unrecognised; not, perhaps, unprinted, but still of great value, even
in hard cash. Correspondents who beg for a Ruskin autograph and a bit
of his writing from those whom they suppose to have plenty, are often
surprised to hear that others have been before them, and that now the
only way is through the dealers at a guinea a page or more. He told
me that he thought the manuscripts of his best-known works had been
destroyed, and no doubt had forgotten that many of them had been given
away to those who treasured them. Since his death a considerable part
has been brought to light, but of the vast quantity of writing--notes,
rough copies, fair copies, and letters, done in a busy life of sixty
working years--there may be much more to find scattered through the
world: for Ruskin's hand, like Nuremberg's, goes through every land.
In 1881 a Mr. Atkinson was sent to Coniston to make a bust of Ruskin.
With his usual good nature to every one who came personally into
contact with him--the roughness was only that of his sharp pen--the
Professor treated the unknown as his visitor, found him lodgings and a
workshop, and a place at his table for a great while, during which the
bust made but slow progress. One reason, perhaps, for Mr. Atkinson's
difficulty was that Ruskin had just grown a beard, and the well-known
face was no longer there to mould. "Can't you treat the beard early
Greek fashion; I should like to be a Bearded Bacchus!" he said. In
spite of the admitted failure, he gave further work to the sculptor
in casting leaves and other detail "for St. George's Schools"--that
visionary object on which so much labour and thought were spent; and
this use of casts from natural leaves, I am told by Mr. E. Cooke, was
really originated by Ruskin in the Working Men's College days, though
now pretty widely known. Some of Mr. Atkinson's casts, I may add, are
on view in the Coniston Museum. But the sculptor's chief personal wish
was to get a mould of Ruskin's hand. He used to say that there was
more in it than in his face; at least, it was the most characteristic
feature, and representable in solid form, while the face, depending on
the bright blue eye and changeful expression, evaded him as it evaded
more celebrated sculptors. But Ruskin did not like being oiled and
moulded, and though Mr. Atkinson made enticing demonstrations on less
worthy fingers, till we were all up to our elbows in plaster of Paris,
he never to my knowledge won his point.
"Such a funny hand," says Browning's lover, "it was like a claw!"
Ruskin's was all finger-grip; long, strong talons, curiously
delicate-skinned and refined in form, though not academically
beautiful. Those whose personal acquaintance with him dated only
from the later years never knew his hand, for then it had lost its
nervous strength; and in cold weather--the greatest half of the year
in the North--the hand suffered more than the head. But his palm, and
especially the back of the hand, was tiny. When he rowed his boat he
held the oars entirely in his fingers; when he shook hands you felt
the pressure of the fingers, not of the palm. In writing, he held the
pen as we are taught to hold a drawing-pencil, and the long fingers
gave much more play to the point than is usual in formed penmanship.
Knowing that, it is not surprising to find that his writing varies,
not only from one period to another, but with passing moods. Everybody
shows some of this variety, but Ruskin's hand was as flexible and as
impressionable as his whole being.
[Illustration: CONISTON
WRITTEN BY JOHN RUSKIN AND MARY RICHARDSON, 1830]
He had an odd way, down to the last, of "printing" an inscription on
the fly-leaf of a book or on the mount of a drawing, in neat, square
Roman type, inked between double lines ruled in pencil. Sometimes
giving a present to a favoured visitor he would say, "Stay, I must
write your name in it"; and you expected the well-known autograph
cheque-signature, scribbled with a flourish. But no! Spectacles, and
ruler, and pencil first; two carefully ruled lines, an eighth of an
inch apart; then the cork-handled, fine steel pen, and laborious
regularity of inscription; till the onlooking recipient laughed
outright at all this time and trouble spent on a trifle. But Ruskin was
quite grave about it.
This was a reversion to early habits. His juvenile MSS., of which many
were kept by his parents and still remain at Brantwood, contain many
pages of similar calligraphy. His first Latin and French declensions
are printed in pencil; at the age of seven he wrote the first copies
of his "Harry and Lucy" in this way, pencilled first and penned over,
thinking he was an author making a book. Many children do, but not
with his tenacity and taste. In 1828 (age nine) he had brought this
self-imposed education to something like perfection with the tiny
"print" of "Eudosia," page after page showing wonderful steadiness of
hand and eye; and at the end of that year he executed the masterpiece
of childish ingenuity which he described in the autobiographical "Harry
and Lucy"--the poem in "double print," all the down-strokes doubled:
"And it was most beautifully done, you may be sure," says the saucy
infant, not untruly. Some of his early mineral catalogues, begun at
this time, appear to have been continued later, though the difference
can hardly be told from any improvement in the penmanship.
[Illustration: RUSKIN'S WRITING IN 1836; FAIR COPY OF A POEM]
Meanwhile his ordinary running hand was a shocking scribble, but in
the middle of it he seems to have pulled himself up continually,
or he was pulled up by an overlooking mother, and the wild scrawl
becomes tidy and neat. I suspect that his earlier home lessons did not
include much copybook work. He developed his own writing like other
precocious boys and girls, though there is some trace of teaching at
the very start. But after 1830 he exchanged, perhaps at the instance
of superior orders, his "print" for copperplate; the "Iteriad" (1831)
is fair-copied in a large, regular round-hand, and the Tour poems of
1833 are in a smaller, less anxious, but more formed business style.
One sees the father's influence coming in, and all his letters to the
old-fashioned business man show the obvious desire to please. "My
dear papa" is flourished around in the most approved writing-master's
manner, and "John Ruskin" at the end is in black letter, finishing a
sheet of impeccable commercial-hand, in which the free-and-easy wording
contrasts quite ludicrously with the formal writing.
[Illustration: RUSKIN'S HANDWRITING IN 1837]
It was only, or chiefly, to his father that such letters were written.
For his mother he had another hand; for his friends and for himself
an assortment of varying scribbles. But there, I think, comes out one
of the leading points in his character. To be a man of strong thought
and will, innovator in art, science, politics, morality, and religion,
there never was such a chameleon, always ready to colour his mind
after his surroundings; all things to all men. To the opponent he was
an opponent; to the admirer an admirer, without at once testing the
sincerity of the admiration or the source of the opposition. It was the
cause of many regretted incidents in public life, but in private life
the ground of his charm. Nobody who approached him in kindness failed
of being met more than half way, while impertinence and rudeness,
however unintended, struck a discord at once. So much of a chameleon
he was, that he could persuade himself into liking, for the moment,
and for the sake of his companion on the spot, many a thing he had
denounced or derided; and sometimes he could do curious things out of
the same unrecognised sympathy. Once after a lecture, leading Taglioni
to her carriage in the midst of a crowd of onlookers, I saw him cross
the London pavement with an old-world minuet-step, hardly conscious, I
am sure, of the quaint homage he was paying to the great dancer he had
admired in his boyhood.
Those flourishes of the pen for his father's pleasure never appear
in his own private scribble. His ideas came too quickly to leave him
time for ornament, and he had no need to idle in dots and circles
between the phrases. His spelling was always good, but he never stopped
to punctuate; a dash was enough for most kinds of stops. Letters of
1845 and 1852 are curious for the underlining or interlining of long
passages, not, apparently, for emphasis; possibly to mark sections of
these general epistles home for copying. In all this early writing
there is an effort to keep pace with the flow of thoughts, even in the
verse; he wrote so much that mere economy of time must have driven him
at speed to the shortest way of getting the matter down. In diaries of
the period are some shorthand notes which I take to be his; but if he
ever tried shorthand he dropped it soon.
[Illustration: NOTES FOR "STONES OF VENICE"
BY JOHN RUSKIN (ABOUT 1850)]
The model upon which Ruskin's usual handwriting was at last formed was
his mother's. It is perhaps a commonplace to say that we all betray in
our writing the greatest personal influence of our earlier years. While
penning this very page, a letter has just been brought to me which at
first glance put me in mind of a friend long since dead: it is from
his school-master. Not Ruskin's father nor any of his teachers appear
to have influenced him like his mother. Her more deliberate writing
was extremely elegant; rather small, moderately sloping, with a pretty
combination of curve and angle, and capitals carefully formed. In the
note-book in which he composed verses from 1831 to 1838 you can see the
development of his hand from a spiky and cramped boyish scribble to the
more open and slightly more upright style of 1835 and 1836, the year of
his matriculation at Oxford; a neat and educated penmanship, easy to
read and regular, though differing slightly from day to day in size and
slope. The backward switch of his _y_ and forward toss of the tail to
his angular _t_ are already there; and the dainty shaping of capitals,
based on Italic or Elzevir print, like his mother's, with suggestion
of the _serif_ in a little elegant curl to _H_ and _F_. Instead of
spasmodic reform, as earlier, there is perfect steadiness for page
after page.
At Oxford his writing became rather larger and looser, perhaps from
Latin exercises, in which indubitable distinctness is required. The
"Poetry of Architecture" fair copy can be seen in a facsimile in the
new Library Edition; the draft scribbled in a sketch-book during Oxford
vacation is reproduced (p. 141); you note the tendency to round the
foot of the down-stroke and the length of the greater limbs of the
letters. He used to tell his secretary to take no notice of a letter in
which _h_ and _l_ looked like _n_ and _e_.
Leaving Oxford and writing hard at "Modern Painters" earlier volumes,
which cost a great deal of pen-work, he went back to the smaller hand
of voluminous authors, and the constant attention to one subject
gave it regularity. But the letters of the time are naturally more
impulsive; indeed, in 1849 there are bits which prefigure his latest
style in its upright and loose sketchiness. From 1849 or 1850 for some
years the chief work was "Stones of Venice," and the note-books and
studies for this are fairly represented by the page on "Sta. Maria
dell' Orto." This is the earlier "Modern Painters" manner. You see the
growing freedom, but it is not yet wild and whirling.
[Illustration: RUSKIN'S HANDWRITING IN 1875]
The difference is shown at a glance in comparing this with the sample
of his well-known later hand. It was by the end of the 'fifties that
the regular and tight spikiness began finally to disappear and give
place to far-flung curves. The great turn in his life which took place
about 1860 showed itself in his penmanship as well as in his thought,
and the final style became formed, which, with merely the differences
of better or worse, lasted until all writing was over. After the summer
of 1889 it was at very rare intervals that he took pen in hand. For
some time before his death by mere disuse he seemed to have lost the
very power of writing at all. At last, one day, being asked for his
signature, he set down with shaking fingers the first few letters of
it, and broke off with "Dear me! I seem to have forgotten how to write
my own name!" And he wrote no more.
There have been authors and journalists whose printed work, no
doubt, exceeds his in quantity; but in reckoning the sum total of his
penmanship we must not forget that every printed page meant, for him,
several written pages, especially in earlier books; also, that he
was a conscientious correspondent, and every day wrote many letters.
It may be set off against this that he sometimes used the help of an
amanuensis, though he rarely dictated, and it was only when he had
hammered his subject into shape that he had it copied for the printer.
Occasionally in late years he let it be type-written, but most of his
work was done before the age of type-writers. He would use the most
unlikely copyists, as when he got the little girls of his Brantwood
class to write out his notes. All he asked was a distinct hand and a
docile scribe. His secretary, like the secretary in "Gil Blas," did
everything but write, and sometimes was packing parcels or sweeping
leaves while the valet was copying lectures on Greek art. Some early
MSS. are in the hand of George Hobbs; many of the later were written
by Crawley; none by Baxter. At other times he requisitioned the young
ladies; it was for this that Mrs. Severn formed her large, round,
upright hand, and Miss Anderson had many a copying task, as well as
others whose work will be valued by collectors for its corrections from
the master's pen, like the quartz which holds the sparkle of gold.
But he taught them to write distinctly--that was his great requirement.
Once, on a sleepless night, he called me, with many apologies, to write
from dictation. Naturally I wrote fast to get my job done and return
to my slumbers; but he continually pulled me up with, "I'm sure you're
scribbling. Let me see if I can read it." Out on the fells, taking the
dip and strike of strata, or among the cathedrals making notes and
measurements, he would often warn his assistant of the folly of hasty
scrawling. "I've lost so much time and trouble by my now bad writing,"
he used to say.
It has been told already how he was struck at first by Miss Francesca
Alexander's handwriting before he had seen her drawing, which
afterwards he praised so highly. The distinct neatness of her beautiful
calligraphy appealed to his love for missals and the lost art, as
he feared, of the true scribe. But of queer and quaint writing he
was impatient. Words were to be read, not played with in decorative
affectations. The baser sort of business-hand roused him to scorn, and
he had a sharp eye for the characteristics of a cranky or insincere
correspondent. When postcards came in, like many others he did not
approve of them and never used them. One of his household sometimes got
postcards written in Runes, and, seeing the mystic inscriptions, he
wanted to know why. "So that people may not read it," was the answer.
"What's the use of that?" replied Ruskin. "Isn't language given you to
conceal your thoughts?"
* * * * *
[For further illustrations of his handwriting, see his earliest
"printing" at seven or eight, with his latest current style, actual
size, on page 108; a pencil scribble at ten or eleven, page 171; his
neater writing of the same period, on page 199; his ordinary careful
penmanship about 1835, on page 109; and his looser final hand, pages
163 and 174.]
X
RUSKIN'S MUSIC
X
RUSKIN'S MUSIC
"It is well known," says a recent newspaper writer, "that Ruskin's
ear was as deaf to musical sound as his eye was sensitive to natural
beauty." On the other hand, Miss Wakefield, the celebrated singer and
the originator of country Musical Competitions, has put together a
volume of 158 pages--most of them, certainly, in rather big type--under
the title of "Ruskin on Music." The inference, of course, to an
unbelieving world is that he wrote about what he did not understand.
But Miss Wakefield understands; and she says, "what is to be admired in
what he has said of the art is the beautiful way in which its spiritual
meaning and teaching have been expressed by him, in the short passages
which he has devoted to it, and in which no one has ever excelled him."
For his thoughts on music there is that book to read; but for Ruskin's
quest of music, for his lifelong attempts to qualify as a musician,
there is nothing to show. The story has not yet been told, because it
has little bearing on his life's main work, and--to put it roughly--it
is the story of a failure. Perhaps there are admirers who would rather
not know about the failure; and yet--you shall judge when you have
heard it!
There are still in existence the bound volumes of piano-pieces and
operatic songs which he learnt when he was an undergraduate at Oxford.
One of these volumes is open on the piano, in our photograph of the
Brantwood drawing-room, arranged as it used to be when he strummed a
little before dinner and read at the four candles after dinner. Each
piece is inscribed by the Oxford music-master with the usual vague
respect of Town to Gown in the formula, "-- Ruskin, Esq., Ch.Ch." The
master does not seem to have known his Christian name, but he evidently
dragged him through a great deal of Bellini, and Donizetti, and Mozart;
and "forty years on--shorter in wind, though in memory long" Ruskin
had a keen recollection of these pieces, and liked to go over them
with any young friend, showing how they used to sing "Non piu andrai"
or "Prendero quel brunettino," with all the flourishes. There are his
fingering exercises, as elaborately annotated as all his old books are;
he must have spent much time and taken great pains, in those early
days, over his music. It was not for want of opportunity, nor for lack
of intention, that he did not become a musician.
When he left Oxford he still continued his lessons, especially the
singing. I have never heard of his singing in company, but I can hardly
doubt that the lessons did much for his voice. Any one who has heard
him lecture, or read, or even talk, knows how resonant and flexible
it was, and how thoroughly under his command. He had naturally a weak
chest; he caught cold easily, and his throat was often affected; but
he always, I think, was able to lecture, and his voice was the first
thing that attracted an audience. The singing lessons were not without
result.
[Illustration: (_Photograph by A. E. Brickhill_)
RUSKIN'S PIANO IN BRANTWOOD DRAWING-ROOM
(BEFORE RECENT ALTERATIONS)]
In later years his music-master was George Frederick West, who taught
him--or tried to teach him--something of composition. I can remember
Mr. West coming to give him a lesson at Herne Hill, but I don't think
I was ever present at the ordeal. You can imagine that "Dr. Ruskin,"
as Mr. West always called him, was a most difficult pupil, wanting at
every turn to know why; incredulous of the best authority; impatient of
the compromises and conventions, the "wohl-temperirtes Klavier"; and
eager to upset everything and start afresh. It is Mrs. Severn who can
describe these droll interviews and Mr. West's despairing appeal, "But
you wouldn't be ungrammatical, Doctor Ruskin?"
I am not so sure about that; but Mr. Ruskin learnt what he wanted. One
thing he could do to perfection. He could easily and readily transpose
and copy a song that was too high or too low, and he liked doing so. It
does not imply great scholarship, but it is wonderful, as Dr. Johnson
said of the performing dog, that he should do it at all. He might have
been spending his time to better purpose, you think?
Music lessons went on, at all available intervals, down to the close
of his active life. At Sandgate in 1887-88 he was learning from Mr.
Roberts. In his lodgings, besides the cottage piano already there, he
got a grand piano and a harmonium (the last was afterwards given to a
chapel in Coniston), and because he had few chances of hearing music
in that retirement, he engaged a young lady professional to play of
evenings to himself and the friends who were staying with him.
In his books there are several hard hits at concerts and concert-goers;
but just as he wrote against railways and yet, he said, "used them
himself, few people more," so he was an energetic concert-goer. On
arriving at Paris or any great foreign town his first question was,
"What about the opera?" With classical Italian opera he was familiar
from his youth up. He loved it, indignant when pestilent modernism
hurried the tempo or took liberties with the well-known score.
In London he usually had a season ticket for the Crystal Palace
concerts--you remember how he abused the Crystal Palace!--and when he
was driven away by the "autumn cleaning," a great business in old Mrs.
Ruskin's scrupulous housekeeping at Denmark Hill, he would stay at the
Queen's Hotel in Norwood, "to be near the Manns concerts."
He has just mentioned Charles Halle in "Ethics of the Dust," but in
private letters comes out his real admiration of the great pianist.
John Hullah was one of his friends; his copy of Hullah's "Manual" is
scribbled with devices for simplifying the teaching of the keyboard.
Indeed, being as he was a born teacher, and counting as he did music an
essential to education, he even taught--or tried to teach--what he knew
of it whenever there was a chance. That class of little country girls
at Brantwood had to learn music too; it was in his time of failing
strength, and the story is tragi-comic; but in such times the real
heart reveals itself through all weaknesses, and it was a very kindly
and earnest nature that made him write out neat cards of music-lore
reduced to its lowest terms for the cottage lasses whose lives he tried
to raise and brighten.
It was only on evenings of actual illness or serious trouble that
he passed the time without music, and he generally managed to have
somebody in the house who could play and sing. One of his admirations
was "Claribel" (Mrs. Barnard), whom he met at Jean Ingelow's; she sang
her own songs to his great delight. Later, among many, there were the
Misses Bateman and Miss Wakefield; in "Joanna's Care" he has told his
readers about the charm of Mrs. Severn's singing. And it was not only
comic songs and nigger ballads that he would listen to; he liked fun,
as his readers ought to know by now, and a good funny song, if the tune
was sound, made him clap his hands in a quaint gesture and laugh all
over--the more that there was much sadness in his thoughts. I remember
Sir Edward Burne-Jones's account of a visit to the Christy Minstrels;
how the Professor dragged him there, to a front seat, and those
burnt-corked people anticked and shouted, and Burne-Jones wanted to go,
and Ruskin wouldn't, but sat laughing through the whole performance as
if he loved it. An afternoon, to him, of oblivion to the cares of life;
an odd experience; but he would not call it music. "Now let us have
something different," he used to say when he had laughed enough.
[Illustration: (_Miss Hargreaves, photographer_)
JOHN RUSKIN IN THE SEVENTIES
FROM A BUST BY PROFESSOR B. CRESWICK]
The old songs were his delight, old English and French and Scotch.
German songs, German music, and everything German, except Duerer and
Holbein, he could not abide; German love-songs especially, "songs
of seduction," he called them. He would just endure a bit of Swiss
carolling, with its breezy reminder of the Alps; but the unlucky
individual who tried him with Fesca has cause to remember the event.
Haydn and Mozart he classed with the Italians, and Handel with the good
old standards; but Mendelssohn was not to be named. Worst of all he
misliked execution without feeling: the brilliant young lady pianist
had no welcome from Ruskin. Gaiety, or else tenderness, appealed; even
among the old songs there were those he cast out of the programme. Of
"Charmante Gabrielle" he said once, "it might do when a king sang it."
Corelli was one of his favourite composers; that was another link with
"Redgauntlet" and Wandering Willie; and though he was never a collector
of rarities as such, he bought all the Corelli he could meet with, as
well as various old editions of early music at Chappell's sales.
[Music illustration: AT MARMION'S GRAVE
WORDS BY SIR WALTER SCOTT
AIR BY JOHN RUSKIN, 1881
But yet from out the lit-tle hill
Ooz-es the slen-der spring-let still, And
shep-herd boys re-pair To seek the wat-er-
flag and rush, And plait their gar-lands fair;
When thou shalt find the lit-tle hill
With thy heart com-mune, and be still.]