At different dates he was elected to various societies–Geological, Zoological, Architectural, Horticultural, Historical, Anthropological, Metaphysical; and to the Athenaeum and Alpine Clubs. He was elected Hon. Member of the Academy of Florence in 1862, of the Academy of Venice, 1877, of the Royal Academies of Antwerp and Brussels in 1892; and was also an Hon. Member of the American Academy. But he did not seek distinctions, and he even declined them, as in the case of the medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
A more striking form of distinction than such titles is the fact that he was the first writer whose contemporaries, during his lifetime, formed societies to study his work. The first Ruskin Society was founded in 1879 at Manchester, and was followed by the Societies of London, Glasgow and Liverpool. In 1887 the Ruskin Reading Guild was formed in Scotland, with many local branches in England and Ireland, and a journal, subsequently re-named _Igdrasil_, to promote study of literary and social subjects in Ruskin, and in writers like Carlyle and Tolstoi taking a standpoint similar to his. In 1896, Ruskin Societies were formed at Birmingham and in the Isle of Man. Many classes and clubs for the study of Ruskin were also in operation throughout America during his lifetime.
His eightieth birthday was the signal for an outburst of congratulations almost greater than even admirers had expected. The post came late and loaded with flowers and letters, and all day long telegrams arrived from all parts of the world, until they lay in heaps, unopened for the time being. A great address had been prepared, with costly illumination on vellum, and binding by Mr. Cobden Sanderson.
“Year by year,” it said, “in ever widening extent, there is an increasing trust in your teaching, an increasing desire to realize the noble ideals you have set before mankind in words which we feel have brought nearer to our hearts the kingdom of God upon earth. It is our hope and prayer that the joy and peace you have brought to others may return in full measure to your own heart filling it with the peace which comes from the love of God and the knowledge of the love of your fellow-men.”
Among those who subscribed to these sentiments were various people of importance, such as Royal Academicians, the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, the Trustees of the British Museum and of the National Gallery, the St. George’s Guild and Ruskin Societies, with many others; and the address was presented by a deputation who reported that they had found him looking well “and extremely happy.”
A similar illuminated address from the University of Oxford ran thus:
“We venture to send you, as you begin your eighty-first year, these few words of greeting and good-will, to make you sure that in Oxford the gratitude and reverence with which men think of you is ever fresh. You have helped many to find in life more happiness than they thought it held; and we trust there is happiness in the latter years of your long life. You have taught many to see the wealth of beauty in nature and in art, prizing the remembrance of it; and we trust that the sights you have best loved come back to your memory with unfading beauty. You have encouraged many to keep a good heart through dark days, and we trust that the courage of a constant hope is yours.”
The London Ruskin Society sent a separate address; and to show that if not a prophet in his own country he was at any rate a valued friend, the Coniston Parish Council resolved “and carried unanimously,” says the local journal, “with applause,”
“That the congratulations of this council be offered to Mr. John Ruskin, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, together with the warm thanks which they and all their neighbours feel for the kindness he has shown, and the many generous acts he has done to them and theirs during twenty-seven years of residence at Coniston, where his presence is most truly appreciated, and his name will always be most gratefully remembered.”
But as the year went on he did not regain his usual summer strength. Walking out had become a greater weariness to him, and he had to submit to the humiliation of a bath-chair. To save himself even the labour of creeping down to his study, he sat usually in the turret-room upstairs, next to his bed-chamber, but still with the look of health in his face, and the fire in his eyes quite unconquered. He would listen while Baxter read the news to him, following public events with interest, or while Mrs. Severn or Miss Severn read stories, novel after novel; but always liking old favourities best, and never anything that was unhappy. Some pet books he would pore over, or drowse over by the hour. The last of these was one in which he had a double interest, for it was about ships of war, and it was written by the kinsman of a dear friend. Some of the artists he had loved and helped had failed him or left him, but Burne-Jones was always true. One night, going up to bed, the old man stopped long to look at the photograph from Philip Burne-Jones’s portrait of his father. “That’s my dear brother, Ned,” he said, nodding good-bye to the picture as he went. Next night the great artist died, and of all the many losses of these later years this one was the hardest to bear.
So when a little boy lent him “A Fleet in Being” he read and re-read it; then got a copy for himself, and might have learnt it by heart, so long he pored over it. But when the little boy or his sisters went to visit the “Di Pa” (Dear Papa), as he liked children to call their old friend, he had now scarcely anything to talk about. “He just looked at us, and smiled,” they would report; “and we couldn’t think what to say.”
He had his “bright days,” when he would hear business discussed, though a very little of it was wearisome. It was impossible to bring before him half the wants and wishes of his correspondents, who could not yet realise his weakness, and besought the notice they fancied so easily given. Yet in that weakness one could trace no delusions, none of the mental break-down which was taken for granted. If he gave an opinion it was clear and sound enough; of course with the old Ruskinian waywardness of idea which always puzzled his public. But he knew what he was about, and knew what was going on. He was like the aged Queen Aud in the saga, who “rose late and went to bed early, and if anyone asked after her health she answered sharply.”
But all the love and care spent on him could not keep him with us. There came the Green Yule that makes a fat kirkyard, and in January of 1900 hardly a house in the neighbourhood was free from the plague of influenza. In spite of strictest precautions it invaded Brantwood.
On the 18th of January he was remarkably well, as people often are before an illness–“fey,” as the old Northern folk-lore has it. Towards evening, when Mrs. Severn went to him for the usual reading–it was Edna Lyall’s “In the Golden Days”–his throat was irritable and he “ached all over.” They put him to bed and sent for Dr. Parsons, his constant medical attendant, who found his temperature as high as 102 deg., and feared the consequences. But the patient, as he always did, refused to be considered ill, and ate his dinner, and seemed next day to be really better. There was no great cause for alarm, though naturally some for anxiety; and in reasonable hopes of amendment, the slight attack was not made public.
On Saturday morning, the 20th, all appeared to be going well until about half-past ten. Suddenly he collapsed and became unconscious. It was the dreaded failure of heart after influenza. His breathing weakened, and through the morning and through the afternoon in that historic little room, lined with his Turners, he lay, falling softly asleep. No efforts could revive him. There was no struggle; there were no words. The bitterness of death was spared him. And when it was all over, and those who had watched through the day turned at last from his bedside, “sunset and evening star” shone bright above the heavenly lake and the clear-cut blue of Coniston fells.
Next morning brought messages of hurried condolence, and the Monday such a chorus from the press as made all the praises of his lifetime seem trifling and all its blame forgotten. If only, in his years of struggle and despair, he had known the place he should win!
On the Tuesday came a telegram offering a grave in Westminster Abbey, the highest honour our nation can give to its dead. But his own mind had long since been made plain on that point, and his wishes had not been forgotten. “If I die here,” he used to say, “bury me at Coniston. I should have liked, if it happened at Herne Hill, to lie with my father and mother in Shirley churchyard, as I should have wished, if I died among the Alps, to be buried in the snow.”
We carried him on Monday night down from his bed-chamber and laid him in the study. There was a pane of glass let into the coffin-lid, so that the face might be kept in sight; and there it lay, among lilies of the valley, and framed in the wreath sent by Mr. Watts, the great painter, a wreath of the true Greek laurel, the victor’s crown, from the tree growing in his garden, cut only thrice before, for Tennyson and Leighton and Burne-Jones. It would be too long to tell of all such tokens of affection and respect that were heaped upon the coffin,–from the wreath of the Princess Louise down to the tributes of humble dependants,–above a hundred and twenty-five, we counted; some of them the costliest money could buy, some valued no less for the feeling they expressed. I am not sure that the most striking was not the village tailor’s, with this on its label–“There was a man sent from God, and his name was John.”
On the Wednesday we made our sad procession to the church, through storm and flood. The village was in mourning, and round the churchyard gates men, women, and children stood in throngs. The coffin was carried in by eight of those who had been in his employ, and the church filled noiselessly with neighbours and friends, who after a hymn, and the Lord’s prayer, and a long silence, passed up the aisles for their last look, and to heap more offerings of wreaths and flowers around the bier. At dusk tall candles were lit, and so through the winter’s night watch was kept.
Thursday, the 25th, brought together a great assembly, great for the remoteness of the place and the inclemency of the weather. The country folk have a saying “Happy is the dead that the rain rains on;” and the fells were darkly clouded and the beck roared by, swollen to a torrent. The church was far too small to hold the congregation, which included most of his personal friends and the representatives of many public bodies. A crowd stood outside in the storm while the service went on.
It began with a hymn written for the occasion by Canon Rawnsley who with the Vicar of Hawkshead, Brantwood’s parish church, read the Psalms. A hymn, “Comes at times a stillness as of even,” was sung by his friend Miss Wakefield; and the lesson read by Canon Richmond, arrived officially to represent the Bishop of Carlisle, but to most of us representing old times and the comradeships of his youth and early manhood. The Vicar of Coniston and the Rev. Reginald Meister, on behalf of the Dean of Christ Church, also took part in the service. When the Dead March sounded the coffin was covered with a pall given by the Ruskin Linen Industry of Keswick, lined with bright crimson silk, and embroidered with the motto, “Unto This Last,” and with his favourite wild roses showered over the gray field, just as they fall in the _Primavera_ of Botticelli. There was no black about his burying, except what we wore for our own sorrow; it was remembered how he hated black, so much that he would even have his mother’s coffin painted blue; and among the white and green and violet of the wreaths that filled the chancel, none was more significant in its sympathy than Mrs. Severn’s great cross of red roses.
As we carried him down the churchyard path, a drop or two fell from the boughs, but a gleam of sunshine, the first after many days, shot along the crags from under the cloud, and the wind paused. Standing there by the graveside, who could help being thankful that he had found so lovely a resting-place after so tranquil a falling to sleep? At his feet, parted only by the fence and the garden, is the village school; and who does not know how he loved the children of Coniston? At his right hand are the graves of the Beevers; his last old friend, Miss Susan Beever, lies next to him. Over the spot hang the thick boughs of a fir-tree–who does not know what he has written of his favourite mountain-pine? And behind the church, shut in with its dark yews’, rise the crags of Coniston, those that he wearied for in his boyhood, beneath which he prayed, in sickness, to lie down and rest. “The crags are lone on Coniston.”
INDEX
Abbeville,
Acland, Sir H.W., M.D.,
Acland, Sir T.D.,
Adairs and Agnews,
Agnew, Miss Joan Ruskin,
_and see_ Severn, Mrs. A.
Alessandri, Angelo,
Alexander, Mrs. and Miss Francesca, Alice, Princess,
Allen, Mr. George,
“Amiens, The Bible of,”
Anderson, Mr. J.R.,
Anderson, Miss S.D.,
Andrews, Dr. and family,
Animals, Ruskin and,
Anne, Nurse,
“Arachne,”
“Aratra Pentelici,”
Architects, Royal Institute,
Architectural Association, lecture to, “Architecture, the Poetry of,”
“Architecture, the Seven Lamps of,” “Ariadne Florentina,”
Armytage, J.C.,
Arthur, Prince,
Assisi,
Avallon,
Baker, Mr. George,
Baxter, Mr. Peter,
Beever, Miss Mary,
Miss Susanna, 2
“Bibliotheca Pastorum,”
Bishop, Mrs. W.H.,
Blow, Mr. Detmar J.,
Boehm, Sir Edgar,
Boni, Commendatore G.,
Botticelli,
Bourdillon, Mr. F.W.,
Boys, T.,
Bradford lectures,
Brantwood,
Brown, Dr. John,
Prof. Thomas,
Rawdon,
Rev. Walter,
Browning, Robert and Mrs.,
Buckland, Dr.,
Bunney, J.W.,
Burgess, Arthur,
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward,
Camberwell lectures,
Cambridge lectures,
Carlyle, Thomas,
Mrs.,
Carpaccio,
Carrick and Vokins,
Cesnola, General L.P. di,
“Cestus of Aglaia,”
Chamberlain, John Henry,
Chamouni,
Christ’s Hospital lecture,
Collins, “Charley,”
Coniston,
lecture,
Cooke, Mr. E.,
Cousen, J.,
Coutet, Joseph,
Cowper-Temple, Mr. and Mrs. (Lord and Lady Mount Temple), “Crown of Wild Olive,”
Croydon,
Cruikshank, George,
Cutt, R.P.,
Cyanometer,
Dale, Rev. T.,
Dart, Henry,
Darwin, Charles,
Denmark Hill,
“Deucalion,”
Deverell, W.H.,
Dickinson, Lowes,
Dixon, Thomas,
Domecq, Adele,
Peter,
Downes, David,
Dublin lecture,
“Eagle’s Nest,”
Edinburgh lectures,
Edwardes, Sir Herbert,
“Elements of Drawing,”
“Ethics of the Dust,”
Eton lectures,
Eyre, Governor,
Fall, Richard,
Faunthorpe, Rev. J.P.,
Fielding, Copley,
Fleming, Mr. A.,
Florence,
Forbes, Principal J.D.,
Forgeries of Ruskin,
“Fors Clavigera,”
“Friendship’s Offering,”
Friends of Living Creatures, Society of, Froude, J.A.,
Furnivall, F.J.,
Geneva,
Geology,
_and see_ Deucalion, Minerals
Giessbach,
Gladstone, W.E.,
Glasgow Rectorship,
Glenfarg,
Glenfinlas,
Goodwin, Mr. Albert, R.W.S.,
Gordon, Rev. Osborne,
Gothic Revival,
Gray,
Euphemia (Effie),
Mr. George, of Perth,
Mr. and Mrs. Richard,
Greenaway, Kate,
Gull, Sir Wm., M.D.,
Halle, Sir Charles,
Harding, J.D.,
Hardraw Fall,
Harrison, W.H.,
“Harry and Lucy Concluded,”
Helps, Sir Arthur,
Herne Hill,
Hill, Miss Octavia,
Hilliard,
Mrs.,
Miss,
Laurence Jermyn,
Hooper, W.H.,
Howell, Charles Augustus,
Hunt, W. Holman,
Hunt, “Old” William,
Ilaria di Caretto,
Jameson, Mrs.,
Jeffery, W.,
Jephson, Dr., of Leamington,
Jowett, H. (of Hazell, Watson and Viney),
“Kata Phusin,”
Keble,
Kendal lecture,
Keswick,
“King of the Golden River,”
King’s College, London,
Kingsley, Rev. W.,
Langdale Linen Industry,
“Laws of Fesole,”
Le Keux, J.H.,
“Leoni,”
Leopold, Prince,
Lewis, J.F., R.A.,
Liddell, Dean,
Lockhart, J.G.,
London Institution lectures,
Longfellow,
“Lord’s Prayer, Letters on the,”
Loudon’s Magazines,
“Love’s Meinie,”
Lucca,
Luini,
Lupton, Thomas,
Macdonald,
Mr. Alex.,
W.M., of Crossmount,
Mallock, Mr. W.H.,
Manchester lectures,
Manning, Cardinal,
“Marcolini,”
Marks, H.S., R.A.,
Matlock,
Matterhorn,
Maurice, Rev. F.D.,
May Queens,
Meissonier’s “Napoleon,”
Metaphysical Society,
Meteorological Society,
Millais, Sir J.E.,
Milman, Dean,
Minerals and Crystals,
Mitford, Miss,
“Modern Painters,”
Moore, Prof. C.H.,
Rev. Daniel,
Mornex,
“Mornings in Florence,”
“Munera Pulveris,”
Munro of Novar,
Murray, Mr. C. Fairfax,
Mythology,
National Gallery,
Newman, Mr. H.R.,
Newton, Sir Charles,
Northcote, James, R.A.,
Norton, Prof. C.E.,
Oliver, Prof.,
Oxford:
Ruskin as under graduate,
as graduate,
as Professor,
his lectures,
his drawing school,
his Hinksey diggings,
Oxford Museum,
Palermo,
Paris,
Patmore, Coventry,
Pedigree of Ruskin,
Perth,
Photography, Ruskin’s early use of, Pisa,
Plague wind,
Poems,
“Political Economy of Art,”
Politics, Ruskin’s attitude,
Portraits of Ruskin, by
Northcote,
Richmond,
Rossetti,
Boehm,
Posting-tours,
“Praeterita,”
Pre-Raphaelitism,
Pringle, Thomas,
“Proserpina,”
Prout, Samuel,
Publishing arrangements,
Ruskin’s,
“Queen of the Air,”
Queen Victoria,
Railways, Ruskin’s attitude toward,
Randal, Mr. Frank,
Religion, Ruskin’s development,
Reynolds, lectures on,
Richardson families,
Charles,
Jessie,
Mary (Mrs. Bolding),
Dr. William,
Mr. William,
_and see_ pedigree,
Richmond, George, R.A.,
Sir William B., R.A.,
Roberts, David, R.A.,
Robson, Mr. E.R.,
Rogers, Samuel,
Rome,
Rooke, Mr. T.M., R.W.S.,
Rossetti,
D.G.,
T.P.,
Rowbotham, Mr.,
“Royal Academy, Notes on the,”
Royal Institution lectures,
Runciman, Mr.,
Ruskin family,
John James,
Mrs. (Margaret Cox, John
Ruskin’s mother),
St. Andrews Rectorship,
St. George’s Guild,
St. Mark’s Rest,
St. Ursula,
Sandgate,
Saussure,
Seascale,
Seddon, Thomas,
“Sesame and Lilies,”
Severn,
Mr. Arthur, R.I.
Mrs. Arthur,
_and see_ Agnew, Miss
“Sheepfolds, Notes on the Construction of,” Sheffield communists,
Museum (St. George’s now “Ruskin”), Sillar, W.C.,
Smetham, James,
Smith, Elder & Co.,
Smith, Sydney,
Socialism, Ruskin’s attitude,
Somervell, Mr. R.,
South Kensington Museum lecture,
Spurgeon, C.H.,
Stanfield, C., R.A.,
Stillman, W.J.,
“Stones of Venice,”
Stowe, Mrs. H.B.,
Street-sweeping,
Swan, Henry,
Swiss towns, intended history,
Talbot, Mrs., and Mr. Q.,
Talloires,
Taylor, Sir Henry,
Tea-shop, Ruskin’s,
Telford, Henry,
Tennyson,
Thackeray,
Thomson, Mr. George,
“Time and Tide,”
Tintoret,
Toynbee, Arnold,
Trevelyan, Sir Walter and Lady,
Tunbridge Wells,
lecture at,
Turner, J.M.W.,
“Two Paths,”
Tyrwhitt, Rev. R, St. J.
University College, London,
lecture at,
“Unto this last,”
“Val d’Arno,”
Venice,
Vere, Aubrey de,
Verona,
Waldensians,
Ward, Rev. J. Clifton,
William,
Watts, G.F., R.A.,
Wedderburn, Mr. A., K.C.,
Whistler, J. McN.,
Willett, Henry, F.G.S.,
Windus, G.,
Winnington school,
Withers, Charlotte,
Woodward, Benjamin,
Woolwich lectures,
Working Men’s College,
Wornum, R.N.,
Xenophon’s “Economist,”
“Yewdale and its streamlets,”
Yule, Colonel and Mrs.,
Zermatt,