that he was really interested in Anglo-Saxons and Irish Saints.
There is the Venerable Bede, evidently studied, and the life of
St. Patrick--you know he was always respectful to the patron of
Ireland--but not a leaf cut! There is J. R. Green's "Making of
England," appreciatively annotated, and Sharon Turner, much marked
and cut down in a reckless way to fit the shelf. A much worse example
of this chopping of books is Westwood's "Miniatures and Ornaments of
Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS.," a most valuable folio, from which Ruskin
has sawn the top edge and ripped out all the best plates. As in the
case of his mediaeval missals, scribbled on the margin by his irreverent
pen, he would say that his books were for use and not for curiosities.
These plates were ripped out, not for wanton mischief or in vulgar
carelessness, but to show to his classes at lectures. The margins
were cut, so that the books might be put away in shelves or cabinets,
clearing the workshop of a busy man, instead of leaving them about
to be mishandled and dog-eared; for the best of housemaids cannot be
expected always to treat the master's litter as if they loved it. None
of these volumes are so damaged that a little vamping would not set
them right; though of course they would not be the tall copies prized
by bibliomaniacs. But how many of these tall copies are read by their
buyers?
[Illustration: (_Miss Brickhill, photographer_)
RUSKIN'S SWISS FIGURE]
On the other hand he bound some volumes much more sumptuously than
they deserved. On this shelf there is a very splendid tome, lettered
on the back "SWISSE HISTOR.," evidently bound abroad, which on opening
you find to be Gaullieur's "La Suisse Historique," much used for
intended work on Swiss towns; and another grand, thick, bevelled,
gilded, crushed-morocco series lettered "HEPHAESTUS," which turns out
to be "Les Ouvriers des Deux Mondes" (Paris, 1857)--the only sample we
can find of the Political Economy we were looking for. Nor is there
anything of the sort elsewhere in the room.
On the other side of the fireplace is a nest of shelves filling
the corner; you see it in the picture of Ruskin's study, above his
armchair. These shelves are full of maps and scraps, presented poems at
the top and other gleanings awaiting removal when he should next put
his room in order; old Baedekers and chess-books lower down, with the
set of chessmen and the little travelling board handy for a game after
tea; and boxes filled with the British Museum reproductions of those
bonny Greek coins, thick, rich and bossy, like nuggets come to life or
fossils in metal.
Over the fire are no books, but, as many pictures of the Brantwood
study have shown, a della Robbia relief, replacing the Turner which
once hung there; and the stuffed kingfisher, Cyprus pottery and
figurines, a bit or two of colour in Japanese enamel and Broseley
lustre, and in the middle of the mantelpiece the Swiss girl which
we have photographed. It is a brown old wood-carving, nearly a foot
high, with the vineyard pruning-hook (now broken away) and the _hotte_
or creel full of vine-leaves (they use the word _hot_ for a pannier
or creel in the Cumberland dialect also); and though the drapery is
commonplace--kerchief, corset and skirt--there is something of the fine
school of sculpture about the lines, not unworthy of a good Nuremberg
bronze. I do not know how or whence this figure came to the family,
but it was old Mrs. Ruskin's before it was brought to Brantwood, and
here it is, so to say, the very centrepiece of the house. When he
sat writing at his usual place and looked up, his eye would light on
it first of all, before rising to the Florentine Madonna above or
wandering to the Turners on the wall to the right, or out of window to
the lake and mountains and Coniston Old Hall opposite. What has he not
said about the beauty of the peasant-girl in the fields as compared
with the proud ideals of classic art?--that the painting we most need
is to paint cheeks red with health, and so on? Here was always the
reminder of that bedrock principle of his thought. You know how George
Borrow describes a writer who used to find his inspiration in a queer
portrait over the fireplace? This, I think--though I never heard Ruskin
say so, and perhaps it is rather the symbol than the cause--gives us
the keynote of his study and the work that went on in it.
The rest of his library represents not so much his professed occupation
as what you might call his hobbies. To the left, within reach of the
writing-table, all is Botany, and not very modern botany either. Beyond
the cases full of Turners in sliding frames, and drawers of business
papers, all is Geology and Natural History, mostly out of date, or
shall we call it "classical"? There is Mineralogy, old Jameson, and
Cloiseaux, gorgeously bound, and Miller, and perhaps a larger number
of the handbook class, in French and English, and of more modern date,
than in any other department. There are his old friends Forbes and
Phillips on glaciers and geology, and some more recent three-volume
treatises with uncomplimentary scribblings on their margins. There is
Yarrell's "Birds"--he never could endure the cuts; and three sets of
Bewick. One of the most used is Donovan's "British Insects," eight
volumes, with coloured plates.
Opposite you find more botany; the nineteen massive folios of
"Florae Danicae Descriptio," the twenty-seven volumes of the old, old
_Botanical Magazine_, with the beautiful plates of Sowerby, the
three dozen volumes and index of Sowerby's "English Botany," the six
volumes of Baxter's "Island Plants," the nine volumes of Lecoq's
"Geographie Botanique," and so forth; all showing his purely artistic
and "unscientific" interest in natural history. Modern anatomy and
evolution were nothing to him; what he cared about was the beauty of
the creatures and the sentiments that clustered round them in mythology
and poetry.
[Illustration: (_Miss Hargreaves, photographer_)
TWO BOOKS OF RUSKIN'S--A "NUREMBERG CHRONICLE" AND HIS POCKET "HORACE"]
Of poetry and _belles-lettres_ he had a great assortment, as might
be expected, and mostly in volumes interesting for their history,
though not chosen as rare editions. He kept his grandfather's "Burns,"
his father's "Byron," his own college "Aristophanes," with copious
lecture-notes and sketches of the Poetry of Architecture in blank
spaces. He had Morris's "Earthly Paradise," "from his friend the
author"; a "Linnaeus" that had belonged to Ray, the great Cumbrian
botanist; "A Dyaloge of Syr Thomas More Knyghte" (1530), with the neat
autograph, "ffrancis Bacons booke," apparently that of the famous Lord
Bacon; and, of course, his Scott manuscripts have been often described
by visitors to Brantwood. One little token of unexpected reverence
for a name which hasty readers might think was not to be spoken in
Ruskin's study, is a tiny duodecimo in yellow silk--"Dialogo di
Antonio Manetti," about the size, form, and measurements of Dante's
Hell--inscribed apparently by the great artist "di Michelagnol
Buonarroti."
Greek authors, and a few translations like Jowett's "Plato";
Missals and Bibles in mediaeval Greek and Latin; a few old printed
books--"Danthe" (1491), and a couple more "fourteeners"--but only on
subjects in which he was interested, such as heraldry--Randle Holmes
(1688), and Guillim (1638), coloured by Ruskin and much marked;
Douglas's "Virgil" (1553), Chapman's "Homer," the original "Cowley"
of 1668, various copies of "Poliphilo," together with standard poets,
complete what may be called the bric-a-brac of the shelves above the
mineral collection. Some readers of Omar Khayyam may be interested in
his dissent to stanza 34, and energetic assent to 21, 25, 45 and 46,
scored on the margins in the edition of 1879; and some of his artistic
readers, will they be sympathetic or scandalised at his collection of
Rodolph Toepffer's Genevese caricatures? There is very little about Art
in all these lines of books: Millingen's "Greek Vases," and the still
greater work of Lenormant and De Witte are there indeed, but the only
other art books are those of two old friends, Prout's "Sketches at Home
and Abroad," and Harding's "Elementary Art."
Some of the books he used for special work are in other parts of the
house, and many must have been sold or given away when they were done
with. A number of those he gave away are in a case at the Coniston
Museum, from which we photograph a fine Nuremberg Chronicle side by
side with the tiny "Horace" he used to carry in his pocket on journeys
abroad. In his bedroom he kept a great deal of favourite reading for
wakeful nights--Carlyle and Helps, Scott and Byron, Shakespeare and
Spenser, Miss Edgeworth and Madame de Genlis, and the books of his
youth, a most curious collection of dingy antiquity, with not a few
French novels: and elsewhere are the ponderous tomes from which he
gleaned. His work was not done without much reference to books; but,
after all, it was never compilation. Perhaps it is a truism, but this
look round Ruskin's library gives it some freshness and force--that
the writing which makes its mark in the world is not the second-hand,
patchwork sort, however laborious and however learned. He looked at
Nature, and wrote down what he saw; he felt deeply, and wrote what he
felt.
XIII
RUSKIN'S BIBLES
XIII
RUSKIN'S BIBLES
"Ruskin et la bible"--who would have expected it?--is the title of a
French book, written by a science professor, and published in Paris.
We all know that his works, from "Modern Painters" to "Praeterita,"
are full of the Bible. Sometimes his allusions and quotations are
merely ornamental, and sometimes his remarks are sharp enough to pain
the reader; for Ruskin went through many phases of faith, or, rather,
through a long period of doubt, from which he came, in his later years,
into a new and very simple acceptance of the Christian hope. But at
all times he took the Bible seriously, and in many a passage he has
made its thoughts and stories live for us with marvellous reality. Hear
him tell the Death of Moses or the Call of Peter in those well-known
pages of his masterpiece, or follow him in "Fors" through unpalatable
deductions from neglected commands, and you cannot but feel that he was
a great preacher, "a man of one book," and that book was the Bible.
How he was brought up upon it he tells us in his autobiography. In
Coniston Museum not the least interesting of the Ruskin relics is the
Bible from which, as he noted on the fly-leaf, his mother taught him
the paraphrases. Turning it over one sees how the parts he has named as
especially studied, Psalm cxix. above all, have been soiled; for even
little John Ruskin, model of home-bred boys, was like Tommy Grimes the
scamp--he couldn't always be good--and continual thumbing embrowns the
page.
It was his mother to whom he owed this youthful training in a close
knowledge of the text, "without note or comment." This was her Bible in
the earlier days. Later in life she laid the somewhat worn volume aside
for a new one, a nonpareil Oxford Bible with references, 1852, with
inscription in her husband's handwriting--
MARGARET RUSKIN
DENMARK HILL
BOUGHT AT DOVER 13 MAY, 1858
--and a bearded thistle-head is fastened for a memento on the fly-leaf.
To the end of her life she read in it every day, and every day learned
two verses by heart; she has pencilled on the margins the dates in her
last two years, 1870 and 1871; and after the daily reading she always
put the volume away in its yellow silk bag with purple strings. This
curious habit of dating came out also in her son's old age; perhaps the
modern psychologist will diagnose in it some form of degeneracy, but in
old times dates were important from a lingering respect for astrology,
which is betrayed--most likely unintended--in the precision with which
John Ruskin's father noted the exact hour of his birth. It is in a
Baskett Bible of 1741, with engraved title-page, and a pencil drawing,
probably by John in his boyhood, stuck in as a sort of frontispiece--a
copy from a picture of Jesus Mocked. Opposite to it is written: "John
Ruskin, son of John James Ruskin and Margaret Ruskin, Born 8 February
1819 at 1/4 past 7 o'clock Morning. Babtized (_sic_) 20 Feby 1819
by the Rev^d Mr. Boyd"--the father, I understand, of "A.K.H.B." To
emphasise the Scottish character of the family one may note that this
volume has bound up with it at the end "The Psalms of David in Meeter,"
printed at Edinburgh, 1738. It is most curious that Mr. J. J. Ruskin,
a distinctly well-educated man, should have made the mistake in
spelling, and carried on the old tradition of providing material for
the horoscope.
[Illustration: (_Miss Hargreaves, photographer_)
THE BIBLE FROM WHICH RUSKIN LEARNT IN CHILDHOOD, AND HIS GREEK MS.
PSALTER]
Another Baskett Bible of 1749, nicely rebound in old red morocco,
handsomely tooled, bears the family's earliest register. It is written
in a big, unscholarly hand in the blank space of the last page of
Maccabees; for this volume contained an Apocrypha, and the page
becoming worn, it was stuck down on the cover. "John Ruskin, Baptized
Aprill 9th, 1732 O.S." (_i.e._, 1733 new style), and then follow the
children of this John, with dates and hours of birth, between 1756
and 1772--Margaret, Mary, William, John Thomas, Elizabeth, Robert,
and James. John Thomas, born October 22, 1761, was the father of John
James, the father of John. Like many other remarkable men who owed
their fame to their powers rather than to their circumstances, Ruskin
came of a line of decent, respectable, bourgeois folk, who read their
Bibles, "feared God, and took their own part when required."
His earliest literary training, so to say, was closely connected with
Bible study: for every Sunday he had to take notes of the sermon and
write out a report of the discourse. One of his childish sermon-books
is preserved in the Coniston Museum, and a page is reproduced here to
show the care of writing and choice of wording insisted upon. In the
stories and verses with which he amused himself, he learned a good deal
of freedom and ease: in these he learned dignity of style, a corrective
to boyish flippancy. Also he got the habit of thinking with his pen, so
that he nearly always scribbled when most people would only meditate.
His father's Bible (a small pica 8vo, Oxford edition of 1846, on the
fly-leaf "Margaret Ruskin to her husband John James Ruskin, 1850,"
finely rebound in tawny leather, gilt) was used by him in later times,
and side-lined vigorously; all the blank spaces are scribbled over with
the thoughts that came as he read.
[Illustration: (_Miss Brickhill, photographer_)
A PAGE FROM ONE OF THE SERMON-BOOKS WRITTEN BY RUSKIN AS A BOY]
There is a grand Old Testament in Greek MS. The back is lettered
"tenth century," but Dr. Caspar Rene Gregory, who spent some time in
examining the books at Brantwood, pointed out that the Greek date for
1463 could be dimly seen printed off from the lost final leaf. It was
bound in vellum in or after 1817, to judge from the water-mark in the
fly-leaves; the binding alone is worm-eaten, leaving the body of the
book untouched. The pages, a little waterstained, are written large and
quaint with the reed pen, and adorned with strips of painted pattern
and Byzantine portraits of the authors of the books--Solomon as a
young king, Isaiah and the prophets in varying phases of grey-bearded
dignity and elaborate robes of many colours, rather coarsely but
very richly painted. Such a book to most would be quite too sacred
for anything but occasional turning with careful finger-tips, or a
paper-knife delicately inserted at the outer margin of the leaves; not
to say too crabbed in its contractions and old style calligraphy to
be read with ease. But Ruskin read it, and annotated as he read. He
did the same with the Greek Psalter in the Coniston Museum, shown in
the illustration on p. 197; he did it still more copiously, and in
ink, not merely in erasable pencil, in his most valuable tenth-century
Greek Gospels, or rather Book of Lessons, from which we have a page
photographed. I am very far from saying that this is a practice to be
imitated; but any one who wishes to follow Ruskin in his more intimate
thoughts on the Bible, at the time of crisis in 1875 when he was busy
on this book, and when he was beginning to turn from the agnostic
attitude of his middle life to the old-fashioned piety of his age--any
one who wants to get at his mind would find it here.
[Illustration: (_Miss Brickhill, photographer_)
THE GREEK GOSPELS, WITH ANNOTATIONS BY RUSKIN]
Some of the remarks merely comment on the grammatical forms, or the
contractions, or the style of writing. Where a page is written with
a free hand, evidently to the scribe's enjoyment, he notes the fact;
and likewise where the scribe found it dull, and penned perfunctorily.
That is quite like him, to ask how the man felt at his work! But there
are many curious hints of questioning, and then confessions of his
doubts about the doubts, that go to one's heart to read. "I have always
profound sympathy for Thomas," he scribbles. "Well questioned, Jude!"
"This reads like a piece of truth (John xviii. 16). How little one
thinks of John's being by, in that scene!" "The hour being unknown, as
well as unlooked for (Matt. xxiv. 42), the Lord comes, and the servant
does not know that He has--(and has his portion, unknowingly?)." To
the cry for Barabbas (Matt. xxvii. 20) he adds, "Remember! it was not
the mob's fault, except for acting as a mob"; and to verse 24 (Pilate
washing his hands)--"How any popular electionist or yielding governor
can read these passages of Matthew and not shrivel!" On the parable
of the vine, the earlier note to the verse about the withered branch
cast into the fire and burned is--"How useless! and how weak and vain
the whole over-fatigued metaphor!" But then--"I do not remember when I
wrote this note, but the 'over-fatigued metaphor' comes to me to-day,
8th Nov. 1877, in connection with the [Greek: kathos
egapese], as the most precious and direct help and life." You remember
John xv. 9: "As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you; continue
ye in my love." That word was the help and life he found.
[Illustration: (_Miss Brickhill, photographer_)
KING HAKON'S BIBLE]
He used to read his Latin Bibles too, but most of these were collected
rather for their artistic value than otherwise. Of printed bibles
there were few in his library; one, a Latin version in three volumes,
purple morocco, printed by Fran. Gryphius, 1541, and adorned, as the
title puts it, with images suitable no less for their beauty than
for their truth, has the cuts resembling Holbein's work in "Icones
Historiarum Veteris Testamenti" (Lyons, apud Joannem Frellonium, 1547).
But he loved mediaeval illumination, and owned too many thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century Bibles, Psalters, and Missals to be described in
this chapter.
Mention may be made of a few, such as the big fourteenth-century Latin
Bible, splendidly written in double columns with stiff Gothic patterns
in red and blue, and dainty little decorative initials, each a picture.
Some of these he used to set his pupils and assistants to enlarge; and
a very difficult job it was to get the curves to Ruskin's mind. If you
made them too circular he would expound the spring of the lines until
you felt that you had been guilty of all the vices of the vulgarest
architect's draughtsman, an awful character in the true Ruskinian's
eyes. If you insisted on the "infinite" and hyperbolic sweep of
the contour--and you can't magnify a sixpence into a dinner-plate
without some _parti pris_--then you had the lecture on Moderation and
Restraint. But Ruskin was always very good-humoured and patient in
these lessons; in the end a happy mean was found between Licence and
Formality, and such works as the "Noah's Ark"--now, I believe, in the
Sheffield museum--were elaborated. Perhaps photography would have been
a shorter cut; but it should have been capital training, if one had
known what use to make of it.
Then there is a Versio Vulgata MS. of the thirteenth century, poorly
half bound in shabby boards, with a pencil note--not by Ruskin, of
course--"bo^t at Naples 1826 for 21/-." Twice or thrice as many pounds
would be cheap for it now, I suppose. A pleasant story is told by
Bishop Nicolson in his diary of the year when Queen Anne came to the
throne, of his meeting the famous Dr. Bentley on the Queen's birthday
(February 8, 1702), and how the great Cambridge scholar laughed at the
mania for possessing rare editions--a fancy by no means exclusively of
these latter days. "He ridicul'd ye Expensive humour of purchaseing old
Editions of Books at extravagant Rates; a Vanity to wch ye present E.
of Sunderland and B(ishop) of N(orwich) much subject. The former bought
a piece of Cicero's works out of Dr. Fr. Bernard's Auction, printed
about 1480, at ye Rate of 3lb. 2s. 6d. which Dr. Bentley himself had
presented to yt physitian, and wch cost him no more than the odd half
Crown." The Bishop of Barrow-in-Furness in editing the diary has tried
to trace the subsequent fortune of the book for which Bentley thought
L3 2s. 6d. too high a price. There seem to have been two volumes, each
of which might answer to the description, sold at the dispersal of the
Blenheim library in 1881; and of these one fetched L54, and the other
L38, both prices greatly below their market value at the present time.
Very like the last mentioned in Ruskin's collection is his small
thirteenth-century Bible, with minute double-columned writing, as
tiny as newspaper print, but perfectly readable, and lovely to look
at. This is an English-written book, with a glossary of names at the
end; it came from the library of the Hon. Archibald Fraser, son of
the celebrated Lord Lovat. Another small thirteenth-century Bible is
Italian work; a German MS. Latin prayer-book and psalter dating from
about 1220, with rich bold pictures and ornament in broad bands of
blue and burnished masses of gold, bound in grey-green velvet, was a
great treasure. His so-called St. Louis Psalter and the prayer-book of
Yolande of Navarre have been often mentioned by him, but to go into
these would take us away from our subject--his Bibles.
[Illustration: (_Herr K. Koren, photographer_)
AN ILLUMINATED PAGE OF KING HAKON'S BIBLE]
The one he prized most is known as King Hakon's Bible, from a reference
on the fly-leaf to King Hakon V. of Norway. It is a small volume
(shown in our illustration as standing in front of the embroidered
cover in which his Birthday Addresses are kept) with 613 leaves of the
thinnest vellum, measuring no more than 41/4 by 61/4 inches, and
written in tiny black-letter, double columned, every page ornamented;
there are more than eighty delicately painted pictures, and hundreds
of daintily coloured initials, a perfect treasury of decorative art.
The binding is of the sixteenth century, and thought to be English;
boards covered with brown leather, brass bosses and clasps, and stamped
with panels of griffins in relief, and the motto repeated between
them of "Jhesus help." The book is French work of the middle of the
thirteenth century, and the black-letter inscription reads, "Anno dni.
M^o. CCC^o. X^o. istum librum emit fr. hanricus prior provicialis a
conventu hathersleu. de dono dni. regis Norwegie," which is to say:
"In 1310 brother Henry, provincial prior, bought this book from the
Conventus (whatever that means) at Haderslev (in Sleswig) out of the
gift of my lord the king of Norway." It hardly seems as though the king
had owned the book, as Ruskin believed when he bought it, but it is not
surprising that the keepers of the National Library at Christiania were
disappointed in finding that it had gone into his hands from Quaritch's
catalogue, just too soon for them; and that the Norwegians sent a
scholar to report upon it, Herr Kristian Koren, and on Ruskin's death
again tried to become possessors, though Ruskin's heirs have, so far,
not seen their way to part with the treasure he so much valued. To Herr
Koren I owe the photograph of one of its pages, here reproduced.