days. We took the walk his father and he used to take on many Sundays
passed in that neighbourhood, up a glen to the south of the village.
In his diary that day he began an analysis of the Psalms--he had been
taking them for his morning Bible-readings; and I find that at St.
Cergues, on the 5th, he had thankfully noted the arrival of a telegram
with good news from home, just as he was reading me the 104th Psalm.
He did not hold "family prayers" as a habit, but sometimes when he was
delighted with a nice chapter he couldn't keep it to himself.
[Illustration: MONT BLANC CLEARING
SKETCHED WITH RUSKIN AT SALLENCHES, SEPTEMBER 1882]
Early next morning Mont Blanc was clear, though soon clouded (the diary
is quoted in the "Storm-cloud" lecture); and then, in pursuance of the
geology study he had begun he set to work "to do a little Deucalion,"
but opened Job instead, at xi. 16, and read on "with comfort" the
"glorious natural history" of the old book. Next day he noted the
second speech of Zophar as "the leading piece of political economy"
which he ought to have quoted in "Fors."
In spite of the dull weather we had a good ramble up the valley he
called "Norton's Glen," from the remembrance of walks there with
Professor Charles Eliot Norton; and though sketching was little use, he
was happy in the contemplation of boulders. It was in coming down from
that walk (if I remember right; the diary does not mention it) that I
got such a scolding for proposing to extract a fossil from a stone in a
vineyard terrace-wall: "You bad boy! Have you no respect for property?"
or words to that effect; and I had to leave the specimen _in situ_.
But next day I "scored" with a careful drawing of the Nant d'Arpenaz,
disentangling the contorted beds of limestone; and in the diary is a
copy from my sketch, a subject, he said, he had often tried in vain. On
the way back to Sallenches we looked at the old Hotel du Mont Blanc at
St. Martin, which gives a title to one of the chapters of "Praeterita,"
and need not be described here; but he was so taken with it and its
memories that he asked whether it was for sale, and really formed a
plan of buying it, and coming to live there. The diary gives various
reasons, ending with one of the oddest; I had made some verses about
the place, rather on the lines his talk had suggested, but ending with
more optimism, and these, too, he notes, contributed to the "leadings"
which pointed him to a new home in Savoy. A little later there came a
letter addressed to "MM. Ruskin et Collingwood"--"Quite like a firm,"
he said; "I wonder what they think we're travelling in; but I hope
we'll always be partners"--the terms of the offer I forget, but they
did not seem practicable, or Coniston might have known him no more.
At least, it was possible, and it would have been good in many ways
for him; but there were ties to think of. Next day, after rain in the
valley and snow on the Varens, and swallows gathering in crowds along
the eaves and cornices of the square, there was a grand clearance
at sunset, and he wrote to Miss Beever the note printed in "Hortus
Inclusus" about seeing Mont Blanc--"a sight which always redeems me
to what I am capable of at my poor little best, and to what loves and
memories are most precious to me. So I write to _you_, one of the
few true loves left. The snow has fallen fresh on the hills, and it
makes me feel that I must soon be seeking shelter at Brantwood and
the Thwaite." And yet he was greatly tempted to stay. On the splendid
morning which followed he wrote in his journal, "Perfect light on the
Dorons, and the Varens a miracle of aerial majesty. I--happy in a more
solemn way than of old. Read a bit of Ezra and referred to Haggai ii.
9--'In this place will I give peace.'"
[Illustration: THE HEAD OF THE LAKE OF ANNECY
SKETCHED WITH RUSKIN AT TALLOIRES, SEPTEMBER 1882]
Letters, however, were expected at Geneva, and with many plans for Sixt
and Chamouni he turned his back on Sallenches for the time and had
a "marvellous drive through the valley of Cluse; C---- sectionising
(making notes of limestone strata) all the way. Divine walk to old
spring under Brezon." Then he reproves himself for his annoyance at
the "plague-wind" and tiresome letters at Geneva, "for I shall try to
remember the Aiguille de Bionassay of the 13th at evening and the Nant
d'Arpenaz looked back at yesterday morning--with my morning walk once
more among the dew above Sallenches--for ever and a day."
Without keeping constantly before one's mind his passionate love of
scenery it is impossible to put a right estimate on much that he has
written. There are comparatively few people whose chief pleasure is
in taking a walk and looking at the country, without any notion of
sport or games to eke out the interest. It is true that he sketched
and wrote, but his pleasure was in seeing. It was his admiration of
Nature that had brought him to admire Art in his youth, and I think it
is not too much to say that Art was always a secondary thing to him
personally. The desire to see Art healthily and nobly practised made
him study the life of the craftsman and the craftsman's surroundings,
spiritual and material. The material needs of Victorian society pressed
upon him "Unto this Last" and "St. George"; the spiritual needs drove
him back upon ancient religious ideals, "The Queen of the Air" and "St.
Benedict." All these various strands of thought were closely woven
together in his life, but from the beginning to the end the love for
natural scenery was the core of the cable. You gather already from this
"Cashbook" that a few days among the Alps had quite restored him to
physical strength, and given him hopes and happiness.
On Saturday, September 16, we left Geneva for Annecy, intending more
limestone geology, and thenceforward had many days' driving with the
"Mephistopheles coachman and the Black Dog," as he put it at first.
Later on he became enthusiastic over the same coachman for his capital
driving and care of his horses, and because of the story of the dog
Tom, whom, the man said, he had rescued from death at the hands of an
American owner at Nice. Tom, with his spiked fur collar, was usually
absent at the start. The driver said he was shut up so that he might
not annoy Messieurs; but he always appeared, was scolded, and forgiven,
and petted for the rest of the way. Affection for animals appealed to
Ruskin, and in France one sees much of it. On one of these drives we
stopped for lunch out of doors before a wayside inn. To this lunch
there came a little dog, two cats, and a pet sheep, and shared our
wine, bread, and Savoy sponge-cakes. The sheep at last got to putting
its feet on the table, and the landlady rushed out and carried him off
in her arms into the house; but Ruskin, I think, would quite as soon
have let the creature stay. At Annecy the landlord told me stories of
his big St. Bernard dog, how he was defended from other dogs by the
cat, and how sometimes they quarrelled, and then the dog had to go
and sit on the mat out of doors until the cat had forgiven him; how
the cat also was in the habit of catching swallows on the wing, and
bringing them in to show--as, certainly, cats do with the mice they
catch--and then she would let them go uninjured. This delighted Ruskin
at dinner, and may have suggested the dream which I see he records in
his "Cashbook"--"dreamt of a fine old lion who was quite good if he
wasn't kept prisoner; but when I had got him out, I didn't know what
to do with him." The parting with Tom and his master I have mentioned
elsewhere--how he gave the man twenty francs for a _bonne main_ and two
francs over for a _bonne patte_, he said, to the dog!
[Illustration: THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL IN SNOW
SKETCHED WITH RUSKIN AT MODANE, NOVEMBER 11, 1882]
At Annecy, in the pleasant Hotel Verdun, he confessed himself already
stronger, and fit for anything but proofs and business letters; but the
"plague-cloud" still hung over the view. He noted that the smoke from
the factory chimneys could not be told from the clouds except by its
density, and mixed with the mist so as to throw a pall over the lake
from the town to the Tournette--the great mountain of the neighbourhood
above Talloires. But still he did not see that the black, ragged, dirty
weather was caused by the smoke, though he compared it with a London
November. The nearer scenery was visible and beautiful. The blue lake,
always blue, with a light of its own, and Talloires, with pleasant
associations and unspoiled surroundings of most romantic character,
charmed him as of old. We drove there the first Sunday; he took me up
to Eugene Sue's house and then on to the cascade, two and a half hours'
walk, and then sauntered among the vineyards and along the bay, under
the plane-tree avenues, driving home in an open carriage, and said he
had not spent such an idle day for ten years. Next day we "did" the
Gorge of the Fier, and discussed the possible causes of this great
ravine, through which the river plunges so unexpectedly and, one would
think, unnecessarily. Then to Talloires again, and planned return for
work.
Meanwhile he had made appointments in Italy. He talked of a rush to
Rome and hasty visits to Lucca and Florence, coming back soon to the
Alps. But this turned out to be a longer journey than he had meant.
His seal-motto was "To-day," and the business of the moment was always
the most important with him; and so the Italian tour was prolonged to
nearly two months. It ended in his catching a thorough cold at Pisa
through sketching in November winds, and in his longing for the clear
air of the Alps again, before returning to London for the lecture he
had promised to give in December. This was the lecture announced as
"Crystallography," but delivered as "Cistercian Architecture," about
which he said, joking at his own expense, that it would probably have
come to much the same thing whatever the title had been. I did not
quite see why he should lecture on either; but he declared himself
quite well, and as we had dropped crystallography--the chief subject
before the tour--for cathedrals and abbeys in Italy, he shut himself
up at Pisa, cold and all, to write his lecture. Then having, as he
thought, mastered it, we ran north. He wanted to stay at St. Michel,
a favourite place on the Mont Cenis line, but high, and likely to be
bleak in November for a man with a bad cold, I thought--very possibly
mistaken. I took tickets for Aix-les-Bains, and we had our only quarrel
on that trip. I felt particularly guilty as he recounted to me, in an
injured tone, the horrors of Aix, the one place he abominated, and the
beauties of St. Michel, while the train climbed the Dora valley to
Bardonecchia in fairly fine weather.
On the French side it was deep snow and bitter weather as we ran
down to Aix. The next day was delightful, but I always shirked the
recollection of my misdemeanour until I found how his diary-entries
ignored it. "The cold's quite gone! Friday in glowing sunshine, Pisa
to Turin; Saturday in frightful damp and cold, Turin to Aix; but quite
easy days both. Sun coming out now. Dent de Bourget over mist and low
cloud, very lovely, as I dressed."
The next entry I copy because it shows that he was not as entirely
hostile to railways as the casual reader imagines. Writing of the
ride to Annecy he says in the "Cashbook": "An entirely divine
railway-_coupe_ drive from Aix by the river gorges; one enchantment of
golden trees and ruby hills." But it was a splendid day. In clumsier
phrasing I wrote home of "all the prettiest autumn colours that ever
were made out of remnants of old rainbows patched up into a gala dress
for the world."
[Illustration: A SAVOY TOWN IN SNOW]
At Annecy we delayed only long enough for me to get rooms in the
Hotel de l'Abbaye at Talloires, where we stayed from the 14th to
the 22nd in stormy, snowy weather. He was quite well at first, and
proud of leading the way down the steep mountain-tracks--well known
to him--in the dark after long walks; but some days we could not
get out at all. I sat writing by the log fire in the dining-room;
he preferring his bedroom, with what glimpses could be got of the
lake through snowstorms; and in the night the wind howled through
deserted corridors--for the place was once a real monastery--until it
became quite uncanny. His bad dreams had gone, but he could not get
exercise enough to sleep well. The lecture was variously rewritten,
monks and myths chasing one another through his brain, instead of the
crystal-cleavages and rock-forms he had set out to study. St. Benedict
had been too strong for us, and the ghost of St. Bernard of Talloires
(or of Menthon, not the St. Bernard of his former pilgrimage, but a
tenth-century hermit, whose cave is still shown) who saw "not the Lake
of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta," and founded the
hospice that bears his name--as Ruskin would fain have founded, in
another way, a refuge for those who fall in the nineteenth-century
struggle for life; but fell himself in attempting it.
I did not know at the time that he was meditating a return to his
Professorship at Oxford. He kept that a secret, and sent me off on a
special mission to draw Alps in snow. Rejoining him at Geneva I found
him in the depths of misery, with the weather bad and his work going
too slowly forward, and the glamour all gone out of his "mother town"
of Geneva, "or what was once Geneva," he said, ruined by touristry and
luxury into a mere suburb of Paris, which was a suburb of hell. So
through cold and flooded France he took his way homeward. At Paris,
Hotel Meurice was no longer what it had been; the pneumatic clock in
his room, with its minute-gun of a tick and a jerk, got on his nerves,
and he demanded of the bewildered waiter that it should be stopped. The
Tuileries were in ruins, placarded for sale as building material. In
the bookshops he could not buy the books he sought, but, as it seemed,
only photographs of actresses. The Louvre, even, in such surroundings
gave him only suggestions of irritation. And it was a thankful
secretary who saw him safely over the Channel and back to Herne Hill on
the first Saturday in December.
But the journey was not a failure. At Lucca he made some of his best
drawings, and the descriptive passages in "Praeterita" and elsewhere,
written on that tour, or from notes then made, are among his finest;
and he was able to write in his "Cashbook" on December 3: "Slept well,
and hope to be fit for lecture to-morrow; very happy in showing our
drawings and complete sense of rest after three months' tossing."
Early in the next year he found himself able to take up his old work
at Oxford, and for awhile--but only for awhile--it seemed that the
storm-cloud of his life had cleared away.
VI
RUSKIN'S ILARIA
VI
RUSKIN'S ILARIA
On Friday, September 22, 1882, we were at Turin. "Filthy city," Ruskin
wrote in his diary. "One pestilence now of noise and smoke; and I got
fearfully sad and discouraged, not only by this, but by not caring the
least any more for my old pets of pictures, and not being able to see
the minerals in close, dark rooms." But he adds, "Note the unique white
amianth," and so forth, and he seemed to know the collection by heart.
As to the pictures, the way he pointed out how Vandyck _enjoyed_ the
laying on of his colour, in a portrait of King Charles, gloating over
the horse's mane and the delicate dexterity of the armour, makes me
hope that even the steam tramways of Turin had not utterly darkened his
life.
Once out of the town his spirits rose. "Alps clear, within twenty
or thirty miles of Monte Viso; then through sandhills of Bra to
Montenotte, down among the strange mounds and dells of the Apennine
gneiss, to Savona walled down to the sea, beside a dismantled fortress
which is certainly one of Turner's late subjects. Then among the olives
and palms, and by the green serpentines, under darkening clouds, with
constant boom and sigh of waves, to Cogoleto." But at Genoa the Sunday
was "a day of disgust at all things. Proud palaces, foolish little St.
Georges over their doors. Duomo in my pet style, not doing it credit;
and a long climb over rocks, and road of black limestone veined with
white, commanding all the heaps, rather than hills, of the mouldering
earth, looking almost barren in its dull grass, on which the suburbs
of Genoa, hamlet and villa, are scattered far and wide; the vast new
cemetery, their principal object of view and glorification, seen by the
winding of the waterless river-bed."
To most of us there is nothing more exhilarating than the
platform-shout when the south express starts--"Parrr--tenza per
Spezia--Pisa--Livorno--Firenze--Civitavecchia--Roooma!" and the
clattering dash through tunnel after tunnel, among the rocks and green
breakers of that wonderful coast. But it only worried and unnerved him.
It was not his old road.
It was dull weather at Pisa after the first dewy morning for the Campo
Santo; and there were "entirely diabolical" trams and chimneys in the
town since his last visit. The streets, every reach of them loved of
old for some jewel of mellowed architecture, were changing with modern
progress. The town was noisier and dirtier than in days of yore. He
had come to meet Nicola Pisano and company; but the ghosts wouldn't
rise. "Penny whistles from the railroad perpetual, and view of town
from river totally destroyed by iron pedestrian bridge. Lay awake very
sad from one to half-past four, but when I sleep my dreams are now
almost always pleasant, often very rational. A really rather beautiful
one of consoling an idiot youth who had been driven fierce, and making
him gentle, might be a lesson about Italy. But what is Italy without
her sky--or her religion?" So he broke off work in the Baptistery on
Michaelmas Day at noon, and ordered the carriage for Lucca.
[Illustration: THE PALACE OF PAOLO GUINIGI, LUCCA]
Every one knows the route; over the Maremma, between the sea and the
mountains. Peaks of Carrara clouded to the north; ruins of Ripafratta
frowning over the crags; "vines, olives, precipices." At last you see
a neat little town, boxed up in four neat walls, with rows of trees on
the ramparts and towers looking over the trees; it is just like the
mediaeval town in the background of a triptych. Silk-mills there are,
but not in evidence--at least, so it was twenty years ago.
As we drove up to the gate that afternoon the Customs officers turned
out, and we laughed when the coachman shouted: "English family! Nothing
to declare!" and the officers bowed, unquestioning. "So much nicer,
isn't it?" said Ruskin, "than being bundled about among trucks and all
the hideous things they heap round railway stations"; and in a few
minutes we were in front of the Hotel Royal of the Universe. Signor
Ruskino was expected; family and servants were at the door; everybody
shook hands. The cook was busy with the dinner, I think; for when we
had seen our rooms--he took the plainest of the tall, partitioned suite
with rococo decorations, palatial but tarnished--"First," he said, "I
must go and see the cook"; and so away to the kitchen.
He was patient of life's little worries; but he liked a good dinner
when it was there. I remember the serviette full of crumbly chestnuts,
and the Hermitage--afternoon sun meanwhile beating through half-shut
persianes in dusty air, and a peep of greeny-blue hills over the
square--Ruskin lifting his glass for a birthday toast. There was a
certain damsel, whose own folk called her the Michaelmas goose; he put
it more prettily: "Here's to St. Michael, and Dorrie, and All Angels!"
Then he went out to see Ilaria.
She was an early flame of his. He must have seen Ilaria before 1845,
but it was in that eventful year he fell in love. Ilaria was, of
course, the marble Lady of Lucca; but falling in love is not too strong
a word.
The Forty-five in the nineteenth century had its Rebellion almost as
full of consequences as the Forty-five of the century before. The raid
of Prince Charlie opened up the Highlands, and gave us Ossian and Scott
and Romanticism; little else. The raid of John Ruskin, in 1845, for the
first time wandering free and working out his own thoughts among the
Old Masters and mediaeval ruins of Italy, started the whole movement
which made British art decorative and philanthropic. There were others
helping, but he led the way; and it was in that Forty-five that he
"went up the Three Steps and in at the Door."
The passage in which he first described Ilaria is almost hackneyed.
"She is lying on a simple couch with a hound at her feet.... The hair
is bound in a flat braid over the fair brow, the sweet and arched eyes
are closed, the tenderness of the loving lips is set and quiet; there
is that about them which forbids breath; something which is not death
nor sleep, but the pure image of both."
Who or what the lady might have been in the flesh he hardly seems to
have cared; at least he never dwelt on the story. She was daughter of
a Marquis of Carretto, and wife of Paolo Guinigi, chief of a powerful
family in Lucca. In 1405 she died. In 1413 Paolo was building that
palace with the tower, now a poor-house, from which he ruled his fellow
townsmen with a rod of iron. She never saw the arcaded palace, and the
frowning, machicolated tower; she could never have had part or lot in
the tyranny of his later rule. We often read in history of a woman
keeping within bounds the nascent fierceness of a man who--losing
her--let himself go and became the scourge of his world. But in all his
pride Paolo remembered the pretty wife, untimely lost.
[Illustration: ILARIA DEL CARRETTO
HEAD OF THE EFFIGY BY JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA IN LUCCA CATHEDRAL]
The very year he built his castle he tempted away the greatest sculptor
of the age from his native town and thronging engagements to carve
her a tomb. Jacopo della Quercia came to Lucca in 1413, and six years
later left after finishing this and other sculptures there. He could
hardly have known Ilaria; he must have worked from very insufficient
materials in getting her portrait, and it must have been a tiresome
and delicate business to satisfy his patron, his tyrant. But then
Quercia was "a most amiable and modest man," and he had the secret
of noble portraiture, "Truth lovingly told." The sort of critics who
do not gush say of this work that it is the first masterpiece of the
Early Renaissance. It has all the best qualities of mediaeval art--its
severe symbolism and decorative effect, with all the best of the later
classicism--its reality, softness and sweetness.
Paolo's enemies before long drove him out of Lucca, and the city
wreaked vengeance on the tyrant by shattering his wife's tomb, this
masterpiece. Somehow the effigy itself was spared, and set up again
with bits of the wreck against the bare church wall. It was this dead
lady, this marble lady, with browned, translucent cheeks, and little
nose just bruised away at the tip, that took Ruskin's imagination in
his youth. In his age he wrote, "It is forty years since I first saw
it, and I have never found its like."
For a month, with an interval at Florence, he kept me pretty closely
at work drawing Ilaria--side-face, full-face, three-quarters, every
way; together with bits of detail from the early thirteenth-century
porch of St. Martin's and other churches, and some copies in the
picture gallery. He painted hard himself, and never did better work in
his life. Two studies, "half-imperial," of the facade of St. Martin's
are especially well known; one was at the Academy (winter 1901) and
one at the same time at the Royal Water-colour Society's Exhibition.
He used to sit in quaint attitudes on his camp-stool in the square,
manipulating his drawing-board with one hand and his paint-brush
with the other; Baxter, his valet, holding the colour-box up for him
to dip into, and a little crowd of chatterers looking on. He rather
enjoyed an audience, and sometimes used to bring back odd gleanings of
their remarks when he came in to luncheon. One ragged boy, personally
conducting a friend from the country, was overheard enumerating the
strangers' meals at the hotel: "They eat much, much, these English!" Of
course, most in the crowd knew him, or about him. The dean and chapter
came to approve, the choir to grin, and the gendarmes to patronise; a
few French tourists hovered round, but no English that I remember.