“The Early Italian Poets,” up to L100, with Smith and Elder; and endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to induce Thackeray to find a place for other poems in _The Cornhill Magazine._
Mr. W.M. Rossetti, in his book on his brother “as Designer and Writer” and in his “Family Letters,” draws a pleasant picture of the intimacy between the artist and the critic. “At one time,” he says, “I am sure they even loved one another.” But in 1865 Rossetti, never very tolerant of criticism and patronage, took in bad part his friend’s remonstrances about the details of “Venus Verticordia.” Eighteen months later, Ruskin tried to renew the old acquaintance. Rossetti did not return his call; and further efforts on Ruskin’s part, up to 1870, met with little response. But the lecture on Rossetti in “The Art of England” shows that on one side at least “their parting,” as Mr. W.M. Rossetti says, “was not in anger;” and the portrait of 1861, now in the Oxford University Galleries, will remain as a memorial of the ten years’ friendship of the two famous men.
At Red Lion Square, during Lent term, 1855, the three teachers worked together every Thursday evening. With the beginning of the third term, March 29, the increase of the class made it more convenient to divide their forces. Rossetti thenceforward taught the figure on another night of the week; while the elementary and landscape class continued to meet on Thursdays under Ruskin and Lowes Dickinson. In 1856 the elementary and landscape class was further divided, Mr. Dickinson taking Tuesday evenings, and Ruskin continuing the Thursday class, with the help of William Ward as under-master. Later on, G. Allen, J. Bunney, and W. Jeffrey were teachers. Burne-Jones, met in 1856 at Rossetti’s studio, was also pressed into the service for a time.
There were four terms in the Working Men’s College year, the only vacation, except for the fortnight at Christmas, being from the beginning of August to the end of October. Ruskin did not always attend throughout the summer term, though sometimes his class came down to him into the country to sketch. He kept up the work without other intermission until May, 1858, after which the completion of “Modern Painters” and many lecture-engagements took him away for a time. In the spring of 1860 he was back at his old post for a term; but after that he discontinued regular attendance, and went to the Working Men’s College only at intervals, to give addresses or informal lectures to students and friends. On such occasions the “drawing-room” or first floor of the house in which the College was held would be always crowded, with an audience who heard the lecturer at his best; speaking freely among friends out of a full treasure-house “things new and old”–accounts of recent travel, lately-discovered glories of art, and the growing burden of the prophecy that in those years was beginning to take more definite shape in his mind.
As a teacher, Ruskin spared no pains to make the work interesting. He provided–Mr. E. Cooke informs me that he was the first to provide–casts from natural leaves and fruit in place of the ordinary conventional ornament; and he sent a tree to be fixed in a corner of the class-room for light and shade studies. Mr. W. Ward in the preface to the volume of letters already quoted says that he used to bring his minerals and shells, and rare engravings and drawings, to show them.
“His delightful way of talking about these things afforded us most valuable lessons. To give an example: he one evening took for his subject a cap, and with pen and ink showed us how Rembrandt would have etched, and Albert Duerer engraved it. This at once explained to us the different ideas and methods of the two masters. On another evening he would take a subject from Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum,’ and with a large sheet of paper and some charcoal, gradually block in the subject, explaining at the same time the value and effect of the lines and masses.”
And for sketching from nature he would take his class out into the country, and wind up with tea and talk. “It was a treat to hear and see him with his men,” writes Dr. Furnivall.
His object in the work, as he said before the Royal Commission on National Institutions, was _not to make artists_, but to make the workmen better men, to develop their powers and feelings,–to educate them, in short. He always has urged young people intending to study art as a profession to enter the Academy Schools, as Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites did, or to take up whatever other serious course of practical discipline was open to them. But he held very strongly that everybody could learn drawing, that their eyes could be brightened and their hands steadied, and that they could be taught to appreciate the great works of nature and of art, without wanting to make pictures or to exhibit and sell them.
It was with this intention that he wrote the “Elements of Drawing” in 1856, supplemented by the “Elements of Perspective” in 1859; the illustrations for the book were characteristic sketches by the author, beautifully cut by his pupil, W.H. Hooper, who was one of a band of engravers and copyists formed by these classes at the Working Men’s College. In spite of the intention not to make artists by his teaching, Ruskin could not prevent some of his pupils from taking up art as a profession; and those who did so became, in their way, first-rate men. George Allen as a mezzotint engraver, Arthur Burgess as a draughtsman and wood-cutter, John Bunney as a painter of architectural detail, W. Jeffery as an artistic photographer, E. Cooke as a teacher, William Ward as a facsimile copyist, have all done work whose value deserves acknowledgment, all the more because it was not aimed at popular effect, but at the severe standard of the greater schools. But these men were only the side issue of the Working Men’s College enterprise. Its real result was in the proof that the labouring classes could be interested in Art; and that the capacity shown by the Gothic workman had not entirely died out of the nation, in spite of the interregnum, for a full century, of manufacture. And the experience led Ruskin forward to wider views on the nature of the arts, and on the duties of philanthropic effort and social economy.
CHAPTER VIII
“MODERN PAINTERS” CONTINUED (1855-1856)
It was in the year 1855 that Ruskin first published “Notes on the Royal Academy and other Exhibitions.” He had been so often called upon to write his opinion of Pre-Raphaelite pictures, either privately or to the newspapers, or to mark his friends’ catalogues, that he found at last less trouble in printing his notes once for all. The new plan was immediately popular; three editions of the pamphlet were called for between June 1 and July 1. Next year he repeated the “Notes” and six editions were sold.
In spite of a dissentient voice here and there, he was really by that time recognised as the leading authority upon taste in painting. He was trusted by a great section of the public, who had not failed to notice how completely he and his friends were winning the day. The proof of it was in the fact that they were being imitated on all sides; Ruskinism in writing and Pre-Raphaelitism in painting were becoming fashionable.
But at the same time the movement gave rise to the Naturalist-landscape school, a group of painters who threw overboard the traditions of Turner and Prout, Constable and Harding, and the rest, just as the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren threw over the Academical masters. For such men their study was their picture; they devised tents and huts in wild glens and upon waste moors, and spent weeks in elaborating their details directly from nature, instead of painting at home from sketches on the spot.
This was the fulfilment of his advice to young artists; and so far as young artists worked in this way, for purposes of study, he encouraged them. But he did not fail to point out that this was not all that could be required of them. Even such a work as Brett’s “Val d’Aosta,” marvellous as it was in observation and finish, was only the beginning of a new era, not its consummation. It was not the painting of detail that could make a great artist; but the knowledge of it, and the masterly use of such knowledge. A great landscapist would know the facts and effects of nature, just as Tintoret knew the form of the human figure; and he would treat them with the same freedom, as the means of expressing great ideas, of affording by the imagination noble grounds for noble emotion, which, as Ruskin had been writing at Vevey in 1854, was poetry. Meanwhile the public and the critic ought to become familiar with the aspects of nature, in order to recognise the difference between the true poetry of painting, and the mere empty sentimentalism which was only the rant and bombast of landscape art.
With such feelings as these he wrote the third and fourth volumes of “Modern Painters,” (published respectively January 15 and April 14, 1856). The work was afterwards interrupted only by a recurrence of his old cough, in the exceptionally cold summer of 1855. He went down to Tunbridge Wells, where his cousin, William Richardson of Perth, was practising as a doctor; it was not long before the cough gave way to treatment, and he was as busy as ever. About October of that year he wrote to Mrs. Carlyle as follows, in a letter printed by Professor C.E. Norton, conveniently summing up his year:
“Not that I have not been busy–and very busy, too. I have written, since May, good six hundred pages, had them rewritten, cut up, corrected, and got fairly ready for press–and am going to press with the first of them on Gunpowder Plot day, with a great hope of disturbing the Public Peace in various directions. Also, I have prepared above thirty drawings for engravers this year, retouched the engravings (generally the worst part of the business), and etched some on steel myself. In the course of the six hundred pages I have had to make various remarks on German Metaphysics, on Poetry, Political Economy, Cookery, Music, Geology, Dress, Agriculture, Horticulture, and Navigation,[6] all of which subjects I have had to ‘read up’ accordingly, and this takes time. Moreover, I have had my class of workmen out sketching every week in the fields during the summer; and have been studying Spanish proverbs with my father’s partner, who came over from Spain to see the Great Exhibition. I have also designed and drawn a window for the Museum at Oxford; and have every now and then had to look over a parcel of five or six new designs for fronts and backs to the said Museum.
[Footnote 6: Most of these subjects will be easily recognised in “Modern Painters,” Vols. III. and IV. The “Navigation” refers to the “Harbours of England.”]
“During my above-mentioned studies of horticulture, I became dissatisfied with the Linnaean, Jussieuan, and Everybody-elseian arrangement of plants, and have accordingly arranged a system of my own; and unbound my botanical book, and rebound it in brighter green, with all the pages through-other, and backside foremost–so as to cut off all the old paging numerals; and am now printing my new arrangement in a legible manner, on interleaved foolscap. I consider this arrangement one of my great achievements of the year. My studies of political economy have induced me to think also that nobody knows anything about that; and I am at present engaged in an investigation, on independent principles, of the natures of money, rent, and taxes, in an abstract form, which sometimes keeps me awake all night. My studies of German metaphysics have also induced me to think that the Germans don’t know anything about _them_; and to engage in a serious enquiry into the meaning of Bunsen’s great sentence in the beginning of the second volume of the ‘Hippolytus,’ about the Finite realization of Infinity; which has given me some trouble.
“The course of my studies of Navigation necessitated my going to Deal to look at the Deal boats; and those of geology to rearrange all my minerals (and wash a good many, which, I am sorry to say, I found wanted it). I have also several pupils, far and near, in the art of illumination; an American young lady to direct in the study of landscape painting, and a Yorkshire young lady to direct in the purchase of Turners,–and various little bye things besides. But I am coming to see you.”
The tone of humorous exaggeration of his discoveries and occupations was very characteristic. But he was then growing into the habit of leaving the matter in hand, as he often did afterwards, to follow side issues, and to take up new studies with a hasty and divided attention; the result of which was seen in his sub-title for the third volume of “Modern Painters”–“Of Many Things”; which amused his readers not a little. But that he still had time for his friends is seen in the account of a visit to Denmark Hill, written this year by James Smetham.
“I walked there through the wintry weather, and got in about dusk. One or two gossiping details will interest you before I give you what I care for; and so I will tell you that he has a large house with a lodge, and a valet and footman and coachman, and grand rooms glittering with pictures, chiefly Turner’s, and that his father and mother live with him, or he with them…. His father is a fine old gentleman, who has a lot of bushy gray hair, and eyebrows sticking up all rough and knowing, with a comfortable way of coming up to you with his hands in his pockets, and making _you_ comfortable, and saying, in answer to your remark, that ‘John’s’ prose works are pretty good. His mother is a ruddy, dignified, richly dressed old gentlewoman of seventy-five, who knows Chamonix better than Camberwell; evidently a _good_ old lady, with the ‘Christian Treasury’tossing about on the table. She puts ‘John’ down, and holds her own opinions, and flatly contradicts him; and he receives all her opinions with a soft reverence and gentleness that is pleasant to witness….
“I wish I could reproduce a good impression of ‘John’ for you, to give you the notion of his ‘perfect gentleness and lowlihood.’ He certainly bursts out with a remark, and in a contradictious way, but only because he believes it, with no air of dogmatism or conceit. He is different at home from that which he is in a lecture before a mixed audience, and there is a spiritual sweetness in the half-timid expression of his eyes; and in bowing to you, as in taking wine, with (if I heard aright) ‘I drink to thee,’ he had a look that has followed me, a look bordering on tearful.
“He spent some time in this way. Unhanging a Turner from the wall of a distant room, he brought it to the table and put it in my hands; then we talked; then he went up into his study to fetch down some illustrative print or drawing; in one case, a literal view which he had travelled fifty miles to make, in order to compare with the picture. And so he kept on gliding all over the house, hanging and unhanging, and stopping a few minutes to talk.”
And yet there were many with whom he had to deal who did not look at things in his light; who took his criticism as personal attack, and resented it with bitterness. There is a story told (but not by himself) about one of the “Notes on the Academy,” which he was then publishing–how he wrote to an artist therein mentioned that he regretted he could not speak more favourably of his picture, but he hoped it would make no difference in their friendship. The artist replied (so they say) in these terms: “Dear Ruskin,–Next time I meet you, I shall knock you down; but I hope it will make no difference in our friendship.” “Damn the fellow! why doesn’t he stand up for his friends?” said another disappointed acquaintance. Perhaps Ruskin, secure in his “house with a lodge, and a valet and footman and coachman,” hardly realized that a cold word from his pen sometimes meant the failure of an important Academy picture, and serious loss of income–that there was bitter truth underlying _Punch’s_ complaint of the Academician:
“I paints and paints.
Hears no complaints,
And sells before I’m dry;
Till savage Ruskin
Sticks his tusk in,
And nobody will buy.”
Against these incidents should be set such an anecdote as the following, told by Mr. J.J. Ruskin in a letter of June 3, 1858:
“Vokins wished me to name to you that Carrick, when he read your criticism on ‘Weary Life,’ came to him with the cheque Vokins had given, and said your remarks were all right, and that he could not take the price paid by Vokins the buyer; he would alter the picture. Vokins took back the money, only agreeing to see the picture when it was done.”
John Ruskin in reply said he did not see why Carrick should have returned the cheque.
A letter from Mrs. Browning describes a visit to Denmark Hill, and ends,–“I like Mr. Ruskin very much, and so does Robert; very gentle, yet earnest–refined and truthful. I like him very much. We count him one among the valuable acquaintances made this year in England.” This has been dated 1855; but Ruskin, writing to Miss Mitford from Glenfinlas, 17th August, 1853, says, “I had the pleasure this spring, of being made acquainted with your dear Elizabeth Browning, as well as with her husband. I was of course prepared to like _her_, but I did not expect to like _him_ as much as I did. I think he is really a very fine fellow, and _she_ is the only sensible woman I have yet met with on the subject of Italian politics. Evidently a noble creature in all things.” In June, 1850, he had met Robert Browning, on the invitation of Coventry Patmore, and said: “He is the only person whom I have ever heard talk ration-ally about the Italians, though on the Liberal side.”
In these volumes of “Modern Painters” he had to discuss the Mediaeval and Renaissance spirit in its relation to art, and to illustrate from Browning’s poetry, “unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages, always vital and right and profound; so that in the matter of art there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his.” This was written twenty-five years before the Browning Society was heard of, and at a time when the style of Browning was an offence to most people. To Ruskin, also, it had been some, thing of a puzzle; and he wrote to the poet, asking him to explain himself; which the poet accordingly did.
That Ruskin was open to conviction and conversion could be shown from the difference in his tone of thought about poetry before and after this period; that he was the best of friends with the man who took him to task for narrowness, may be seen from the following letter, written on the next Christmas Eve:
“MY DEAR MR. RUSKIN,
“Your note having just arrived, Robert deputes me to write for him while he dresses to go out on an engagement. It is the evening. All the hours are wasted, since the morning, through our not being found at the Rue de Grenelle, but here–and our instinct of self-preservation or self-satisfaction insists on our not losing a moment more by our own fault.
“Thank you, thank you for sending us your book, and also for writing my husband’s name in it. It will be the same thing as if you had written mine–except for the pleasure, as you say, which is greater so. How good and kind you are!
“And not well. That is worst. Surely you would be better if you had the summer in winter we have here. But I was to write only a word–Let it say how affectionately we regard you.
“ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
“3, RUE DU COLYSEE,
“_Thursday Evening, 24th” (December_, 1855).
CHAPTER IX
“THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART” (1857-1858)
The humble work of the drawing-classes at Great Ormond Street was teaching Ruskin even more than he taught his pupils. It was showing him how far his plans were practicable; how they should be modified; how they might be improved; and especially what more, beside drawing-classes, was needed to realize his ideal. He was anxiously willing to co-operate with every movement, to join hands with any kind of man, to go anywhere, do anything that might promote the cause he had at heart.
Already at the end of 1854 he had given three lectures, his second course, at the Architectural Museum, specially addressed to workmen in the decorative trades. His subjects were design and colour, and his illustrations were chiefly drawn from mediaeval illumination, which he had long been studying. These were informal, quasi-private affairs, which nevertheless attracted notice owing to the celebrity of the speaker. It would have been better if his addresses had been carefully prepared and authentically published; for a chance word here and there raised replies about matters of detail in which his critics thought they had gained a technical advantage, adding weight to his father’s desire not to see him “expose himself” in this way. There were no more lectures until the beginning of 1857.
On January 23rd, 1857, he spoke before the Architectural Association upon “The Influence of Imagination in Architecture,” repeating and amplifying what he had said at Edinburgh about the subordinate value of proportion, and the importance of sculptured ornament based on natural forms. This of course would involve the creation of a class of stone-carvers who could be trusted with the execution of such work. Once grant the value of it, and public demand would encourage the supply, and the workmen would raise themselves in the effort.
A louder note was sounded in an address at the St. Martin’s School of Art, Castle Street, Long Acre (April 3rd, 1857), where, speaking after George Cruikshank, his old friend–practically his first master–and an enthusiastic philanthropist and temperance advocate, Ruskin gave his audience a wider view of art than they had known before: “the kind of painting they most wanted in London was painting cheeks red with health.” This was anticipating the standpoint of the Oxford Lectures, and showed how the inquiry was beginning to take a much broader aspect.
Another work in a similar spirit, the North London School of Design, had been prosperously started by a circle of men under Pre-Raphaelite influence, and led by Thomas Seddon. He had given up historical and poetic painting for naturalistic landscape, and had returned from the East with the most valuable studies completed, only to break down and die prematurely. His friends, among them Holman Hunt, were collecting money to buy from the widow his picture of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, to present it to the National Gallery as a memorial of him; and at a meeting for the purpose, Ruskin spoke warmly of his labours in the cause of the working classes.
In the summer of 1857 the Art Treasures Exhibition was held at Manchester, and Ruskin was invited to lecture. The theme he chose was “The Political Economy of Art.” He had been studying political economy for some time back, but, as we saw from his letter to Carlyle, he had found no answer in the ordinary text-books for the questions he tried to put. He wanted to know what Bentham and Ricardo and Mill, the great authorities, would advise him as to the best way of employing artists, of educating workmen, of elevating public taste, of regulating patronage; but these subjects were not in their programme. And so he put together his own thoughts into two lectures upon Art considered as Wealth: first, how to get it; next, how to use it.[7]
[Footnote 7: July 10 and 13, 1857. He went to Manchester from Oxford, where he had been staying with the Liddells, writing enthusiastically of the beauty of their children and the charm of their domestic life.]
There were very few points in these lectures that were not vigorously contested at the moment, and conceded in the sequel–in some form or other. The paternal function of government, the right of the state to interfere in matters beyond its traditional range, its duty with regard to education–all this was quite contrary to the prevailing habits of thought of the time, especially at Manchester, the headquarters of the _laissez faire_ school; but to Ruskin, who, curiously enough, had just then been referring sarcastically to German philosophy, knowing it only at second-hand, and unaware of Hegel’s political work–to him this Platonic conception of the state was the only possible one, as it is to most people nowadays. In the same way, his practical advice has been accepted, perhaps unwittingly, by our times. We do now understand the difference between artistic decoration and machine-made wares; we do now try to preserve ancient monuments, and to use art as a means of education. And we are in a fair way, it seems, of lowering the price of modern pictures, as he bids us, to “not more than L500 for an oil picture and L100 for a water-colour.”
After a visit to the Trevelyans at Wallington he went with his parents to Scotland; for his mother, now beginning to grow old, wanted to revisit the scenes of her youth. They went to the Highlands and as far north as the Bay of Cromarty, and then returned by way of the Abbeys of the Lowlands, to look up Turner sites, as he had done in 1845 on the St. Gothard. From the enjoyment of this holiday he was recalled to London by a letter from Mr. Wornum saying that he could arrange the Turner drawings at the National Gallery.
His first letter on the National Gallery, in 1847, has been noticed. He had written again to _The Times_ (December 29th, 1852), pressing the same point–namely, that if the pictures were put under glass no cleaning nor restoring would be needed; and that the Gallery ought not to be considered as a grand hall, decorated with pictures, but as a convenient museum, with a chronological sequence of the best works of all schools,–every picture hung on the line and accompanied by studies for it, if procurable, and engravings from it.
Now–in 1857–question was raised of removing the National Gallery from Trafalgar Square. The South Kensington Museum was being formed, and the whole business of arranging the national art treasures was gone into by a Royal Commission, consisting of Lord Broughton (in the chair), Dean Milman, Prof. Faraday, Prof. Cockerell, and George Richmond. Ruskin was examined before them on April 6th, and re-stated the opinions he had written to _The Times_, adding that he would like to see two National Galleries–one of popular interest, containing such works as would catch the public eye and enlist the sympathy of the untaught; and another containing only the cream of the collections, in pictures, sculpture and the decorative crafts, arranged for purposes of study. This was suggested as an ideal; of course, it would involve more outlay, and less display, than any Parliamentary vote would sanction, or party leader risk.
Another question of importance was the disposal of the pictures and sketches which Turner had left to the nation. Ruskin was one of the executors under the will; but, on finding that, though Turner’s intention was plain, there were technical informalities which would make the administration anything but easy, he declined to act. It was not until 1856 that the litigation was concluded, and Turner’s pictures and sketches were handed to the Trustees of the National Gallery. Ruskin, whose want of legal knowledge had made his services useless before, now felt that he could carry out the spirit of Turner’s will by offering to arrange the sketches; which were in such a state of confusion that only some person with knowledge of the artist’s habits of work and subjects could, so to speak, _edit_ them; and the editor would need no ordinary skill, patience and judgment, into the bargain.
Meanwhile, for that winter (1856-7) a preliminary exhibition was held of Turner’s oil-paintings, with a few water-colours, at Marlborough House, then the headquarters of the Department of Science and Art, soon afterwards removed to South Kensington. Ruskin wrote a catalogue, with analysis of Turner’s periods of development and characteristics; which made the collection intelligible and interesting to curious sight-seers. They showed their appreciation by taking up five editions in rapid succession.
Just before lecturing at Manchester, he wrote again on the subject to _The Times_; and in September his friend R.N. Wornum, Director of the National Gallery in succession to Eastlake and Uwins, wrote–as we saw–that he might arrange the sketches as he pleased. He returned from Scotland, and set to work on October 7th.
It was strange employment for a man of his powers; almost as removed from the Epicurean Olympus of “cultured ease” popularly assigned to him, as night-school teaching and lecturing to workmen. But, beside that it was the carrying out of Turner’s wishes, he always had a certain love for experimenting in manual toil; and this was work in which his extreme neatness and deftness of hand was needed, no less than his knowledge and judgment. During the winter for full six months, he and his two assistants worked, all day and every day, among the masses of precious rubbish that had been removed from Queen Anne Street to the National Gallery.
Mr. J.J. Ruskin wrote, on February 19 and 21, 1852:
“I have just been through Turner’s house with Griffith. His labour is more astonishing than his genius. There are L80,000 of oil pictures done and undone–Boxes half as big as your Study Table, filled with Drawings and Sketches. There are Copies of Liber Studiorum to fill all your Drawers and more, and House Walls of proof plates in Reams–they may go at 1/-each….
“Nothing since Pompeii so impressed me as the interior of Turner’s house; the accumulated dust of 40 years partially cleared off; Daylight for the first time admitted by opening a window on the finest productions of art buried for 40 years. The Drawing Room has, it is reckoned, L25,000 worth of proofs, and sketches, and Drawings, and Prints. It is amusing to hear Dealers saying there can be no Liber Studiorums–when I saw neatly packed and well labelled as many Bundles of Liber Studiorum as would fill your entire Bookcase, and England and Wales proofs in packed and labelled Bundles like Reams of paper, as I told you, piled nearly to Ceiling …
“The house must be dry as a Bone–the parcels were apparently quite uninjured. The very large pictures were spotted, but not much. They stood leaning against another in the large low Rooms. Some _finished_ go to Nation, many unfinished _not_: no frames. Two are given unconditional of Gallery Building–_very fine_: if (and this is a condition) _placed beside Claude._ The style much like the laying on in Windmill Lock in Dealer’s hands, which, now it is cleaned, comes out a real Beauty. I believe Turner loved it. The will desires all to be framed and repaired and put into the best showing state; as if he could not release his money to do this till he was dead. The Top of his Gallery is one ruin of Glass and patches of paper, now only just made weather-proof …
“I saw in Turner’s Rooms, _Geo. Morlands_ and _Wilsons_ and _Claudes_ and _portraits_ in various stiles _all by Turner._ He copied every man, was every man first, and took up his own style, casting all others away. It seems to me you may keep your money and revel for ever and for nothing among Turner’s Works.”
Among the quantities so recklessly thrown aside for dust, damp, soot, mice and worms to destroy–some 15,000 Ruskin reckoned at first, 19,000 later on–there were many fine drawings, which had been used by the engravers, and vast numbers of interesting and valuable studies in colour and in pencil. Four hundred of these were extricated from the chaos, and with infinite pains cleaned, flattened, mounted, dated and described, and placed in sliding frames in cabinets devised by Ruskin, or else in swivel frames, to let both sides of the paper be seen. The first results of the work were shown in an Exhibition at Marlborough House during the winter, for which he wrote another catalogue. Of the whole collection he began a more complete account, which was too elaborate to be finished in that form; but in 1881 he published a “Catalogue of the Drawings and Sketches of J M.W. Turner, R.A., at present exhibited in the National Gallery,” so that his plan was practically fulfilled.
During 1858 Ruskin continued to lecture at various places on subjects connected with his Manchester addresses–the relation of art to manufacture, and especially the dependence of all great architectural design upon sculpture or painting of organic form. The first of the series was given at the opening of the Architectural Museum at South Kensington, January 13th, 1858, entitled “The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations;” in which he showed that naturalism, as opposed to meaningless pattern-making, was always a sign of life. For example, the strength of the Greek, Florentine and Venetian art arose out of the search for truth, not, as it is often supposed, out of striving after an ideal of beauty; and as soon as nature was superseded by recipe, the greatest schools hastened to their fall. From which he concluded that modern design should always be founded on natural form, rather than upon the traditional patterns of the east or of the mediaevals.
On February 16th he spoke on “The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art and Policy,” at Tunbridge Wells; a subject similar to that of his address to the St. Martin’s School of the year before, but amplified into a plea for the use of wrought-iron ornament, as in the new Oxford Museum, then building, and on April 25th he again addressed St. Martin’s School.
The Oxford Museum was an experiment in the true Gothic revival. The architects, Sir Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward, had allowed their workmen to design parts of the detail, such as capitals and spandrils, quite in the spirit of Ruskin’s teaching, and the work was accordingly of deep interest to him. So far back as April, 1856, he had given an address to the men employed at the Museum, whom he met, on Dr. Acland’s invitation, at the Workmen’s Reading Rooms. He said that his object was not to give some labouring men the chance of becoming masters of other labouring men, and to help the few at the expense of the many, but to lead them to those sources of pleasure, and power over their own minds and hands, that more educated people possess. He did not sympathize with the socialism that had been creeping into vogue since 1848. He thought existing social arrangements good, and he agreed with his friends, the Carlyles, who had found that it was only the incapable who could not get work. But it was the fault of the wealthy and educated that working people were not better trained; it was not the working-men’s fault, at bottom. The modern architect used his workman as a mere tool; while the Gothic spirit set him free as an original designer, to gain–not more wages and higher social rank, but pleasure and instruction, the true happiness that lies in good work well done.
To explain the design of the Oxford Museum and to enlist support, he wrote two letters to Dr. Acland (May 25th, 1858, and January 20th, 1859), which formed part of a small book, reporting its aims and progress, illustrated with an engraving of one of the workmen’s capitals. Ruskin himself contributed both time and money to the work, and his assistance was not unrecognised. In 1858 “Honorary Studentships” (i.e., fellowships) were created at Christ Church by the Commissioners’ ordinances. At the first election held, December 6th, 1858, there were chosen for the compliment Ruskin, Gladstone, Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, Dr. (Sir) H.W. Acland, and Sir F.H. Gore Ouseley. At the second, December 15th, 1858, were elected Henry Hallam, the Earl of Stanhope, the Earl of Elgin, the Marquis of Dalhousie and Viscount Canning.
Parallel with this movement for educating the “working-class,” there was the scheme for the improvement of middle-class education, which was then going on at Oxford–the beginning of University Extension–supported by the Rev. F. Temple (later Archbishop of Canterbury), and Mr. (afterwards Sir) Thomas Dyke Acland. Ruskin was heartily for them; and in a letter on the subject, he tried to show how the teaching of Art might be made to work in with the scheme. He did not think that in this plan, any more than at the Working Men’s College, there need be an attempt to teach drawing with a view to forming artists; but there were three objects they might hold in view: the first, to give every student the advantage of the happiness and knowledge which the study of Art conveys; the next, to enforce some knowledge of Art amongst those who were likely to become patrons or critics; and the last, _to leave no Giotto lost among hill shepherds._
CHAPTER X
“MODERN PAINTERS” CONCLUDED (1838-1860)
Oxford and old friends did not monopolise Ruskin’s attention: he was soon seen at Cambridge–on the same platform with Richard Redgrave, R.A., the representative of Academicism and officialism–at the opening of the School of Art for workmen on October 29th, 1858. His Inaugural Address struck a deeper note, a wider chord, than previous essays; it was the forecast of the last volume of “Modern Painters,” and it sketched the train of thought into which he had been led during his tour abroad, that summer.
The battles between faith and criticism, between the historical and the scientific attitudes, which had been going on in his mind, were taking a new form. At the outset, we saw, naturalism overpowered respect for tradition–in the first volume of “Modern Painters;” then the historical tendency won the day, in the second volume. Since that time, the critical side had been gathering strength, by his alliance with liberal movements and by his gradual detachment from associations that held him to the older order of thought. As in his lonely journey of 1845 he first took independent ground upon questions of religion and social life, so in 1858, once more travelling alone, he was led by his meditations,–freed from the restraining presence of his parents–to conclusions which he had been all these years evading, yet finding at last inevitable.
He went abroad for a third attempt to write and illustrate his History of Swiss Towns. He spent part of May on the Upper Rhine between Basle and Schaffhausen, June and half of July on the St. Gothard route and at Bellinzona. In reflecting over the sources of Swiss character, as connected with the question of the nature of art and its origin in morality, he was struck with the fact that all the virtues of the Swiss did not make them artistic. Compared with most nations they were as children in painting, music and poetry. And, indeed, they ranked with the early phases of many great nations–the period of pristine simplicity “uncorrupted by the arts.”
From Bellinzona he went to Turin on his way to the Vaudois Valleys, where he meant to compare the Waldensian Protestants with the Swiss. Accidentally he saw Paul Veronese’s “Queen of Sheba” and other Venetian pictures; and so fell to comparing a period of fully ripened art with one of artlessness; discovering that the mature art, while it appeared at the same time with decay in morals, did not spring from that decay, but was rooted in the virtues of the earlier age. He grasped a clue to the puzzle, in the generalisation that Art is the product of human happiness; it is contrary to asceticism; it is the expression of pleasure. But when the turning point of national progress is once reached, and art is regarded as the laborious incitement to pleasure,–no longer the spontaneous blossom and fruit of it,–the decay sets in for art as for morality. Art, in short, is created _by_ pleasure, not _for_ pleasure. The standard of thought, the attitude of mind, of the Waldensians, he now perceived to be quite impossible for himself. He could not look upon every one outside their fold as heathens and publicans; he could not believe that the pictures of Paul Veronese were works of iniquity, nor that the motives of great deeds in earlier ages were lying superstitions. He took courage to own to himself and others that it was no longer any use trying to identify his point of view with that of Protestantism. He saw both Protestants and Roman Catholics, in the perspective of history, converging into a primitive, far distant, ideal unity of Christianity, in which he still believed; but he could take neither side, after this.
The first statement of the new point of view was, as we said, the Inaugural Lecture of the Cambridge School of Art. The next important utterance was at Manchester, February 22nd, 1859, where he spoke on the “Unity of Art,” by which he meant–not the fraternity of handicrafts with painting, as the term is used nowadays–but that, in whatever branch of Art, the spirit of Truth or Sincerity is the same. In this lecture there is a very important passage showing how he had at last got upon firm ground in the question of art and morality: “_I do_ NOT _say in the least that in order to be a good painter you must be a good man_; but I do say that in order to be a good natural painter there must be strong elements of good in the mind, however warped by other parts of the character.” So emphatic a statement deserves more attention than it has received from readers and writers who assume to judge Ruskin’s views after a slight acquaintance with his earlier works. He was well aware himself that his mind had been gradually enlarging, and his thoughts changing; and he soon saw as great a difference between himself at forty and at twenty-five, as he had formerly seen between the Boy poet and the Art critic. He became as anxious to forget his earlier books, as he had been to forget his verse-writing; and when he came to collect his “Works,” these lectures, under the title of “The Two Paths,” were (with “The Political Economy of Art”) the earliest admitted into the library.
After this Manchester lecture he took a driving tour in Yorkshire–posting in the old-fashioned way–halting at Bradford for the lecture on “Modern Manufacture and Design” (March 1st), and ending with a visit to the school at Winnington, of which more in a later chapter.
In 1859 the last Academy Notes, for the time being, were published. The Pre-Raphaelite cause had been fully successful, and the new school of naturalist landscape was rapidly asserting itself. Old friends were failing, such as Stanfield, Lewis, and Roberts: but new men were growing up, among whom Ruskin welcomed G.D. Leslie, F. Goodall, J.C. Hook,–who had come out of his “Pre-Raphaelite measles” into the healthy naturalism of “Luff Boy!”–Clarence Whaite, Henry Holiday, and John Brett, who showed the “Val d’Aosta.” Millais’ “Vale of Rest” was the picture which attracted most notice: something of the old rancour against the school was revived in the _Morning Herald_, which called his works “impertinences,” “contemptible,” “indelible disgrace,” and so on. It was the beginning of a transition from the delicacy of the Pre-Raphaelite Millais to his later style; and as such the preacher of “All great art is delicate” could not entirely defend it. But the serious strength of the imagination and the power of the execution he praised with unexpected warmth.
He then started on the last tour abroad with his parents. He had been asked, rather pointedly, by the National Gallery Commission, whether he had seen the great German museums, and had been obliged to reply that he had not. Perhaps it occurred to him or to his father that he ought to see the pictures at Berlin and Dresden and Munich, even though he heartily disliked the Germans with their art and their language and everything that belonged to them,–except Holbein and Duerer. By the end of July the travellers were in North Switzerland; and they spent September in Savoy, returning home by October 7th.
Old Mr. Ruskin was now in his seventy-fifth year and his desire was to see the great work finished before he died. There had been some attempt to write this last volume of “Modern Painters” in the previous winter, but it had been put off until after the visit to Germany had completed a study of the great Venetian painters–especially Titian and Veronese. Now at last, in the autumn of 1859, he finally set to work on the writing.
The assertion of Turner’s genius had been necessary in 1843, but Turner was long since dead; his fame was thoroughly vindicated; his bequest to the nation dealt with, so far as possible. Early Christian Art was recognised–almost beyond its claims. The Pre-Raphaelites and naturalistic landscapists no longer needed the hand which “Modern Painters” had held out to them by the way. Of the great triad of Venice, Tintoret had been expounded, Veronese and Titian were now taken up and treated with tardy, but ample recognition.
And now, after twenty years of labour, Ruskin had established himself as the recognised leader of criticism and the exponent of painting and architecture. He had created a department of literature all his own. He had enriched the art of England with examples of a new and beautiful draughtsmanship, and the language with passages of poetic description and eloquent declamation, quite, in their way, unrivalled. He had built up a theory of art, so far uncontested; and thrown new light on the Middle Ages and Renaissance, illustrating, in a way then novel, their chronicles by their remains. He had beaten down opposition, risen above detraction, and won the prize of honour–only to realise, as he received it, that the fight had been but a pastime tournament, after all; and to hear, through the applause, the enemy’s trumpet sounding to battle. For now, without the camp, there were realities to face; as to Art–“the best in this kind are but shadows.”
BOOK III
HERMIT AND HERETIC
(1860-1870)
CHAPTER I
“UNTO THIS LAST” (1860-1861)
At forty years of age Ruskin finished “Modern Painters.” From that time art was sometimes his text, rarely his theme. He used it as the opportunity, the vehicle, so to say, for teachings of wider range and deeper import; teachings about life as a whole, conclusions in ethics and economics and religion, to which he sought to lead others, as he was led, by the way of art.
During the time when he was preaching his later doctrines, he wished to suppress the interfering evidences of the earlier. He let his works on art run out of print, not for the benefit of second-hand booksellers, but in the hope that he could fix his audience upon the burden of his prophecy for the time being. But the youthful works were still read; high prices were paid for them, or they were smuggled in from America. And when the epoch of “Fors” had passed, he agreed to the reprinting of all that early material. He called it obsolete and trivial; others find it interestingly biographical–perhaps even classical.
This year, then, 1860, the year of the Italian Kingdom, of Garibaldi, and of the beginning of the American war, marks his turning point, from the early work, summed up in the old “Selections,” to the later work.
Until he was forty, Mr. Ruskin was a writer on art; after that his art was secondary to ethics. Until he was forty he was a believer in English Protestantism; afterwards he could not reconcile current beliefs with the facts of life as he saw them, and had to reconstruct his creed from the foundations. Until he was forty he was a philanthropist, working heartily with others in a definite cause, and hoping for the amendment of wrongs, without a social upheaval. Even in the beginning of 1860, in his evidence before the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Institutions, he was ready with plans for amusing and instructing the labouring classes, and noting in them a “thirsty desire” for improvement. But while his readiness to make any personal sacrifice, in the way of social and philanthropic experiment, and his interest in the question were increasing, he became less and less sanguine about the value of such efforts as the Working Men’s College, and less and less ready to co-operate with others in their schemes. He began to see that no tinkering at social breakages was really worth while; that far more extensive repairs were needed to make the old ship seaworthy.
So he set himself, by himself, to sketch the plans for the repairs. Naturally sociable, and accustomed to the friendly give-and-take of a wide acquaintance, he withdrew from the busy world into a busier solitude. During the next few years he lived much alone among the Alps, or at home, thinking out the problem; sometimes feeling, far more acutely than was good for clear thought, the burden of the mission that was laid upon him. In March, 1863, he wrote from his retreat at Mornex to Norton:
“The loneliness is very great, and the peace in which I am at present is only as if I had buried myself in a tuft of grass on a battlefield wet with blood–for the cry of the earth about me is in my ears continually, if I do not lay my head to the very ground.”
And a few months later:
“I am still very unwell, and tormented between the longing for rest and lovely life, and the sense of this terrific call of human crime for resistance and of human misery for help, though it seems to me as the voice of a river of blood which can but sweep me down in the midst of its black clots, helpless.”
Sentences like these, passages here and there in the last volume of “Modern Painters,” and still more, certain passages omitted from that volume, show that about 1860 something of a cloud had been settling over him,–a sense of the evil of the world, a horror of great darkness. In his earlier years, his intense emotion and vivid imagination had enabled him to read into pictures of Tintoret or Turner, into scenes of nature and sayings of great books, a meaning or a moral which he so vividly communicated to the reader as to make it thenceforward part and parcel of the subject, however it came there to begin with. It is useless to wonder whether Turner, for instance, consciously meant what Ruskin found in his works. A great painter does not paint without thought, and such thought is apt to show itself whether he will or no. But it needs imaginative sympathy to detect and describe the thought. And when that sympathy was given to suffering, to widespread misery, to crying wrongs; joined also with an intense passion for justice, which had already shown itself in the defence of slighted genius and neglected art; and to the Celtic temperament of some highstrung seer and trance-prophesying bard; it was no wonder that Ruskin became like one of the hermits of old, who retreated from the world to return upon it with stormy messages of awakening and flashes of truth more impressive, more illuminating than the logic of schoolmen and the state-craft of the wise.
And then he began to take up an attitude of antagonism to the world, he who had been the kindly helper and minister of delightful art. He began to call upon those who had ears to hear to come out and be separate from the ease and hypocrisy of Vanity Fair. Its respectabilities, its orthodoxies, he could no longer abide. Orthodox religion, orthodox morals and politics, orthodox art and science, alike he rejected; and was rejected by each of them as a brawler, a babbler, a fanatic, a heretic. And even when kindly Oxford gave him a quasi-academical position, it did not bring him, as it brings many a heretic, back to the fold.
In this period of storm and stress he stood alone. The old friends of his youth were one by one passing away, if not from intercourse, still from full sympathy with him in his new mood. His parents were no longer the guides and companions they had been; they did not understand the business he was about. And so he was left to new associates, for he could not live without some one to love,–that was the nature of the man, however lonely in his work and wanderings.
The new friends of this period were, at first, Americans; as the chief new friends of his latest period (the Alexanders) were American, too. Charles Eliot Norton, after being introduced to him in London in 1855, met him again by accident on the Lake of Geneva–the story is prettily told in “Praeterita.” Ruskin adds:
“Norton saw all my weaknesses, measured all my narrownesses, and, from the first, took serenely, and as it seemed of necessity, a kind of paternal authority over me, and a right of guidance…. I was entirely conscious of his rectorial power, and affectionately submissive to it, so that he might have done anything with me, but for the unhappy difference in our innate, and unchangeable, political faiths.”
So, after all, he stood alone.
Another friend about this time was Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe, to whom he wrote on June 18th, 1860, from Geneva:
“It takes a great deal, when I am at Geneva, to make me wish myself anywhere else, and, of all places else, in London; nevertheless, I very heartily wish at this moment that I were looking out on the Norwood Hills, and were expecting you and the children to breakfast to-morrow.
“I had very serious thoughts, when I received your note, of running home; but I expected that very day an American friend, Mr. Stillman, who, I thought, would miss me more here than you in London, so I stayed.
“What a dreadful thing it is that people should have to go to America again, after coming to Europe! It seems to me an inversion of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of ‘United’ States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ungrammatical), particularly when they have been making themselves cruelly pleasant to friends here. My friend Norton, whom I met first on this very blue lake water, had no business to go back to Boston again, any more than you….
“So you have been seeing the Pope and all his Easter performances! I congratulate you, for I suppose it is something like ‘Positively the last appearance on any stage.’ What was the use of thinking about _him_? You should have had your own thoughts about what was to come after him. I don’t mean that Roman Catholicism will die out so quickly. It will last pretty nearly as long as Protestantism, which keeps it up; but I wonder what is to come next. That is the main question just now for everybody.”
W.J. Stillman had been a correspondent about 1851,–“involved in mystical speculations, partly growing out of the second volume of ‘Modern Painters,'” as he said of himself in an article on “John Ruskin” in the _Century_ Magazine (January, 1888). With him Ruskin spent July and August of 1860 at Chamouni. He did but little drawing, and in the few sketches that remain of that summer there is evidence that his mind was far away from its old love of mountains and of streamlets. His lonely walks in the pinewoods of the Arveron were given to meditation on a great problem which had been set, as it seemed, for him to solve, ever since he had written that chapter on “The Nature of Gothic.” Now at last, in the solitude of the Alps, he could grapple with the questions he had raised; and the outcome of the struggle was “Unto this Last.”
The year before, from Thun and Bonneville and Lausanne (August and September, 1859) he had written letters to E.S. Dallas, suggested by the strikes in the London building trade. In these he appears to have sketched the outline of a new conception of social science, which he was now elaborating with more attempt at system and brevity than he had been accustomed to use.
These new papers, painfully thought out and carefully set down in his room at the Hotel de l’Union, he used–as long before he read his daily chapter to the breakfast party at Herne Hill–to read to Stillman: and he sent them to the _Cornhill Magazine_, started the year before by Smith and Elder. Ruskin had already contributed to it a paper on “Sir Joshua and Holbein,” a stray chapter from Vol. V., “Modern Painters.” His reputation as a writer and philanthropist, together with the friendliness of editor and publisher, secured the insertion of the first three,–from August to October. The editor then wrote to say that they were so unanimously condemned and disliked, that, with all apologies, he could only admit one more. The series was brought hastily to a conclusion in November: and the author, beaten back as he had never been beaten before, dropped the subject, and “sulked,” so he called it, all the winter.
It is pleasant to notice that neither Thackeray, the editor nor Smith, the publisher quarrelled with the author who had laid them open to the censure of their public,–nor he with them. On December 21st, he wrote to Thackeray, in answer apparently, to a letter about lecturing for a charitable purpose: and continued:
“The mode in which you direct your charity puts me in mind of a matter that has lain long on my mind, though I never have had the time or face to talk to you of it. In somebody’s drawing-room, ages ago, you were speaking accidentally of M. de Marvy.[8] I expressed my great obligation to him; on which you said that I could prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow,–which choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered the circumstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the general impression on your mind of the hollowness of people’s sayings and hardness of their hearts. The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite way to yours. I think there are many people who will relieve hopeless distress for one who will help at a hopeful pinch; and when I have the choice I nearly always give where I think the money will be fruitful rather than merely helpful. I would lecture for a school when I would _not_ for a distressed author; and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but not–unless I had no other object–his widow after he was gone. In a word, I like to prop the falling more than to feed the fallen.”
[Footnote 8: Louis Marvy, an engraver, and political refugee after the French Revolution of 1848. He produced the plates, and Thackeray the text, of “Landscape Painters of England, in a series of steel engravings, with short Notices.”]
The winter passed without any great undertaking. G.F. Watts proposed to add Ruskin’s portrait to his gallery of celebrities; but he was in no mood to sit. Rossetti did, however, sketch him this year. In March he presented eighty-three Turner drawings to Oxford, and twenty-five to Cambridge. The address of thanks with the great seal of Oxford University is dated March 23rd, 1861; the Catalogue of the Cambridge collection is dated May 28th.
On April 2nd he addressed the St. George’s Mission Working Men’s Institute, and shortly afterwards, though at this time in a much enfeebled state of health, gave a lecture before “a most brilliant audience,” as the _London Review_ reported, at the Royal Institution (April 19th, 1861). Carlyle wrote to his brother John:
“Friday last I was persuaded–in fact had inwardly compelled myself as it were–to a lecture of Ruskin’s at the Institution, Albemarle Street, Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A crammed house, but tolerable even to me in the gallery. The lecture was thought to ‘break down,’ and indeed it quite did ‘_as a lecture_’; but only did from _embarras de richesses_–a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial; and in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one.”
Papers on “Illuminated Manuscripts” (read before the Society of Antiquaries on June 6th) and on “The Preservation of Ancient Buildings” (read to the Ecclesiological Society a fortnight later) show that old interests were not wholly forgotten, even in the stress of new pursuits, by this man of many-sided activity.
During May, 1861, he paid a visit to the school girls at Winnington, in June and July he took a holiday at Boulogne with the fisher folk, in August he went to Ireland as guest of the Latouches of Harristown, County Kildare, and in September he returned to the Alps, spending the rest of the year at Bonneville and Lucerne.
CHAPTER II
“MUNERA PULVERIS” (1862)
After an autumn among the Alps, hearing that the Turner drawings in the National Gallery had been mildewed, he ran home to see about them in January 1862; and was kept until the end of May. He found that his political economy work was not such a total failure as it had seemed. Froude, then editor of _Fraser’s Magazine_, thought there was something in it, and would give him another chance. So, by way of a fresh start, he had his four _Cornhill_ articles published in book form; and almost simultaneously, in June 1862 the first of the new series appeared.
The author had then returned to Lucerne with Mr. and Mrs. Burne-Jones, with whom he crossed the St. Gothard to Milan, where he tried to forget the harrowing of hell in a close study of Luini, and in copying the “St. Catherine” now at Oxford. Ruskin has never said so much about Luini as, perhaps, he intended. A short notice in the “Cestus of Aglaia,” and occasional references scattered up and down his later works, hardly give the prominence in his writings that the painter held in his thoughts. It was about this time that he was made an Hon. Member of the Florentine Academy.
He re-crossed the Alps, and settled to his work on political economy at Mornex, where he spent the winter except for a short run home, which gave him the opportunity of addressing the Working Men’s College on November 29.
His retreat is described in one of his letters home:
“MORNEX, _August_ 31 (1862).
“MY DEAREST MOTHER,
“This ought to arrive on the evening before your birthday: it is not possible to reach you in the morning, not even by telegraph as I once did from Mont Cenis, for–(may Heaven be devoutly thanked therefore)–there are yet on Mont Saleve neither rails nor wires….
“The place I have got to is at the end of all carriage-roads, and I am not yet strong enough to get farther, on foot, than a five or six miles’ circle, within which is assuredly no house to my mind. I cast, at first, somewhat longing eyes on a true Savoyard chateau–notable for its lovely garden and orchard–and its unspoiled, unrestored, arched gateway between two round turrets, and Gothic-windowed keep. But on examination of the interior–finding the walls, though six feet thick, rent to the foundation–and as cold as rocks, and the floors all sodden through with walnut oil and rotten-apple juice–heaps of the farm stores having been left to decay in the ci-devant drawing room, I gave up all medieval ideas, for which the long-legged black pigs who lived like gentlemen at ease in the passage, and the bats and spiders who divided between them the corners of the turret-stair, have reason–if they knew it–to be thankful.
“The worst of it is that I never had the gift, nor have I now the energy, to _make_ anything of a place; so that I shall have to put up with almost anything I can find that is healthily habitable in a good situation. Meantime, the air here being delicious and the rooms good enough for use and comfort, I am not troubling myself much, but trying to put myself into better health and humour; in which I have already a little succeeded.”
After describing the flowers of the Saleve he continues:
“My Father would be quite wild at the ‘view’ from the garden terrace–but he would be disgusted at the shut in feeling of the house, which is in fact as much shut in as our old Herne Hill one; only to get the ‘view’ I have but to go as far down the garden as to our old ‘mulberry tree.’ By the way there’s a magnificent mulberry tree, as big as a common walnut, covered with black and red fruit on the other side of the road. Coutet and Allen are very anxious to do all they can now that Crawley is away; and I don’t think I shall manage very badly,” etc.
A little later he took in addition a cottage in which the Empress of Russia had once stayed: it commanded a finer view than the larger house, which has since been turned into a hotel (Hotel et Pension des Glycines). This place was for some time the hermitage in which he wrote his political economy. Of his lonely rambles he wrote later on:
“If I have a definite point to reach, and common work to do at it–I take people–anybody–with me; but all my best _mental_ work is necessarily done alone; whenever I wanted to think, in Savoy, I used to leave Coutet at home. Constantly I have been alone on the Glacier des Bois–and far among the loneliest aiguille recesses. I found the path up the Brezon above Bonneville in a lonely walk one Sunday; I saw the grandest view of the Alps of Savoy I ever gained, on the 2nd of January, 1862, alone among the snow wreaths on the summit of the Saleve. You need not fear for me on ‘Langdale Pikes’ after that.”
In September the second article appeared in _Fraser._ “Only a genius like Mr. Ruskin could have produced such hopeless rubbish,” says a newspaper of the period. Far worse than any newspaper criticism was the condemnation of Denmark Hill. His father, whose eyes had glistened over early poems and prose eloquence, strongly disapproved of this heretical economy. It was a bitter thing that his son should become prodigal of a hardly earned reputation, and be pointed at for a fool. And it was intensely painful for a son “who had never given his father a pang that could be avoided,” as old Mr. Ruskin had once written, to find his father, with one foot in the grave, turning against him. In December the third paper appeared. History repeated itself, and with the fourth paper the heretic was gagged. A year after, his father died; and these _Fraser_ articles were laid aside until the end of 1871, when they were taken up again, and published on New Year’s Day 1872, as “Munera Pulveris.”
From the outset, however, he was not without supporters. Carlyle wrote on June 30, 1862:
“I have read, a month ago, your _First_ in _Fraser_, and ever since have had a wish to say to it and you, _Euge macte nova virtute._ I approved in every particular; calm, definite, clear; rising into the sphere of _Plato_ (our almost best), wh’h in exchange for the sphere of _Macculloch, Mill and Co._ is a mighty improvement! Since that, I have seen the little _green_ book, too; reprint of your _Cornhill_ operations,–about 2/3 of wh’h was read to me (_known_ only from what the contradict’n of sinners had told me of it);–in every part of wh’h I find a high and noble sort of truth, not one doctrine that I can intrinsically dissent from, or count other than salutary in the extreme, and pressingly needed in Engl’d above all.”
Erskine of Linlathen wrote to Carlyle, August 7th, 1862:
“I am thankful for any unveiling of the so-called science of political economy, according to which, avowed selfishness is the Rule of the World. It is indeed most important preaching–to preach that there is not one God for religion and another God for human fellowship–and another God for buying and selling–that pestilent polytheism has been largely and confidently preached in our time, and blessed are those who can detect its mendacities, and help to disenchant the brethren of their power….”
J.A. Froude, then editor of _Fraser_, and to his dying day Mr. Ruskin’s intimate and affectionate friend, wrote to him on October 24 (1862?):
“The world talks of the article in its usual way. I was at Carlyle’s last night…. He said that in writing to your father as to subject he had told him that when Solomon’s temple was building it was credibly reported that at least 10,000 sparrows sitting on the trees round declared that it was entirely wrong–quite contrary to received opinion–hopelessly condemned by public opinion, etc. Nevertheless it got finished and the sparrows flew away and began to chirp in the same note about something else.”
CHAPTER III
THE LIMESTONE ALPS (1863)
Our hermit among the Alps of Savoy differed in one respect from his predecessors. They, for the most part, saw nothing in the rocks and stones around them except the prison walls of their seclusion; he could not be within constant sight of the mountains without thinking over the wonders of their scenery and structure. And it was well for him that it could be so. The terrible depression of mind which his social and philanthropic work had brought on, found a relief in the renewal of his old mountain-worship. After sending off the last of his _Fraser_ papers, in which, when the verdict had twice gone against him, he tried to show cause why sentence should not be passed, the strain was at its severest. He felt, as few others not directly interested felt, the sufferings of the outcast in English slums and Savoyard hovels; and heard the cry of the oppressed in Poland and in Italy: and he had been silenced. What could he do but, as he said in the letters to Norton, “lay his head to the very ground,” and try to forget it all among the stones and the snows?
He wandered about geologizing, and spent a while at Talloires on the Lake of Annecy, where the old Abbey had been turned into an inn, and one slept in a monk’s cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery, St. Bernard of Menthon’s memory haunting the place, and St. Germain’s cave close by in the rocks above. At the end of May he came back to England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Institution. The subject he chose was “The Stratified Alps of Savoy.”
At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in papers embedded in Transactions of various societies. Professor Alphonse Favre’s great work did not appear until 1867, and the “Mechanismus der Gebirgsbildung” of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English public the subject was a fresh one. To Ruskin it was familiar: he had been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer and note-book. In the field he had compared Studer’s meagre sections, and consulted the available authorities on physical geology, though he had never entered upon the more popular sister-science of palaeontology. He left the determination of strata to specialists: his interest was fixed on the structure of mountains–the relation of geology to scenery; a question upon which he had some right to be heard, as knowing more about scenery than most geologists, and more about geology than most artists.
As examples of Savoy mountains this lecture described in detail the Saleve, on which he had been living for two winters, and the Brezon, the top of which he had tried to buy from the commune of Bonneville–one of his many plans for settling among the Alps. The commune thought he had found a gold-mine up there, and raised the price out of all reason. Other attempts to make a home in the chateaux or chalets of Savoy were foiled, or abandoned, like his earlier idea to live in Venice. But his scrambles on the Saleve led him to hesitate in accepting the explanation given by Alphonse Favre of the curious north-west face of steeply inclined vertical slabs, which he suspected to be created by cleavage, on the analogy of other Jurassic precipices. The Brezon–_brisant_, breaking wave–he took as type of the billowy form of limestone Alps in general, and his analysis of it was serviceable and substantially correct.
This lecture was followed in 1864 by desultory correspondence with Mr. Jukes and others in _The Reader_, in which he merely restated his conclusions, too slightly to convince. Had he devoted himself to a thorough examination of the subject–but this is in the region of what might have been. He was more seriously engaged in other pursuits, of more immediate importance. Three days after his lecture he was being examined before the Royal Academy Commission, and after a short summer visit to various friends in the north of England, he set out again for the Alps, partly to study the geology of Chamouni and North Switzerland, partly to continue his drawings of Swiss towns at Baden and Lauffenburg, with his pupil John Bunney. But even there the burden of his real mission could not be shaken off, and though again seeking health and a quiet mind, he could not quite keep silence, but wrote letters to English newspapers on the depreciation of gold (repeating his theory of currency), and on the wrongs of Poland and Italy; and he put together more papers, not then published, in continuation of his “Munera Pulveris.”
Since about 1850, Carlyle had been gradually becoming more and more friendly with John Ruskin; and now that this social and economical work had been taken up, he began to have a real esteem for him, though always with a patronizing tone, which the younger man’s open and confessed discipleship accepted and encouraged. This letter especially shows both men in an unaccustomed light: Ruskin, hating tobacco, sends his “master” cigars; Carlyle, hating cant, replies rather in the tone of the temperance advocate, taking a little wine for his stomach’s sake:
“CHELSEA, 22 _Feby_, 1865
“DEAR RUSKIN,
“You have sent me a munificent Box of Cigars; for wh’h what can I say in ans’r? It makes me both sad and glad. _Ay de mi._
“We are such stuff,
Gone with a puff–Then
think, and smoke Tobacco!’
“The Wife also has had her Flowers; and a letter wh’h has charmed the female mind. You forgot only the first chapter of ‘Aglaia’;–don’t forget; and be a good boy for the future.
“The Geology Book wasn’t _Jukes_; I found it again in the Magazine,–reviewed there: ‘Phillips,'[9] is there such a name? It has ag’n escaped me. I have a notion to come out actually some day soon; and take a serious Lecture from you on what you really know, and can give me some intelligible outline of, ab’t the Rocks,–_bones_ of our poor old Mother; wh’h have always been venerable and strange to me. Next to nothing of rational could I ever learn of the subject….
[Footnote 9: “Jukes,”–Mr. J.B. Jukes, F.R.S., with whom Ruskin had been discussing in _The Reader_. “Phillips,” the Oxford Professor of Geology, and a friend of Ruskin’s.]
“Yours ever,
“T. CARLYLE.”
CHAPTER IV
“SESAME AND LILIES” (1864)
Wider aims and weaker health had not put an end to Ruskin’s connection with the Working Men’s College, though he did not now teach a drawing-class regularly. He had, as he said, “the satisfaction of knowing that they had very good masters in Messrs. Lowes Dickinson, Jeffery and Cave Thomas,” and his work was elsewhere. He was to have lectured there on December 19th, 1863; but he did not reach home until about Christmas; better than he had been; and ready to give the promised address on January 30th, 1864. Beside which he used to visit the place occasionally of an evening to take note of progress, and some of his pupils were now more directly under his care.
It was from one of these visits to the College, on February 27th, that he returned, past midnight, and found his father waiting up for him, to read some letters he had written. Next morning the old man, close upon seventy-nine years of age, was struck with his last illness; and died on March 3rd. He was buried at Shirley Church, near Addington, in Surrey, not far from Croydon; and the legend on his tomb records: “He was an entirely honest merchant, and his memory is, to all who keep it, dear and helpful. His son, whom he loved to the uttermost, and taught to speak truth, says this of him.”
Mr. John James Ruskin, like many other of our successful merchants, had been an open-handed patron of art, and a cheerful giver, not only to needy friends and relatives, but also to various charities. For example, as a kind of personal tribute to Osborne Gordon, his son’s tutor, he gave L5,000 toward the augmentation of poor Christ-Church livings. His son’s open-handed way with dependants and servants was learned from the old merchant, who, unlike many hard-working money-makers, was always ready to give, though he could not bear to lose. In spite of which he left a considerable fortune behind him,–considerable when it is understood to be the earnings of his single-handed industry and steady sagacity in legitimate business, without indulgence in speculation. He left L120,000 with various other property, to his son. To his wife he left his house and L37,000, and a void which it seemed at first nothing could fill. For of late years the son had drifted out of their horizon, with ideas on religion and the ordering of life so very different from theirs; and had been much away from home–he sometimes said, selfishly, but not without the greatest of all excuses, necessity. And so the two old people had been brought closer than ever together; and she had lived entirely for her husband. But, as Browning said,–“Put a stick in anywhere, and she will run up it”–so the brave old lady did not faint under the blow, and fade away, but transferred her affections and interests to her son. Before his father’s death the difference of feeling between them, arising out of the heretical economy, had been healed. Old Mr. Ruskin’s will treated his son with all confidence in spite of his unorthodox views and unbusiness-like ways. And for nearly eight years longer his mother lived on, to see him pass through his probation-period into such recognition as an Oxford Professorship implied, and to find in her last years his later books “becoming more and more what they always ought to have been” to her.
At the same time, her failing sight and strength needed a constant household companion. Her son, though he did not leave home yet awhile for any long journeys, could not be always with her. Only six weeks after the funeral he was called away for a time to fulfil a lecture-engagement at Bradford. Before going he brought his pretty young Scotch cousin. Miss Joanna Ruskin Agnew, to Denmark Hill for a week’s visit. She recommended herself at once to the old lady, and to Carlyle, who happened to call, by her frank good-nature and unquenchable spirits; and her visit lasted seven years, until she was married to Arthur Severn, son of the Ruskins’ old friend, Joseph Severn, British Consul at Rome. Even then she was not allowed far out of their sight, but settled in the old house at Herne Hill: “nor virtually,” said Ruskin in the last chapter of “Praeterita,” “have she and I ever parted since.”
All through that year he remained at home, except for short necessary visits, and frequent evenings with Carlyle. And when, in December, he gave those lectures in Manchester which afterwards, as “Sesame and Lilies,” became his most popular work, we can trace his better health of mind and body in the brighter tone of his thought. We can hear the echo of Carlyle’s talk in the heroic, aristocratic, Stoic ideals, and in the insistence on the value of books and free public libraries,[10]–Carlyle being the founder of the London Library. And we may suspect that his thoughts on women’s influence and education had been not a little directed by those months in the company of “the dear old lady and ditto young” to whom Carlyle used to send his love.
[Footnote 10: The first lecture, “Of Kings’ Treasuries,” was given, December 6th, 1864, at Rusholme Town Hall, Manchester, in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme Institute. The second, “Queens’ Gardens,” was given December 14th, at the Town Hall, King Street, now the Free Reference Library, Manchester, in aid of schools for Ancoats.]
In 1864 a new series of papers on Art was begun, the only published work upon Art of all these ten years. The papers ran in _The Art Journal_ from January to July, 1865, and from January to April. 1866, under the title of “The Cestus of Aglaia,” by which was meant the Girdle, or restraining law, of Beauty, as personified in the wife of Hephaestus, “the Lord of Labour.” Their intention was to suggest, and to evoke by correspondence, “some laws for present practice of art in our schools, which may be admitted, if not with absolute, at least with a sufficient consent, by leading artists.” As a first step the author asked for the elementary rules of drawing. For his own contribution he showed the value of the “pure line,” such as he had used in his own early drawings. Later on, he had adopted a looser and more picturesque style of handling the point; and in the “Elements of Drawing” he had taught his readers to take Rembrandt’s etchings as exemplary. But now he felt that this “evasive” manner, as he called it, had its dangers. And so these papers attempted to supersede the amateurish object lesson of the earlier work by stricter rules for a severer style; prematurely, as it proved, for the chapters came to an end before the promised code was formulated. The same work was taken up again in “The Laws of Fesole”; but the use of the pure line, which Ruskin’s precepts failed to enforce, was, in the end, taught to the public by the charming practice of Mr. Walter Crane and Miss Greenaway.
A lecture at the Camberwell Working Men’s Institute on “Work and Play” was given on January 24th, 1865; which, as it was printed in “The Crown of Wild Olive,” we will notice further on. Various letters and papers on political and social economy and other subjects hardly call for separate notice: with the exception of one very important address to the Royal Institution of British Architects, given May 15th, “On the Study of Architecture in our Schools.”
CHAPTER V
“ETHICS OF THE DUST” (1865)
Writing to his father from Manchester about the lecture of February 22, 1859–“The Unity of Art”–Ruskin mentions, among various people of interest whom he was meeting, such as Sir Elkanah Armitage and Mrs. Gaskell, how “Miss Bell and four young ladies came from Chester to hear me, and I promised to pay them a visit on my way home, to their apparent great contentment.”
The visit was paid on his way back from Yorkshire. He wrote:
“WINNINGTON, NORTHWICH, CHESHIRE.
“12 _March_, 1859.
“This is such a nice place that I am going to stay till Monday: an enormous old-fashioned house–full of galleries and up and down stairs–but with magnificently large rooms where wanted: the drawing-room is a huge octagon–I suppose at least forty feet high–like the tower of a castle (hung half way up all round with large and beautiful Turner and Raphael engravings) and with a baronial fireplace:–and in the evening, brightly lighted, with the groups of girls scattered round it, it is a quite beautiful scene in its way. Their morning chapel, too, is very interesting:–though only a large room, it is nicely fitted with reading desk and seats like a college chapel, and two pretty and rich stained-glass windows–and well-toned organ. They have morning prayers with only one of the lessons–and without the psalms: but singing the Te Deum or the other hymn–and other choral parts: and as out of the thirty-five or forty girls perhaps twenty-five or thirty have really available voices, well trained and divided, it was infinitely more beautiful than any ordinary church service–like the Trinita di Monte Convent service more than anything else, and must be very good for them, quite different in its effect on their minds from our wretched penance of college chapel.
“The house stands in a superb park, full of old trees and sloping down to the river; with a steep bank of trees on the other side; just the kind of thing Mrs. Sherwood likes to describe;–and the girls look all healthy and happy as can be, down to the little six-years-old ones, who I find know me by the fairy tale as the others do by my large books:–so I am quite at home.
“They have my portrait in the library with three others–Maurice, the Bp. of Oxford, and Archdeacon Hare,–so that I can’t but stay with them over the Sunday.”
The principles of Winnington were advanced; the theology–Bishop Colenso’s daughter was among the pupils; the Bishop of Oxford had introduced Ruskin to the managers, who were pleased to invite the celebrated art-critic to visit whenever he travelled that way, whether to lecture at provincial towns, or to see his friends in the north, as he often used. And so between March 1859 and May 1868, after which the school was removed, he was a frequent visitor; and not only he, but other lions whom the ladies entrapped:–mention has been made in print (in “The Queen of the Air”) of Charles Halle, whom Ruskin met there in 1863, and greatly admired.
“I like Mr. and Mrs. Halle so very much,” he wrote home, “and am entirely glad to know so great a musician and evidently so good and wise a man. He was very happy yesterday evening, and actually sat down and played quadrilles for us to dance to–which is, in its way, something like Titian sketching patterns for ball-dresses. But afterwards he played Home, sweet Home, with three variations–_quite_ the most wonderful thing I have ever heard in music. Though I was close to the piano, the motion of the fingers was entirely invisible–a mere _mist_ of rapidity; the _hands_ moving slowly and softly, and the variation, in the ear, like a murmur of a light fountain, far away. It was beautiful too to see the girls’ faces round, the eyes all wet with feeling, and the little coral mouths fixed into little half open gaps with utter intensity of astonishment.”
Ruskin could not be idle on his visits; and as he was never so happy as when he was teaching somebody, he improved the opportunity by experiments in education permitted there for his sake. Among other things, he devised singing dances for a select dozen of the girls, with verses of his own writing; one, a maze to the theme of “Twist ye, twine ye,” based upon the song in “Guy Mannering,” but going far beyond the original motive in its variations weighted with allegoric thought. Deep as the feeling of this little poem is, there is a nobler chord struck in the Song of Peace, the battle-cry of the good time coming; in the faith–who else has found it?–that looks forward to no selfish victory of narrow aims, but to the full reconciliation of hostile interests and the blind internecine struggle of this perverse world, in the clearer light of the millennial morning.
Ruskin’s method of teaching, as illustrated in “Ethics of the Dust,” has been variously pooh-poohed by his critics. It has seemed to some absurd to mix up Theology, and Crystallography, and Political Economy, and Mythology, and Moral Philosophy, with the chatter of school-girls and the romps of the playground. But it should be understood, before reading this book, which is practically the report of these Wilmington talks, that it is printed as an illustration of a method. It showed that play-lessons need not want either depth or accuracy; and that the requirement was simply capacity on the part of the teacher.
The following letter from Carlyle was written in acknowledgment of an early copy of the book, of which the preface is dated Christmas, 1865.
“CHELSEA,
“_20 Decr, 1865._
“The ‘Ethics of the Dust,’ wh’h I devoured with’t pause, and intend to look at ag’n, is a most shining Performance! Not for a long while have I read anything tenth-part so radiant with talent, ingenuity, lambent fire (sheet–and _other_ lightnings) of all commendable kinds! Never was such a lecture on _Crystallography_ before, had there been nothing else in it,–and there are all manner of things. In power of _expression_ I pronounce it to be supreme; never did anybody who had _such_ things to explain explain them better. And the bit of Egypt’n mythology, the cunning _Dreams_ ab’t Pthah, Neith, etc., apart from their elucidative quality, wh’h is exquisite, have in them a _poetry_ that might fill any Tennyson with despair. You are very dramatic too; nothing wanting in the stage-direct’ns, in the pretty little indicat’ns: a very pretty stage and _dramatis personae_ altogeth’r. Such is my first feeling ab’t y’r Book, dear R.–Come soon, and I will tell you all the _faults_ of it, if I gradually discover a great many. In fact, _come_ at any rate!
“Y’rs ever,
“T. CARLYLE.”
The Real Little Housewives, to whom the book was dedicated, were not quite delighted–at least, they said they were not–at the portraits drawn of them, in their pinafores, so to speak, with some little hints at failings and faults which they recognised through the mask of _dramatis personae._ Miss “Kathleen” disclaimed the singing of “Vilikins and his Dinah,” and so on. It is difficult to please everybody. The public did not care about the book; the publisher hoped Mr. Ruskin would write no more dialogues: and so it remained, little noticed, for twelve years. In 1877 it was republished and found to be interesting, and in 1905 the 31st thousand (authorised English edition) had been issued. At that time, however, Sesame and Lilies had run to 160,000 copies.
Winnington Hall, the scene of these pastimes, is now, I understand, used by Messrs. Brunner, Mond & Co. as a commonroom or clubhouse for the staff in their great scientific industry.
CHAPTER VI
“THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE” (1865-1866)
Mention has been made of an address to working men at the Camberwell Institute, January 24th, 1865. This lecture was published in 1866, together with two others,[11] under the title of “The Crown of Wild Olive”–that is to say, the reward of human work, a reward “which should have been of gold, had not Jupiter been so poor,” as Aristophanes said.
[Footnote 11: Republished in 1873, with a fourth lecture added, and a Preface and notes on the political growth of Prussia, from Carlyle’s “Frederick.”]
True work, he said, meant the production (taking the word production in a broad sense) of the means of life; every one ought to take some share in it, according to his powers: some working with the head, some with the hands; but all acknowledging idleness and slavery to be alike immoral. And, as to the remuneration, he said, as he had said before in “Unto this Last,” Justice demands that equal energy expended should bring equal reward. He did not consider it justice to cry out for the equalization of incomes, for some are sure to be more diligent and saving than others; some work involves a great preliminary expenditure of energy in qualifying the worker, as contrasted with unskilled labour. But he did not allow that the possession of capital entitled a man to unearned increment; and he thought that, in a community where a truly civilized morality was highly developed, the general sense of society would recognise an average standard of work and an average standard of pay for each class.
In the next two lectures he spoke of the two great forms of Play, the great Games of Money-making and War. He had been invited to lecture at Bradford, in the hope that he would give some useful advice towards the design of a new Exchange which was to be built; in curious forgetfulness, it would appear, of his work during the past ten years and more. Indeed, the picture he drew them of an ideal “Temple to the Goddess of Getting-on” was as daring a sermon as ever prophet preached. But when he came to tell them that the employers of labour might be true captains and kings, the leaders and the helpers of their fellow-men, and that the function of commerce was not to prey upon society but to provide for it, there were many of his hearers whose hearts told them that he was right, and whose lives have shown, in some measure, that he did not speak in vain.
Still stranger, to hearers who had not noted the conclusion of his third volume of “Modern Painters,” was his view of war, in the address to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, in December 1865. The common view of war as destroyer of arts and enemy of morality, the easy acceptance of the doctrine that peace is an unqualified blessing, the obvious evils of battle and rapine and the waste of resources and life throughout so many ages, have blinded less clear-sighted and less widely-experienced thinkers to another side of the teaching of history, which Ruskin dwelt upon with unexpected emphasis.
But modern war, horrible, not from its scale, but from the spirit in which the upper classes set the lower to fight like gladiators in the arena, he denounced; and called upon the women of England, with whom, he said, the real power of life and death lay, to mend it into some semblance of antique chivalry, or to end it in the name of religion and humanity.
In the _New Review_ for March 1892, there appeared a series of “Letters of John Ruskin to his Secretary,” which, as the anonymous contributor remarked, illustrate “Ruskin the worker, as he acts away from the eyes of the world; Ruskin the epistolographer, when the eventuality of the printing-press is not for the moment before him Ruskin the good Samaritan, ever gentle and open-handed when true need and a good cause make appeal to his tender heart; Ruskin the employer, considerate, generous–an ideal master.”
Charles Augustus Howell became known to Ruskin (in 1864 or 1865) through the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites; and, as the editor of the letters puts it, “by his talents and assiduity” became the too-trusted friend and _protege_ of Ruskin, Rossetti and others of their acquaintance. It was he who proposed and carried out the exhumation, reluctantly consented to, of Rossetti’s manuscript poems from his wife’s grave, in October, 1869; for which curious service to literature let him have the thanks of posterity. But he was hardly the man to carry out Ruskin’s secret charities, and long before he had lost Rossetti’s confidence[12] he had ceased to act as Ruskin’s secretary.
[Footnote 12: In the manner described by Mr. W.M. Rossetti at p. 351, Vol. I., of “D.G. Rossetti, his family letters,” to which the reader is referred.]
From these letters, however, several interesting traits and incidents may be gleaned, such as anecdotes about the canary which was anonymously bought at the Crystal Palace Bird Show (February 1866) for the owner’s benefit: about the shopboy whom Ruskin was going to train as an artist; and about the kindly proposal to employ the aged and impoverished Cruikshank upon a new book of fairy tales, and the struggle between admiration for the man and admission of his loss of power, ending in the free gift of the hundred pounds promised.
In April, 1866, after writing the Preface to “The Crown of Wild Olive,” and preparing the book for publication, Ruskin was carried off to the Continent for a holiday with Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan, her niece Miss Constance Hilliard (Mrs. Churchill), and Miss Agnew (Mrs. Severn), for a thorough rest and change after three years of unintermitting work in England. They intended to spend a couple of months in Italy. On the day of starting, Ruskin called at Cheyne Walk with the usual bouquet for Mrs. Carlyle, to learn that she had just met with her death, in trying to save her little dog, the gift of Lady Trevelyan. He rejoined his friends, and they crossed the Channel gaily, in spite of what they thought was rather a cloud over him. At Paris they read the news. “Yes,” he said, “I knew. But there was no reason why I should spoil your pleasure by telling you.”
On his arrival at Dijon he wrote to Carlyle, who in answer after giving way to his grief–“my life all laid in ruins, and the one light of it as if gone out,”–continued:–“Come and see me when you get home; come oftener and see me, and speak _more_ frankly to me (for I am very true to y’r highest interests and you) while I still remain here. You can do nothing for me in Italy; except come home improved.”
But before this letter reached Ruskin, he too had been in the presence of death, and had lost one of his most valued friends. Their journey to Italy had been undertaken chiefly for the sake of Lady Trevelyan’s health, as the following extracts indicate:
“PARIS, _2nd May, 1866_.
“Lady Trevelyan is much better to-day, but it is not safe to move her yet–till to-morrow. So I’m going to take the children to look at Chartres cathedral–we can get three hours there, and be back to seven o’clock dinner. We drove round by St. Cloud and Sevres yesterday; the blossomed trees being glorious by the Seine,–the children in high spirits. It reminds me always too much of Turner–every bend of these rivers is haunted by him.”
“DIJON, _Sunday, 6th May, 1866_.
“Lady Trevelyan is _much_ better, and we hope all to get on to Neufchatel to-morrow. The weather is quite fine again though not warm; and yesterday I took the children for a drive up the little valley which we used to drive through on leaving Dijon for Paris. There are wooded hills on each side, and we got into a sweet valley, as full of nightingales as our garden is of thrushes, and with slopes of broken rocky ground above, covered with the lovely blue milk-wort, and purple columbines, and geranium, and wild strawberry-flowers. The children were intensely delighted, and I took great care that Constance should not run about so as to heat herself, and we got up a considerable bit of hill quite nicely, and with greatly increased appetite for tea, and general mischief. They have such appetites that I generally call them ‘my two little pigs.’ There is a delightful French waiting-maid at dinner here–who says they are both ‘charmantes,’ but highly approves of my title for them nevertheless.”
“NEUFCHATEL, _10th May_, 1866.
“Lady Trevelyan is still too weak to move. We had (the children and I) a delightful day yesterday at the Pierre a Bot, gathering vetches and lilies of the valley in the woods, and picnic afterwards on the lovely mossy grass, in view of all the Alps–Jungfrau, Eiger, Blumlis Alp, Altels, and the rest, with intermediate lake and farmsteads and apple-blossom–very heavenly.”
Here, within a few days, Lady Trevelyan died. Throughout her illness she had been following the progress of the new notes on wild-flowers (afterwards to be “Proserpina”) with keen interest, and Sir Walter lent the help of botanical science to Ruskin’s more poetical and artistic observations. For the sake of this work, and for the “children,” and with a wise purpose of bearing up under the heavy blow that had fallen, the two friends continued their journey for a while among the mountains.
From Thun they went to Interlachen and the Giessbach. Ruskin occupied himself closely in tracing Studer’s sections across the great lake-furrow of central Switzerland–“something craggy for his mind to break upon,” as Byron said when he was in trouble. At the Giessbach there was not only geology and divine scenery, enjoyable in lovely weather, but an interesting figure in the foreground, the widowed daughter of the hotel landlord, beautiful and consumptive, but brave as a Swiss girl should be. They all seem to have fallen in love with her, so to speak the young English girls as much as the impressionable art-critic: and the new human interest in her Alpine tragedy relieved, as such interests do, the painfulness of the circumstances through which they had been passing. Her sister Marie was like an Allegra to this Penserosa; bright and brilliant in native genius. She played piano-duets with the young ladies; taught Alpine botany to the savants; guided them to the secret dells and unknown points of view; and with a sympathy unexpected in a stranger, beguiled them out of their grief, and won their admiration and gratitude. Marie of the Giessbach was often referred to in letters of the time, and for many years after, with warmly affectionate remembrances.
A few bits from his letters to his mother, which I have been permitted to copy, will indicate the impressions of this summer’s tour.
“HOTEL DU GIESBACH, _6th June, 1866_,
“MY DEAREST MOTHER,
“Can you at all fancy walking out in the morning in a garden full of lilacs just in rich bloom, and pink hawthorn in masses; and along a little terrace with lovely pinks coming into cluster of colour all over the low wall beside it; and a sloping bank of green sward from it–and below that, the Giesbach! Fancy having a real Alpine waterfall in one’s garden,–seven hundred feet high. You see, we are just in time for the spring, here, and the strawberries are ripening on the rocks. Joan and Constance have been just scrambling about and gathering them for me. Then there’s the blue-green lake below, and Interlaken and the lake of Thun in the distance. I think I never saw anything so beautiful. Joan will write to you about the people, whom she has made great friends with, already.”
“_7th June, 1866_.
“I cannot tell you how much I am struck with the beauty of this fall: it is different from everything I have ever seen in torrents. There are so many places where one gets near it without being wet, for one thing; for the falls are, mostly, not vertical so as to fly into mere spray, but over broken rock, which crushes the water into a kind of sugar-candy-like foam, white as snow, yet glittering; and composed, not of bubbles, but of broken-up water. Then I had forgotten that it plunged straight into the lake; I got down to the lake shore on the other side of it yesterday, and to see it plunge clear into the blue water, with the lovely mossy rocks for its flank, and for the lake edge, was an unbelievable kind of thing; it is all as one would fancy cascades in fairyland. I do not often endure with patience any cockneyisms or showings off at these lovely places. But they do one thing here so interesting that I can forgive it. One of the chief cascades (about midway up the hill) falls over a projecting rock, so that one can walk under the torrent as it comes over. It leaps so clear that one is hardly splashed, except at one place. Well, when it gets dark, they burn, for five minutes, one of the strongest steady fireworks of a crimson colour, behind the fall. The red light shines right through, turning the whole waterfall into a torrent of fire.”
“_11th June, 1866._
“We leave, according to our programme, for Interlachen to-day,–with great regret, for the peace and sweetness of this place are wonderful and the people are good; and though there is much drinking and quarrelling among the younger men, there appears to be neither distressful poverty, nor deliberate crime: so that there is more of the sense I need, and long for, of fellowship with human creatures, than in any place I have been at for years. I believe they don’t so much as lock the house-doors at night; and the faces of the older peasantry are really very beautiful. I have done a good deal of botany, and find that wild-flower botany is more or less inexhaustible, but the cultivated flowers are infinite in their caprice. The forget-me-nots and milkworts are singularly beautiful here, but there is quite as much variety in English fields as in these, as long as one does not climb much–and I’m very lazy, compared to what I used to be,”
“_LAUTERBRUNNEN, 13th June, 1866._
“We had a lovely evening here yesterday, and the children enjoyed and understood it better than anything they have yet seen among the Alps. Constance was in great glory in a little walk I took her in the twilight through the upper meadows: the Staubbach seen only as a grey veil suspended from its rock, and the great Alps pale above on the dark sky. She condescended nevertheless to gather a great bunch of the white catchfly,–to make ‘pops’ with,–her friend Marie at the Giesbach having shown her how a startling detonation may be obtained, by skilful management, out of its globular calyx.
“This morning is not so promising,–one of the provoking ones which will neither let you stay at home with resignation, nor go anywhere with pleasure. I’m going to take the children for a little quiet exploration of the Wengern path, to see how they like it, and if the weather betters–we may go on. At all events I hope to find an Alpine rose or two.”
In June, 1866, the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford was vacant; and Ruskin’s friends were anxious to see him take the post. He, however, felt no especial fitness or inclination for it, and did not stand. Three years later he was elected to a Professorship that at this time had not been founded.
After spending June in the Oberland, he went homewards through Berne, Vevey and Geneva, to find his private secretary with a bundle of begging letters, and his friend Carlyle busy with the defence of Governor Eyre.
In 1865 an insurrection of negroes at Morant Bay, Jamaica, had threatened to take the most serious shape, when it was stamped out by the high-handed measures of Mr. Eyre. After the first congratulations were over another side to the question called for a hearing. The Baptist missionaries declared that among the negroes who were shot and hanged _in terrorem_ were peaceable subjects, respectable members of their own native congregations, for whose character they could vouch; they added that the gravity of the situation had been exaggerated by private enmity and jealousy of their work and creed. A strong committee was formed under Liberal auspices, supported by such men as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hughes, the author of “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”–men whose motive was above suspicion–to bring Mr. Eyre to account.
Carlyle, who admired the strong hand, and had no interest in Baptist missionaries, accepted Mr. Eyre as the saviour of society in his West Indian sphere; and there were many, both in Jamaica and at home, who believed that, but for his prompt action, the white population would have been massacred with all the horrors of a savage rebellion. Ruskin had been for many years the ally of the Broad Church and Liberal party. But he was now coming more and more under the personal influence of Carlyle; and when it came to the point of choosing sides, declared himself, in a letter to the _Daily Telegraph_ (December 20th, 1865), a Conservative and a supporter of order; and joined the Eyre Defence Committee with a subscription of L100. The prominent part he took, for example, in the meeting of September, 1866, was no doubt forced upon him by his desire to save Carlyle, whose recent loss and shaken nerves made such business especially trying to him. Letters of this period remain, in which Carlyle begs Ruskin to “be diligent, I bid you!”–and so on, adding, “I must absolutely _shut up_ in that direction, to save my sanity.” And so it fell to the younger man to work through piles of pamphlets and newspaper correspondence, to interview politicians and men of business, and–what was so very foreign to his habits–to take a leading share in a party agitation.
But in all this he was true to his Jacobite instincts. He had been brought up a Tory; and though he had drifted into an alliance with the Broad Church and philosophical Liberals, he was never one of them. Now that his father was gone, perhaps he felt a sort of duty to own himself his father’s son; and the failure of liberal philanthropy to realise his ideals, and of liberal philosophy to rise to his economic standards, combined with Carlyle to induce him to label himself Conservative. But his conservatism could not be accepted by the party so called. Fortunately, he did not need or ask their recognition. He took no interest in party politics, and never in his life voted at a Parliamentary election. He only meant to state in the shortest terms that he stood for loyalty and order.
CHAPTER VII
“TIME AND TIDE” (1867)
The series of letters published as “Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne” were addressed[13] to Thomas Dixon, a working cork-cutter of Sunderland, whose portrait by Professor Legros is familiar to visitors at the South Kensington Museum. He was one of those thoughtful, self-educated working men in whom, as a class, Ruskin had been taking a deep interest for the past twelve years, an interest which had purchased him a practical insight into their various capacities and aims, and the right to speak without fear or favour. At this time there was an agitation for Parliamentary reform, and the better representation of the working classes; and it was on this topic that the letters were begun, though the writer went on to criticise the various social ideals then popular, and to propose his own. He had already done something of the sort in “Unto this Last”; but “Time and Tide” is much more complete, and the result of seven years’ further thought and experience. His “Fors Clavigera” is a continuation of these letters, but written at a time when other work and ill health broke in upon his strength. “Time and Tide” is not only the statement of his social scheme as he saw it in his central period, but, written as these letters were–at a stroke, so to speak–condensed in exposition and simple in language, they deserve the most careful reading by the student of Ruskin.