"For the best and truest beginning of all blessings, I had been
taught the perfect meaning of Peace, in thought, act, and word.
Angry words, hurry, and disorder I never knew in the stillness of
my childhood's home. Next to this quite priceless gift of Peace, I
had received the perfect understanding of the natures of Obedience
and Faith. I obeyed word or lifted finger of father or mother,
simply as a ship her helm; not only without idea of resistance, but
receiving the direction as a part of my own life and force,--a
helpful law, as necessary to me in every moral action as the law of
gravity in leaping. And my practice in Faith was soon complete;
nothing was ever promised me that was not given, nothing ever
threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever told me that
was not true."
Ruskin's father began to read Byron to him soon after he entered his
teens, the first passage being the shipwreck in "Don Juan."
"I recollect that he and my mother looked across the table at each
other with something of alarm, when on asking me a few _festas_
afterwards what we should have for after-dinner reading, I
instantly answered, 'Juan and Haidee.' My selection was not
adopted, and feeling there was something wrong somewhere, I did not
press it, attempting even some stutter of apology, which made
matters worse. Perhaps I was given a bit of 'Childe Harold'
instead, which I liked at that time nearly as well; and, indeed,
the story of Haidee soon became too sad for me. But very certainly
by the end of this year, 1834, I knew my Byron pretty well all
through. . . . I never got the slightest harm from Byron; what harm
came to me was from the facts of life and from books of a baser
kind, including a wide range of the works of authors popularly
considered extremely instructive,--from Victor Hugo down to Dr.
Watts."
Byron became a great favorite with the young student, as will be seen
from the following passage:--
"I rejoiced in all the sarcasm of 'Don Juan.' But my firm decision,
as soon as I got well into the later cantos of it, that Byron was
to be my master in verse, as Turner in color, was made, of course,
in that gosling, or say cygnet, epoch of existence, without
consciousness of the deeper instincts that prompted it. Only two
things I consciously recognized,--that his truth of observation was
the most exact and his chosen expression the most concentrated that
I had yet found in literature. By that time my father had himself
put me through the first two books of Livy, and I knew, therefore,
what close-set language was; but I saw then that Livy, as afterward
that Horace and Tacitus, were studiously, often laboriously, and
sometimes obscurely concentrated; while Byron wrote, as easily as a
hawk flies and as clearly as a lake reflects, the exact truth in
the precisely narrowest terms,--not only the exact truth, but the
most central and useful one. Of course I could no more measure
Byron's greater powers at that time than I could Turner's; but I
saw that both were right, in all things that I knew right from
wrong in, and that they must henceforth be my masters, each in his
own domain. But neither the force and precision nor the rhythm of
Byron's language was at all the central reason for my taking him
for master. Knowing the Song of Moses and the Sermon on the Mount
by heart, and half the Apocalypse besides, I was in no need of
tutorship either in the majesty or simplicity of English words; and
for their logical arrangement I had had Byron's own master, Pope,
since I could lisp. But the thing wholly new and precious to me in
Byron was his measured and living truth,--measured as compared with
Homer, and living as compared with everybody else."
He began to be an observer of beauty at a very early age, and then, as
afterwards, placed beauty first, utility second. He says:--
"So that very early, indeed, in my thoughts of trees I had got at
the principle, given fifty years afterwards in Proserpina, that the
seeds and fruits of them were for the sake of the flowers, not the
flowers for the fruit. The first joy of the year being in its
snowdrops, the second and cardinal one was in the almond-blossom,
every other garden and woodland gladness following from that in an
unbroken order of kindling flower and shadowy leaf; and for many
and many a year to come--until, indeed, the whole of life became
autumn to me--my chief prayer for the kindness of Heaven, in its
flowerful seasons, was that the frost might not touch the
almond-blossom."
His mother, who was a very religious woman, used to oblige him to learn
long chapters of the Bible by heart at a very early age, and his
favorite chapters were always from the Psalms, where there is so much of
grand and glowing poetry. It was a fine diet for such a child as he, or,
indeed, for any child; and he attributes his taste for the grand things
in literature to his early knowledge of the matchless poetry of the
Bible. Doubtless it gave also that devotional bent to his mind which has
been one of his many striking characteristics through life. He is as
essentially religious as one of the old Hebrew prophets, and has brought
forward his religious precepts in season and out of season ever since he
began to write.
He was taken on his travels when but a boy, and saw many of the beauties
of Europe before he went to Oxford. He made acquaintance at that early
age with most of the beautiful buildings about which he has since
written so eloquently. The old Gothic buildings pleased him most of
all,--even the rugged Gothic of the North. He spent much time in Italy
and in Switzerland, which he says is a country to be visited and not
lived in. He thinks that such sublimity of scenery should only be looked
upon reverently, and that those who view it habitually lose their
reverence, and, indeed, do not appreciate it at any time.
At Oxford he produced a prize poem; but he has never been heard of as a
poet since, although there is more of poetry in his prose than in the
verse of many of his contemporary poetical brethren, and if any man of
his time has been endowed with the true poetic temperament, it is surely
he.
His constitution has always been feeble, and he can bear no excitement,
and has been known to sink into such exhaustion from a little
over-tension of the nerves that it has been very difficult to bring him
back to consciousness.
A person of this nature was probably very romantic in his youth, and he
fell very violently in love with a Scottish lady when quite young. He
says that never having been indulged with much affection in youth, or
been allowed to bestow a great deal even upon his parents, when in later
life love did come, "it came with violence, utterly rampant and
unmanageable, at least to me, who never before had anything to manage."
He lived in a world of his own dreams for a long time, endowing the
object of his affections with every grace and charm. He was an exacting
as well as a passionate lover, and the lady was of far cooler blood than
he. But after a variety of experiences, such as fall to the lot of most
lovers, the lady became his wife. Of course the world knows little of
the inner secrets of that married life, for John Ruskin is not a man to
cry his sorrows in the market-place; but the world does know that the
marriage proved very unhappy, and that it was finally followed by a
separation. Of course there was a world of scandal at the time, which is
now happily forgotten; for all this was very, very long ago, and the
first scandal was as nothing compared to that which followed the lady's
marriage with Millais, the artist of whom London is so proud. There was
no moral blame imputed to either party at the time of the separation;
and it was understood to have been only one of the numerous cases of
incompatibility, of which the world is so full.
This most deplorable event in Ruskin's life was followed by long years
of seclusion. He had never gone much into society, but after this he
lived in almost utter solitude for years, writing his wonderful books,
and making long stays in Venice and other distant cities. He was born to
wealth, and never had to trouble himself about the more prosaic affairs
of the world. In this country we have had until recently no large
leisure class, and those who are now taking that place are few in
number, and seem utterly at a loss how to pass their time amid the
business and bustle of our hurrying life. More and more are they going
to Europe, as is natural; for there they find people like themselves,
and multitudes of them, who have nothing to do, and who therefore seek
to enjoy their leisure. With such a man as Ruskin this was not
difficult, and he became a hard worker, not from necessity, but from the
pressure from within. He never made or sought to make any money from his
books, but they gave him great delight in the writing, and brought him
fame, which he did not disdain. One of the cardinal principles of his
morality has always been that poverty is no bar to happiness, but that
all that is best in life is open to poor as well as rich. This he
proclaimed loudly in lectures to workingmen, which he inaugurated in
London, Edinburgh, and other cities. If men can only be taught to see,
and to think, and to worship, according to Ruskin they have always
sources of happiness at hand, of which no outward force of circumstances
can deprive them. This is a great and a true gospel, and would there
were more such eloquent proclaimers of it as Ruskin! what could be
better doctrine for the men and women of this generation than this:--
"In order to teach men how to be satisfied, it is necessary fully
to understand the art and joy of humble life; this at present, of
all arts and sciences, being the one most needing study. Humble
life,--that is to say, proposing to itself no future exaltation,
but only a sweet continuance; not excluding the idea of
forethought, but only of fore-sorrow, and taking no troublous
thought for coming days. The life of domestic affection and
domestic peace, full of sensitiveness to all elements of costless
and kind pleasure, therefore chiefly to the loveliness of the
natural world."
Again he sums up these costless pleasures in sentences weighty with
meaning:--
"To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath
over plough, hoe, and spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope,
to pray,--these are the things which make men happy; they have
always had the power to do this, and they always will. The world's
prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these
few things, but upon iron or glass, or electricity or steam, in
nowise."
Ruskin has always had a quarrel with the railroads, and says that all
travelling becomes dull in proportion to its rapidity. "Going by
railroad," he affirms, "I do not call travelling at all; but it is
merely 'being sent' to a place, and very little different from becoming
a parcel. A man who really loves travelling would as soon consent to
pack a day of such happiness into an hour of railroad as one who loved
eating would agree, if it were possible, to concentrate his dinner into
a pill." Walking he commends most heartily to young men, and considers
it one of the rarest pleasures of life. In this country walking-parties
are as yet almost unknown, but in Europe they are extremely common,
especially among students. What could be better for the youth of our
land than such a pastime as this for their vacations?
He has also a great contempt for some of the feats of modern science,
and exclaims somewhere:--
"The scientific men are as busy as ants examining the sun and the
moon and the seven stars; and can tell me all about them, I
believe, by this time, and how they move, and what they are made
of. And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they
move or of what they are made. I can't move them any other way than
they go, nor make them of anything else better than they are made."
It is over forty years ago that Ruskin startled the literary and
artistic world with that marvellous book entitled "Modern Painters;
Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient
Masters." The title contained the argument of the book, and it was a
monumental heresy to utter at that time. Not that there was the least
doubt as to its truth, but no voice had then been raised to proclaim it.
The English people at that time were blind worshippers of Claude and
one or two other old masters; and here was a daring youth--reminding one
of David with his sling--going forth to do battle against all the
received art opinions of his day, and boldly proclaiming Turner a better
painter than Claude, Salvator Rosa, Gaspar Poussin, and the various
Van-Somethings who had until that time held undisputed sway in
conventional art circles. The young Oxford graduate was greeted with a
perfect tempest of ridicule and denunciation. Every critic in the land
hurled his lance at him, and every artist looked upon him with sovereign
contempt. The young Oxford man, however, valiantly held his ground. He
possessed genius, profound conviction, and a magnificent self-conceit;
and he hurled back defiance to the whole art-clan, and rode forward.
Criticism beat upon the book in vain. Everybody read it, and everybody
talked about it, and it conquered criticism at last. No such sensation
in the art line has been made in Ruskin's day. His teachings in the
course of a few years well-nigh revolutionized art opinion in England.
The sum and substance of it was Nature against conventionality. People
must look at Nature with their own eyes and judge art by the help of
Nature. This seems simple enough to-day, but it was a new doctrine in
Ruskin's youth.
Ruskin has always been an extremest in everything, and he went so far as
to denounce Raphael's "Charge to Peter" on the grounds that the Apostles
are not dressed as men of that time and place would have been when going
out fishing. He held to an almost brutal realism in everything, and
preached his doctrine whether men would hear or whether they would
forbear. He soon rallied a little coterie of artists about him, and
formed a school styled the Pre-Raphaelites. The principal founder of the
school was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, since better known as a poet than an
artist. He held his little court in London for many years, and a great
number of young men sat at his feet. His chief supporters at first were
Holman Hunt and Millais. These latter soon left Rossetti far behind in
execution; but Rossetti was the soul of the movement. He had received
his inspiration directly from Ruskin. Among the reminiscences of this
art movement are Oscar Wilde and the esthetes of London to-day, with
their "symphonies" in blue and their "arrangements" in yellow, and the
hideous females who go about London drawing-rooms in limp dresses of
sulphur color and sage green loosely hanging from their shoulders, after
the manner of ancient Greece. But they have had real artists among
them,--these apostles of the sunflower and knights of the lily,--and
although some of the better class have repudiated the antics of their
followers, the movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism has really been an
artistic success.
Ruskin followed the "Modern Painters" in due time with his "Seven Lamps
of Architecture" and his "Stones of Venice." They were masterpieces of
eloquent description and rhetoric. No such vivid writing had been seen
for many a day, and no such zeal and earnestness. The wealth of gorgeous
imagery was dazzling; the declamation imparted to it the eloquence of an
earlier day, and the lofty thought and moral purpose were peculiarly the
author's own. The books exerted a remarkable influence. He has written
much since, but he has never reached the height he attained in those
earlier books.
As he grew older, he grew dogmatic and crotchety in the extreme. He
imitated Carlyle in his scoldings, and indeed was much influenced by
Carlyle in many ways. He has always been an impracticable theorist, and
in these latter years he has put forth a thousand foolish and subversive
vagaries. People have not taken him quite seriously for some time. They
laugh at his follies, ridicule his philanthropic schemes,--of which he
has an infinite number, for he is a man of the kindest heart,--they tell
excruciating stories of his colossal self-conceit, and they go home and
read his books because no such books can be found written by any other
man, search they never so widely. He has always been a wrong-headed
man, entirely out of accord with the world around him, and consequently
almost sure to be on the wrong side of every practical political
question. He and Carlyle had much in common in all this, and it would
have been a rich treat to have heard Ruskin proclaiming his political
creed, "I am a King's man, and no mob's man;" and to have heard Carlyle
answer with denunciations of his millions of fellow-countrymen, "mostly
fools."
Ruskin lives in one of the most beautiful of London suburbs,--on Denmark
Hill, at the south side of the river, near Dulwich and the exquisite
Sydenham slopes, where the Crystal Palace stands. His home is beautiful,
filled with wonderful art treasures and numberless books, with many rare
and costly editions. He has lectured much at Oxford; and of late years
his lectures have been so crowded that tickets had to be procured to
attend them. This, when the lectures of the most learned professors of
the university are often given to a beggarly array of empty boxes.
He has given away during his lifetime the greater part of his large
fortune,--not always wisely, but always in a manner characteristic of
the man. He has acted upon the belief that it is wrong to take interest
in excess of the principal, and has made the property over to his
debtors whenever he has had interest to this extent. He gave seventeen
thousand pounds to his poor relations as soon as he came into his
fortune; and fifteen thousand pounds more to a cousin, tossing it to him
as one would a sugar-plum; fourteen thousand pounds to Sheffield and
Oxford; and numberless other gifts to different charities, mostly of an
eccentric nature. He retained for himself three hundred and sixty pounds
a year, upon which he says "a bachelor gentleman ought to live, or if he
cannot, deserves speedily to die." Of course such a royal giver has been
besieged during his whole life by an innumerable company of beggars for
every conceivable object; but he has always chosen to select for himself
his beneficiaries, and has often sent sharp answers to appeals; like
the following to the secretary of a Protestant Blind Pension Society:
"To my mind, the prefix of 'Protestant' to your society's name indicates
far stonier blindness than any it will relieve." And in reply to a
letter asking aid in paying off a church debt he replies:--
"I am sorrowfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the
world the precisely least likely to give you a farthing. My first
word to all men and boys who care to hear me is, 'Don't get into
debt. Starve, and go to heaven; but don't borrow. Try, first,
begging. I don't mind, if it's really needful, stealing. But don't
buy things you can't pay for.' And of all manner of debtors, pious
people building churches they can't pay for are the most detestable
nonsense to me. Can't you preach and pray behind the hedges, or in
a sandpit, or in a coal-hole, first? And of all manner of churches
thus idiotically built, iron churches are the damnablest to me. And
of all the sects and believers in any ruling spirit--Hindoos,
Turks, Feather Idolaters, and Mumbo Jumbo Log and Fire
Worshippers--who want churches, your modern English Evangelical
sect is the most absurd and objectionable and unendurable to me.
All of which you might very easily have found out from my books.
Any other sort of sect would, before bothering me to write it to
them."
Ruskin is the poet and the high-priest of Nature. To him she reveals her
mysteries, and he interprets them to a dull and commonplace world in
language as glowing and impassioned as that of the prophets and priests
of the olden time. No man, apparently, has seen the sea as Ruskin has
seen it,--not even Byron, who wrote so majestic a hymn to it; no man has
so seen the mountains, with his very soul transfixed in solemn awe; no
one has felt as he the holy stillness of the forest aisles, or so
described even the tiny wild flowers of the fields. And he has not only
seen their outward glories, but he has interpreted their hidden
meanings. He has carried the symbolism of Nature on into the moral
world. There is no greater moralist than he. He is stern in his demands
for right, and truth, and sincerity in life and in work. This has been
the keynote of his teachings throughout life. He hates a falsehood or a
sham as much as Browning or Carlyle. He has taught his countrymen many
things. No people love Nature better than the English of the present
day, and John Ruskin has opened the eyes of many of them to the beauties
that lie everywhere about them. Then his long agitation for a better
architecture has not been wholly in vain. Though the architects all
laughed at him when his lectures were given, many of his ideas slowly
made their way, and the new demand for strength and solidity and
sincerity in building has been largely due to him.
But much greater than all his art influence has been the weight of his
moral teachings. No preacher of the day has preached to such an audience
as he, and he has always held men to the best that is in them. Long
after his idiosyncrasies shall have been forgotten, and his faults and
foibles given over to oblivion, his precepts will remain to influence
the life and thought of the coming time.
[Illustration]
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Transcriber's note:
The [Illustration] tags in this etext represent decorative breaks
between chapters, not Illustrations.
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