could not get rid of the idea of champagne and all the vanities and
vulgarities which hang on to the very word. There was an ugly prison,
too, put up next the cathedral; and even St. Remi did not make amends.
So he hastened on to Troyes, spending a few hours between trains at
Chalons, where we "did" the town in the regular tourist fashion,
finding, however, beautiful features of early Gothic at Notre Dame and
the Madeleine.
At Troyes he spent the 17th, sketching hard at St. Urbain and the
cathedral, and next morning reached Sens, a place loved of old for
associations with parents and friends, and not less for its little
gutter-brooks in the streets, which he pointed out with a sort of
boyish glee. The afternoon walk in the valley of the Yonne and up
the chalk hills brought much talk of the geology of flints and the
especial charm of _coteau_ scenery, which he said had never been cared
for until Turner saw it and glorified this comparatively humble aspect
of mountains in the "Rivers of France." He set me to draw the defaced
statues on the porch of the cathedral, the "finest north of Alps" he
declared; but we were getting on rather too fast, and he began to feel
the reaction of fatigue. The weather was sultry, and on the 19th our
journey to Avallon was followed by distant thunder-storms.
At Avallon he stayed till the end of the month. The place was new
to him, but I think he was attracted to it by one of those obscure
associations which so often ran in his mind--it must be interesting
because it was named Avallon--Avalon he called it always, dominated
by the idea of the island-valley of repose where King Arthur found
the immortality of fairyland. The first morning's work at the early
church of St. Ladre, and the first afternoon's walk down the valley
of the Cousin, with brilliant ling in blossom among bold red granite
rocks, fully justified his choice. The town, on its Durham-like hill,
swept round by the deep river-course, and unspoilt by modernisms, and
the wooded, flowery, rocky neighbourhood, full of all that is most
charming in French scenery--there are Roman remains, too, but of these
he took less note--and the curious details of the twelfth-century
church all attracted him mightily. The only drawback was the weather,
which broke down with the thunder and gave us cold east winds and dark
haze, in which sketching was a penance. This told upon him at once;
he even dined alone, wearied out of evenings, and still trying to fix
his mind on the writing work he always took with him--in this instance
the new edition of "Sesame and Lilies" and the "Bible of Amiens." He
burned the candle at both ends; out early to draw elusive detail of
battered sculptures, walking far in the afternoon, and writing hard at
night, impatient of remonstrance even from those who were much better
qualified to order him about than a secretary.
To meet him here came Mr. Frank Randal, who was employed on drawings
for "St. George's Work," and making bright, sunny sketches in which
the neatest of outline was reconciled with the freshest of colouring.
Also came his friend, Mr. Maundrell, to whom I take this chance of
offering an apology which makes me blush to record. Among Ruskin's
drawings was one, much in his Proutesque style, of a chapel at Rue,
near Abbeville. It had been passed as his, when Mrs. Severn went
through the portfolios with him, noting the subjects on the back of the
mounts; and--with some hesitation, I confess, and neglect of the good
rule "When in doubt, don't"--it was shown at both Ruskin Exhibitions as
a work by the master, and greatly admired. Too late for correction, it
was found to be Mr. Maundrell's. Others have nearly caught Ruskin's
style at times--"Bunney's, not mine," he has written on sketches by
an assistant, for this very reason; but for all the more important
drawings there is a good pedigree, and most of the smaller bits which
have been shown or published have come from his sketch-books.
One good excursion from Avallon was to the church of Vezelay, the
twelfth-century place elaborately restored by Viollet-le-Duc, and
interesting for the meeting of Richard Coeur-de-Lion with the other
leaders of the Crusade famous in "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." To
Ruskin any restoration meant ruin; but as he went round the aisles,
disdainful at first but gradually warming to the intelligence and skill
of the great modern architect, he confessed that if restoration might
be done at all it could not be better done. What pleased him much more
was a hunt, on the way back, for the exact spot where the Avallon
granite joined the limestone; he found the two rocks side by side in a
hummock near the road, and was triumphant.
Montreal was another place of pilgrimage, and there the church with
quaint wood-carvings and the picturesque village gave him a happy day.
In his diary (on which see the next chapter) he scolded himself, after
this excursion, for forgetting the good times; of a walk in the rain
to the little oratory of St. Jean des Bons Hommes he said: "I ought to
vignette it for a title to my books!" and of the Avallon neighbourhood
he notes: "Altogether lovely, and like Dovedale and the Meuse and the
glens of Fribourg in all that each has of best, and like Chamouni in
granite cleavage, and like--itself, in sweet French looks and ways....
The miraculous fairy valley ... one of the sweetest ever made by
heaven. The Cyclopean walls, of blocks seven and eight feet long, and
three feet thick--the largest--all averaging two and a half (feet)
cube, at a guess, laid with their smooth cleavages to the outside,
fitted like mosaic--the chinks filled with smaller stones, altogether
peculiar to this district of cleaving, and little twisting, granite."
It was not only the scenery that he cared for, but the evidences of
happy pastoral life, adapting Nature's gifts to human needs. But when,
off the kindly granite and on the cold, grey limestone country, we
passed a forlorn homestead, ruinous and dirty, he shrank back in the
carriage, as if some one had thrown a stone at him.
On the last day of August he left Avallon, and with a short stay at
Semur reached his old quarters at the Hotel de la Cloche, Dijon. He was
already contemplating "Praeterita," picking up the memories of early
days, and planning a drive by the old road through Jura as his parents
used to do it in the pre-railway period. He began by showing me where
he bit his "Seven Lamps" plate in the wash-hand basin, and where Nurse
Anne used to wake him of mornings. Meanwhile, for the book to be called
"Our Fathers have told us," continuing "The Bible of Amiens," he would
spend two days with the monks. Citeaux, the home of the Cistercians,
was the first day's trip, marred by the heat and dust, and by finding
all vestiges of the monks replaced by an industrial school of the
ugliest, which, nevertheless, he inspected with nicely restrained
impatience. A moated grange on the wayside homeward caught his eye, and
as he sketched it he tried to make me believe that this must at least
be a bit of the monks' work, and the journey not in vain. But next day
there were far more interesting experiences in a visit to St. Bernard's
birthplace. He has described this fully in his lecture called "Mending
the Sieve," in the volume of "Verona, &c.," and I need only recall the
surprise of a bystander not wholly unsympathetic, when Ruskin knelt
down on the spot of the great saint's nativity, and stayed long in
prayer. He was little given to outward show of piety, and his talk,
though enthusiastic, had been no preparation for this burst of intense
feeling.
Later on the same day (Saturday, September 2) he left Dijon for the
Jura drive. We passed Poligny, a usual resting-place in bygone
journeys, by train, and stayed at Champagnole, where the old Hotel de
la Poste used to be one of his "homes." It had been splendid weather
for the last few days, after a cold August in Central France; and the
first Jura walk was across the hill to the gorge of the Ain. I had
often been through the Jura, as a blind, benighted modern, but never
before loitered from slab to slab of its fissured limestone summits,
looking for the foreground loveliness of nestling flowers which
contrast so delicately with the quaint, crannied rock; there is nothing
which gives the same lyrical feeling except some of Nature's gardens
in wild Icelandic lava-fields. How eager he was, and delighted with
this open upland! You know there is only one place where he speaks of
"liberty" as a good thing, and there it means the liberty of this Jura
walk, enjoyed that afternoon.
By-and-by we came to a wood. He cast about a little for the way through
the trees, then bade me notice that the flowers of spring were gone:
"You ought to have seen the wood-anemones, and oxalis, and violets";
and then, picking his steps to find the exact spot by a twisted
larch-tree, and gripping my arm to hold me back on the brink of the
abyss, "That's where the hawk sailed off the crag, in one of my old
books; do you remember?"
[Illustration: ON RUSKIN'S OLD ROAD, BETWEEN MOREZ AND LES ROUSSES
SEPTEMBER 1882]
There were thunder clouds over the plain-country that evening, and we
made no stop to sketch. On our drive next day up to the flat, high
country of St. Laurent, with its pine forests and scattered cottages,
and down into Morez, the weather worsened. Thence the road climbs by
the side of the valley to the highest back of Jura at Les Rousses; the
road, he says, "walked most of the way, was mere enchantment." At a
halt I sketched, when a break in the clouds gave sunbeams darting into
the valley beneath, and wisps of white wreathed the steep forests.
You see where he got that beautiful cadence to a fine passage, after
comparing the Jura upland with a Yorkshire moor, and contrasting the
becks of our fells with the enchanted silence of open Jura. "The
raincloud clasps her cliffs, and floats along her fields; it passes,
and in an hour the rocks are dry, and only beads of dew left in the
Alchemilla leaves--but of rivulet or brook, no vestige, yesterday
or to-day or to-morrow. Through unseen fissures and filmy crannies
the waters of cliff and plain have alike vanished; only far down in
the depth of the main valley glides the strong river, unconscious of
change."
Up at Les Rousses he pointed out the fort, then in building or newly
built, with scorn--as if the Swiss on the one side or the French on
the other could be kept in their bounds by stone walls, when real war
comes; and then crossing the frontier there was the elation of getting
into Switzerland. "Why do you like it better than France?" he asked.
I was just trying to say why, that it is a free country and some more
innocent gush, when the Swiss Customs officers ran up, and insisted
on overhauling us, for they don't often see travellers as in the old
days at Les Rousses. I was mightily crestfallen and he not a little
delighted at this exemplification of "liberty"; but he did not make the
incident a horrid example in "Praeterita."
Here we diverged a little from the old road of his youth, by going east
a few miles to St. Cergues instead of making for the Col de la Faucille
at once. The clean inn delighted him; pine boards on the floor,
scrubbed white, and no needless furniture. Here he said we should stay
a week and rest; he had much to write--first ideas for "Praeterita,"
you understand. But the next days were wet, and he sat in his bedroom
writing diligently at first, while I caught some bright intervals for a
sketch, though we never saw the line of the Alps quite clear.
In the lecture on "the Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century," one of
his least convincing though most sincerely meant utterances, there
are references to the strange weather of those days. All the way up
from Morez he wanted me to come into the carriage and shut the window
because of a treacherous east wind, and in my sketch you can see a
certain smoky, not only thundery, look in the clouds. At St. Cergues
this east wind haze was still more pronounced, the Lake of Geneva
ruffled and white, with patches of shadow from small "sailor-boy"
clouds, while the whole range opposite was not exactly shrouded but
veiled in a persistent thickness of air. Above, the sky was bright,
with blue and streaky cirrus, and between the showers the sun glittered
on the trees. That fitful wind with the brownish-grey haze he called
the plague-wind, and in all his lecture there is no very definite
explanation of it, but much declamation against it as the ruin of
landscape, and some vague hints of portent, almost as if he had been a
prophet of old seeing the burden of modern Babylon in the darkened sun.
It is smoke. Any one who haunts our Lake district hills knows it well.
On coronation night I saw it trailing from Barrow and Carnforth up
the Lune valley as far as Tebay, always low and level, leaving the
upper hills clear, perfectly continuous and distinct from the mist of
water. This winter, from the top of Wetherlam on a brilliant frosty
day, I saw it gradually invade the Lake district from the south-east;
the horizontal, clean-cut, upper surface at about 2000 feet; the body
of it dun and semi-transparent; its thick veil fouling the little
cotton-woolly clouds that nestled in the coves of the Kirkstone group,
quite separate from the smoke-pall; and by sunset it had reached to
Dungeon Gill, leaving the Bow Fell valleys clear. Coming down by
moonlight I found the dales in a dry, cold fog, and heard that there
had been no sunshine at Coniston that afternoon. This is Ruskin's
plague-cloud, and the real enemy of the weather not only in England but
in the Alps. You will see it, according to the wind, on either side of
Zurich most notably, and the distance this blight will travel is more
than the casual reader might believe. A strong wind carries it away,
but only to deposit it somewhere else, cutting off the sun's rays, and
breeding rain and storm. This was not understood twenty years ago, but
Ruskin's observations of the weather were perfectly accurate and
his regrets at the changed aspect of Alpine landscape were only too
justifiable.
[Illustration: LAKE OF GENEVA AND DENT D'OCHES UNDER THE SMOKE-CLOUD,
FROM ST. CERGUES
SEPTEMBER 1882]
On Thursday, September 7, he had tired of dull weather at St. Cergues,
and written up his notes for "Praeterita"; he proposed to climb the Dole
and get onward to Geneva. It is a very easy walk of about a couple of
hours up the gently sloping backs of the Helvellyn-like Jura range; and
from its top one should get a grand view of the lake and the Alps to
Mont Blanc. He walked up as briskly as ever; there was a cold wind but
sun overhead, though the mountains to the south and east were still in
the "plague-cloud." There was no sketching to be done, and we followed
the ridge down to the Col de la Faucille. If you look at his map of
the Jura, facsimiled at page 109 of this volume, the Col is where the
road suddenly turns round into zigzags after going straight south-west
behind the Dole; and you remember how he names the whole chapter from
this one spot, as a chief landmark in his memories, for there he always
used to get his first full view of the "Mount Beloved." Few travellers
know it, he says; but it is far from unknown to all who have lived in
la Suisse Romande. There, they take school-children up mountains. Far
better than Helvellyn is known to the English school child, the "dear
Dole" is known to every youngster who has learnt to sing (to the tune
of "Life let us cherish") the song of
La Suisse est belle,
Oh qu'il la faut cherir!
We were not quite without our view. For a moment, too short for a
sketch, Mont Blanc loomed through the dull haze, red in the sunset,
brick red, not Alpine rose; and then all was grey. We found our
carriage and drove down. I was waked in the darkness by Ruskin saying,
"This is where Voltaire lived." "Oh, indeed!" said I.
Next morning, from his old front rooms at the Hotel des Bergues, where
he had already begun a sketch of the houses opposite, merely for
love of them, we went out in the heat to see the Rhone. All the haze
had gone, at least from the nearer view, and he seemed never tired of
looking at the water from the footbridge and wherever it was visible.
I wondered why he would not come on; but now I know. "Fifteen feet
thick--of not flowing but flying water"--I will not quote the wonderful
pages which every lover of Ruskin, of landscape, and of English
undefiled, must know--the "one mighty wave that was always itself, and
every fluted swirl of it constant as the wreathing of a shell"; and
then the bit about its blue, and "the innocent way" of it, and its
dancing and rippling and glittering, "and the dear old decrepit town
as safe in the embracing sweep of it as if it were set in a brooch of
sapphire"--that was what he was thinking, and storing up in his mind
the famous description which showed that even so late, in shattered
health and, as people said, impaired powers, he could talk and write as
brilliantly as ever.
That afternoon in the glaring sunshine we drove out of Geneva through
suburban villadom--he much amused at the modern fashion of house-names,
"Mon Repos," "Chez Nous," and so forth--towards Monnetier. He was at
the moment healthily interested in Alpine structure, the geology of
scenery, and could forget "St. George" in his eagerness to expound his
views on the cleavage of the Saleve. I made a slight note of the lines,
the cathedral-like buttresses which flank the level-bedded masonry of
the great mountain-wall with masses of a different rock, vertically
cloven; and the gorge of Monnetier which cuts the range across with an
unexpected breach; and we went over his old debate with the Genevese
geologists. Then we climbed the Echelle, and from the top found the
Annecy Alps fairly clear, but I think the same heaviness over the
greater snow-peaks. At last we reached Mornex, his old home in the
'sixties, when he was writing "Munera Pulveris" and first seriously
grappling with the social problems which afterwards became his chief
theme in so many lectures and books.
[Illustration: THE GORGE OF MONNETIER AND THE BUTTRESSES OF THE SALEVE]
A letter he wrote that evening, to describe the visit, has recently
been published; how he found his old house a restaurant, with people
drinking on the terrace. He was, though he did not say so, rather cast
down by the change--he who always deplored changes; but brightened when
the landlord guessed who he must be, and quite cheered up--with that
last infirmity of noble minds--on hearing that the English sometimes
came to see Ruskin's house. Indeed, it was more his home than many a
house in England where he spent longer years, for it was of choice, not
of necessity, that he lived there, and would have continued there to
his own great advantage but for his father's death, which recalled him
to the care of his widowed mother.
One phrase in that letter as now printed seems to have pained and
alarmed some of his friends; but surely without cause. He says to
account for beginning his letter on the wrong side of the paper--as
most people seem to do nowadays--that he had taken a glass too much
Burgundy. The son of the sherry-merchant, with old-fashioned notions on
the fitness of things, always took a glass or two of wine at dinner;
one of his sayings was, "A glass of good wine never hurt anybody."
But I am sure all his personal friends will bear me out that it never
went beyond the glass or two. He was no drinker, and his very strong
anti-teetotal attitude was simply the expression of his own habitual
and easy temperance. That evening's dinner I remember well. After our
walk from Veyrier to Pont d'Etrembieres, and more sauntering by the
Rhone in a beautiful red sunset, we came in late. At table we had some
debate about the pictures on the walls of the hotel sitting-room, and
he would not have it that Madame Vigee Lebrun's portrait of herself and
her daughter was charming. "No decent woman," he said, "would paint
herself with bare arms, like that!"--which was quite his usual way of
thinking about a much-discussed question of art. And then we settled to
a little after-dinner writing, and you will not be surprised if we both
nodded over our pens after that long hot day--_and_, of course, the
Burgundy.
V
RUSKIN'S "CASHBOOK"
V
RUSKIN'S "CASHBOOK"
So it is lettered on the back; but his titles, as every one knows, are
far-fetched. There are some accounts in this volume, but most of it is
filled with a diary of the tour abroad in 1882, and subsequent entries,
very neatly written; the red lines for L _s._ _d._ serving to keep the
manuscript within margins, just like print.
Ruskin's journals, I understand, are not to be published. The bulk of
their contents--landscape descriptions and various notes on natural
history, architecture, and many different subjects--have been worked
into his books. The remainder consists of daily jottings about the
weather, always important to one whose chief pleasure was in scenery,
with fragmentary hints of his occupations or travels, and still more
fragmentary mention of persons. They are not exactly memoranda; still
less the memoirs of a literary man, written with one eye on the public.
They are mere soliloquies of the moment, gossip of himself to himself
before breakfast.
While he lived, though I had often occasion to refer to these journals,
I never felt quite at liberty to open this "Cashbook," with its
private notes on a period when I was practically alone with him; his
valet, Baxter, was also of the party, but at meals and at work, on
walks and drives, he had usually to put up with my company. He was
exceedingly and unfailingly kind, but exacting; it would have needed
great self-confidence to be sure of his good opinion. But now that
these papers require it, to paint his portrait as he was at that time,
I have taken advantage of Mrs. Severn's kind leave; and in continuing
the story of the tour I can sometimes add to my reminiscences Ruskin's
impressions on the spot as recorded by himself.
From Geneva we went up to Sallenches (September 9, 1882), hoping to see
the Alps, in spite of the smoke-cloud. He was at the moment thinking
and talking chiefly of "artistic geology," if one may coin a parallel
to "artistic anatomy"--the old subject of his "Modern Painters," vol.
iv. In the chapter on the Old Road I said _healthily_ interested, for
any work on Nature was good for him personally, and this tour was for
the sake of health after long and recurrent attacks of illness.
In those days, and to the few who cared much more for himself than
his mission, St. George and St. Benedict were the enemies; his Guild
and all the worries connected with it, and his ethico-socio-political
meditations, mixed with much wandering into Greek and mediaeval
mythology, always meant mischief to him. So after the visit to Citeaux
and the birthplace of St. Bernard, it was good to see him eager for
the mountains, and looking out for well-known twists in the limestone
strata, and clefts and cascades, points of view and distant glimpses,
all the way up the valley. If only the smoke-cloud would lift, and
a spell of fair weather would tempt him to linger among the Alps,
hammering rocks and sketching cottages, the object of the journey would
be gained.
There was a horrid new road being made high up on the flank of his
favourite mountain, the Brezon, whose top he had wanted to possess. At
Cluses, what were those sticks in the meadow? I asked; and learnt that
they marked out the long-intended railway. A railway in the valley of
the Arve! It meant to him simply the end of all that made the glory and
grandeur of this classic ground. But he was partly comforted by the
thought that after all it might not be, or, at least, not in his time.
Maglans and the Nant d'Arpenaz were still as Turner painted them; and
though his old familiar resting-place at St. Martin was no longer open
as an inn, we could stay across the valley at Sallenches, within easy
walks of many favourite haunts.