'The touch of man,
Raised pigmy mountains, but gigantic tombs,
The touch of Nature raised the mountain's brow.'
At twelve he saw Scawfell
'So haughty and proud,
While its battlements lofty looked down on the cloud.'
Frequent visits at later periods kept his heart aglow with the romance
of these three counties vying so earnestly with each other for supremacy
in the glory of mountain-fell, and garrulous beck, dale and dingle, and
thunderous force. It was in 1871, when he was nearly fifty-three years
old, that he bought from W. J. Linton, the engraver-poet, that Coniston
cottage, as it then was, so closely associated with his name for some
thirty years thereafter. He gave £1,500 for the property, without seeing
it, while lying ill at Matlock. To everybody who knows English
literature Brantwood is a household name. On the steep slope of the
eastern hills, wood-embowered, with moorland above, and a green field
below the highroad, washed by the ripples of the lake on which his boats
rocked--one of which, _The Jumping Jenny_, he had designed, painted 'a
bright blue with a Greek scroll pattern round the gunwale'--it is in all
respects a true poet's paradise. The opinion of Wordsworth was that it
commanded the finest view of Coniston 'Old Man' that was to be had
anywhere. Linton was not a very practical man, choosing his gardener,
not for his skill, but for his shining blue eyes, and letting his
demesne go wild, and his abode to rack and ruin. Ruskin created order
and beauty out of the wilderness, with a rose-garden and a garden for
wild flowers, greatly enlarged the house, made a little harbour on the
shore, and a water-works on the fell, all at considerable outlay,
evidencing by the construction of his reservoir and conduits that
hydraulics and engineering are not best done by untrained enthusiastic
amateurs. In this exquisite retreat began what Mr. Harrison speaks of as
the second period of his career--the period when, except for his Slade
Professorship, he gave himself up, not to the study, for he never can be
said to have studied them--the promulgation of theories about social
economics. The Slade Professorship was an epoch in University life, and
in the history of British art. His classes were crowded. 'That singular
voice of his,' writes a pupil long afterwards, 'which would often hold
all the theatre breathless, haunts me still.' His Oxford lectures were
reprinted as books by Mr. George Allen, formerly a scholar of his at the
Working Man's College, and now become manager of his publishing business
(which, by-the-by, Mr. Allen managed so well as to bring Mr. Ruskin in
some £4,000 a year at a time it was greatly needed). During the
intervals of his professorial duties, and especially after ill-health
compelled their relinquishment, he wrote those invaluable autobiographic
reminiscences contained in 'Præterita' and 'Fors Clavigera'--books the
world will never spare, albeit they are so full of petulant
denunciations, and quaint extravagances, and inconsequent satires. We
forgive all these for the value of the self-revelations of a unique
soul, and for the literary gold-mine they present to the commonwealth of
the English-speaking races. When retired altogether to this Arcadia he
would ramble along the lakeside path, and up the mountain, to the happy
valley of Tarn Hows, or round the water-head to Yewdale, 'my little
nested dale of the Yew,' with its streamlets wandering through the fern,
and its deep water-pockets over which he would stand musing and
questioning them--'How came you to be?' or perchance up Tilberthwaite
Ghyll, with its zig-zagging wooden bridges after the fashion of a Swiss
river-gorge. As he strolled, he would stop to pet some children who,
seeing him coming, would await his kindly greeting, or to chat with some
ancient shepherd, or some housewife at her cottage door, or possibly he
would enter a wayside school-house to puzzle the youngsters with a
division sum respecting the sovereign he would leave for them in the
schoolmaster's hand. The old 'Professor,' as they called him, was
beloved by all, and in his broken years was devotedly cared for and
tended by his cousin and adopted daughter, Mrs. Arthur Severn, who lived
at Brantwood, and who now with her husband owns the estate. We must
remember what he had suffered during his long life, as well as what he
had accomplished. 'As we pass beneath the hills,' says he in 'Modern
Painters,' 'which have been shaken by earthquake and torn by convulsion,
we find periods of perfect repose succeed those of destruction.' He had
married unsuitably to satisfy his parents, and the marriage had been
nullified. Thrice he was passionately in love, and each disappointment
left him sick and despondent, however tenderly remembered and naïvely
talked of in old age. His generous money gifts to relatives, and to
causes like the Guild of St. George, which lay deep in his affections,
as well as, doubtless, some serious lack of lawful 'world-wisdom,' had
virtually dissipated the large fortune left him by his father. He was at
bay, too, with the rest of the world as to his schemes for its
reformation. He had had many serious illnesses, brain fevers included.
At Brantwood, the scenery from his study window, so imposing yet so
tranquillizing, his art collections in every room, his admiring and
sympathetic neighbours, his own inward assurance of right guidance,
combined to give him peace. Among his friends were the Miss Beevers, of
The Thwaite--the house at the far end of the lake, nearly opposite the
one in which Tennyson spent his honeymoon--with whom the good old man
corresponded, and whom he loved with an old-world platonic love
honourable to both sides. They must have an article to themselves, these
'sources and loadstones of all good to the village,' worthy as they are
of remembrance, with their brother, among our literary celebrities.
During the last ten years of his life he gradually grew more and more
feeble, till at length, succumbing to influenza, 'he sank softly
asleep,' when near his eighty-first birthday, with his dearest friends
around him. He was buried in the God's acre of Coniston, without
funereal pomp of black. The pall was of crimson silk embroidered with
wild roses, bearing the motto 'Unto this last.' Later the
beautifully-artistic cross, designed by his secretary, friend, and
authorized biographer, Mr. Collingwood, was erected over the grave. It
has allegorical carvings on it of his book-titles. A medallion likeness
in bronze by Onslow Ford, R.A., was placed in Westminster Abbey.
I have said nothing of Ruskin's ancestry, nothing even of the
'honourable and distinguished merchant,' his father, nor of his loving,
pious, over-careful mother. Neither have I spoken of his education, of
his wanderings and residences in Switzerland and Italy, nor of his royal
gifts of museums and the like for the benefit primarily of artizans. I
have no space to tell of the impulse he gave to art, or to educating
wage-earners through Ruskin colleges and in other ways. His physical
appearance, his personal habits, his daily dealings with his kind, must
be discovered by my readers for themselves. Mr. Collingwood's Life of
him has recently been issued at 2s. 6d., and Mr. Harrison's in 'English
Men of Letters' at 2s. Acquaintance with these should be the duty and
privilege of every educated man and woman.
'The woods, the blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done their
parts for a time, but these do service for ever. Trees for the builder's
yard, flowers for the bride's chamber, corn for the granary, moss for
the grave.
'Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the most honoured
of the earth-children. Unfading, as motionless, the worm frets them not,
and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither blanch in
heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is
entrusted the weaving of the dark, eternal tapestries of the hills, to
them, slow-pencilled, iris-dyed, the tender framing of their endless
imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share
also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the
white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched
meadow the drooping of its cowslip-gold, far above, among the mountains,
the silver lichen-spots rest, star-like, on the stone, and the gathering
orange-stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunset of
a thousand years.'--JOHN RUSKIN: _Modern Painters_.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Hills & Saunders, Oxford._
THE HOUSE AT HERNE HILL IN WHICH RUSKIN WAS BORN IN 1819.]
THE PHILOSOPHER OF BRANTWOOD
JOHN RUSKIN
II.--HIS ART-TEACHING AND HIS BOOKS
'To crib, cabin, and confine in a dull array of formal propositions
the rich exuberance of Mr. Ruskin's thought would be a needless
injury.'--J. A. HOBSON.
'Is there a gospel (of Art) according to Ruskin?' It is Mr. E. T. Cook,
an art-pupil and disciple of his, who asks and answers this question.
He, in 'Studies in Ruskin,' and another Oxford pupil, Mr. W. G.
Collingwood, in 'The Art Teaching of John Ruskin,' agree that their
great teacher did not formulate a creed, though he had definite
fundamental principles to explain to the world, which--however much
overlaid and obscured by eloquent language and elaborate
illustration--were never lost sight of by him, but impregnated all his
writings. As in the New Testament there is a revelation from God through
Jesus Christ, though it contains nothing akin to a Church Catechism or
Westminster Confession of Faith, so in Ruskin there is 'a complete
philosophy of Art' without a concise and formulated system that can be
packed into one's waistcoat pocket. We must find and arrange our canons
for ourselves. The Ruskin 'Gospel of Art'--Mr. Cook's word--or his
'Philosophy of Art'--Mr. Collingwood's word--is merely an old gospel,
with a new application--a philosophy of the position of Art with regard
to God, and the world, and the soul. 'Truth, sincerity, and nobleness'
are essentials of right living, and Art is the outcome and evidence of
the right living of the artist. It is the expression of man's rational,
disciplined delight in the forms and laws of the creation of which he is
a part. The origin of Art is 'imitation touched with delight'--delight,
that is to say, in God's work, and not in a man's own. Beauty, no less
than reality, strength, and morality, is characteristic of true Art as
'an expression of the Creating Spirit of the universe,' whose handiwork
is to be copied. Art is an interpreter of the Divine beauty in things
seen; for the inner life of it is religion, its food is the ocular and
passionate love of Nature, its health is the humility of its artists.
Art looks into the innermost core and centre of phenomena. The true
artist sees and makes others see. The greatest Art is that which conveys
the greatest number of greatest ideas. It is the declaration of the mind
of God-made great men. Fine Art is that in which hand, and head, and
heart have worked equally together. In outline, colour, and shade an
artist is to discipline himself, that he may become skilful in the
seeing of things accurately, and representing them with absolute
fidelity. What he sees accurately, however, he is to represent
imaginatively, so as to arouse the faculty of imagination and a feeling
of praise in others, and to cultivate their nobler instincts, and call
forth and feed their souls. Beauty is of two kinds--typical and
vital--the first lying in those external qualities of bodies which in
some sort represent the Divine attributes; the second in 'the
felicitous fulfilment of function in living things.' Ruskin agrees with
Hogarth that 'all forms of acknowledged beauty are composed exclusively
of curves.' Except in crystals, certain mountain forms, levels of calm
water, and alluvial land, there are no lines nor surfaces of Nature
without curvature. He adds that what curvature is to lines, so is
gradation to shades and colours. He made himself conversant with these
truths by independent study, minute investigation, inexhaustible
industry in sketching.
Architecture, though subject to different rules and modes of handicraft,
is governed also by the same general and spiritual principles. Its
'Seven Lamps' are Sacrifice,--the offering of all that is most costly of
material, intention, execution; Truth,--which demands imagination, but
will not tolerate deception; Power,--realized through observation of
mountain buttresses and domes, cloistered woodland glades, and the
rock-walls of the sea; Beauty,--not as mere mask or covering, but
gracefully fitted to the conditions and uses of the object to be
attained; Life,--expressive of the workman's love of his work, and
knowledge of his ends; Memory,--which haunts the workman with shapes and
colours he has once noted, and which inspires him with ever fresh
ideals; Obedience,--which involves 'chastisement of the passions,
discipline of the intellect, subjection of the will.'
It is in his 'Seven Lamps of Architecture' that the pæan on Giotto's
Campanile occurs, wherein he tells us how, as a boy, he despised it, and
how since then he lived beside it many a day and looked upon it from his
window 'by sunlight and moonlight, noting the bright, smooth, sunny
surface and glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so
white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly
traced in darkness on the eastern sky, that serene height of mountain
alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea-shell.'
His minute observation of form and colour in mountain gloom and mountain
glory, in rushing torrents, and in feathered songster, and his
unrivalled powers of description, must be an inspiration to all
right-minded artists, notwithstanding his unsparing and incisive
criticisms in his 'Notes on Pictures.' His scientific knowledge, too,
stood him in good stead. His words on mountain sculpture, with an
illustration from the Aiguilles or needle-pointed Alpine peaks, too long
for full quotation, may well be cited. 'Nature gives us in these
mountains a clear demonstration of her will. She is here driven to make
fracture the law of being. She cannot tuft the rock-edges with moss, or
round them by water, or hide them with leaves and roots. She is bound to
produce a form, admirable to human beings, by continual breaking away of
substances. And behold--so soon as she is compelled to do this, she
changes the law of fracture itself. "Growth," she seems to say, "is not
essential to my work, nor concealment, nor softness; but curvature is;
and if I must produce my forms by breaking, then the fracture shall be
in curves. If, instead of dew and sunshine, the only instruments I am to
use are the lightning and the frost, then the forked tongues and crystal
wedges shall still work out my laws of tender line. Devastation instead
of nurture may be the task of all my elements, and age after age may
only prolong the renovated ruin; but the appointments of typical beauty
which have been made over all creatures shall not therefore be
abandoned, and the rocks shall be ruled in their perpetual perishing, by
the same ordinances that direct the bending of the reed, and the
blushing of the rose." The cloud, the currents of trickling water, an
interior knot of quartz, help the work of shaping, and the dew "with a
touch more tender than a child's finger--as silent and slight as the
fall of a half-checked tear on a maiden's cheek" help to fix for ever
the form of peak and precipice, and hew the leagues of lifted granite,
into shapes that divide the earth and its kingdoms. Then the colouring
of the mountains is not done only by the chemical constituents of their
rocks, but by the jewellery of the flowers--the dark bell-gentian, the
light blue star-gentian, the alpine rose, the highland heather, the
many-hued blossom-masses, and the golden softness of deep, warm,
amber-coloured mosses.'
It is not always easy to follow Ruskin's own canons of Art in his
exaltation of Turner--as, for instance, in the article of 'Truth touched
with Imagination'--in such a picture as Whitby. There the painter's
cliffs are unnatural and impossible, reminding us more of a straight-cut
pound of cheese than anything ever seen in Nature--specially at Whitby!
We are tempted to praise Turner more for revealing Ruskin than Ruskin
for discovering Turner! Thus, in describing Heysham, it is Ruskin who in
'Harbours of England' gives us the true and very graphic painting, and
Turner a glorified and unrecognisable one. 'A simple, north-country
village on the shore of Morecambe Bay, not in the common sense a
picturesque village; there are no pretty bow-windows, or red roofs, or
rocky steps of entrance to the rustic doors, or quaint gables; nothing
but a single street of thatched and chiefly clay-built cottages ranged
in a somewhat monotonous line, the roofs so green with moss that at
first we hardly discern the houses from the fields and trees. The
village street is closed at the end by a wooden gate, indicating the
little traffic there is on the road through it, giving it the look of a
large farmstead, in which a right of way lies through the yard.' The
rutty roads, the decayed fencing--haystacks and pigstyes--the
parsonage--the church--the craggy limestone rocks amid the brushwood,
and the pleasant turf upon their brows, the gleams of shallow water on
the sandy shore, the fisher-boat on the beach--all help us to see old
Heysham rather through the eyes of the prose-poet than those of the
painter he is lauding.
Opening other--excluding his more voluminous--books, 'Love's Meinie' or
'Proserpina' to wit--the one of birds and the other of flowers--what
exquisite passages meet us on every page! What Ruskinite does not revel
in such as those contrasting the flight of the eagle and the seagull
with that of the swallow, or as that speaking of 'the beauty of the bird
that lives with you in your own houses, and which purifies for you, from
its insect pestilence, the air that you breathe. Thus the sweet domestic
thing has done, for men, at least, these four thousand years. She has
been their companion, not of the home merely, but of the hearth, and the
threshold; companion only endeared by departure, and showing better her
loving-kindness by her faithful return.' She is a type of the stranger,
or the supplicant, herald of our summer, 'who glances through our days
of gladness'--and he gives us much more of the same sweet poetry about
her. Then there are sentences like that outburst of joy at the discovery
of the blue asphodel in the fields beyond Monte Mario--'a spire two feet
high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue
as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of
the like, in Elysian fields, some day!'
Ruskin confessed ignorance of the writings of political economists, of
which he had read none but Adam Smith's--twenty years before--and his
continual travesty of them as though 'buying in the cheapest market and
selling in the dearest'--labour included--was their sole message to the
world, makes it difficult to quote from his more philosophical or social
science works. It must be remembered that Smith had forestalled Ruskin
in stating that wage-earners had a right to a living wage, and that
others, like Jeremy Bentham, had forestalled him in the doctrine of the
'greatest good of the greatest number' underlying his own strictures on
our land system.
In his usual contradictory way he sometimes tells us the sword must
still be whetted to settle international disputes. At others he calls
war the mother of all evils, and writes paragraphs worthy of Carlyle on
the French and English villagers from their respective Drumdrudges,
pitying the peasantry upon whom the losses and cruelties fall, and
denouncing the squires who officer them and lead them to death. Women he
calls upon to exercise their influence in favour of peace, because they
can, if they will, put an end to all wars for ever. The idleness of the
upper classes, and the seeking of outlets for their capital by
financial speculators are, he says, its chief causes, and
ill-accumulated moneys are spent on it. In all this an ever-increasing
multitude of Christians agree with him, as well as in his denunciation
of the inhumanity of mere mercenary commerce uncontrolled by
consideration for others, and in his pleadings for purer and happier
homes, equal opportunities of education, and the glory and grace of
honest labour. When a man who has done much for the good of his fellows
can write of Ruskin in the second phase of his literary career, 'to him
I owe the guidance of my life, all its best impulses, and its worthiest
efforts,' we may be sure his later books were really great,
notwithstanding their blemishes.
[Illustration: (Faithfully yours J Ruskin)
JOHN RUSKIN'S HANDWRITING IN ADVANCED LIFE.]
[Illustration:
MEDALLION ON THE RUSKIN MEMORIAL, DERWENTWATER.
By A. C. Lucchesi.]
VIEWS FROM GRETA HALL
'This Greta Hall is a house on a small eminence, a furlong from
Keswick, in the county of Cumberland. Yes, my dear Sir, here I am,
with Skiddaw at my back--on my right hand the Bassenthwaite Water,
with its majestic _case_ of mountains, all of simplest outline.
Looking slant, direct over the feather of this infamous pen, I see
the sun setting. My God! what a scene! Right before me is a great
_camp_ of single mountains--each in shape resembles a giant's
tent--and to the left, but closer to it far than the Bassenthwaite
Water to my right, is the Lake of Keswick, with its islands and
white sails, and glossy lights of evening,--crowned with green
meadows; but the three remaining sides are encircled by the most
fantastic mountains that ever earthquakes made in sport, as
fantastic as if Nature had laughed herself into the convulsion in
which they were made. Close behind me flows the Greta; I hear its
murmuring distinctly. Then it curves round, almost in a
semi-circle, and is now catching the purple lights of the scattered
clouds above it directly before me.'--_A letter of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's._
[Illustration:
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
From a Painting by G. Dawe, R.A.]
VII
A GREAT LIFE MARRED
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
'This illustrious man, the largest and most spacious intellect, the
subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet
existed among men.'--DE QUINCEY.
In him we have another of our intellectual giants, a many-sided man, a
poet, a theologian, a politician, or, in Charles Lamb's well-known
phrase, a logician, a metaphysician, a bard. He was a fortunate man in
so far as he has attained literary immortality. He was a singularly
unfortunate man in so far as his natural character was deficient in
will-power, and lacking in that subtle but invaluable property known as
common-sense. His story, once you begin it, holds you, like the story of
his own 'long, lank, brown, and ancient Mariner's,' captive to the end,
it is so full of pathetic romance.