it shone--we always went for a ramble or a drive. One venturesome start
in a thunderstorm I recollect, for Ruskin was not the least timid, as
you might expect from his highly-strung temperament. He used to walk
planks and look down precipices, too, like a regular steeple-jack, and
handle all sorts of animals fearlessly. This thunderstorm gave us grand
Turneresque effects, of which I have a sketch, but no description; but
I have borrowed an old letter of the time which gives a fair sample of
an afternoon with Ruskin. It is dated October 28, 1882.
"A biting scirocco was blowing, but we started in the usual carriage
driven by the boy with the red tie. As we left the hotel an army of
beggars hailed the Professor, who solemnly distributed pence, to
lighten his pocket and his mind. Then we scampered through the streets,
which are all pavement, and none broader than Hanway Street; but
everybody drives furiously in them as a point of Lucchese and Tuscan
honour, and nobody seems to be run over.
"Out through the city walls you are in the country at once. Indeed, I
can't help thinking of the town as a garden where houses are bedded out
instead of flowers; they are so close packed, so varied and pretty.
But out at the gate it is a wide stretch of plain with mountains all
round, and bright cottages, cadmium-yellow in the stubble-fields and
cane-brakes, for they thatch the maize-heads over the roofs by way of
storage. Out of one quite decent-looking farm-house a decent-looking
woman came rushing and gesticulating after the carriage. The Professor
called on the driver to stop; and the woman, out of breath, declared
she was the mother of five and wanted charity. He gave her a note;
notes, you know, can be a good deal less than five pounds in Italy.
[Illustration: THUNDERSTORM CLEARING, LUCCA]
"At the foot of the hills, south of Lucca, we left the carriage and
walked up the road; Baxter, too, with the umbrella, coat, camp-stool
and geological hammer as usual. The road goes up through chestnuts and
under vines, till you get to some farms and a church on the top of the
buttress-hills, with a splendid view of Lucca and the valley, behind
rich slopes of autumn colours, and a monastery with its cypresses in
the middle distance. Then we dived into a valley and crossed a marble
quarry, for all the stones here are marble; the road is mended with
marble, and the pigstyes are built of marble; and then we scrambled up
the main hill. There is a sort of track through chestnut and myrtle
and arbutus with scarlet fruit against the sky. Girls were gathering
chestnuts and arbutus berries--such a picture!
"So with an hour's scrambling we came out through a wood of stone
pines to the top, a sort of marble platform. The scirocco had blown
us up fine weather; the Carrara hills were clear, and the Apennines
for miles; fantastic peaks, all sorts of gables, pyramids, cones,
and domes. The sea was ridged and beating hard on the shore of the
Maremma; the bay of Spezia in the distance, and little Lucca, tidy
and square below, tucked into its four walls like a baby in a cot
with a patchwork quilt. I stayed ten minutes to get a sketch, while
the Professor and Baxter howked out a particularly contorted bit of
marble, and then we plunged through the pines on the back of the ridge
to get a view southward. This, you know, is the wood where Ugolino in
Dante dreamed he was hunting when they had shut him up to starve in the
Famine Tower at Pisa, and it deserves its fame. It is quite another
world from the hot rich valleys below; among the trees there are fresh,
English-looking meadows with daisies very big and very pink, and
beyond--the wonderful Mediterranean coast, rose colour in the sunset.
Pisa far down there showed every detail distinct, cathedral and leaning
tower like toys; even at Leghorn we could see the ships in port. It was
like looking on the world from the angels' point of view; a glimpse
through the centuries.
"But the sun was half-way below the sea, and we turned and raced the
darkness down to the valley, along a path some six inches wide, with
a marble precipice below and a clay bank above. Then the moon rose; a
regular conventional Italian moon, chequering the path like sunshine,
lamping the cypresses and campaniles. Our driver was asleep; we stirred
him out and drove through misty by-roads to the town gates. Out came
the Customs officer. 'Have you anything to declare, gentlemen?'
'Nothing, sir!' 'Felice sera, signori!' 'A happy evening, sir!'
"The streets were very quiet though it was not late. By the Dominican
convent, in the moonlight, there was a woman kissing the great
crucifix; few other folk about; and we made the square ring again when
we chased the moon into the plane-trees and rattled up to the hotel
door."
One morning toward the end of October, soon before we left Lucca, I
went to work on a last drawing of Ilaria (since honoured by Ruskin
with a place in his Sheffield museum) and found the marble wet and
fouled. Somebody had been taking a cast. After long days in the quiet
cathedral, among so many haunting thoughts, studying the face, it had
grown almost as alive to me as it always was to him. Even I felt a
little shock. It was a liberty, somebody taking a cast! At breakfast
entered a not very prepossessing fellow carrying a plaster mask. Signor
Ruskin had asked at the shop; one was now made.
[Illustration: THE MARBLE MOUNTAINS OF CARRARA AND THE VALLEY OF THE
SERCHIO FROM THE LUCCA HILLS]
I never saw him more moved. In a storm of anger he left the room,
crying out, "Send him away." Fortunately we had with us Henry R.
Newman, the American artist, then working for Ruskin at Florence. He
could do the talking to the disappointed, enraged Italian, and got rid
of him--and a Napoleon of mine--after awhile. I was thankful to Newman
for getting rid of the cast as well; and when the coast was clear
Ruskin looked in, rather apologetic after his outburst. "I hope you
didn't give the fellow anything," he said, and, of course, I was much
too weak-minded to fight the case.
But I still think the object-lesson was well worth a Napoleon. That
ghastly thing was not our Ilaria; any cast is a hard, dead caricature
if once you have really known the living, ancient marble. And the wrath
of Ruskin laid his secret bare. Do you think he could have stirred
the world with mere flourishes from the pen? Falling in love was not
too strong a word for the feeling that dictated, over Ilaria's marble
portrait, his plea for sincerity in art: "If any of us, after staying
for a time beside this tomb, could see, through his tears, one of the
vain and unkind encumbrances of the grave, which, in these hollow and
heartless days, feigned sorrow builds to foolish pride, he would, I
believe, receive such a lesson of love as no coldness could refuse, no
fatuity forget, and no insolence disobey."
To gather up the threads it may be worth while noting briefly the chief
incidents in this Italian tour, with a few comments from Ruskin's
unpublished diary, showing how rapidly pleasure and pain alternated in
his moods.
On arrival, walking round the town, first to Ilaria and last to San
Romano, he notes: "Found all. D. G." The next day he heard of the
death of J. W. Bunney, who had done so much work for him at Venice,
notably the large picture of St. Mark's now in the Sheffield museum.
We often thought Ruskin did not feel these losses, and was a little
hard when news came that old friends were gone. But under the apparent
stoicism there was much real emotion; indeed, some of his later attacks
of mental illness followed such events. I do not say they were the
only causes, but they contributed. In April 1887, the sudden death
of Laurence Hilliard, on board ship in the AEgean, undoubtedly turned
the balance, and intensified weakness and worry into illness of many
months' duration. In this case he wrote: "A heavy warning to me, were
warning needed. But I fear death too constantly, and feel it too
fatally, as it is." I think his fear of death was purely the dread
of leaving his work undone, with some shrinking of the possible pain;
his sense of death was in the growing limitation of his powers, which
he could only forget in the presence of beautiful landscape. Thus next
day, on the Lucca mountains, he "sat long watching the soft sunlighted
classic hills, plumed and downy with wood, the burning russet of fallen
chestnuts for foreground, thinking how lovely the world was in its
light, when given."
At Florence on Oct. 4: "Hotel Gran Bretagna once more; good dinner
and flask of Aleatico. Nothing hurt of Ponte Vecchio or the rest."
Next morning the pendulum swung the other way, partly, I am afraid,
because he could not get me to be ecstatic about the Duomo, and I
almost argued him into a good word for Bronzino's "Judith." Then,
again, a drive to Bellosguardo and a beautiful walk made it all right
again, and a visit to Fiesole in sunshine redeemed the character of
the neighbourhood. But the great event was his introduction to Mrs.
and Miss Francesca Alexander, brought about through Mr. Newman, and
followed by a friendship which had a great and happy influence on his
later life. Miss Alexander's beautiful handwriting, and the pathos of
her manuscript "Story of Ida," and her pen-drawings to the "Roadside
Songs of Tuscany," which he then and there bought for "St. George"
and the world, were a great discovery, to him as if he had found "the
famous stone which turneth all to gold."
Returning to Lucca on the 11th he worked with zeal and power on his
drawings of the Duomo, and wrote his diary with animation. Here is a
vignette from it: "Sat. 14th. Wet afternoon; bought cheese and hunted
for honey. Found the only view from ramparts in the evening. Tanneries
and cotton-mills spoil the north-west side. Girls singing in a milly,
cicadesque, incomprehensible manner. An old priest standing to hear
them--thinking--I would give much to know what!"
During this October at Lucca he was visited by Mr. and Mrs. E. R.
Robson; Mr. Robson was then preparing (or intended by the authorities
to prepare) plans for a museum at Sheffield, which should hold the
collection belonging to the St. George's Guild. Mr. Charles Fairfax
Murray also came to see him; he, like Randal, Newman, Rooke, Alessandri
and one or two others, was employed by Ruskin on drawings for this
museum. From the 27th to the 29th he went alone to Florence, on a
farewell visit to the Alexanders, returning to Lucca for a couple of
days' work before going to Pisa, where he had asked Angelo Alessandri,
the Venetian painter, and Giacomo Boni, the Venetian architect, to meet
him. Signor Boni is now world-famous by his antiquarian work at Rome;
one sees his name in the papers, expounding the Forum to our king in
the King's English, with a strange legend of his Oxford pupilship to
Ruskin.
He and Signor Alessandri, however, were not strictly pupils of Ruskin,
who had met them during the winter of 1876-77 at Venice, and, so to
say, adopted them. At this second meeting he liked them and their
work more than ever. His character of them is given in the first of
his lectures on returning next year to Oxford: "Clever ones, yes; but
not cleverer than a great many of you; eminent only, among the young
people of the present day whom I chance to know, in being extremely
old-fashioned; and--don't be spiteful when I say so--but really they
are, all the four of them--two lads and two lassies--quite provokingly
good." The two lads were Boni and Alessandri, one of the lady artists
was Miss Alexander. But it was a compliment to his audience to call
them cleverer than Boni, whose great power already showed itself in
his keen eye and square shoulders. Napoleon Bonaparte must have looked
something like him, I thought, when he began to charm the fierce
Republic; but there the comparison ends. Ruskin set him to measure Pisa
cathedral all over, to see why it was so irregular; and for a little
holiday one heavenly morning before breakfast, Boni took me up the
Baptistery, outside, even to the skirts of the great St. John on the
top of the dome--all Pisa beneath, and the Maremma in sheaves of mist
as if angels were haymaking, and the sea and the mountains bathed in
blue atmosphere around.
These days of busy work and evenings of bright talk were too soon
ended, and on November 10 we took our first stage northward and
homeward.
VII
RUSKIN'S MAPS
VII
RUSKIN'S MAPS
Reading the map is as great a pleasure to some people as reading a
story-book. You will see them pore over the atlas for an hour together,
going on dream-journeys. It is a cheap way of globe-trotting, and gets
rid of the discomforts; only one must have imagination to turn the
wriggling hair-lines into vistas of river scenery, and the woolly-bear
shading into forested crests and peaks against the sunset. It needs a
good deal of imagination to get over the ugliness of most modern maps;
but why should maps be ugly?
That is a question which Ruskin often asked, and he gave a great deal
of trouble and time to the subject: not enough to carry out such a
reformation as his energetic preaching and teaching did effect in some
other things, but perhaps we have not quite come to the end of the
story yet.
Anyway, the map-readers, and all who have known the bliss of owning a
Bible with a "Palestine" for solace during sermon-time in childhood,
or have realised the privileges of even Bradshaw's ugly chart on a
long journey--all these will not think it strange to be told that
Ruskin was a map-lover too, and that he was nearly as fond of plans as
of pictures. Indeed, the old complaint against his art criticism was
that he wanted pictures to be maps, decoratively coloured diagrams of
nature, in which you could find your way about, know the points of the
compass, latitude, altitude, geology, botany, fauna, flora, and the
universal gazetteer.
[Illustration: RUSKIN'S FIRST MAP OF ITALY
AT SEVEN OR EIGHT: SIZE OF THE ORIGINAL]
He says in the Notes on his Turner Exhibition that he began to learn
drawing by copying maps, and only came to pictures later. It is a
biographical fact that his first use of a paint-box was to tint seas
blue--not skies; and to ornament his outline with a good full red and
green and yellow. Here is his first map of Italy, facsimiled from
the coloured original. You see how he tried to be neat, and how he
knew, without having to amend his lettering, to put one D and two
R's in "MEDITERRANEAN." About Germany he was always antagonistic or
inattentive; here, you see, he thinks it is in Austria! It is hardly
possible that he was really copying when he made that characteristic
blunder.
[Illustration: GEOLOGY ON THE OLD ROAD
BY JOHN RUSKIN]
Why do we refer to these childishnesses? Because he--the art critic and
art teacher--began his art career not by sketching people or cottages
or flowers, but by copying maps; and because he ended his career
in bidding his hearers do likewise. Of course the value of advice
entirely depends upon what you mean to do with it. If you want to make
colourable imitations of fashionable pictures, don't take Ruskin's word
for anything. If you want to be a scholar in the school of the Old
Masters, then you might do worse than listen to him. They "leant on a
firm and determined outline"--that is Sir Joshua Reynolds; they started
with painstaking draughtmanship, and added colour tint by tint; and so
he says, "I place map-making first among the elementary exercises," and
so forth, and made his young pupils begin with simple facsimile--"If
you can draw Italy you know something about form"--and then paint the
globe with its conflicting shade and local colour. Afterwards, in
setting one at Turner, he would say, "I want you to make a map of the
subject. Get the masses outlined, and fill in the spaces with the main
colours; and that will do."
The next photograph is from a coloured drawing of the same size;
the pale spaces are pink and yellow and green, and the Lake of
Geneva, which looks rather blotchy in the print, is more pleasant in
ultramarine. This is one of a set of geological maps made to illustrate
the course of the usual tour through France and the Alps, perhaps, to
judge by the handwriting, for the journey of 1835, when he made special
preparations to study geology. He could hardly carry a bulky sheet or
atlas, and so extracted just what he required, in a series of neat
little pages, put together into a home-made case, ready for use at any
moment. Youngsters who take this kind of trouble are likely to become
men of weight; at least, they get to know how interesting the world
is. Ruskin on a journey was never bored, unless he was ill; he looked
out of window and poked you up: "Now, put away that book; we are just
coming to the chalk"; or, "Are you looking out for the great twist in
the limestone?" And the changes in the face of the country, with new
flowers and varying crops, were a continual entertainment.
[Illustration: SKETCH OF SPAIN
BY JOHN RUSKIN]
Another use of maps to Ruskin was in writing the descriptive eloquence
for which most readers chiefly admire him. I remember a very good judge
of pictures and books once choosing the best passage of Ruskin--not
that such "bests" come to much--and fixing on the bird's-eye-view
passage in which he takes you with the stork and the swallow on their
northward flight over the varying scenery of Europe ("Stones of
Venice," II., vi., Sec. 8; "Selections," I., Sec. 20). Now this has all the
imaginative charm of Hans Christian Andersen's "Snow Queen," or George
Macdonald's "At the Back of the North Wind"; but it is nothing more nor
less than notes on the map of Europe--of course, by a map-lover.
[Illustration: PHYSICAL SKETCH OF SAVOY
BY JOHN RUSKIN]
To help in such work he collected maps wherever he went. He kept
them in a special set of drawers in his study, some mounted on spent
diagram-cards from his lectures, and some dropping to pieces with
wear and tear. Among these are still his first map of the Lakes,
from Jonathan Otley's or Wordsworth's Guide, and his old Keller's
"Switzerland" of 1844, which he used forty years later, saying that
he did not want the railways, and no new map showed the roads better.
Of favourite towns, such as Venice and Amiens, there are large scale
plans, the best that could be bought; and of some Swiss districts, like
Neuchatel, there is quite a library of cartology. A highly detailed map
of Medoc, from a wine advertisement, was found useful; likewise Britain
with the centres of Trinity College, London, which he kept for its
clearness. Philip's "Authentic Map of England" is endorsed "good common
use," and he even kept close at hand a set of children's dissecting
maps. The Ordnance Survey is fully represented, but because too much
was put into these beautiful six-inch sheets, he has coloured them
fancifully and vigorously, to get clear divisions of important parts.
Clearness and distinctness, every one must feel, are not the strong
points of modern cartography, hence the use of sketch-maps: such as
this of Spain, scribbled on a sheet of foolscap to keep him in mind of
the graceful, swinging coastline and the proportions of the provinces.
The overloaded modern map is a work of reference--it is a dictionary,
not a book. Ruskin felt that it was useless for educational or literary
purposes, and he was continually trying to improve away the detail
and to substitute graphic statistics. One line of this attempt was in
the direction of models. Beck's raised map of Switzerland (1853) was
often in use, but it was spoilt for him by the shining surface, which
catches high lights and distracts the eye: all models ought to be
painted in dead colours, except the water, which needs the shine for
the sake of transparency.
So, in 1881, when he was working at the physical geology of the
Coniston neighbourhood, he tried to make a model of the hills and
dales, to see how the strike and dip of strata and the faults and
dykes in the rock came out in relation to ups and downs, lake-basins
and crags, and so forth. He found modelling too tedious to carry out
himself, and, with characteristic oddness in his employment of means
to ends, he set his gardener, the late Dawson Herdson, on the job.
Herdson made a very fair general sketch in clay of the Old Man, and the
main features as seen from the Coniston side; but he had not pegged
out his distances, and when Dow Crag was built up into emphatic gloom,
and Leverswater hollowed into depth, the smaller heights had no space
left for them, and the effect was altogether too willow-patterned. Then
Ruskin put another of his employes to work, and after much labour the
model now in the Coniston Museum was evolved.
This was intended to be photographed or engraved in a side-light, as
one of a series of physical maps. Another was to have been Savoy, for
which Ruskin made the sketch here shown. The black Lake of Geneva is
dark blue in his drawing; the valleys are green, and the mountains
roughly knocked in with lamp-black and Chinese white, tinted over
with yellow for limestone, pink for Mont Blanc protogine, and red for
gneiss. Rough as the sketch is, you see the structure of the Alps, the
lie of the land, at a glance. Towns, roads, and all the rest should be
shown, he said, on separate plans.
Towards this purpose he collected bird's-eye views in great variety,
from Maclure and Macdonald's lithograph of the Soudan, to quaint
old panoramas, of which one--the mountains seen from the Buet--is
quite like a William Blake design of Heaven and Hell, and fit to
serve as a background to all the mythologies. Also, for their
pleasant picturesqueness, he liked the queer productions of ancient
cartographers, such as Edmund Squib's funny map of China (1655), and
a seventeenth-century production called "The New Map of Muscovy," and
"The Course of the Great River Wolga," by A. Olearius; with pictures
of Russian peasants along the banks, and the camels of "the Tartar who
dwells on the plains of Thibet." Such maps have the charm of graphic
expression; they don't pretend to be gazetteers, but they take you
about the country with the entertainment of a traveller's tale.
[Illustration: THE HISTORY OF FRANCE
BY JOHN RUSKIN]
They are decorative also; that was another appeal to Ruskin. William
Morris has shown in the illustrations to the Saga Library how maps can
become picturesque designs, and this was much on the lines that Ruskin
would have followed. He might not have inserted dragons of the deep,
nor, as in Drayton's "Polyolbion," nymphs and shepherds on the hills
and lakes, out of all proportion and possibility; but he thought a map
could be far more explanatory and ornamental than the usual school
atlas.
His attempt at a diagrammatic history of France, sketched on a page of
note-paper, was engraved for "Our Fathers have Told Us"--his projected
school history of the "Nice Things that have Happened." You see--and
for lack of space I must leave it for your further insight--how he
designed to show the roses of Provence and the lilies of France in this
garden of Gaul, at one time feebly struggling, then blowing fully and
freely spreading, then broken in upon by the wild beast of war; the
lily bed trampled and ruined; Aquitaine wasted to blankness, and so
forth. Worked out completely, an atlas of history on this plan might be
as pretty as any picture-book. A child accustomed to such maps would
have little trouble in remembering the outlines of national growth,
and the whole tedious business of dates and uncouth names would be
infinitely lightened. Perhaps, some day, Ruskin's hint will be taken,
and his suggestions will bear fruit.
He never cared for worship and admiration, when they did not mean the
understanding of his aims, and the carrying out of his work. He knew
his gift was to irrigate, as he said--to suggest and stimulate. People
called him an egoist; but how wise in its humility was the close of his
preface to "Loves Meinie!"--"It has been throughout my trust, that if
Death should write on these, 'What this man began to build, he was not
able to finish,' God may also write on them, not in anger but in aid,
'A stronger than he cometh.'" And for much that he has left to do, no
greater strength is needed, but only the glory of going on.
VIII
RUSKIN'S DRAWINGS
VIII
RUSKIN'S DRAWINGS