The Life of John Ruskin by W. G. Collingwood (page 4)

[Footnote 13: During February, March and April, 1867, and published in the _Manchester Examiner_ and _Leeds Mercury_.]

Before this work was ended, Carlyle had come back from Mentone to Chelsea, and was begging his friend, in the warmest terms, to come and see him. Shortly afterward, a passage which Ruskin would not retract gave offence to Carlyle. But the difference was healed, and later years reveal the sage of Chelsea as kindly and affectionate as ever. This friendship between the two greatest writers of their age, between two men of vigorous individuality, outspoken opinions, and widely different tastes and sympathies, is a fine episode in the history of both.

In May, Ruskin was invited to Cambridge to receive the honorary degree of LL.D., and to deliver the Rede Lecture. The _Cambridge Chronicle_ of May 24th, 1867, says: “The body of the Senate House was quite filled with M.A.’s and ladies, principally the latter, whilst there was a large attendance of undergraduates in the galleries, who gave the lecturer a most enthusiastic reception.” A brief report of the lecture was printed in the newspaper; but it was not otherwise published, and the manuscript seems to have been mislaid for thirty years. I take the liberty of copying the opening sentences as a specimen of that Academical oratory which Mr. Ruskin then adopted, and used habitually in his earlier lectures at Oxford.

The title of the discourse was “The Relation of National Ethics to National Arts.”

“In entering on the duty to-day entrusted to me, I should hold it little respectful to my audience if I disturbed them by expression of the diffidence which they know that I must feel in first speaking in this Senate House; diffidence which might well have prevented me from accepting such duty, but ought not to interfere with my endeavour simply to fulfil it. Nevertheless, lest the direction which I have been led to give to my discourse, and the narrow limits within which I am compelled to confine the treatment of its subject may seem in anywise inconsistent with the purpose of the founder of this Lecture–or with the expectations of those by whose authority I am appointed to deliver it, let me at once say that I obeyed their command, not thinking myself able to teach any dogma in the philosophy of the arts, which could be of any new interest to the members of this University: but only that I might obtain the sanction of their audience, for the enforcement upon other minds of the truth, which–after thirty years spent in the study of art, not dishonestly, however feebly–is manifest to me as the clearest of all that I have learned, and urged upon me as the most vital of all I have to declare.”

He then distinguished between true and false art, the true depending upon sincerity, whether in literature, music or the formative arts: he reinforced his old doctrine of the dignity of true imagination as the attribute of healthy and earnest minds; and energetically attacked the commercial art-world of the day, and the notion that drawing-schools were to be supported for the sake of the gain they would bring to our manufacturers.

In this lecture we see the germ of the ideas, as well as the beginning of the style, of the Oxford Inaugural course, and the “Eagle’s Nest”; something quite different in type from the style and teaching of the addresses to working men, or to mixed popular audiences at Edinburgh or Manchester, or even at the Royal Institution. At this latter place, on June 4th, Sir Henry Holland in the chair, he lectured on “The Present State of Modern Art, with reference to advisable arrangement of the National Gallery,” repeating much of what he had said in “Time and Tide” about the taste for the horrible and absence of true feeling for pure and dignified art in the theatrical shows of the day, and in the admiration for Gustave Dore, then a new fashion. Mr. Ruskin could never endure that the man who had illustrated Balzac’s “Contes Drolatiques” should be chosen by the religious public of England as the exponent of their sacred ideals.

In July after a short visit to Huntly Burn near Abbotsford, he went to Keswick for a few weeks, from whence he wrote the rhymed letters to his cousin at home, quoted (with the date wrongly given as 1857) in “Praeterita” to illustrate his “heraldic character” of “Little Pigs” and to shock exoteric admirers. Like, for example, Rossetti and Carlyle, Ruskin was fond of playful nicknames and grotesque terms of endearment. He never stood upon his dignity with intimates; and was ready to allow the liberties he took, much to the surprise of strangers.

He reached Keswick by July 4, and spent his time chiefly in walks upon the hills, staying at the Derwentwater Hotel. He wrote:

“Keswick, _19th July, ’67, Afternoon, 1/2 past 3_.

“My dearest Mother,

“As this is the last post before Sunday I send one more line to say I’ve had a delightful forenoon’s walk–since 1/2 past ten–by St. John’s Vale, and had pleasant thoughts, and found one of the most variedly beautiful torrent beds I ever saw in my life; and I feel that I gain strength, slowly but certainly, every day. The great good of the place is that I can be content without going on great excursions which fatigue and do me harm (or else worry me with problems;)–I am _content_ here with the roadside hedges and streams; and this contentment is the great thing for health,–and there is hardly anything to annoy me of absurd or calamitous human doing; but still this ancient cottage life–very rude and miserable enough in its torpor–but clean, and calm, not a vile cholera and plague of bestirred pollution, like back streets in London. There is also much more real and deep beauty than I expected to find, in some of the minor pieces of scenery, and in the cloud effects.”

“_July 16_.

“I have the secret of extracting sadness from all things, instead of joy, which is no enviable talisman. Forgive me if I ever write in a way that may pain you. It is best that you should know, when I write cheerfully, it is no pretended cheerfulness; so when I am sad–I think it right to confess it.”

“_30th July._

“Downes[14] arrived yesterday quite comfortably and in fine weather. It is not bad this morning, and I hope to take him for a walk up Saddleback, which, after all, is the finest, to my mind, of all the Cumberland hills–though that is not saying much; for they are much lower in effect, in proportion to their real height, than I had expected. The beauty of the country is in its quiet roadside bits, and rusticity of cottage life and shepherd labour. Its mountains are sorrowfully melted away from my old dreams of them.”

[Footnote 14: The gardener at Denmark Hill.]

Next day he “went straight up the steep front of Saddleback by the central ridge to the summit. It is the finest thing I’ve yet seen, there being several bits of real crag-work, and a fine view at the top over the great plains of Penrith on one side, and the Cumberland hills, as a chain, on the other. Fine fresh wind blowing, and plenty of crows. Do you remember poor papa’s favourite story about the Quaker whom the crows ate on Saddleback? There were some of the biggest and hoarsest-voiced ones about the cliff that I’ve ever had sympathetic croaks from;–and one on the top, or near it, so big that Downes and Crawley, having Austrian tendencies in politics, took it for a ‘black eagle.’ Downes went up capitally, though I couldn’t get him down again, because he _would_ stop to gather ferns. However, we did it all and came down to Threlkeld–of the Bridal of Triermain,

“‘The King his way pursued
By lonely Threlkeld’s waste and wood,’

“in good time for me to dress and, for a wonder, go out to dinner with Acland’s friends the Butlers.”

As an episode in this visit to Keswick, ten days were given to the neighbourhood of Ambleside, “to show Downes Windermere.”

“Waterhead, Windermere,

“_10th August, 1867, Evening_.

“I was at Coniston to-day. Our old Waterhead Inn, where I was so happy playing in the boats, _exists_ no more.–Its place is grown over with smooth Park grass–the very site of it forgotten! and, a quarter of a mile down the lake, a vast hotel built in the railroad station style–making up, I suppose, its fifty or eighty beds, with coffee-room–smoking-room–and every pestilent and devilish Yankeeism that money can buy, or speculation plan.

“The depression, whatever its cause, does not affect my strength. I walked up a long hill on the road to Coniston to-day (gathering wild raspberries)–then from this new Inn, two miles to the foot of Coniston Old Man; up it; down again–(necessarily!)–and back to dinner, without so much as warming myself–not that there was much danger of doing that at the top; for a keen west wind was blowing drifts of cloud by at a great pace, and one was glad of the shelter of the pile of stones, the largest and _oldest_ I ever saw on a mountain top. I suppose the whole mountain is named from it. It is of the shape of a beehive, strongly built, about 15 feet high (so that I made Downes follow me up it before I would allow he had been at the top of the Old Man) and covered with lichen and short moss. Lancaster sands and the Irish sea were very beautiful, and so also the two lakes of Coniston and Windermere, lying in the vastest space of sweet cultivated country I have ever looked over,–a great part of the view from the Rigi being merely over black pine forest, even on the plains. Well, after dinner, the evening was very beautiful, and I walked up the long hill on the road back from Coniston–and kept ahead of the carriage for two miles: I was sadly vexed when I had to get in: and now–I don’t feel as if I had been walking at all–and shall probably lie awake for an hour or two–and feeling as if I had not had exercise enough to send me to sleep.”

“LANGDALE, _13th August, Evening._

“It is perfectly calm to-night, not painfully hot–and the full moon shining over the mountains, opposite my window, which are the scene of Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion.’ It was terribly hot in the earlier day, and I did not leave the house till five o’clock. Then I went out, and in the heart of Langdale Pikes found the loveliest rock-scenery, chased with silver waterfalls, that I ever set foot or heart upon. The Swiss torrent-beds are always more or less savage, and ruinous, with a terrible sense of overpowering strength and danger, lulled. But here, the sweet heather and ferns and star mosses nestled in close to the dashing of the narrow streams;–while every cranny of crag held its own little placid lake of amber, trembling with falling drops–but quietly trembling–not troubled into ridgy wave or foam–the rocks themselves, _ideal_ rock, as hard as iron–no–not quite that, but _so_ hard that after breaking some of it, breaking solid white quartz seemed like smashing brittle loaf sugar, in comparison–and cloven into the most noble masses; not grotesque, but majestic and full of harmony with the larger mountain mass of which they formed a part. Fancy what a place! for a hot afternoon after five, with no wind–and absolute solitude; no creature–except a lamb or two–to mix any ruder sound or voice with the plash of the innumerable streamlets.”

It was during this tour that he looked at a site on the hill above Bowness-on-Windermere, where Mr. T. Richmond, the owner, proposed building him a house. He liked the view, but found it too near the railway station.

After spending September with his mother at Norwood under the care of Dr. Powell, he was able to return home, prepare “Time and Tide” for publication, and write the preface on Dec. 14th. On the 19th the book was out, and immediately bought up. A month later the second edition was issued.

CHAPTER VIII

AGATES, AND ABBEVILLE (1868)

Of less interest to the general reader, though too important a part of Ruskin’s life and work to be passed over without mention, are his studies in Mineralogy. We have heard of his early interest in spars and ores; of his juvenile dictionary in forgotten hieroglyphics; and of his studies in the field and at the British Museum. He had made a splendid collection, and knew the various museums of Europe as familiarly as he knew the picture-galleries. In the “Ethics of the Dust” he had chosen Crystallography as the subject in which to exemplify his method of education; and in 1867, after finishing the letters to Thomas Dixon, he took refuge, as before, among the stones, from the stress of more agitating problems.

In the lecture on the Savoy Alps in 1863 he had referred to a hint of Saussure’s that the contorted beds of the limestones might possibly be due to some sort of internal action, resembling on a large scale that separation into concentric or curved bands which is seen in calcareous deposits. The contortions of gneiss were similarly analogous, it was suggested, to those of the various forms of silica. Ruskin did not adopt the theory, but put it by for examination in contrast with the usual explanation of these phenomena, as the simple mechanical thrust of the contracting surface of the earth.

In 1863 and 1866 he had been among the Nagelflueh of Northern Switzerland, studying the puddingstones and breccias. He saw that the difference between these formations, in their structural aspect, and the hand-specimens in his collection of pisolitic and brecciated minerals was chiefly a matter of size; and that the resemblances in form were very close. And so he concluded that if the structure of the minerals could be fully understood a clue might be found to the very puzzling question of the origin of mountain structure.

Hence his attempt to analyze the structure of agates and similar banded and brecciated minerals, in the series of papers in the _Geological Magazine_;[15] an attempt which though it was never properly completed, and fails to come to any general conclusion, is extremely interesting as an account of beautiful and curious natural forms till then little noticed by mineralogists.

[Footnote 15: August and November, 1867, January, April and May, 1868, December, 1869, and January, 1870, illustrated with very fine mezzotint plates and woodcuts.]

A characteristic anecdote of this period is preserved in “Arrows of the Chace.”

“The _Daily Telegraph_ of January 21st, 1868, contained a leading article upon the following facts. It appeared that a girl, named Matilda Griggs, had been nearly murdered by her seducer, who, after stabbing her in no less than thirteen places, had then left her for dead. She had, however, still strength enough to crawl into a field close by, and there swooned. The assistance she met with in this plight was of a rare kind. Two calves came up to her, and disposing themselves on either side of her bleeding body, thus kept her warm and partly sheltered from cold and rain. Temporarily preserved, the girl eventually recovered, and entered into recognizances, under a sum of forty pounds, to prosecute her murderous lover. But ‘she loved much,’ and failing to prosecute, forfeited her recognizances, and was imprisoned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer for her debt. ‘Pity the poor debtor,’ wrote the _Daily Telegraph_, and in the next day’s issue appeared the following letter, probably not intended for the publication accorded to it. ‘Sir,–Except in ‘Gil Blas,’ I never read of anything Astraean on the earth so perfect as the story in your fourth article to-day. I send you a cheque for the Chancellor. If forty, in legal terms, means four hundred, you must explain the farther requirements to your impulsive public.

“‘I am, Sir, your faithful servant, ‘J. RUSKIN.'”

The writer of letters like this naturally had a large correspondence, beside that which a circle of private friends and numberless admirers and readers elicited. About this time it grew to such a pitch that he was obliged to print a form excusing him from letter-writing on the ground of stress of work. And indeed, this year, though he did not publish his annual volume, as usual, he was fully occupied with frequent letters to newspapers, several lectures and addresses, a preface to the reprint of his old friend Cruikshank’s “Grimm,” and the beginning of a new botanical work, “Proserpina,” in addition to the mineralogy, and a renewed interest in classical studies. Of the public addresses the most important was that on “The Mystery of Life and its Arts,” delivered in the theatre of the Royal College of Science, Dublin (May 13th), and printed in “Sesame and Lilies.”

After this visit to Ireland he spent a few days at Winnington; and late in August crossed the Channel, for rest and change at Abbeville. For the past five years he had found too little time for drawing; it was twenty years since his last sketching of French Gothic, except for a study (now at Oxford), of the porch at Amiens, in 1856. He took up the old work where he had left it, after writing the “Seven Lamps,” with fresh interest and more advanced powers of draughtsmanship as shown in the pencil study of the Place Amiral Courbet, now in the drawing school at Oxford.

The following are extracts from the usual budget of home letters; readers of “Fors” will need no further introduction to their old acquaintance, the tallow-chandler.

“ABBEVILLE, _Friday, 18th Sept._, 1868

“You seem to have a most uncomfortable time of it, with the disturbance of the house. However, I can only leave you to manage these things as you think best–or feel pleasantest to yourself. I am saddened by another kind of disorder, France is in everything so fallen back, so desolate and comfortless, compared to what it was twenty years ago–the people so much rougher, clumsier, more uncivil–everything they do, vulgar and base. Remnants of the old nature come out when they begin to know you. I am drawing at a nice tallow-chandler’s door, and to-day, for the first time had to go inside for rain. He was very courteous and nice, and warned me against running against the candle-ends–or bottoms, as they were piled on the shelves, saying–‘You must take care, you see, not to steal any of my candles’–or ‘steal _from_ my candles,’ meaning not to rub them off on my coat. He has a beautiful family of cats–papa and mamma and two superb kittens–half Angora.”

“_22nd Sept._

“I am going to my cats and tallow-chandler…. I was very much struck by the superiority of manner both in him and in his two daughters who serve at the counter, to persons of the same class in England. When the girls have weighed out their candles, or written down the orders that are sent in, they instantly sit down to their needlework behind the counter, and are always busy, yet always quiet; and their father, though of course there may be vulgar idioms in his language which I do not recognize, has entirely the manners of a gentleman.”

_30th Sept_.

“I have the advantage here I had not counted on. I see by the papers that the weather in England is very stormy and bad. Now, though it is showery here, and breezy, it has always allowed me at some time of the day to draw. The air is tender and soft, invariably–even when blowing with force; and to-day, I have seen quite the loveliest sunset I ever yet saw,–one at Boulogne in ’61 was richer; but for delicacy and loveliness nothing of past sight ever came near this.”

Earlier on the same day he had written:

“I am well satisfied with the work I am doing, and even with my own power of doing it, if only I can keep myself from avariciously trying to do too much, and working hurriedly. But I can do _very_ little quite _well_, each day: with that however it is my bounden duty to be content.

“And now I have a little piece of news for you. Our old Herne Hill house being now tenantless, and requiring some repairs before I can get a tenant, I have resolved to keep it for myself, for my rougher mineral work and mass of collection; keeping only my finest specimens at Denmark Hill. My first reason for this, is affection for the old house:–my second, want of room;–my third, the incompatibility of hammering, washing, and experimenting on stones with cleanliness in my stores of drawings. And my fourth is the power I shall have, when I want to do anything very quietly, of going up the hill and thinking it out in the old garden, where your greenhouse still stands, and the aviary–without fear of interruption from callers.

“It may perhaps amuse you, in hours which otherwise would be listless, to think over what may be done with the old house. I have ordered it at once to be put in proper repair by Mr. Snell; but for the furnishing, I can give no directions at present: it is to be very simple, at all events, and calculated chiefly for museum work and for stores of stones and books: and you really must not set your heart on having it furnished like Buckingham Palace.

“I have bought to-day, for five pounds, the front of the porch of the Church of St. James. It was going to be entirely destroyed. It is worn away, and has little of its old beauty; but as a remnant of the Gothic of Abbeville–as I happen to be here–and as the church was dedicated to my father’s patron saint (as distinct from mine) I’m glad to have got it. It is a low arch–with tracery and niches, which ivy, and the Erba della Madonna, will grow over beautifully, wherever I rebuild it.”

At Abbeville he had with him as usual his valet Crawley; and as before he sent for Downes the gardener, to give him a holiday, and to enjoy his raptures over every new sight. C.E. Norton came on a short visit, and Ruskin followed him to Paris, where he met the poet Longfellow (October 7). At last on Monday, 19th October, he wrote:

“Only a line to-day, for I am getting things together, and am a little tired, but very well, and glad to come home, though much mortified at having failed in half my plans, and done nothing compared to what I expected. But it is better than if I were displeased with all I _had_ done. It isn’t Turner–and it isn’t Correggio–it isn’t even Prout–but it isn’t bad.”

Returning home, he gave an account of his autumn’s work in the lecture at the Royal Institution, January 29th, 1869, on the “Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme.” This lecture was not then published in full: but part of the original text is printed in the third chapter of the work we have next to notice, “The Queen of the Air.”

CHAPTER IX

“THE QUEEN OF THE AIR” (1869)

In spite of a “classical education” and the influence of Aristotle upon the immature art-theories of his earlier works, Ruskin was known, in his younger days, as a Goth, and the enemy of the Greeks. When he began life, his sense of justice made him take the side of Modern Painters against classical tradition. Later on, when considering the great questions of education and the aims of life, he entirely set aside the common routine of Greek and Latin grammar as the all-in-all of culture. But this was not because he shared Carlyle’s contempt for classical studies.

In “Modern Painters,” Vol. III., he had followed out the indications of nature-worship, and tried to analyse in general terms the attitude of the Greek spirit towards landscape scenery, as betrayed in Homer and Aristophanes and the poets usually read. Since that time his interest in Greek literature had been gradually increasing. He had made efforts to improve his knowledge of the language; and he had spent many days in sketching and studying the terra-cottas and vases and coins at the British Museum. He had also taken up some study of Egyptology, through Champollion, Bunsen and Birch, in the hope of tracing the origin of Greek decorative art. Comparative mythology, at that time, was a department of philology, introduced to the English public chiefly by Max Mueller. Under his influence Ruskin entered step by step upon an inquiry which afterwards became of singular importance in his life and thought.

In 1865 he had told his hearers at Bradford that Greek Religion was not, as commonly supposed, the worship of Beauty, but of Wisdom and Power. They did not, in their great age, worship “Venus,” but Apollo and Athena. And he regarded their mythology as a sincere tradition, effective in forming a high moral type, and a great school of art. In the “Ethics of the Dust” he had explained the myth of Athena as parallel to that of Neith in Egypt; and in his fable of Neith and St. Barbara he had hinted at a comparison, on equal terms, of Ancient and Mediaeval mythology. He ended by saying that, though he would not have his young hearers believe “that the Greeks were better than we, and that their gods were real angels,” yet their art and morals were in some respects greater, and their beliefs were worth respectful and sympathetic study. The “Queen of the Air” is his contribution to this study.

On March 9th, 1869, his lecture at University College, London, on “Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm,” began with an attempt to explain in popular terms how a myth differs from mere fiction on the one hand and from allegory on the other, being “not conceived didactically, but didactic in its essence, as all good art is.” He showed that Greek poetry dealt with the series of Nature-myths with which were interwoven ethical suggestions; that these were connected with Egyptian beliefs, but that the full force of them was only developed in the central period of Greek history, and their interpretation was to be read in a sympathetic analysis of the spirit of men like Pindar and AEschylus. “The great question,” he said, “in reading a story is, always, not what wild hunter dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded it; but what wise man first perfectly told, and what strong people first perfectly lived by it. And the real meaning of any myth is that which it has at the noblest age of the nation among whom it was current.”

In the next chapter he worked out, as a sequel to his lecture, two groups of Animal-myths; those connected with birds, and especially the dove, as type of Spirit, and those connected with the serpent in its various significances. These two studies were continued, more or less, in “Love’s Meinie” and in the lecture printed in “Deucalion,” as the third group, that of Plant-myths, was carried on in “Proserpina.” The volume contained also extracts from the lecture on the Architecture of the Valley of the Somme, and two numbers of the “Cestus of Aglaia,” and closed with a paper on The Hercules of Camarina, read to the South Lambeth Art School on March 15th. This study of a Greek coin had already formed the subject of an address at the Working Men’s College, and anticipated the second course of Oxford Lectures. For the rest, “The Queen of the Air” is marked by its statement, more clearly than before in Ruskin’s writing, of the dependence of moral upon physical life, and of physical upon moral science. He speaks with respect of the work of Darwin and Tyndall; but as formerly in the Rede Lecture, and afterwards in the “Eagle’s Nest,” he claims that natural science should not be pursued as an end in itself, paramount to all other conclusions and considerations; but as a department of study subordinate to ethics, with a view to utility and instruction.

Before this book was quite ready for publication, and after a sale of some of his less treasured pictures at Christie’s he left home for a journey to Italy, to revisit the subjects of “Stones of Venice,” as in 1868 he had revisited those of the “Seven Lamps.” At Vevey, on the way, he wrote his preface (May 1st).

By quiet stages he passed the Simplon, writing from Domo d’Ossola, 5th May, 1869:

“I never yet had so beautiful a day for the Simplon as this has been; though the skin of my face is burning now all over–to keep me well in mind of its sunshine. I left Brieg at 6 exactly–light clouds breaking away into perfect calm of blue. Heavy snow on the col–about a league–with the wreaths in many places higher than the carriage. Then, white crocus all over the fields, with Soldanelle and Primula farinosa. I walked about three miles up, and seven down, with great contentment; the waterfalls being all in rainbows, and one beyond anything I ever yet saw; for it fell in a pillar of spray against shadow behind, and became rainbow altogether. I was just near enough to get the belt broad, and the down part of the arch: and the whole fall became orange and violet against deep shade. To-morrow I hope to get news of you all, at Baveno.”

“BAVENO, _Thursday, 6th May_, 1869.

“It is wet this morning, and very dismal, for we are in a ghastly new Inn, the old one being shut up; and there is always a re-action after a strong excitement like the beauty of the Simplon yesterday, which leaves one very dull. But it is of no use growling or mewing. I hope to be at Milan to-morrow–at Verona for Sunday. I have been reading Dean Swift’s life, and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ again. Putting the delight in dirt, which is a mere disease, aside, Swift is very like me, in most things:–in opinions exactly the same.”

At Milan, next day, he went to see the St. Catherine of Luini which he had copied, and found it wantonly damaged by the carelessness of masons who put their ladders up against it, just as if it were a bit of common whitewashed wall.

On the 8th he reached Verona after seventeen years’ absence, and on the 10th he was in Venice. There, looking at the works of the old painters with a fresh eye, and with feelings and thoughts far different from those with which he had viewed them as a young man, in 1845, he saw beauties he had passed over before, in the works of a painter till then little regarded by connoisseurs, and entirely neglected by the public. Historians of art like Crowe and Cavalcaselle[16] had indeed examined Carpaccio’s works and investigated his life, along with the lives and works of many another obscure master: artists like Hook and Burne-Jones had admired his pictures; Ruskin had mentioned his backgrounds twice or thrice in “Stones of Venice.” But no writer had noticed his extraordinary interest as an exponent of the mythology of the Middle Ages, as the illustrator of poetical folk-lore derived from those antique myths of Greece, and newly presented by the genius of Christianity.

[Footnote 16: Their “History of Painting in North Italy,” containing a detailed account of Carpaccio, was published in 1871.]

This was a discovery for which Ruskin was now ripe, He saw at once that he had found a treasure-house of things new and old. He fell in love with St. Ursula as, twenty-four years earlier, he had fallen in love with the statue of Ilaria at Lucca; and she became, as time after time he revisited Venice for her sake, a personality, a spiritual presence, a living ideal, exactly as the Queen of the Air might have been to the sincere Athenian in the pagan age of faith. The story of her life and death became an example, the conception of her character, as read in Carpaccio’s picture, became a standard for his own life and action in many a time of distress and discouragement. The thought of “What would St. Ursula say?” led him–not always, but far more often than his correspondents knew–to burn the letter of sharp retort upon stupidity and impertinence, and to force the wearied brain and overstrung nerves into patience and a kindly answer. And later on, the playful credence which he accorded to the myth deepened into a renewed sense of the possibility of spiritual realities, when he learnt to look, with those mediaeval believers; once more as a little child upon the unfathomable mysteries of life.

But this anticipates the story; at the time, he found in Carpaccio the man who had touched the full chord of his feelings and his thoughts, just as, in his boyhood, Turner had led him, marvelling, through the fire and cloud to the mountain-altar; and as, in his youth, Tintoret had interpreted the storm and stress of a mind awakening to the terrible realities of the world. It was no caprice of a changeful taste, nor love of startling paradox, that brought him to “discover Carpaccio;” it was the logical sequence of his studies, and widening interests, and a view of art embracing far broader issues than the connoisseurship of “Modern Painters,” or the didacticism of “Seven Lamps,” or the historical research of “Stones of Venice.”

Soon after the “Queen of the Air” was published Carlyle wrote:

“Last week I got y’r ‘Queen of the Air,’ and read it. _Euge, Ettge._ No such Book have I met with for long years past. The one soul now in the world who seems to feel as I do on the highest matters, and speaks _mir aus dem Herzen_, exactly what I wanted to hear!-As to the natural history of those old myths I remained here and there a little uncert’n; but as to the meanings you put into them, never anywhere. All these things I not only ‘agree’ with, but w’d use Thor’s Hammer, if I had it, to enforce and put in action on this rotten world. Well done, well done!–and pluck up a heart, and continue ag’n and ag’n. And don’t say ‘most g’t tho’ts are dressed _in shrouds_’: many, many are the Phoebus Apollo celestial arrows you still have to shoot into the foul Pythons, and poisonous abominable Megatheriums and Plesiosaurians that go staggering ab’t, large as cathedrals, in our sunk Epoch ag’n….”

CHAPTER X

VERONA AND OXFORD (1869-1870)

The main object of this journey was, however, not to study mythology, but to continue the revision of old estimates of architecture, and after seventeen years to look with a fresh eye at the subjects of “Stones of Venice.”

The churches and monuments of Verona had been less thoroughly studied than those of Venice, and now they were threatened with imminent restoration. On May 25th he wrote:–“It is very strange that I have just been in time–after 17 years’ delay–to get the remainder of what I wanted from the red tomb of which my old drawing hangs in the passage”–(the Castelbarco monument). “To-morrow they put up scaffolding to retouch, and I doubt not, spoil it for evermore.” He succeeded in getting a delay of ten days, to enable him to paint the tomb in its original state; but before he went home it “had its new white cap on and looked like a Venetian gentleman in a pantaloon’s mask.” He brought away one of the actual stones of the old roof.

On June 3 he wrote:

“I am getting on well with all my own work; and much pleased with some that Mr. Bunney is doing for me; so that really I expect to carry off a great deal of Verona…. The only mischief of the place is its being too rich. Stones, flowers, mountains–all equally asking one to look at them; a history to every foot of ground, and a picture on every foot of wall; frescoes fading away in the neglected streets–like the colours of the dolphin.”

As assistants in this enterprise of recording the monuments of Venice and Verona, and of recording them more fully and in a more interesting way than by photography, he took with him Arthur Burgess and John Bunney, his former pupils. Mr. Burgess was the subject of a memoir by Ruskin in the _Century Guild Hobby Horse_ (April, 1887), appreciating his talents and lamenting his loss. Mr. Bunney, who had travelled with Ruskin in Switzerland in 1863, and had lately lived near Florence, thenceforward settled in Venice, where he died in 1882, after completing his great work, the St. Mark’s now in the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield. A memoir of him by Mr. Wedderburn appeared in the catalogue of the Venice Exhibition, at the Fine Art Society’s Gallery in November, 1882.

At Venice Ruskin had met his old friend Rawdon Brown[17], and Count Giberto Borromeo, whom he visited at Milan on his way home, with deep interest in the Luinis and in the authentic bust of St. Carlo; so closely resembling Ruskin himself. Another noteworthy encounter is recorded in a letter of May 4th.[18]

[Footnote 17: Whose book on the English in Italy (from Venetian documents) was shortly to be published, with funds supplied by Ruskin.]

[Footnote 18: This date ought to be “June 4th,” as Mr. E.T. Cook notices (Library Edn. XIX., p. liv.).]

“As I was drawing in the square this morning, in a lovely, quiet, Italian, light, there came up the poet Longfellow with his little daughter–a girl of 12, or 13, with _springy_-curled flaxen hair,–curls, or waves, that wouldn’t come out in damp, I mean. They stayed talking beside me some time. I don’t think it was a very vain thought that came over me, that if a photograph could have been taken of the beautiful square of Verona, in that soft light, with Longfellow and his daughter talking to me at my work–some people both in England and America would have liked copies of it.”

Readers of “Fors” will recognise an incident noted on the 18th of June.

“Yesterday, it being quite cool, I went for a walk; and as I came down from a rather quiet hillside, a mile or two out of town, I past a house where the women were at work spinning the silk off the cocoons. There was a sort of whirring sound as in an English mill; but at intervals they sang a long sweet chant, all together, lasting about two minutes–then pausing a minute and then beginning again. It was good and tender music, and the multitude of voices prevented any sense of failure, so that it was very lovely and sweet, and like the things that I mean to try to bring to pass.”

For he was already meditating on the thoughts that issued in the proposals of St. George’s Guild, and the daily letters of this summer are full of allusions to a scheme for a great social movement, as well as to his plans for the control of Alpine torrents and the better irrigation of their valleys. On the 2nd of June he wrote:–“I see more and more clearly every day my power of showing how the Alpine torrents may be–not subdued–but ‘educated.’ A torrent is just like a human creature. Left to gain full strength in wantonness and rage, no power can any more redeem it: but watch the channels of every early impulse, and fence _them_, and your torrent becomes the gentlest and most blessing of servants.”

His mother was anxious for him to come home, being persuaded that he was overworking himself in the continued heat which his letters reported. But he was loath to leave Italy, in which, he said, his work for the future lay. He made two more visits to Venice, to draw some of the sculptured details, now quickly perishing, and to make studies of Tintoret and Carpaccio. Among other friends who met him there was Mr. Holman Hunt, with whom he went round his favourite Scuola di San Rocco (1st July). Two days later he wrote:

“You will never believe it; but I have actually been trying to draw–a baby. _The_ baby which the priest is holding in the little copy of Tintoret by Edward Jones which my father liked so much, over the basin stand in his bedroom.[19] All the knowledge I have gained in these 17 years only makes me more full of awe and wonder at Tintoret. But it _is_ so sad–so sad;–no one to care for him but me, and all going so fast to ruin. He has done that infant Christ in about five minutes–and I worked for two hours in vain, and could not tell _why_ in vain–the mystery of his touch is so great.”

[Footnote 19: Mr. and Mrs Burne-Jones had been in Venice in June, 1862; the artist, then young and comparatively unknown, with a commission to copy for Ruskin.]

Final farewell was said to Verona on the 10th August, for the homeward journey by the St. Gothard, and Giessbach, where he found the young friend of 1866 now near her end–and Thun, where he met Professor C.E. Norton. On the way he wrote:

“Lugano, _Saturday, 14th August_, 1869.

“My Dearest Mother,

“Yesterday–exactly three months from the day on which I entered Verona to begin work, I made a concluding sketch of the old Broletto of Como, which I drew first for the 7 lamps[20]–I know not how many years ago,–and left Italy, for this time–having been entirely well and strong every day of my quarter of a year’s sojourn there.

[Footnote 20: “Stones of Venice,” Vol. I., plate 5.]

“This morning, before breakfast, I was sitting for the first time before Luini’s Crucifixion: for all religious-art qualities the greatest picture south of the Alps–or rather, in Europe.

“And just after breakfast I got a telegram from my cousin George announcing that I am Professor of Art–the first–at the University of Oxford.

“Which will give me as much power as I can well use–and would have given pleasure to my poor father–and therefore to me–once…. It will make no difference in my general plans, about travel, etc. I shall think quietly of it as I drive up towards St. Gothard to-day.

“Ever, my dearest mother, ever your loving son,

“J. Ruskin.”

Six years earlier, while being examined before the Royal Academy commission, he had been asked: “Has it ever struck you that it would be advantageous to art if there were at the universities professors of art who might give lectures and give instruction to young men who might desire to avail themselves of it, as you have lectures on geology and botany?” To which he had replied: “Yes, assuredly. The want of interest on the part of the upper classes in art has been very much at the bottom of the abuses which have crept into all systems of education connected with it. If the upper classes could only be interested in it by being led into it when young, a great improvement might be looked for, therefore I feel the expediency of such an addition to the education of our universities.” His interest in the first phase of University Extension, and his gifts of Turners to Oxford and Cambridge, had shown that he was ready to go out of his way to help in the cause he had promoted. His former works on art, and reputation as a critic, pointed to him as the best qualified man in the country for such a post. He had been asked by his Oxford friends, who were many and influential, to stand for the Professorship of Poetry, three years earlier. There was no doubt that the election would be a popular one, and creditable to the University. On the other hand, Ruskin as Professor would have a certain sanction for his teaching, he believed; the title and the salary of L358 a year were hardly an object to him; but the position, as accredited lecturer and authorised instructor of youth, opened up new vistas of usefulness, new worlds of work to conquer; and he accepted the invitation. On August 10th he was elected Slade Professor.

He returned home by the end of August to prepare himself for his new duties. During the last period he had been giving, on an average, half a dozen lectures a year, which amply filled his annual volume. Twelve lectures were required of the professor. Many another man would have read his twelve lectures and gone his way; but he was not going to work in that perfunctory manner. He undertook to revise his whole teaching; to write for his hearers a completely new series of treatises on art, beginning with first principles and broad generalisations, and proceeding to the different departments of sculpture, engraving, landscape-painting and so on; then taking up the history of art:–an encyclopaedic scheme. He took this Oxford work not as a substitute for other occupation, exonerating him from further claims upon his energy and time; nor as a bye-play that could be slurred. He tried to do it thoroughly, and to do it in addition to the various work already in hand, under which, as it was, he used to break down, yearly, after each climax of effort.

This autumn and winter, with his first and most important course in preparation, he was still writing letters to the _Daily Telegraph_; being begged by Carlyle to come–“the sight of your face will be a comfort,” says the poor old man–and undertaking lectures at the Royal Artillery Institution, Woolwich, and at the Royal Institution, London. The Woolwich lecture, given on December 14th, was that added to later editions of the “Crown of Wild Olive,” under the title of “The Future of England.” The other, February 4th, 1870, on “Verona and its Rivers,” involved not only a lecture on art and history and contemporary political economy, but an exhibition of the drawings which he and his assistants had made during the preceding summer.

Four days later he opened a new period in his career with his inaugural Lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford.

BOOK IV

PROFESSOR AND PROPHET (1870-1900)

CHAPTER I

FIRST OXFORD LECTURES (1870-1871)

On Tuesday, 8th February, 1870, the Slade Professor’s lecture-room was crowded to over-flowing with members of the University, old and young, and their friends, who flocked to hear, and to see, the author of “Modern Painters.” The place was densely packed long before the time; the ante-rooms were filled with personal friends, hoping for some corner to be found them at the eleventh hour; the doors were blocked open, and besieged outside by a disappointed multitude.

Professorial lectures are not usually matters of great excitement: it does not often happen that the accommodation is found inadequate. After some hasty arrangements Sir Henry Acland pushed his way to the table, announced that it was impossible for the lecture to be held in that place, and begged the audience to adjourn to the Sheldonian Theatre. At last, welcomed by all Oxford, the Slade Professor appeared, to deliver his inaugural address.[21]

[Footnote 21: The inaugural course was given Feb. 8, 16, 23; March 3, 9, 16 and 23, 1870.]

It was not strictly academic, the way he used to come in, with a little following of familiars and assistants,–exchange recognition with friends in the audience, arrange the objects he had brought to show,–fling off his long sleeved Master’s gown, and plunge into his discourse. His manner of delivery had not altered much since the time of the Edinburgh Lectures. He used to begin by reading, in his curious intonation, the carefully-written passages of rhetoric, which usually occupied only about the half of his hour. By-and-by he would break off, and with quite another air extemporise the liveliest interpolations, describing his diagrams or specimens, restating his arguments, re-enforcing his appeal. His voice, till then artificially cadenced, suddenly became vivacious; his gestures, at first constrained, became dramatic. He used to act his subject, apparently without premeditated art, in the liveliest pantomime. He had no power of voice-mimicry, and none of the ordinary gifts of the actor. A tall and slim figure, not yet shortened from its five feet ten or eleven by the habitual stoop, which ten years later brought him down to less than middle height; a stiff, blue frock-coat; prominent, half-starched wristbands, and tall collars of the Gladstonian type; and the bright blue stock which every one knows for his heraldic bearing: no rings or gewgaws, but a long thin gold chain to his watch:–plain old-English gentleman, neither fashionable bourgeois nor artistic mountebank.

But he gave himself over to his subject with such unreserved intensity of imaginative power, he felt so vividly and spoke so from the heart, that he became whatever he talked about, never heeding his professorial dignity, and never doubting the sympathy of his audience. Lecturing on birds, he strutted like the chough, made himself wings like the swallow; he was for the moment a cat, when he explained (not “in scorn”) that engraving was the “art of scratch.” If it had been an affectation of theatric display, we “emancipated school-boys,” as the Master of University used to call us, would have seen through it at once, and scorned him. But it was so evidently the expression of his intense eagerness for his subject, so palpably true to his purpose, and he so carried his hearers with him, that one saw in the grotesque of the performance only the guarantee of sincerity.

If one wanted more proof of that, there was his face, still young-looking and beardless; made for expression, and sensitive to every change of emotion. A long head, with enormous capacity of brain, veiled by thick wavy hair, not affectedly lengthy but as abundant as ever, and darkened into a deep brown, without a trace of grey; and short, light whiskers growing high over his cheeks. A forehead not on the model of the heroic type, but as if the sculptor had heaped his clay in handfuls over the eyebrows, and then heaped more. A big nose, aquiline, and broad at the base, with great thoroughbred nostrils and the “septum” between them thin and deeply depressed; and there was a turn down at the corners of the mouth, and a breadth of lower lip, that reminded one of his Verona griffin, half eagle, half lion; Scotch in original type, and suggesting a side to his character not all milk and roses. And under shaggy eyebrows, ever so far behind, the fieriest blue eyes, that changed with changing expression, from grave to gay, from lively to severe; that riveted you, magnetised you, seemed to look through you and read your soul; and indeed, when they lighted on you, you felt you had a soul of a sort. What they really saw is a mystery. Some who had not persuaded them to see as others see, maintained that they only saw what they looked for; others, who had successfully deceived them, that they saw nothing. No doubt they might be deceived; but I know now that they often took far shrewder measurements of men–I do not say of women–than anybody suspected.

For the Inaugural Course, he was, so to speak, on his best behaviour, guarding against too hasty expression of individuality. He read careful orations, stating his maturest views on the general theory of art, in picked language, suited to the academic position. The little volume is not discursive or entertaining, like “Modern Painters,” and contains no pictures either with pen or pencil; but it is crammed full of thought, and of the results of thought.

The Slade Professor was also expected to organise and superintend the teaching of drawing; and his first words in the first lecture expressed the hope that he would be able to introduce some serious study of Art into the University, which, he thought, would be a step towards realising some of his ideals of education. He had long felt that mere talking about Art was a makeshift, and that no real insight could be got into the subject without actual and practical dealing with it. He found a South Kensington School in existence at Oxford, with an able master, Mr. Alexander Macdonald; and though he did not entirely approve of the methods in use, tried to make the best of the materials to his hand, accepting but enlarging the scope of the system. The South Kensington method had been devised for industrial designing, primarily; Ruskin’s desire was to get undergraduates to take up a wider subject, to familiarise themselves with the technical excellences of the great masters, to study nature, and the different processes of art,–drawing, painting and some forms of decorative work, such as, in especial, goldsmiths’ work, out of which the Florentine school had sprung. He did not wish to train artists, but, as before in the Working Men’s College, to cultivate the habit of mind that looks at nature and life, not analytically, as science does, but for the sake of external aspect and expression. By these means he hoped to breed a race of judicious patrons and critics, the best service any man can render to the cause of art.

And so he got together a mass of examples in addition to the Turners which he had already given to the University galleries. He placed in the school a few pictures by Tintoret, some drawings by Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Burne-Jones, and a great number of fine casts and engravings. He arranged a series of studies by himself and others, as “copies,” fitted, like the Turners in the National Gallery, with sliding frames in cabinets for convenient reference and removal. After spending most of his first Lent Term in this work, he went home for a month to prepare a catalogue, which was published the same year: the school not being finally opened until October, 1871. During these first visits to Oxford he was the guest of Sir Henry Acland; on April 29, 1871, Professor Ruskin, already honorary student of Christ Church, was elected to an honorary fellowship at Corpus, and enabled to occupy rooms, vacated by the Rev. Henry Furneaux, who gave up his fellowship on marrying Mr. Arthur Severn’s twin-sister.[22]

[Footnote 22: His rooms were in Fellows’ buildings, No. 2 staircase, first floor right.]

After this work well begun, he went abroad for a vacation tour with a party of friends–as in 1866; Lady Trevelyan’s sister, Mrs. Hilliard, to chaperone the same young ladies, and three servants with them. They started on April 27th; stayed awhile at Meurice’s to see Paris; and at Geneva, to go up the Saleve, twice, in bitter black east wind. Then across the Simplon to Milan. After a month at Venice and Verona, where he recurred to his scheme against inundation, then ridiculed by _Punch_, but afterwards taken up seriously by the Italians, they went to Florence, and met Professor Norton. In the end of June they turned homewards, by Pisa and Lucca, Milan and Como, and went to visit their friend Marie of the Giessbach.

At the Giessbach they spent a fortnight, enjoying the July weather and glorious walks, in the middle of which war was suddenly declared between Germany and France. The summons of their German waiter to join his regiment brought the news home to them, as such personal examples do, more than columns of newspaper print; and as hostilities were rapidly beginning, Ruskin, with the gloomiest forebodings for the beautiful country he loved, took his party home straight across France, before the ways should be closed.

August was a month of feverish suspense to everybody; to no one more than to Ruskin, who watched the progress of the armies while he worked day by day at the British Museum preparing lectures for next term. This was the course on Greek relief-sculpture, published as “Aratra Pentelici.”[23] It was a happy thought to illustrate his subject from coins, rather than from disputed and mutilated fragments; and he worked into it his revised theory of the origin of art–not Schiller’s nor Herbert Spencer’s, and yet akin to theirs of the “Spieltrieb,”–involving the notion of doll-play;–man as a child, re-creating himself, in a double sense; imitating the creation of the world and really creating a sort of secondary life in his art, to play with, or to worship. In the last lecture of the series (published separately) the Professor compared–as the outcome of classic art in Renaissance times–Michelangelo and Tintoret, greatly to the disadvantage of Michelangelo. This heresy against a popular creed served as text for some severe criticism; but as he said in a prefatory note to the pamphlet, readers “must observe that its business is only to point out what is to be blamed in Michael Angelo, and that it assumes the fact of his power to be generally known,” and he referred to Mr. Tyrwhitt’s “Lectures on Christian Art” for the opposite side of the question.

[Footnote 23: Delivered Nov. 24, 26, Dec. 1, 3, 8 and 10, 1870.]

Meanwhile the war was raging. Ruskin was asked by his friends to raise his voice against the ravage of France; but he replied that it was inevitable. At last, in October, he read how Rosa Bonheur and Edouard Frere had been permitted to pass through the German lines, and next day came the news of the bombardment of Strasburg, with anticipations of the destruction of the Cathedral, library, and picture galleries, foretelling, as it seemed, the more terrible and irreparable ruin of the treasure-houses of art in Paris. His heart was with the French, and he broke silence in the bitterness of his spirit, upbraiding their disorder and showing how the German success was the victory of “one of the truest monarchies and schools of honour and obedience yet organised under heaven.” He hoped that Germany, now that she had shown her power, would withdraw, and demand no indemnity. But that was too much to ask.

Before long Paris itself became the scene of action, and in January 1871 was besieged and bombarded. So much of Ruskin’s work and affection had been given to French Gothic that he could not endure to think of his beloved Sainte Chapelle as being actually under fire–to say nothing of the horror of human suffering in a siege. He joined Cardinal (then Archbishop) Manning, Professor Huxley, Sir John Lubbock and James Knowles in forming a “Paris Food Fund,” which shortly united with the Lord Mayor’s committee for the general relief of the besieged. The day after writing on the Sainte Chapelle he attended the meeting of the Mansion House, and gave a subscription of L50. He followed events anxiously through the storm of the Commune and its fearful ending, angered at the fratricide and anarchy which no Mansion House help could avert or repair.

It was no time for talking on art, he felt: instead of the full course, he could only manage three lectures on landscape, and these not so completely prepared as to make them ready for printing. Before Christmas he had been once more to Woolwich, where Colonel Brackenbury invited him to address the cadets at the prize-giving of the Science and Art Department, December 13, 1870, in which the Rev. W. Kingsley, an old friend of Ruskin’s and of Turner’s, was one of the masters. Two of the lectures of the “Crown of Wild Olive” had been given there, with more than usual animation, and enthusiastically received by crowded and distinguished audiences, among whom was Prince Arthur (the Duke of Connaught), then at the Royal Military Academy. This time it was the “Story of Arachne,” an address on education and aims in life; opening with reminiscences of his own childhood, and pleasantly telling the Greek myths of the spider and the ant, with interpretations for the times.

In the three lectures on landscape, given January 20, February 9 and 23, 1871, he dwelt on the necessity of human and historic interest in scenery; and compared Greek “solidity and veracity” with Gothic “spirituality and mendacity,” Greek chiaroscuro and tranquil activity with Gothic colour and “passionate rest.” Botticelli’s “Nativity” (now in the National Gallery) was then being shown at the Old Master’s Exhibition, and Ruskin took it, along with the works of Cima, as a type of one form of Greek Art.

In April, 1871, his cousin, Miss Agnew, who had been seven years at Denmark Hill, was married to Mr. Arthur Severn. Ruskin, who had added to his other work the additional labour of “Fors Clavigera,” went for a summer’s change to Matlock. July opened with cold, dry, dark weather, dangerous for out-of-door sketching. One morning early–for he was always an early riser–he took a chill while painting a spray of wild roses before breakfast (the drawing now in the Oxford Schools). He was already overworked, and it ended in a severe attack of internal inflammation, which nearly cost him his life. He was a difficult patient to deal with. The local practitioner who attended him used to tell how he refused remedies, and in the height of the disease asked what would be _worst_ for him. He took it; and to everybody’s surprise, recovered.[24]

[Footnote 24: Mrs. Arthur Severn, in a note on the proof, says: “It was a slice of cold roast beef he hungered for, at Matlock (to our horror, and dear Lady Mount Temple’s, who were nursing him): there was none in the hotel, and it was late at night; and Albert Goodwin went off to get some, somewhere, or anywhere. All the hotels were closed; but at last, at an eating-house in Matlock Bath, he discovered some, and came back triumphant with it, wrapped up in paper; and J.R. enjoyed his late supper thoroughly; and though we all waited anxiously till the morning for the result, it had done no harm! And when he was told pepper was bad for him, he dredged it freely over his food in defiance! It was directly after our return to Denmark Hill he got Linton’s letter offering him this place (Brantwood). There are, I believe, ten acres of moor belonging to Brantwood.” Mr. Albert Goodwin, R.W.S., the landscape painter, travelled, about this time, in Italy with Ruskin.]

During the illness at Matlock his thoughts reverted to the old “Iteriad” times of forty years before, when he had travelled with his parents and cousin Mary from that same “New Bath Hotel,” where he was now lying, to the Lakes; and again he wearied for “the heights that look adown upon the dale. The crags are lone on Coniston.” If he could only lie down there, he said, he should get well again.

He had not fully recovered before he heard that W.J. Linton, the poet and wood-engraver, wished to sell a house and land at the very place: L1,500, and it could be his. Without question asked he bought it at once; and as it would be impossible to lecture at Oxford so soon after his illness, he set off, before the middle of September, with his friends the Hilliards to visit his new possession. They found a rough-cast country cottage, old, damp, decayed; smoky chimneyed and rat-riddled; but “five acres of rock and moor and streamlet; and,” he wrote, “I think the finest view I know in Cumberland or Lancashire, with the sunset visible over the same.”

The spot was not, even then, without its associations: Gerald Massey the poet, Linton, and his wife Mrs. Lynn Linton the novelist, Dr. G.W. Kitchin (Dean of Durham) had lived and worked there, and Linton had adorned it outside with revolutionary mottoes–“God and the people,” and so on. It had been a favourite point of view of Wordsworth’s; his “seat” was pointed out in the grounds. Tennyson had lived for a while close by: his “seat,” too, was on the hill above Lanehead.

But the cottage needed thorough repair, and that cost more than rebuilding, not to speak of the additions of later years, which have ended by making it into a mansion surrounded by a hamlet. And there was the furnishing; for Denmark Hill, where his mother lived, was still to be headquarters. Ruskin gave carte-blanche to the London upholsterer with whom he had been accustomed to deal; and such expensive articles were sent that when he came down for a month next autumn, he reckoned that, all included, his country cottage had cost him not less than L4,000.

But he was not the man to spend on himself without sharing his wealth with others. On November 22nd, Convocation accepted a gift from the Slade Professor of L5,000 to endow a mastership of drawing at Oxford, in addition to the pictures and “copies” placed in the schools; he had set up a relative in business with L15,000, which was unfortunately lost; and at Christmas he gave L7,000, the tithe of his remaining capital, to the St. George’s Fund; of which more hereafter.

On November 23rd he was elected Lord Rector of St. Andrew’s University, by 86 votes against 79 for Lord Lytton. After the election it was discovered that, by the Scottish Universities Act of 1858, no one holding a professorship at a British University was eligible. Professor Ruskin was disqualified, and gave no address; and Lord Neaves was chosen in his place.

Mrs. Ruskin was now ninety years of age; her sight was nearly gone, but she still retained her powers of mind, and ruled with severe kindliness her household and her son. Her old servant Anne had died in March. Anne had nursed John Ruskin as a baby, and had lived with the family ever since, devoted to them, and ready for any disagreeable task–

“So that she was never quite in her glory,” “Praeterita” says, “unless some of us were ill. She had also some parallel speciality for _saying_ disagreeable things, and might be relied upon to give the extremely darkest view of any subject, before proceeding to ameliorative action upon it. And she had a very creditable and republican aversion to doing immediately, or in set terms, as she was bid; so that when my mother and she got old together, and my mother became very imperative and particular about having her teacup set on one side of her little round table, Anne would observantly and punctiliously put it always on the other: which caused my mother to state to me, every morning after breakfast, gravely, that if ever a woman in this world was possessed by the Devil, Anne was that woman.”

But this gloomy Calvinism was tempered with a benevolence quite as uncommon. It was from his parents that Ruskin learned never to turn off a servant, and the Denmark Hill household was as easy-going as the legendary “baronial” retinue of the good old times. A young friend asked Mrs. Ruskin, in a moment of indiscretion, what such a one of the ancient maids did–for there were several without apparent occupation about the house. Mrs. Ruskin drew herself up and said, “She, my dear, puts out the dessert.”

And yet, in her blindness, she could read character unhesitatingly. That was, no doubt, why people feared her. When Mr. Secretary Howell, in the days when he was still the oracle of the Ruskin-Rossetti circle, had been regaling them with his wonderful tales, after dinner, she would throw her netting down and say, “How _can you_ two sit there and listen to such a pack of lies?” She objected strongly, in these later years, to the theatre; and when sometimes her son would wish to take a party into town to see the last new piece, her permission had to be asked, and was not readily granted, unless to Miss Agnew, who was the ambassadress in such affairs of diplomacy. But while disapproving of some of his worldly ways, and convinced that she had too much indulged his childhood, the old lady loved him with all the intensity of the strange fierce lioness nature, which only one or two had ever had a glimpse of. And when (December 5th, 1871) she died, trusting to see her husband again–not to be near him, not to be so high in heaven but content if she might only _see_ him, she said–her son was left “with a surprising sense of loneliness.” He had loved her truly, obeyed her strictly and tended her faithfully; and even yet hardly realized how much she had been to him. He buried her in his father’s grave, and wrote upon it, “Here beside my father’s body I have laid my mother’s: nor was dearer earth ever returned to earth, nor purer life recorded in heaven.”

CHAPTER II

“FORS” BEGUN (1871-1872)

On January 1st, 1871, was issued a small pamphlet, headed “Fors Clavigera,” in the form of a letter to the working men and labourers of England, dated from Denmark Hill, and signed “John Ruskin.” It was not published in the usual way, but sold by the author’s engraver, Mr. George Allen, at Heathfield Cottage, Keston, Kent. It was not advertised; press-copies were sent to the leading papers; and of course the author’s acquaintance knew of its publication. Strangers, who heard of this curious proceeding, spread the report that in order to get Ruskin’s latest, you had to travel into the country, with your sevenpence in your hand, and transact your business among Mr. Allen’s beehives. So you had, if you wanted to see what you were buying; for no arrangements were made for its sale by the booksellers: sevenpence a copy, carriage paid, no discount, and no abatement on taking a quantity.

By such pilgrimages, but more easily through the post, the new work filtered out, in monthly instalments, to a limited number of buyers. After three years the price was raised to tenpence. In 1875 the first thousands of the earlier numbers were sold: “the public has a very long nose,” Mr. Ruskin once said, “and scents out what it wants, sooner or later.” A second edition was issued, bound up into yearly volumes, of which eight were ultimately completed. Meanwhile the work went on, something in the style of the old Addison _Spectator_; each part containing twenty pages, more or less, by Ruskin, with added contributions from various correspondents.

The charm of “Fors” is neither in epigram nor in anecdote, but in the sustained vivacity that runs through the texture of the work; the reappearance of golden threads of thought, glittering in new figures, and among new colours; and throughout all the variety of subject a unity of style unlike the style of his earlier works, where flowery rhetorical passages are tagged to less interesting chapters, separately studied sermonettes interposed among the geology, and Johnson, Locke, Hooker, Carlyle–or whoever happened to be the author he was reading at the time–frankly imitated. It was always clever, but often artificial; like the composition of a Renaissance painter who inserts his _bel corpo ignudo_ to catch the eye. In “Fors,” however, the web is of a piece, all sparkling with the same life; though as it is gradually unwound from the loom it is hard to judge the design. That can only be done when it is reviewed as a whole.

At the time, his mingling of jest and earnest was misunderstood even by friends. The author learnt too painfully the danger of seeming to trifle with cherished beliefs. He forswore levity, but soon relapsed into the old style, out of sheer sincerity: for he was too much in earnest not to be frankly himself in his utterances, without writing up to, or down to, any other person’s standard.

Ruskin did not wish to lead a colony or to head a revolution. He had been pondering for fifteen years the cause of poverty and crime, and the conviction had grown upon him that modern commercialism was at the root of it all. But his attacks on commercialism–his analysis of its bad influence on all sections of society–were too vigorous and uncompromising for the newspaper editors who received “Fors,” and even for most of his private friends. There were, however, some who saw what he was aiming at: and let it be remarked that his first encouragement came from the highest quarters. Just as Sydney Smith, the chief critic of earlier days, had been the first to praise “Modern Painters,” in the teeth of vulgar opinion, so now Carlyle spoke for “Fors.”

“5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, _April 30th_, 1871.

“Dear Ruskin,

“This ‘Fors Clavigera,’ Letter 5th, which I have just finished reading, is incomparable; a quasi-sacred consolation to me, which almost brings tears into my eyes! Every word of it is as if spoken, not out of my poor heart only, but out of the eternal skies; words winged with Empyrean wisdom, piercing as lightning,–and which I really do not remember to have heard the like of. _Continue_, while you have such utterances in you, to give them voice. They will find and force entrance into human hearts, _whatever_ the ‘angle of incidence’ may be; that is to say, whether, for the degraded and _in_ human Blockheadism we, so-called ‘men,’ have mostly now become, you come in upon them at the broadside, at the top, or even at the bottom. Euge, Euge!–Yours ever,

“T. Carlyle.”

Others, like Sir Arthur Helps, joined in this encouragement. But the old struggle with the newspapers began over again.

They united in considering the whole business insane, though they did not doubt his sincerity when Ruskin put down his own money, the tenth of what he had, as he recommended his adherents to do. By the end of the year he had set aside L7,000 toward establishing a company to be called of “St. George,” as representing at once England and agriculture. Sir Thomas Dyke Acland and the Right Hon. W. Cowper-Temple (afterwards Lord Mount Temple), though not pledging themselves to approval of the scheme, undertook the trusteeship of the fund. A few friends subscribed; in June, 1872, after a year and a half of “Fors,” the first stranger sent in his contribution, and at the end of three years L236 13s. were collected, to add to his L7,000, and a few acres of land were given.

Meanwhile Ruskin practised what he preached. He did not preach renunciation; he was not a Pessimist any more than an Optimist. Sometimes he felt he was not doing enough; he knew very well that others thought so. I remember his saying, in his rooms at Oxford in one of those years: “Here I am, trying to reform the world, and I suppose I ought to begin with myself, I am trying to do St. Benedict’s work, and I ought to be a saint. And yet I am living between a Turkey carpet and a Titian, and drinking as much tea”–taking his second cup–“as I can _swig_!”

That was the way he put it to an undergraduate; to a lady friend he wrote later on, “I’m reading history of early saints, too, for my Amiens book, and feel that I ought to be scratched, or starved, or boiled, or something unpleasant; and I don’t know if I’m a saint or a sinner in the least, in mediaeval language. How did the saints feel themselves, I wonder, about their saintship!”

If he had forsaken all and followed the vocation of St. Francis,–he has discussed the question candidly in “Fors” for May, 1874–would not his work have been more effectual, his example more inspiring? Conceivably: but that was not his mission. His gospel was not one of asceticism; it called upon no one for any sort of suicide, or even martyrdom. He required of his followers that they should live their lives to the full in “Admiration, Hope and Love”: and not that they should sacrifice themselves in fasting and wearing of camels’-hair coats. He wished them to work, to be honest, and just, in all things immediately attainable. He asked the tenth of their living–not the widow’s two mites; and it was deeply painful to him to find, sometimes, that they had so interpreted his teaching: as when he wrote, later, to Miss Beever:

“One of my poor ‘Companions of St. George’ who has sent me, not a widow’s but a parlour-maid’s (an old schoolmistress) ‘all her living,’ and whom I found last night, dying, slowly and quietly, in a damp room, just the size of your study (which her landlord won’t mend the roof of), by the light of a single tallow candle,–dying, I say, _slowly_ of consumption, not yet near the end, but contemplating it with sorrow, mixed partly with fear lest she should not have done all she could for her children! The sight of this and my own shameful comforts, three wax candles and blazing fire and dry roof, and Susie and Joanie for friends! Oh me, Susie, what _is_ to become of me in the next world, who have in this life all my good things!”

After carrying on “Fors” for some time his attention was drawn by Mr. W.C. Sillar to the question of “Usury.” At first he had seen no crying sin in Interest. He had held that the “rights of capital” were visionary, and that the tools should belong to him that can handle them, in a perfect state of society; but he thought that the existing system was no worse in this respect than in others, and his expectation of reform in the plan of investment went hand-in-hand with his hope of a good time coming in everything else. So he quietly accepted his rents, as he accepted his Professorship, for example, thinking it his business to be a good landlord and spend his money generously, just as he thought it his business to retain the existing South Kensington drawing school, and the Oxford system of education–not at all his ideal–and to make the best use of them.

A lady who was his pupil in drawing, and a believer in his ideals of philanthropy, Miss Octavia Hill, undertook to help him in 1864 in efforts to reclaim part–though a very small part–of the lower-class dwellings of London. Half a dozen houses in Marylebone left by Ruskin’s father, to which he added three more in Paradise Place, as it was euphemistically named, were the subjects of their experiment. They were ridiculed at first; but by the noblest endeavour they succeeded, and set an example which has been followed in many of our towns with great results. They showed what a wise and kind landlord could do by caring for tenants, by giving them habitable dwellings, recreation ground and fixity of tenure, and requiring in return a reasonable and moderate rent. He got five per cent. for his capital, instead of twelve or more, which such property generally returns, or at that time returned.

But when he began to write against rent and interest there were plenty of critics ready to cite this and other investments as a damning inconsistency. He was not the man to offer explanations at any time. It was no defence to say that he took less and did more than other landlords. And so he was glad to part with the whole to Miss Hill; nor did he care to spend upon himself the L3,500, which I believe was the price. It went right and left in gifts; till one day he cheerfully remarked:

“It’s a’ gane awa’
Like snaw aff a wa’.”

“Is there really nothing to show for it?” he was asked. “Nothing,” he said, “except this new silk umbrella.”

He had talked so much of the possibility of carrying on honest and honourable retail trade, that he felt bound to exemplify his principles. He took a house No. 19, Paddington Street, with a corner shop, near his Marylebone property, and set himself up in business as a teaman. Mr. Arthur Severn painted the sign, in neat blue letters; the window was decked with fine old china, bought from a Cavaliere near Siena, whose unique collection had been introduced to notice by Professor Norton; and Miss Harrie Tovey, an old servant of Denmark Hill, was established there, like Miss Mattie in “Cranford,” or rather like one of the salaried officials of “Time and Tide,” to dispense the unadulterated leaf to all comers. No advertisements, no self-recommendation, no catchpenny tricks of trade were allowed; and yet the business went on, and, I am assured, prospered with legitimate profits. At first, various kinds of the best tea only were sold; but it seemed to the tenant of the shop that coffee and sugar ought to be included in the list. This was not at all in Ruskin’s programme, and there were great debates at home about it. At last he gave way, on the understanding that the shop was to be responsible for the proper roasting of the coffee according to the best recipe. After some time Miss Tovey died. And when, in the autumn of 1876, Miss Octavia Hill proposed to take the house and business over and work it with the rest of the Marylebone property, the offer was thankfully accepted.

Another of his principles was cleanliness; “the speedy abolition of all abolishable filth is the first process of education.” He undertook to keep certain streets, not crossings only, cleaner than the public seemed to care for, between the British Museum and St. Giles’. He took the broom himself, for a start, put on his gardener, Downes, as foreman of the job, and engaged a small staff of helpers. The work began, as he promised, in a humorous letter to the _Pall Matt Gazette_ upon New Year’s Day, 1872, and he kept his three sweepers at work for eight hours daily “to show a bit of our London streets kept as clean as the deck of a ship of the line.”

There were some difficulties, too. One of the staff was an extremely handsome and lively shoeblack, picked up in St. Giles’. It turned out that he was not unknown to the world: he had sat to artists–to Mr. Edward Clifford, to Mr. Severn; and went by the name of “Cheeky.” Every now and then Ruskin “and party” drove round to inspect the works. Downes could not be everywhere at once: and Cheeky used to be caught at pitch and toss or marbles in unswept Museum Street. Ruskin rarely, if ever, dismissed a servant; but street sweeping was not good enough for Cheeky, and so he enlisted. The army was not good enough, and so he deserted; and was last seen disappearing into the darkness, after calling a cab for his old friends one night at the Albert Hall.

One more escapade of this most unpractical man, as they called him. Since his fortune was rapidly melting away, he had to look to his works as an ultimate resource: they eventually became his only means of livelihood. One might suppose that he would be anxious to put his publishing business on the most secure and satisfactory footing; to facilitate sale, and to ensure profit. But he had views. He objected to advertising; though he thought that in his St. George’s Scheme he would have a yearly Book Gazette drawn up by responsible authorities, indicating the best works. He distrusted the system of _unacknowledged_ profits and percentages, though he fully agreed that the retailer should be paid for his work, and wished, in an ideal state, to see the shopkeeper a salaried official. He disliked the bad print and paper of the cheap literature of that day, and knew that people valued more highly what they did not get so easily. He had changed his mind with regard to one or two things–religion and glaciers chiefly–about which he had written at length in earlier works.

So he withdrew his most popular books–“Modern Painters” and the rest–from circulation, though he was persuaded by the publisher to reprint “Modern Painters” and “Stones of Venice” once more–“positively for the last time,” as they said the plates would give no more good impressions. He had his later writings printed in a rather expensive style; at first through Smith & Elder, after two years by Messrs. Watson & Hazell (later Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd.), and the method of publication is illustrated in the history of “Sesame and Lilies,” the first volume of these “collected works.” It was issued by Smith & Elder, May, 1871, at 7s., to the trade only, leaving the retailer to fix the price to the public. In September, 1872, the work was also supplied by Mr. George Allen, and the price raised to 9s.6d., (carriage paid) to trade and public alike, with the idea that an extra shilling, or nearly ten per cent., might be added by the bookseller for his trouble in ordering the work. If he did not add the commission, that was his own affair; though with postage of order and payment, when only one or two copies at a time were asked for, this did not leave much margin. So it was doubled, by the simple expedient of doubling the price!–or, to be accurate, raising it to 18s. (carriage paid) for 20s. over the counter. It was freely prophesied by business men that this would not do: however, at the end of fifteen years the _sixth edition_ of this work in this form was being sold, in spite of the fact that, five years before, a smaller reprint of the same book had been brought out at 5s., and was then in its fourth edition of 3,000 copies each.

Compared with the enormous sale of sensational novels and school books, this is no great matter; but for a didactic work, offered to the public without advertisement, and in the face of the almost universal opposition of the book-selling trade, it means not only that, as an author, Ruskin had made a secure reputation, but also that he deserved the curious tribute once paid him by the journal of a big modern shop (Compton House, Liverpool) as a “great tradesman.”

CHAPTER III

OXFORD TEACHING (1872-1875)

Early in 1872, after bringing out “Munera Pulveris,” the essays he had written ten years before for _Fraser_ on economy; after getting those street-sweepers to work near the British Museum where he was making studies of animals and Greek sculpture; and after once more addressing the Woolwich cadets, this time[25] on the Bird of Calm (the mythology of the Halcyon), Professor Ruskin went to Oxford to give a course of ten lectures[26] on the Relation of Natural Science to Art, afterwards published under the title of “The Eagle’s Nest.” He wrote to Professor Norton:

[Footnote 25: January 13, 1872.]

[Footnote 26: Feb. 8, 10, 15, 17, 22, 24. 29; March 2, 7, and 9.]

“I am, as usual, unusually busy. When I get fairly into my lecture work at Oxford I always find the lecture would come better some other way, just before it is given, and so work from hand to mouth. I am always unhappy, and see no good in saying so. But I am settling to my work here–recklessly–to do my best with it: feeling quite sure that it is talking at hazard for what chance good may come. But I attend regularly in the schools as mere drawing-master, and the men begin to come in one by one, about fifteen or twenty already; several worth having as pupils in any way, being of temper to make good growth of.”

Why was he always unhappy? It was not that Mr. W.B. Scott criticised “Ruskin’s influence” in that March; or that by Easter he had to say farewell to his old home on Denmark Hill, and settle “for good” at Brantwood. Nor that he could go abroad again for a long summer in Italy with Mr. and Mrs. Severn and the Hilliards and Mr. Albert Goodwin. They started about the middle of April, and on the journey out he wrote, beside his “Fors” which always went on, a preface to the Rev. R. St. John Tyrwhitt’s “Christian Art and Symbolism.” He drew the Apse at Pisa, half-amused and half-worried by the little ragamuffin who varied the tedium of watching his work by doing horizontal-bar tricks on the railings of the Cathedral green. Then to Lucca, where, to show his friends something of Italian landscape, he took them for rambles through the olive farms and chestnut woods, among which Miss Hilliard lost her jewelled cross. Greatly to Ruskin’s delight, as a firm believer in Italian peasant-virtue, it was found and returned without hint of reward.

At Rome they visited old Mr. Severn, and then went homeward by way of Verona, where Ruskin wrote an account of the Cavalli monuments for the Arundel society, and Venice, where he returned to the study of Carpaccio. At Rome he had been once more to the Sistine, and found that on earlier visits the ceiling and the Last Judgment had taken his attention too exclusively. Now that he could look away from Michelangelo he become conscious of the claims of Botticelli’s frescoes, which represent, in the Florentine school, somewhat the same kind of interest that he had found in Carpaccio. He became enamoured of Botticelli’s Zipporah, and resolved to study the master more closely. On reaching home he had to prepare “The Eagle’s Nest” for publication; in the preface he gave special importance to Botticelli, and amplified it in lectures on early engraving, that Autumn;[27] in which I remember his quoting with appreciation the passage on the Venus Anadyomene from Pater’s “Studies in the Renaissance” just published.

[Footnote 27: “Ariadne Florentina,” delivered on Nov. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, and Dec. 7, and repeated on the following Thursdays. Ruskin’s first mention of Botticelli was in the course on Landscape, Lent Term, 1871.]

This sudden enthusiasm about an unknown painter amused the Oxford public: and it became a standing joke among the profane to ask who was Ruskin’s last great man. It was in answer to that, and in expression of a truer understanding than most Oxford pupils attained, that Bourdillon of Worcester wrote on “the Ethereal Ruskin,”–that was Carlyle’s name for him:–

“To us this star or that seems bright, And oft some headlong meteor’s flight
Holds for awhile our raptured sight.

“But he discerns each noble star;
The least is only the most far,
Whose worlds, may be, the mightiest are.”

The critical value of this course however, to a student of art-history, is impaired by his using as illustrations of Botticelli, and of the manner of engraving which he took for standard, certain plates which were erroneously attributed to the artist. “It is strange,” he wrote in despair to Professor Norton, “that I hardly ever get anything stated without some grave mistake, however true in my main discourse.” But in this case a fate stronger than he had taken him unawares. The circumstances do not extenuate the error of the Professor, but they explain the difficulties under which his work was done. The cloud that rested on his own life was the result of a strange and wholly unexpected tragedy in another’s.

It was an open secret–his attachment to a lady, who had been his pupil, and was now generally understood to be his _fiancee_. She was far younger than he; but at fifty-three he was not an old man; and the friends who fully knew and understood the affair favoured his intentions and joined in the hope, and in auguries for the happiness for which he had been so long waiting. But now that it came to the point the lady finally decided that it was impossible. He was not at one with her in religious matters. He could speak lightly of her evangelical creed–it seemed he scoffed in “Fors” at her faith. She could not be unequally yoked with an unbeliever. To her, the alternative was plain; the choice was terrible: yet, having once seen her path, she turned resolutely away.[28]

[Footnote 28: In former editions the following sentence was added: “Three years after, as she lay dying, he begged to see her once more. She sent to ask whether he could yet say that he loved God better than he loved her; and when he said ‘No,’ her door was closed upon him for ever.” The statement was suggested by information from Ruskin in later days. I must, however, have misrepresented the facts, as the lady’s mother has left it in writing that no such incident occurred.]

Meanwhile, in the bitterest despair he sought refuge as he had done before, in his work. He accepted the lesson, though he, too, could not recant; still he tried to correct his apparent levity in the renewed seriousness and more earnest tone of “Fors,” speaking more plainly and more simply, but without concession. He wrote on the next Christmas Eve to an Aberdeen Bible-class teacher:

“If you care to give your class a word directly from me, say to them that they will find it well, throughout life, never to trouble themselves about what they ought _not_ to do, but about what they _ought_ to do. The condemnation given from the Judgment Throne–most solemnly described–is all for the _undones_ and not for the _dones_. People are perpetually afraid of doing wrong; but unless they are doing its reverse energetically, they do it all day long, and the degree does not matter. Make your young hearers resolve to be honest in their work in this life. Heaven will take care of them for the other.”

That was all he could say: he did not _know_ there was another life: he _hoped_ there was: and yet, if he were not a saint or a Christian, was there any man in the world who was nearer to the kingdom of Heaven than this stubborn heretic?

His heretical attitude was singular. He was just as far removed from adopting the easy antagonism of science to religion as from siding with religion against science. In a paper singularly interesting–and in his biography important–on the “Nature and Authority of Miracle,” read to the Metaphysical Society (February 11, 1873), he tried to clear up his position and to state a qualified belief in the supernatural.

With that year expired the term for which he had been elected to the Slade Professorship, and in January 1873 he was re-elected. In his first three years he had given five courses of lectures designed to introduce an encyclopaedic review and reconstruction of all he had to say upon art. Beginning with general principles, he had proceeded to their application in history, by tracing certain phases of Greek sculpture, and by contrasting the Greek and the Gothic spirit as shown in the treatment of landscape, from which he went on to the study of early engraving. The application of his principles to theory was made in the course on Science and Art (“The Eagle’s Nest”). Now, on his re-election, he proceeded to take up these two sides of his subject, and to illustrate this view of the right way to apply science to art, by a course on Birds, in Nature, Art and Mythology, and next year by a study of Alpine forms. The historical side was continued with lectures on Niccola Pisano and early Tuscan sculpture, and in 1874 with an important, though unpublished, course on Florentine Art.

It is to this cycle of lectures that we must look for that matured Ruskinian theory of art which his early works do not reach; and which his writings between 1860 and 1870 do not touch. Though the Oxford lectures are only a fragment of what he ought to have done, they should be sufficient to a careful reader; though their expression is sometimes obscured by diffuse treatment, they contain the root of the matter, thought out for fifteen years since the close of the more brilliant, but less profound, period of “Modern Painters.”

The course on Birds[29] was given in the drawing school at the University Galleries. The room was not large enough for the numbers that crowded to hear Professor Ruskin, and each of these lectures, like the previous and the following courses, had to be repeated to a second audience. Great pains had been given to their preparation–much greater than the easy utterance and free treatment of his theme led his hearers to believe. For these lectures and their sequel, published as “Love’s Meinie,” he collected an enormous number of skins–to compare the plumage and wings of different species; for his work was with the _outside_ aspect and structure of birds, not with their anatomy. He had models made, as large as swords, of the different quill-feathers, to experiment on their action and resistance to the air. He got a valuable series of drawings by H.S. Marks, R.A., and made many careful and beautiful studies himself of feathers and of birds at the Zoological Gardens, and the British Museum; and after all, he had to conclude his work saying, “It has been throughout my trust that if death should write on these, ‘What this man began to build, he was not able to finish,’ God may also write on them, not in anger, but in aid, ‘A stronger than he cometh.'”

[Footnote 29: March 15, May 2 and 9; repeated March 19, May 5, and 12, 1873.]

Two of the lectures on birds were repeated at Eton[30] before the boys’ Literary and Scientific Society and their friends; and between this and 1880 Ruskin often went to address the same audience, with the same interest in young people that had taken him in earlier years to Woolwich.

[Footnote 30: May 10 and 17.]

After a long vacation at Brantwood, the first spent there, he went up to give his course on Early Tuscan Art (“Val d’Arno”)[31]. The lectures were printed separately and sold at the conclusion and the first numbers were sent to Carlyle, whose unabated interest in his friend’s work was shown in his letter of Oct. 31st: “_Perge, perge_;–and, as the Irish say, ‘more power to your elbow!’ I have yet read this ‘Val d’Arno’ only once. Froude snatched it away from me yesterday; and it has then to go to my brother at Dumfries. After that I shall have it back….”

[Footnote 31: On Mondays and Thursdays, Oct. 21, 23, 27, 30, Nov. 3, 6, 10, 13, 17, 20; repeated on the Wednesdays and Fridays following.]

During that summer and autumn Ruskin suffered from nights of sleeplessness or unnaturally vivid dreams and days of unrest and feverish energy, alternating with intense fatigue. The eighteen lectures in less than six weeks, a “combination of prophecy and play-acting,” as Carlyle had called it in his own case, and the unfortunate discussion with an old-fashioned economist who undertook to demolish Ruskinism without understanding it, added to the causes of which we are already aware, brought him to New Year, 1874, in “failing strength, care, and hope.” He sought quiet at the seaside, but found modern hotel-life intolerable; he went back to town and tried the pantomimes for distraction,–saw Kate Vaughan in Cinderella, and Violet Cameron in Jack in the Box, over and over again, and found himself:

“Now hopelessly a man of the world!–of that woeful outside one, I mean. It is now Sunday; half-past eleven in the morning. Everybody else is gone to church–and I am left alone with the cat, in the world of sin.”

Thinking himself better, he went to Oxford, and announced a course on Alpine form; but after a week was obliged to retreat and go home to Coniston, still hoping to return and give his lectures. But it was no use. The gloom without deepened the gloom within; and he took the wisest course in trying Italy, alone this time with his old servant Crawley.

The greater part of 1874 was spent abroad–first travelling through Savoy and by the Riviera to Assisi, where he wrote to Miss S. Beever:

“The Sacristan gives me my coffee for lunch in his own little cell, looking out on the olive woods; then he tells me stories of conversions and miracles, and then perhaps we go into the sacristy and have a reverent little poke-out of relics. Fancy a great carved cupboard in a vaulted chamber full of most precious things (the box which the Holy Virgin’s veil used to be kept in, to begin with), and leave to rummage in it at will! Things that are only shown twice in the year or so, with fumigation! all the congregation on their knees–and the sacristan and I having a great heap of them on the table at once, like a dinner service. I really looked with great respect on St. Francis’s old camel-hair dress.”

Thence he went to visit Colonel and Mrs. Yule at Palermo, deeply interested in Scylla and Charybdis, Etna and the metopes of Selinus. His interest in Greek art had been shown, not only in a course of lectures, but in active support to archaeological explorations. He said once, “I believe heartily in diggings, of all sorts.” Meeting General L.P. di Cesnola and hearing of the wealth of ancient remains in Cyprus then newly discovered, Mr. Ruskin placed L1,000 at his disposal. General di Cesnola was able, in April, 1875, to announce that in spite of the confiscation of half the treasure-trove by the local Government, he had shipped a cargo of antiquities, including many vases, terra-cottas, and fragments of sculpture. Whence, precisely, these relics came is now doubtful.

The landscape of Theocritus and the remains of ancient glories roused him to energetic sketching–a sign of returning strength, which continued when he reached Rome, and enabled him to make a very fine copy of Botticelli’s Zipporah, and other details of the Sistine frescoes.

Late in October he reached England, just able to give the promised Lectures on Alpine forms,[32]–I remember his curious attempt to illustrate the neve-masses by pouring flour on a model;–and a second course on the AEsthetic and Mathematic schools of Florence;[33] and a lecture on Botticelli at Eton, of which the Literary and Scientific Society’s minute-book contains the following report:

[Footnote 32: Oct. 27, 30; Nov. 3 and 6, 1874.]

[Footnote 33: Nov. 10, 13, 17, 20, 24, 27; Dec. 1 and 4, 1874.]

“On Saturday, Dec. 12th (1874), Professor Ruskin lectured before a crowded, influential and excited audience, which comprised our noble Society and a hundred and thirty gentlemen and ladies, who eagerly accepted an invitation to hear Professor Ruskin ‘talk’ to us on Botticelli. It is utterly impossible for the unfortunate secretary of the Society to transmit to writing even an abstract of this address; and it is some apology for him when beauty of expression, sweetness of voice, and elegance in imagery defy the utmost efforts of the pen.”

Just before leaving for Italy he had been told that the Royal Institute of British Architects intended to present him with their Gold Medal in acknowledgment of his services to the cause of architecture; and during his journey official announcement of the award reached him. He dictated from Assisi (June 12, 1874) a letter to Sir Gilbert Scott, explaining why he declined the honour intended him. He said in effect that if it had been offered at a time when he had been writing on architecture it would have been welcome; but it was not so now that he felt all his efforts to have been in vain and the profession as a body engaged in work–such as the “restoration” of ancient buildings–with which he had no sympathy. It had been represented to him that his refusal to accept a Royal Medal would be a reflection upon the Royal donor. To which he replied:

“Having entirely loyal feelings towards the Queen, I will trust to her Majesty’s true interpretation of my conduct; but if formal justification of it be necessary for the public, would plead that if a Peerage or Knighthood may without disloyalty be refused, surely much more the minor grace proceeding from the monarch may be without impropriety declined by any of her Majesty’s subjects who wish to serve her without reward, under the exigency of peculiar circumstances.”

It was only the term before that Prince Leopold had been at Oxford, a constant attendant on Ruskin’s lectures, and a visitor to his drawing school. The gentle prince, with his instinct for philanthropy, was not to be deterred by the utterances of “Fors” from respecting the genius of the Professor; and the Professor, with his old-world, cavalier loyalty, readily returned the esteem and affection of his new pupil. A sincere friendship was formed, lasting until the Prince’s death.

In June, 1875, Princess Alice and her husband, with Prince Arthur and Prince Leopold, were at Oxford. Ruskin had just made arrangements completing his gifts to the University galleries and schools. The Royal party showed great interest in the Professor and his work. The Princess, the Grand Duke of Hesse, and Prince Leopold acted as witnesses to the deed of gift, and Prince Arthur and Prince Leopold accepted the trusteeship.

With all the Slade Professor’s generosity, the Ruskin drawing school, founded in these fine galleries to which he had so largely contributed, in a palatial hall handsomely furnished, and hung with Tintoret and Luini, Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and other rare masters, ancient and modern; with the most interesting examples to copy–at the most convenient of desks, we may add–yet in spite of it all, the drawing school was not a popular institution. When the Professor was personally teaching, he got some fifteen or twenty–if not to attend, at any rate to join. But whenever the chief attraction could not be counted on, the attendance sank to an average of two or three. The cause was simple. An undergraduate is supposed to spend his morning in lectures, his afternoon in taking exercise, and his evening in college. There is simply no time in his scheme for going to a drawing school. If it were recognised as part of the curriculum, if it counted in any way along with other studies, or contributed to a “school” akin to that of music, practical art might become teachable at Oxford; and Professor Ruskin’s gifts and endowments–to say nothing of his hopes and plans–would not be wholly in vain.

As he could not make the undergraduates draw, he made them dig. He had noticed a very bad bit of road on the Hinksey side, and heard that it was nobody’s business to mend it: meanwhile the farmers’ carts and casual pedestrians were bemired. He sent for his gardener Downes, who had been foreman of the street-sweepers; laid in a stock of picks and shovels; took lessons in stone-breaking himself, and called on his friends to spend their recreation times in doing something useful.

Many of the disciples met at the weekly open breakfasts at the Professor’s rooms in Corpus; and he was glad of a talk to them on other things beside drawing and digging. Some were attracted chiefly by the celebrity of the man, or by the curiosity of his humorous discourse; but there were a few who partly grasped one side or other of his mission and character. The most brilliant undergraduate of the time, seen at this breakfast table, but not one of the diggers, was W.H. Mallock, afterwards widely known as the author of “Is Life Worth Living?” He was the only man. Professor Ruskin said, who really understood him–referring to “The New Republic.” But while Mallock saw the reactionary and pessimistic side of his Oxford teacher, there was a progressist and optimistic side which does not appear in his “Mr. Herbert.” That was discovered by another man whose career, short as it was, proved even more influential. Arnold Toynbee was one of the Professor’s warmest admirers and ablest pupils: and in his philanthropic work the teaching of “Unto this Last” and “Fors” was illustrated–not exclusively–but truly. “No true disciple of mine will ever be a Ruskinian” (to quote “St. Mark’s Rest”); “he will follow, not me, but the instincts of his own soul, and the guidance of its Creator.”

Like all energetic men, Ruskin was fond of setting other people to work. One of his plans was to form a little library of standard books (“Bibliotheca Pastorum”) suitable for the kind of people who, he hoped, would join or work under his St. George’s Company. The first book he chose was the “Economist” of Xenophon, which he asked two of his young friends to translate. To them and their work he would give his afternoons in the rooms at Corpus, with curious patience in the midst of pre-occupying labour and severest trial; for just then he was lecturing at the London Institution on the Alps[34]–reading a paper to the Metaphysical Society[35]–writing the Academy Notes of 1875, and “Proserpina,” etc.–as well as his regular work at “Fors,” and the St. George’s Company was then taking definite form;–and all the while the lady of his love was dying under the most tragic circumstances, and he forbidden to approach her.

[Footnote 34: “The Simple Dynamic Conditions of Glacial Action among the Alps,” March 11, 1875.]

[Footnote 35: “Social Policy based on Natural Selection,” May 11.]

At the end of May she died. On the 1st of June the Royal party honoured the Slade Professor with their visit–little knowing how valueless to him such honours had become. He went north[36] and met his translators at Brantwood to finish the Xenophon,–and to help dig his harbour and cut coppice in his wood. He prepared a preface; but the next term was one of greater pressure, with the twelve lectures on Sir Joshua Reynolds to deliver. He wrote, after Christmas:

[Footnote 36: “On a posting tour through Yorkshire”. He made three such tours in 1875–southward in January, northward in June and July, and southward in September: and another northward in April and May, 1876.]

“Now that I have got my head fairly into this Xenophon business, it has expanded into a new light altogether; and I think it would be absurd in me to slur over the life in one paragraph. A hundred things have come into my head as I arrange the dates, and I think I can make a much better thing of it–with a couple of days’ work. My head would not work in town–merely turned from side to side–never nodded (except sleepily). I send you the proofs just to show you I’m at work. I’m going to translate all the story of Delphic answer before Anabasis: and his speech after the sleepless night.”

Delphic answers–for he was then again brought into contact with “spiritualism”; and sleepless nights–for the excitement of overwork was telling upon him–were becoming too frequent in his own experience; and yet the lectures on Reynolds went off with success.[37] The magic of his oratory transmuted the scribbled jottings of his MS. into a magnificent flow of rolling paragraph and rounded argument that thrilled a captious audience with unwonted emotion, and almost persuaded many a hearer to accept the gospel of “the Ethereal Ruskin.” In spite of a sense of antagonism to his surroundings, he did useful work which none other could do in the University. That this was acknowledged was proved by his re-election, early in 1876: but his third term of three years was a time of weakened health. Repeated absence from his post and inability to fulfil his duties made it obviously his wisest course, at the end of that term, to resign the Slade Professorship.

[Footnote 37: Nov. 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 23, 25, and 27; 1875.]

CHAPTER IV

ST. GEORGE AND ST. MARK (1875-1877)

In the book his Bertha of Canterbury was reading at twilight on the Eve of St. Mark, Keats might have been describing “Fors.” Among its pages, fascinating with their golden broideries of romance and wit, perplexing with mystic vials of wrath as well as all the Seven Lamps and Shekinah of old and new Covenants commingled, there was gradually unfolded the plan of “St. George’s Work.”

The scheme was not easy to apprehend; it was essentially different from anything then known, though superficially like several bankrupt Utopias. Ruskin did not want to found a phalanstery, or to imitate Robert Owen or the Shakers. That would have been practicable–and useless.

He wanted much more. He aimed at the gradual introduction of higher aims into ordinary life: it giving true refinement to the lower classes, true simplicity to the upper. He proposed that idle hands should reclaim waste lands; that healthy work and country homes should be offered to townsfolk who would “come out of the gutter.” He asked land-owners and employers to furnish opportunities for such reforms;–which would involve no elaborate organization nor unelastic rules;–simply the one thing needful, the refusal of Commercialism.

As before, he scorned the idea that real good could be done by political agitation. Any government would work, he said, if it were an efficient government. No government was efficient unless it saw that every one had the necessaries of life, for body and soul; and that every one earned them by some work or other. Capital–that is, the means and material of labour, should therefore be in the hands of the Government, not in the hands of individuals: this reform would result easily and necessarily from the forbidding of loans on interest. Personal property would still be in private hands; but as it could not be invested and turned into capital, it would necessarily be restricted to its actual use, and great accumulation would be valueless.

This is, of course, a very sketchy statement of the ground-work of “Fors,” but to most readers nowadays as comprehensible as, at the time of its publication, it was incomprehensible. For when, long after “Fors” had been written, Ruskin found other writers advocating the same principles and calling themselves Socialists, he said that he too was a Socialist.

But the Socialists of various sects have complicated, and sometimes confused, their simple fundamental principles with various ways and means; to which he could not agree. He had his own ways and means. He had his private ideals of life, which he expounded, along with his main doctrine. He thought, justifiably, that theory was useless without practical example; and so he founded St. George’s Company (in 1877 called St. George’s Guild) as his illustration.

The Guild grew out of his call, in 1871, for adherents: and by 1875 began to take definite form. Its objects were to set the example of a common capital as opposed to a National debt, and of co-operative labour as opposed to competitive struggle for life. Each member was required to do some work for his living–without too strict limits as to the kind–and to practice certain precepts of religion and morality, broad enough for general acceptance. He was also required to obey the authority of the Guild, and to contribute a tithe of his income to a common fund, for various objects. These objects were–first: to buy land