him to keep the beck
clear of stones, and he could deduce you many a lesson in geology on
the way his rivulet filled, rather than deepened, its bed.
It was crossed by a rough wooden bridge. I remember at the building of
this bridge he was considerably annoyed because the workman, thinking
to please him with unusually rude lines, had made the planks so flimsy
that it was hardly safe. He insisted on solidity and security, though
his stone steps were so irregular as to contradict all the rules which
bid you make stairs in a flight equal, for fear of tripping your
passenger.
[Illustration: RUSKIN'S RESERVOIR, BRANTWOOD]
Over the bridge and within the wood there were frequent hummocks and
bosses of rock pushing through the soil, and each with its special
interest of fern or flower. Many a visitor must have recalled or
repeated--
Who loved the little rock, and set
Upon its head the coronet?
while Ruskin led the way, pointing out each trail of ivy (convolvulus
not allowed for fear of strangling the stems) and nest of moss, as
a gardener of the other species might point out his orchids. Then
suddenly forth of the wood you came upon the tennis-lawn--another
concession to youthful visitors, for he played no athletic games. But
in the creation of this glade he took the keenest delight, believing,
as he said, in diggings of all sorts. He was the engineer, and the work
was done in great part by the young people who were to play tennis on
the ground when it was levelled--a rather distant hope, but eventually
fulfilled. The tall, thin saplings have run up higher and higher all
round the green: on one side you look through their veil to the long
expanse of lake; on the other, up the dark, wooded hill; and on a
sunny afternoon it has a curious touch of poetry. There is no statue
on a pedestal or fountain playing in a basin, but on the mossy bank,
beneath the graceful lines of virginal forestry, Decamerons might have
been told. It is an oasis in the North-country farmer's neighbourhood,
this Lake district which the tripper thinks just "country" as God made
it, quoting Cowper, and not dreaming of the "native's" view that the
land is an unroofed mutton-factory, with every inch of it "proputty,
proputty, proputty."
I do not mean to imply that Ruskin's gardening was wilfully
anti-utilitarian. The charm of it was that it brought the natural
advantages and local usages into a new light, with just the refinement
of feeling which made a flight of steps into a rock-garden and a
tennis-ground into a Purist painter's glade. Who but he would have
planted his field with narcissus, scattered thinly among the grass,
to surprise you with a reminiscence of Vevey? And in the old garden
below, though he did not create it, you can trace his feeling in
the terraced zigzag of paths, hedged with apple and the cotoneaster
which flourishes at Coniston, and filled in with sloping patches of
strawberry and gooseberry. The average proprietor would have levelled
his walks and capped his dwarf walls with flat slabs. This irregularity
and cottage-garden business would have offended those new-comers who
buy a bit of nature at the Lakes and improve away all its beauties.
It was in the late 'seventies, when the first illness had forced him
to spend most of his time at Brantwood, and in the early 'eighties,
before final illness put an end to his activity, that Ruskin, having
completed his woodland paths and gardens, and all the "diggings" at his
harbour, went higher up the hill for new worlds to conquer. His bit of
moor above the wood was opened out into a new sort of garden, quite
as charming in its way as any other. It was a steep patch of hillside
grandly overlooking the lake, with a foreground of foliage below and
a background of mountains above; but as Nature left it--or rather as
Nature made it after the original wild growth of oak and birch and
holly had been cleared away by the charcoal-burners and sheep-farmers
of past centuries. Strongly marked ridges of slate-rock cropped out
slantwise, across and across the slope, their backs tufted over
with heather and juniper, and their hollows holding water in sodden
quagmires. Down the slope, from the bogs of the great moor behind,
rising to a thousand feet above the sea in some places, there were two
little streamlets which leapt the ridges and pooled in the hollows
among ferns and mosses. All the green fields and farms of the dalesmen
were once made out of such ground, and many of them at quite as great
a height; indeed the actual elevation of this plot nowhere reaches
five hundred feet. The problem was to take advantage of whatever
useful features the site afforded without destroying its native charm.
To drain and clear an intake and put it under grass, or to plant it
outright, had been done before; but that was to do away with the
moorland character altogether. Just as a portrait-painter studies to
pose his sitter in such a light and in such an attitude as to bring out
the most individual points and get the revelation of a personality, so
Ruskin studied his moor, to develop its resources.
[Illustration: RUSKIN'S MOORLAND GARDEN]
First, there were the streams; and his old theory of saving the water
suggested impounding the trickle in a series of reservoirs; it might
be useful in case of drought or fire. So we were marshalled with pick
and spade every fair afternoon to the "Board of Works," as we called
it; and the old game of the Hinksey diggings was played over again. For
what reason I never clearly understood, juniper was condemned on the
moor as convolvulus in the wood: and every savin-bush, as it is called
in the district, was to be uprooted, while the heather was treasured,
in spite of the farmers' rule to burn the heather off, now and then,
for the sake of the grass which grows, for a while, in its place.
Ruskin always regretted these heather fires, for they do not really
make good grass-land, while they ruin the natural garden of ling and
bell-heather.
When the basins were formed he found to his regret that no mere earthen
bank would hold the water; and skilled labour had to be called in to
build dams of stone and cement, less pretty than the concealed dyke he
had intended. But there was some consolation in devising sluices and
clever gates with long lever handles, artistically curved, to shut and
open the slit. One would have thought, sometimes, to see his eagerness
over these inventions, that he had missed his vocation; and he had
indeed a keen admiration for the civil engineer, wherever the road and
bridge, mine and harbour, did not come into open conflict with natural
beauties which he thought just as essential to human life as the
material advantages of business. And when his reservoirs were made, it
was a favourite entertainment to send up somebody to turn the water on
and produce a roaring cascade among the laurels opposite the front door.
Next, to illustrate his theory of reclaiming wastes, he set about his
moorland garden. At the upper corner of this beck-course there was
one ragged bit of ground against the fence wall. From the more rocky
parts we were set to carry the soil to make terraces, which we walled
up with the rough stones found in plenty under the surface. One wetter
patch was planted with cranberries, and some apple- and cherry-trees
were put in, where the soil was deep and drainage provided. No wall or
wire parted this little space of tillage from the wilder moor and its
rabbits, for the design was to enlarge the cultivated area and make
the moor a paradise of terraces like the top of the purgatorial mount
in Dante; and since this fragment of an experiment was completed, when
strength no longer allowed him to stride up to this once favourite
height, the whole has been left to Nature again. The apple-trees grew,
but untended; they still blossom. The cherries have run wild and are
left to the birds. The rough steps from the rock-platform to the
orchard terrace are disjointed, and fern is creeping through the grass.
But yet from out the little hill
Oozes the slender springlet still,
as it did in those old Brantwood days when we picked and shovelled
together, first unearthing its miniature ravine; and as perhaps
it may--for no one can foretell the fate of any sacred spot--when
the pilgrim of the future tries to identify by its help alone the
whereabouts of Ruskin's deserted garden.
IV
RUSKIN'S OLD ROAD
IV
RUSKIN'S OLD ROAD
In the Life of Ruskin three pages are given to his tour abroad in 1882,
a journey of importance to him, because at a critical moment it gave
him a new lease of life, and of unusual interest to his biographer, who
accompanied him as secretary, which is to say "man-jack-of-all-trades."
In such companionship much personality comes out; and the gossip of
this period, at greater length than the proportions of a biography
allowed, may help to fill in some of the details of his portrait.
Very much broken down in health, despairing of himself and his mission,
he left London on Thursday, August 10, 1882. Calais Tower roused none
of the old enthusiasm; he said rather bitterly, "I wonder how I came to
write about it." But even in his depression the habit of work made him
sketch once more the tracery of the Hotel de Ville. He found out the
trick of its geometrical pattern, and explained it, delighted. Then the
old _chef_ at the Hotel Dessein was still in the flesh, and remembered
former visits and sent up a capital dinner; so the first day on foreign
soil augured hopefully.
On the Saturday he woke up to sunshine at Laon, and took me round the
town, setting me to work on various points. He began a drawing of the
cathedral front, which he finished on the Monday before leaving. It was
always rather wonderful how he would make use of every moment, even
when ill-health and the fatigue of travelling might seem a good reason
for idling. At once on arriving anywhere he was ready to sketch, and up
to the minute of departure he went on with his drawing unperturbed. In
the afternoons he usually dropped the harder work of the morning, and
went for a ramble out into the country; at Laon the hayfields and pear
orchards south of the town gave him, it seemed, just as much pleasure
as Chamouni.