rTHE
PILGRIM
BOOKS
JOHN RUSKIN
THE
PILGRIM BOOKS
General Editor —
S. L. BENSUSAN
1. SHAKESPEARE
2. LAMB
3. WORDSWORTH
4. TENNYSON
5. RUSKIN
Others in Preparation
JOHN RUSKIN
HIS HOMES AND HAUNTS
BY r^
JAMES D.'SYMON
WITH TWELVE DRAWINGS IN CRAYON BY
W. B. ROBINSON
AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
16 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.
AND EDINBURGH
PR
IN PIAM MEMOBIAM
OPTIMA MATRIS
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD — HUNTER STREET
AND HERNE HILL 1
II. HERNE HILL AND EXCURSIONS . . . . . .13
III. OXFORD 24
IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF FAME 32
V. "THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 38
VI. FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, AND ITALY .... 46
VII. OXFORD ONCE MORE : THE SLADE PROFESSOR . . 62
VIII. GATES OF THE HILLS . 70
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF RUSKIN . . . .- . . . Frontispiece
RUSKIN'S BIRTHPLACE, 54 HUNTER STREET, BRUNS-
WICK SQUARE, W.C _ . . . Facing p. 4
RUSKIN'S HOUSE, No. 28 HERNE HILL .... ,,16
RUSKIN'S HOUSE, DENMARK HILL .... ,,20
CHAMOUNI AND MONT BLANC ..... ,,24
THE QUADRANGLE AND PELICAN, CORPUS CHRISTI
COLLEGE, OXFORD ,,28
RUSKIN'S WALK, DENMARK HILL .... ,,32
KINNOULL ,,36
CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD ,,40
DANIELI'S HOTEL, VENICE ,,44
ENTRANCE TO THE DOGE'S PALACE, VENICE . . „ 48
THE MOAT OF NUREMBERG. DRAWING BY JOHN
RUSKIN „ 52
CONISTON WATER AND THE OLD MAN ... ,,56
BRANTWOOD, CONISTON ....... ,,60
LOIRE-SIDE, BY RUSKIN, AFTER TURNER ... ,,64
THE BRIDGE OF RHEINFELDEN ON THE RHINE,
BY RUSKIN, AFTER TURNER ,,68
PEEFACE
THIS essay is obviously an outline; it could not be
otherwise when the story of eighty years had to be
told in eighty pages. The reader will find little that
is new save an anecdote here and there ; but the treat-
ment, as regards locality, has at least the freshness of
its attempt to describe places and scenes not as they
may appear to the independent observer to-day, but
as they appeared to Ruskin himself.
The principal authority has therefore been the
works of John Ruskin, in their compass. Quota-
tions not directly acknowledged in the text are from
Prceterita. Elsewhere the sources are indicated. The
author also acknowledges much valuable help from
the biographical notes of Mr. Cook and Mr. Wedder-
burn in the Library Edition of Ruskin, as well as
from the short biographies of Mr. Collingwood and
Mr. Frederic Harrison. On many critical points he
has consulted, always with illumination, even where
complete agreement was denied him, the invaluable
monograph of Mrs. Meynell, and that of Mr. J. M.
Mather. In justice to himself, he may perhaps confess
that these pages were passed for press before he read
Dean Kitchin's " Ruskin at Oxford."
Cordial thanks are due to Mr. John Leith for his
kindness in lending for reproduction a memorable
letter of Ruskin's.
J. D. S.
Til
JOHN RUSKIN
CHAPTER I
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD— HUNTER STREET
AND HERNE HILL
AT the birth of John Ruskin, the Fates that spin the
destinies of Art and Letters must have sung harmo-
niously to their spindles. For seldom has a man of
genius been so favoured by fortune as the child who
was born to John James Ruskin and his wife Margaret
on February 8, 1819, at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick
Square. An only child, he was from the beginning
marked out as one apart : his forbears were no ordinary
people ; his training was to be peculiar ; above all, he
was to be spared that which is at once the handicap
and the spur of great abilities, a fight with adversity.
He was, it is true, to become in after years a com-
batant among combatants, to fight gallantly for truth,
and to pass away grieving that the complete victory
he had sought was denied him ; but in the early years
no cloud obscured his growing powers. He grew up
like some rare and curious flower in a garden closed
and sheltered from the storms of the world, nurtured
2 JOHN RUSKIN
certainly with a strange spiritual rigour, on his mother's
part ; but that high austerity, unknown to the children
of a more favoured age, was tempered and qualified by
the humanity and culture of his father.
Between them, John Ruskin's parents exercised
upon their son forces differing in degree and in direc-
tion, and the resultant was the critic and stylist. A
third force was that of surroundings, in a merely
topographical sense, and in a certain sense no other
English writer has been so much the product and the
expression of that which lay about his path. For the
most part the dwelling-places of men of genius have
been an accident; for John Ruskin, as the event
proved, they were an essential. It is said that
" home-keeping youth has ever homely wits." John
Ruskin, a home-keeper as few men have been, in the
respect that he continued to live with his parents even
until manhood was well advanced, managed to disprove
the proverb. But this close tie to the parental roof
and to the society of his father and mother, although
a tether, was a tether of elastic that stretched first
over England and Scotland, and afterwards across the
continent of Europe. The Ruskins were the last to
cling to the ideal method of travel, that of the post-
chaise, and their gentle and joyous passages through-
out the length and breadth of the land gave the boy
a temper and an experience that are inseparably inter-
woven with his character. Ruskin is pa?' excellence the
English writer whose career and development are best
illuminated by a study of his Homes and Haunts, and
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 3
that is the theme and purpose of the present essay
in little.
By birth a Londoner, John Ruskin was essentially a
Scotsman by descent and early training. The heritage
of his blood brought him in full measure the qualities
and the defects of the Northern character, wherein
natural breadth contends ever with an imposed rigidity.
In his parents severally these characteristics were per-
sonified : the father a strenuous man of business,
devoted to the arts and somewhat nebulous in his
religion ; the mother of the straitest sect of the
Evangelicals, but with a certain gracious, if some-
what restricted, enthusiasm for the gentler flowers of
the mind. She had striven during the long years
of her engagement to make herself the fitting com-
panion of the man she was to marry, a man whose
education was superior to her own, and the Fates
had ordained that that effort of hers was to find a
strange issue in moulding the mind of a boy who
was afterwards to write his name indelibly on the
page of English Literature and on the artistic de-
velopment of the world. There are some who have
held that Mrs. Ruskin's methods are open to criticism,
but surely her wisdom is justified of its child? Her
rigorous instructions in the text of the English Bible
may sound terrible to this age, but they laid the
foundations of that sense of language which framed
the melodious close of Ruskin's periods. To the
Authorised Version he owed more than to disorgan-
ising Gibbon or judicious Hooker. But when all is
4 JOHN RUSKIN
said and done, models and masters play but a secon-
dary part. "The style," as Buffon did not say, "is
the man himself." It is with the man that we have
here principally to do.
Like most Scotsmen of account, John Ruskin had
a pedigree. It is interesting, but too elaborate, too
full of side issues to be detailed here. There is a
remote link with the Sir Andrew Agnew of the memor-
able speech at Dettingen, another with Ross the Arctic
explorer, but these scarcely count in any explanation
of his heredity. What is to the point is that he was
the son of a man whom he described as " an entirely
honest merchant," when he came to write his epitaph,
and the grandson of a woman of extraordinary force
of character. Ruskin sprang of commercial ancestry
on the father's side, and of seafaring people on the
mother's. That he came of the commercial classes he
tells us with a conscious candour worthy of Evan
Harrington. Harringtonesque, too, are his reminis-
cences of an aunt who kept a baker's shop in Croydon.
The confession is made with just that little excess of
geniality which betrays effort. With equal candour,
in the same book, he avows himself all for aristocracy,
though in no sense an aristocrat. No more need be
said. Let this glimpse of an amiable foible suffice.
Ruskin's grandfather was an Edinburgh wine-mer-
chant of good position, afterwards lost by imprudence.
His father, John James Ruskin, was educated at the
High School of Edinburgh, under the famous Dr.
Adam. He received that excellent sound old classical
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 5
training which in those days of no specialisation fitted
a boy alike for the university or for business. Had
his father continued prosperous, J. J. Ruskin would
doubtless in due time have become an Edinburgh
student, for he showed a strong bent for Latin and
philosophy ; but the family affairs had gone wrong, or
were going wrong, and young John James went into
business. It was fortunate that he did so, for his
commercial success enabled him to surround his son
with those affluent influences which suffered his genius
to develop along its own lines. A place was found for
the elder Ruskin in a wine-merchant's office in London.
There he spent two years, and in 1809 he entered into
partnership with a Mr. Telford, a wealthy squire of
Kent, and a M. Domecq, a great grower of sherry.
Telford, as Mr. Collingwood notes, contributed the
capital, Domecq the sherry, and Ruskin the brains.
For nine years, taking no holidays that were not
business journeys, J. J. Ruskin exercised those brains
in putting his firm on a sound basis. His sensitive
honour had made him resolve to pay off all his father's
debts before he would lay by a penny for himself.
When that was accomplished, he went north to claim
the girl who had been his betrothed during all the years
of his servitude. Margaret Cox was his cousin, the
daughter of a Yarmouth skipper. For a long time she
had lived with J. J. Ruskin's mother in Edinburgh,
whither she had gone on the marriage of his sister.
Her own mother, the skipper's widow, kept the old
King's Head Inn in Croydon Market-place, and had
6 JOHN RUSKIN
done her best for her daughter's education. Even
when J. J. Ruskin declared himself in a position to
marry, Margaret would have delayed ; but one evening
he persuaded her to get married at once in the Scotch
fashion, and next morning the pair left for London.
On this happy despatch hung great issues.
Memory awoke early for the child John Ruskin in
his first home, that Hunter Street house where he
began to construct the world for himself. His picture
of his childhood is that of a solitary, somewhat over-
disciplined little boy, who was always summarily
whipped if he cried, did not do as he was bid, or
tumbled on the stairs. He had few possessions, and
was taught abnegation early, never being permitted for
one instant to hope for the possession of such things
as one saw in toy-shops. A bunch of keys in early
infancy, a cart and a ball when he was older, two
boxes of well-cut bricks when he was five or six, were
his "entirely sufficient possessions." Almost as soon
as he could remember, he had learned to cultivate the
pleasures of the imagination.
" I would pass my days contentedly in tracing the
squares and colours of the carpet, examining the knots
in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the
opposite houses ; with rapturous intervals of excite-
ment during the filling of the water-cart through its
leathern pipe from the dripping iron post at the pave-
ment edge, or the still more admirable proceedings of
the turncock, when he turned and turned until a
fountain sprang up in the middle of the street."
PAKENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 7
The sense of form, however, was his chief resource,
and he sought patterns in the carpet, in bed- covers,
dresses, and wall-papers. The critic awoke in the con-
templation of the carpet, and when he was only three
and a half he asked Mr. Northcote, the Royal Acade-
mician, to whom he was sitting for his portrait, why
there were holes in his carpet. But the sense of colour
was awake also, for when the artist asked the child
what he would like for a background, he replied at
once, " Blue hills," thus presaging not only the future
master of colour, but the passionate lover of moun-
tains, alike in their picturesque and their scientific
significance. He was rewarded by the introduction
of two rounded hills "as blue as his shoes."
Already the little Ruskin's horizon had stretched
beyond a Bloomsbury street. Holidays spent with the
Croydon relations had given him his first impressions
of a South London still rural and beautiful, that was
soon to be his home for many years to come. There
were walks on Duppas Hill and on the heather at
Addington, and sometimes the family took lodgings
with a Mrs. Ridley at Dulwich, in a house that was
"the last of a row in a lane which led out into the
Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of
buttercups in spring and of blackberries in autumn."
He knew Hampstead also, where they lived in " real
cottages, not villas so called." Of his moral train-
ing at this remote period he remembered chiefly his
mother's steady watchfulness to guard him from all
pain and danger; her willingness to let him amuse
8 JOHN RUSKIN
himself as he liked, provided he was neither fretful nor
troublesome. Her rigour was seen in her restriction of
toys of which she disapproved. A " most radiant
Punch and Judy," the gift of his less austere aunt,
was accepted, but afterwards removed, with an intima-
tion that it was not good for him to have them. They
were never seen again. How strange, yet in a way
how salutary, is this to an age that has accepted the
Golliwog and the Billikin, the former innocent and
pleasing enough, but the latter anathema !
But these were insignificant travels: for the child
in his fourth summer had seen and learned to love
Scotland. His father's sister Jessie was married to a
Mr. Richardson in Perth, and in his aunt's house at
Bridge End beside the Tay, towards which the garden
ran sloping steeply, the infant John Ruskin found new
impressions, to be strengthened during later visits, and
to be perfectly described in after-days in the pages
of Prceterita, that autobiography "written frankly,
garrulously, and at ease."
" I would not change the dreams, far less the tender
realities, of those early days, for anything I hear now
remembered by lords and dames of their days of child-
hood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns and lakes in
park- walled forest.
" Lawn and lake enough indeed I had, in the North
Inch of Perth, and pools of pausing Tay, before Rose
Terrace (where I used to live after my uncle died,
briefly apoplectic, at Bridge End), in the peace of the
fair Scotch summer days."
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 9
On this head one more passage must be quoted,
for the light it throws on the mind of the child,
thus early susceptible to the influence of the "spirit
of place " : —
" I passed my days much as the thistles and the tansy
did, only with perpetual watching of all the ways of
running water, — a singular awe developing itself in me,
both of the pools of Tay, where the water changed from
brown to blue-black, and of the precipices of Kinnoul ;
partly out of my own mind, and partly because the
servants always became serious when we went up
Kinnoul way, especially if I wanted to stay and look
at the little crystal spring of Bower's Well."
Thus, like the gods in the Euripidean chorus,
" Ever delicately marching
Through the most pellucid air,"
the soul of John Ruskin began its pilgrimage through
a world to which he was to bring great and high teach-
ing, at much cost to his own peace. But long, tranquil
days of preparation were still before him, amid fairer
surroundings than the fascinating bricks of Hunter
Street.
In 1823, the year after the painting of the North-
cote portrait, John Ruskin the elder had so far
prospered in his business as to be able to think of a
home in a pleasanter quarter. The family removed to
a house with an ample garden on Herne Hill, after-
wards known as No. 28. It was one of a group of four,
10 JOHN RUSKIN
the highest blocks of buildings on the crest of the ridge,
three-storied with garrets, commanding a remarkable
view towards Windsor and Harrow. The garden was
rich in fruit-trees, forbidden to the child, but afterwards
to bear a rich literary fruit for him and for the world,
in the principles laid down in " Proserpina," and even
then early realised, that the seeds and fruit of them
were for the sake of the flowers, and not the flowers
for the fruit.
In that pleasant garden the boy spent most of his
summer days ; surely the weather must have been kinder
then ? Lessons had already begun, and as soon as he
could read fluently his mother began a course of sys-
tematic instruction which nothing was allowed to
interrupt. After his father had gone to town by coach,
John was sent to his daily task, which he was expected
to know by twelve o'clock. The text-book was the
Bible, and a passage had to be learnt by heart. Again
and again mother and son read the Scriptures from
beginning to end, with minute attention to pronuncia-
tion and accent, until the lightest inflexion was per-
fect. This discipline, ended only when Ruskin went to
Oxford, he counted the essential portion of his educa-
tion. With the formidable chapters, strictly learnt by
heart, his mother, as he himself says, " established his
soul in life." Peace lay about him, in those days, and
he learnt obedience and faith, also that habit of fixed
attention with eyes and mind which long afterwards
caused Mazzini to say that Ruskin had the most
analytic mind in Europe.
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 11
He notes, however, the defects of the method —
" calamities," he calls them. Withal he had nothing
to love, nothing to endure, no training in precision of
etiquette and manners. The last cost him a quaint
disquiet, humorously confessed in his account of his
first love affair, and the serio-comic Disraeli episode at
Christ Church.
The evenings at Herne Hill were no less remark-
able than the mornings. Mr. Ruskin came home early,
and while he dined his wife heard from him the events
of the day. From these counsels the son was rigidly
excluded, but in summer he joined his parents at tea-
time in the garden, where the rest of the evening was
spent. In winter or rough weather he had his bread
and milk in the drawing-room, in a little recess, where
he remained, like an idol in its niche, until bedtime,
listening while his father read Scott or Byron. Before
him was a small table, at which as he grew older he
practised a marvellous literature. The Muses had
caught him. He toiled at a conclusion of Miss Edge-
worth's "Harry and Lucy," with copper-plates —
"written by a little boy and drawn," is the artless
legend of the title-page. His father's taste and skill in
water-colour had roused him to emulation. But he
aspired even higher. This child of seven, whom his
mother had fondly dedicated to the Church, had
already recognised a vocation. John Ruskin was to
be a poet.
The growth of his little lyric gift, and its renuncia-
tion for the highest achievement in modern English
12 JOHN RUSKIN
prose, lead us far away from Ruskin's childish days.
But it remained the leading motive of his life until he
stood upon the threshold of manhood. Let us follow
him thither through that growing boyhood, upon which
the shades of the prison-house seemed reluctant to
close.
CHAPTER II
HERNE HILL AND EXCURSIONS
THE great event of the year for John Ruskin was
his father's birthday, the 10th of May. For that
occasion the small poet always produced a copy of
verses, the subject of much anxious thought during
the preceding weeks. But besides these special efforts
he was continually busy with composition, which his
parents encouraged. They made it, indeed, the means
of earning pocket-money, a custom of doubtful wisdom.
But the money at any rate was earned, for the child
did not spare himself.
Nor were his labours wholly in the field of art.
His passion for physical science had declared itself
in his fondness for minerals, and on that theme
he wrote learnedly. As for the reward — " Homer "
fetched a shilling a page; "Composition," a penny
for twenty lines; "Mineralogy," a penny for each
article. His verses are wonderful for a mere child,
but like the rest of Ruskin's poetry, even the maturer
examples, they are little more than literary curiosities
to-day. He imitated Scott, Byron, and Young with
a quaint infusion of his own small observation and
experience. The close transcript of the thing seen is
14 JOHN RUSKIN
perhaps the most valuable sidelight the poems afford
upon the mind of the author-to-be.
But the 10th of May had another significance.
It marked the departure of the Ruskin family upon
their annual tour through England. Their way fre-
quently extended as far as Scotland. These leisurely
journeys, made in a roomy post-chaise, fitted with
all sorts of fascinating convenient devices, were under-
taken as much for business as for pleasure, and in
their course Mr. Ruskin called upon his chief country
customers, always bearing away a substantial sheaf
of commissions. This remarkable wine-merchant was
welcomed everywhere for his personality, like the great
Mel Harrington; but, unlike Melchisedec, he knew how
to turn his popularity to sound commercial advantage.
To little John these travels were another education
and an inspiration. He learned to know the countries
of his birth and of his descent, and he reproduced his
impressions in a continual stream of literary works.
He kept journals, he composed itineraries, he cele-
brated the things he had seen in various verse.
Perched on a little cushioned seat in front of his parents,
he delighted in the wide unfolding view from the
chaise windows, and caught by the equestrian spirit,
he imitated the postilion, in mile-long imaginative
gallops. To add to the realism of this pastime, patient
Papa Ruskin allowed his own devoted legs to be
whipped, "in a quite practical and efficient manner,"
with a silver-mounted riding-whip he had himself
given to the boy.
HERNE HILL— EXCURSIONS 15
The chronology of these early journeys is important.
The first visit to Scotland was made by sea in 1822.
In 1823 the summer tour lay through the south-
west of England. In 1824 they went to the Lakes,
Keswick, and Perth. In 1825 John made his first
acquaintance with the Continent, and saw Paris,
Brussels, and Waterloo, which last he afterwards sang
in a dramatic poem. He was present during this
tour at the coronation festivities of Charles X. In
1826, the year of his first poem, "The Needless
Alarm," they were again at the Lakes and Perth.
His first memory of life, he says, " meaning of things
chiefly precious to me afterwards," was of Friar's
Crag on Derwentwater, now marked by his monu-
ment. The limiting phrase is significant ; for he
had earlier memories, and it marks that passion for
the hills, and above all his affection for that Coniston
region, where he was at length to see an end of his
labours. At the Coniston Inn, in those early days,
he and his mother stayed, while his father went on
his business journeys to Whitehaven, Lancaster, New-
castle, and other northern towns. Thus at large leisure,
and under intelligent guidance, John Ruskin's appren-
ticeship went forward. Through an unspoiled England
he came by easy stages to his life-work.
The year 1826 not only saw the dawn of poetry,
but marked an epoch in Ruskin's formal education.
It was now time to begin Latin. To that task Mrs.
Ruskin was quite equal, and, with the same thorough-
ness that she brought to other lessons, she put her
16 JOHN RUSKIN
son through the Grammar of Dr. Adam, using the
very book that her husband had carried in his satchel
to the High School of Edinburgh.
The summer of 1827 found the Ruskins again at
Perth ; next year they went to the west of England,
and about that time the poet projected a great work,
"Eudosia, a Poem on the Universe." In that year,
too, Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin adopted John's Perth cousin,
Mary Richardson, who was brought up as a sister to
the boy. There was no extended tour in 1829, only
a little sojourn in Kent. In the autumn of 1830
Ruskin was at length considered to have outgrown
his mother's tutorship.
At that time there ministered in Beresford Chapel,
Wai worth, an excellent divine, whose oracles Mrs.
Ruskin attended, accompanied, "contentedly or at
least submissively " (says Ruskin in Prceteritd), by
her husband. Dr. Andrews* who was the father of
the first Mrs. Coventry Patmore, "had the reputa-
tion (in Walworth) of being a good scholar," so to
him John was sent to learn Greek, already too long
delayed. It appears that Dr. Andrews
"in Greek
Was sadly to seek,"
his method was peculiar, not to say fearful and wonder-
ful, but he accomplished one thing in which a more
accurate scholar might have failed — he interested his
pupil, who ever retained a wistful affection for Hel-
lenic studies, although he was the first to confess his
.',
HERNE HILL— EXCURSIONS 17
lamentable deficiency in grasp of the language. In
the sketch of his Oxford career, it will be seen how
he suffered from the lack of proper training. Perhaps
it did not matter much : the enemies of classical
teaching will say that it was better so ; but they mis-
conceive, for Ruskin would have been infinitely helped
by a thorough mastery of Greek, and it was impossible
for him ever to have sunk into a mere pedant.
With Dr. Andrews he went on with his Latin,
reading Virgil, and taking pleasure in his tutor's odd
illustrations; in Greek he read Anacreon, before he
knew his verbs, and of course he fell at once to verse
translation. It was a happy-go-lucky, genial scramble
up Parnassus, with more waggery afoot than sound
learning on both sides ; but the boy was delighted, and
looked forward eagerly to the three days a week on
which he worked with his desultory master. Some
suspicion of the method entered Mrs. Ruskin's shrewd
brain, but she could not be expected to put her finger
on the place. She thought, however, that Dr. Andrews
was " flighty," when, after six months, he proposed that
John should begin Hebrew! Of Semitic studies we
hear no more.
All this time Ruskin's interest in Art was steadily
increasing. He tried to copy Cruikshank's illustrations
to Grimm's Fairy Tales, his first serious beginnings in
drawing. The " singular genius of Cruikshank " and his
pictures, "perhaps the finest line-work since Rembrandt's
etchings," he was always to hold in reverence, and he
would have all beginners make this their first model.
B
18 JOHN RUSKIN
Ruskin's work showed so much promise that his
father now sent him to take drawing-lessons from
Mr. Runciman, with whom he remained for several
years. Runciman was a severe and somewhat opinion-
ative taskmaster, but once at least he bowed to his
pupil's independence, and actually modified his method,
allowing him to use colour earlier than he would have
done in the case of a pupil less extraordinary. In the
same year, 1831, a mathematical master was engaged,
and with him Ruskin got a firm hold of the elements
of geometry, a subject which he really liked and in
which he attempted a little original work of a romantic
kind — the baffling tri-section of an angle.
But a greater influence was now at hand : the boy
was to encounter a force in art that was afterwards
to make his own career, and to rescue from obloquy
and misunderstanding a once popular genius, who,
reaching after a new expression of truth, had put
himself of necessity out of favour with his country-
men. Ruskin's fourteenth birthday brought him a
gift which was a revelation. His father's partner
Mr. Telford sent him Rogers' " Italy." Perhaps the
giver thought only of the poetry in making his choice,
but Ruskin thought less of that than of the wonderful
illustrations, those vignettes by a marvellous man
Turner, who saw mountains as the boy saw them,
but with the eyes of a life's experience. Ruskin's
soul went out with a rush to this new master, in
whom he found what he had been seeking ever since
his precocious mind had begun to grope after the
HEBNE HILL— EXCURSIONS 19
artistic concept. He set himself to copy the "Alps
at Daybreak," and from that moment there was for
him no turning back.
Travel again came to the aid of this fortunate
prince. That very year he saw the Alps of his
dreams — not, however, because of the Turner book,
as one might suppose. The son's enthusiasm for
the peaks and the great silences found only a qualified
echo in the father ; but by a happy chance Mr. Ruskin
had just bought Prout's " Sketches in Flanders and
Germany," and being interested in Gothic, he readily
fell in with his wife's suggestion that they should
all go to see these places for themselves. In May
1833 they set out, and John Ruskin entered upon a
new phase of his mental and moral development.
By way of " customary Calais " the Ruskins began
their posting journey through Flanders and Germany.
The boy noted in after-years that he was already wise
enough to feel Strasburg Cathedral stiff and iron-worky,
but the richness of the wooden houses impressed and
excited him because of their promise of nearness to
Switzerland. "The Nature of Gothic" was not yet
even dimly perceived, otherwise the houses would have
suggested more than Switzerland. That land of his
desire was approached strategically after family council
with Salvador, their courier. Should it be Basle or
Schaffhausen ? At Basle there were no Alps in sight.
To Schaffhausen, then, be it ; and so, on a memorable
Sunday evening, " suddenly — behold — beyond 1 "
A lifetime later he paused, with remembered
20 JOHN RUSKIN
emotion, on these exclamatory words, and left his
great paragraph incomplete. Artist that he was, he
could not write the name of the sacred rampart of
Europe, but there was no need to tell his readers what
he had seen. He resumes : —
" There was no thought in any of us for a moment
of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, sharp
on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose
by the sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had
ever thought or dreamed, — the seen walls of lost Eden
could not have been more beautiful to us ; not more
awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death."
For the rest of that journey he moved in an en-
chanted land, with Turner for his guide. They crossed
the Spliigen and went down into Italy, seeing Milan,
the Lakes, and the Mediterranean at Genoa. Then
they came back through the Oberland to Chamouni,
the scene in after-days of many labours. Already he
had a new great work on hand — he would make an
Italy of his own after the manner of Mr. Rogers, and
be his own illustrator, after the manner of Turner. He
set himself to imitate the delicate vignettes, and as
he wrought came to a surer dexterity of hand, to be
further confirmed in the next year's tour. The route
of that second journey is recorded in his sketches :
Chamouni, St. Bernard, Aosta, the Oberland once
more, St. Gothard, Lucerne, by the Stelvio to Venice
and Verona, and home through the Tyrol and Ger-
many. But his study of the Alps was not alone
HERNE HILL— EXCURSIONS 21
artistic. The young man of science was also busy with
a geological, inquiry, helped by Saussure's Voyages
dans les Alpes, a birthday gift from his father in 1834.
The mountains, he had seen, held physical secrets as
well as possibilities of picture-making, and these he set
himself to discover.
In the interval between the first and second Alpine
journeys, John Ruskin was sent to school as a day-boy
with the Rev. Thomas Dale in Grove Lane, Peckham.
The mere place of his new Academe had not then the
odd associations it bears for us to-day, although it is at
least quaint that he should have passed, with a brief
interlude of study at King's College, London, straight
from Peckham to Christ Church. It was now recog-
nised that Dr. Andrews would never prepare him for
college and the Church, in which the elder Ruskins
hoped in due time to see their genius advancing towards
lawn sleeves. But while he made some better progress
in mere school- work with Mr. Dale, Ruskin had other
occupations that were leading him surely away from
Holy Orders.
The year 1834 had seen his first appearance in print
with his "Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of
the Water of the Rhine," and another essay, " Facts
and Considerations of the Strata of Mont Blanc," both
published in London's Magazine of Natural History.
Nor was Poetry neglected. Through his cousin Charles,
a clerk in Messrs. Smith, Elder's, he had been introduced
to Mr. Pringle, the Editor of that sumptuous boudoir
annual Friendship's Offering. Mr. Pringle encour-
22 JOHN RUSKIN
aged Ruskin's verse-making, and even took the boy to
see Samuel Rogers. At that interview Ruskin knew
not how to play the courtier ; his talk to the poet of
" Italy " was all of Mr. Turner's drawings, about which
Rogers showed little enthusiasm, and no progress was
made in that direction. Mr. Pringle even administered
a mild rebuke on the way back to Herne Hill. But
Friendship's Offering for 1835 contained three poems
— " Andernach," " St. Goar," and " Salzburg "—all by
John Ruskin, and they were illustrated with a beauti-
ful plate engraved by Goodall after Purser, somewhat in
the Turner manner. So the bard felt he might hold
a candle to Mr. Rogers after all. This was all very
giddy and exciting, no doubt, but greater joy was in
store, dashed, however, by a miscarriage of publication.
No matter, he had entered the lists and broken his first
lance for his hero. Blackwooffs criticism of Turner's
Academy pictures for 1836 roused the young man to
reply. Mr. Ruskin enclosed the MS. to the artist,
asking permission to send it to " Maga " ; but Turner,
while obliged, was contemptuous of attacks, desired no
reply, and sent the MS. to Mr. Munro of Novar, who
had bought the censured picture. This article, the
germ of " Modern Painters," was therefore lost. Dis-
covered long afterwards in a duplicate copy, it shows
Turner's champion firm in his saddle — firmer, indeed,
than he ever was on the back of that early pony from
which he rolled so persistently into the mud of Nor-
wood lanes.
With these occupations and excitements, tempered
HERNE HILL— EXCURSIONS 23
by painting lessons from Copley Fielding and by the
wholesome fear of the Oxford matriculation examina-
tion, now looming in sight, Ruskin passed the year
1836. In October he matriculated, and the following
January saw him go into residence. Like everything
else in his career, his entry into Oxford was unique,
a thing apart and purely Ruskinesque, unparalleled
perhaps in the history of the University. At that
amiable comedy we are now to assist.
CHAPTER III
OXFORD
EVER desirous to do the best for his son, Mr. J. J.
Ruskin realised the serious importance of entering
him at a college that offered the highest social and
educational advantages. His choice fell upon Christ
Church, where the society was certainly unexception-
able in point of rank, and where scholarship was
represented by its Dean, the mighty Grecian Gaisford,
unpolished in manner but withal terribly learned.
To Gaisford Mr. Ruskin went in the early part
of the year 1836, to arrange for John's matriculation.
The son, writing of the interview long afterwards, is
quietly alive to its humour. Blunt Dean and earnest
paterfamilias must have made an odd contrast as
they discussed what status John should occupy in
college. Mr. Ruskin learned that there was a finer
flower of undergraduate known as the Gentleman-Com-
moner. Was there anything to hinder his son's being
enrolled as such ? It was merely a question of some
rather heavy fees. Money mattered not, and thus
it came about long afterwards that Mr. Tuckwell,
writing delightfully of that far-off Oxford of 1837,
mentions among the men of note " Young Gentleman-
Commoner Ruskin."
OXFORD 25
It was an Oxford somewhat hard for us of a
later generation to realise. Tract XC. was still three
years ahead, and the University was only beginning
to arouse herself from her long lethargy. But stirrings
of a new spirit were in the air, and at Oriel Newman
was fighting his great spiritual battle that would at
length separate him from his Alma Mater and from
the Church of his fathers, but would set a quickening
seal upon the place he had left. It was an age of
remarkable men — Stanley, Matthew Arnold, Clough,
Lord Hobhouse, Henry Acland, Jowett. Gladstone
had but recently gone down. Of the greater dons
of that time, Dr. Routh, who had actually seen
Dr. Johnson, still held the Presidency of Magdalen
and kept the eighteenth century alive in dress and
manner, but he appeared rarely in the streets after
1836. Pusey, more or less a hermit, occupied the
Hebrew Chair, and formed the subject of fantastic
myths. Buckland, the geologist, with his surprising
hat and bag, was, next to the Dean, the chief
" character" of Christ Church, then rich in oddities.
Newman, taking indispensable exercise, was a familiar
figure on the country roads any afternoon.
Undergraduate life had less diversity, less colour,
than it carries with it to-day. Athletic sports were
unknown, football unheard of; there was only one
cricket field, the Magdalen ground. Boating had not
become a passion ; the delicate, lazy delights of punt
or canoe on the Cher had not yet been discovered.
The hunt, the drag, hurdle-jumping, and tandem-driving
26 JOHN RUSKIN
amused the rich. Men drank too much, and on
Sunday, according to Mozley, in a college affection
forbids us to name, they drowned, in a double measure
of ale, the boredom of writing out, in compulsory
abstract, the morning's sermon at St. Mary's. Costume
was stiff and formal : academic dress strictly en-
forced. Frock and tail coats were correct in hall;
the beaver- hat was worn on the way to the boats
or the cricket field. No one would have appeared in
flannels on the High. The times were now dull,
now riotous — as ever, since St. Scholastica's day.
Rowdyism moves in cycles, passing from college to
college as the wind blows. At the time when John
Ruskin went up, Christ Church seems to have been
lively. At first he was an augmenting cause.
If anything was needed to make his position more
difficult — and difficult it was enough, owing to his
early education — it was the extension of his mother's
care even to the gates of Christ Church. It would
not be fair to blame her, for Ruskin was physically
delicate, and needed watching over in an especial
degree. But it might have been well to have spared
him the burden of a chaperone. It is easy to imagine
the unholy glee of his contemporaries when it became
known that the Gentleman-Commoner from a Peck-
ham Academy had actually been accompanied to
college by his " Mamma," as he called her. Mrs.
Ruskin took lodgings in High Street, and her son
devoted all his evenings to her, until Tom, the great
bell of Christ Church, recalled him at nine o'clock
OXFORD 27
to his rooms in Peckwater Quadrangle. At first he
had to put up with the usual furious invasions of
the revel-rout of undergraduates, but he lived that
down, helped no doubt by the diplomacy that led
him to lay in a bottle or two of papa's best wine.
But the ungodly broke his windows, rode on his
back round the quadrangle, and made his reading
of an essay in Hall the occasion for what would now
be called a " rag," culminating in the inevitable bon-
fire. His theme, alas ! had been very long and very
fine. He had transgressed the unwritten law that
no Gentleman-Commoner's composition should exceed
forty-eight words in length. He had behaved like
a vulgar reading-man, and he was taken to task ac-
cordingly. But in repartee he could hold his own
neatly enough.
There used to be an undergraduate tradition, for
which there is no hint of authority in Prceterita, that
Mrs. Ruskin did not intend her son to go into college
at all, but to live with her in High Street. Christ
Church militant, the tradition says, broke the windows
every night until Ruskin came into the House. But
this is disposed of by the testimony of the autobio-
graphy. Ruskin tells' us that his first night in residence
was spent in Peckwater. The madcap ways of the
noble young men with whom her son was thrown were
inexplicable, if flattering, to Mrs. Ruskin. " It does
little good sporting his oak," she writes, adding that
Lord Desart and Grimston had climbed in through
the window, when John was "hard at work." The
28 JOHN RUSKIN
dear lady evidently imagined that it was eagerness for
her son's society that prompted this feat.
Brought up as he had been, Ruskin was at once
a little too superior and not superior enough. His
intolerance of undergraduate pranks is evident from one
of his poems, in which he describes contemptuously the
noise of a distant " wine." But he found staunch and
good friends in Acland and Liddell. The fame of his
drawings soon brought the curious to his rooms, and
Gaisford sent for his portfolio, which he returned with
a note of compliment.
Wretchedly prepared, Ruskin of course found his
mere reading a tax, and he had to work out of all
proportion to the average necessities of the case. In
these days of far severer schools, the Honours man
is tempted to smile at the elementary studies which
cost the future Professor of Fine Art so much toil.
Luckily, in Osborne Gordon he found a sympathetic
tutor, who in the fulness of time pulled him through.
A very pleasant part of his Christ Church days was
his friendship with Buckland, who pressed his artistic
talent into the service of the geology lecture. Some
of Ruskin's drawings are still in use at the House.
At the Bucklands' he met Darwin, and recognised
him at once for a man of genius.
To win the Newdigate Prize for English Verse
Ruskin set himself with infinite labour and patience.
Three times he tried. The first time Stanley beat
him, the second time Dart ; the third time was lucky,
and in 1839, coached by Keble, he recited his " Salsette
-^4k
. ^.. - .^^ ,
^fi1 lit
J "
8.
s
<J
J 7?)
OXFORD 29
and Elephanta" in the Sheldonian Theatre at Com-
memoration.
At this point, however, his career was interrupted
by serious illness, due to a disappointment. Shortly
before he went up to Oxford, he had fallen wildly in
love with one of the beautiful daughters of his father's
partner, Mr. Domecq. But Adele Clotilde saw nothing
in the awkward poetical boy of Herne Hill, and the
union eagerly desired by the parents of the young people
could not be arranged. The lady made another match.
During his first two years at Christ Church, Ruskin
ate his heart out and sang his sentimental woes. Then
he was threatened with consumption, and was carried
from health resort to health resort for two years. The
news of Ad&le's marriage was carefully concealed from
him. For the time his degree stood over, and sym-
pathetic relatives spoke of a blighted career, of honours
lost, and with them all hope of high preferment in the
Church. Every one who can estimate the circum-
stances aright understands that, despite the Newdigate,
John Ruskin was not on the high-road to academic
distinction, as the Schools account such.
Fortunately for the world, he recovered, and in
1842 he wrent up again to Oxford. Taking pass
Schools, he was awarded a ludicrous distinction then in
vogue — complimentary honours, " an Honorary Double
Fourth." It is in no carping spirit that we are at
this pains to place Ruskin's scholarship at its proper
level ; it only makes his independent achievement the
more extraordinary when we realise how meagrely
30 JOHN RUSKIN
equipped he came to his task. Here is no wail that
he was not turned out a finished pedant, but one does
regret, on a consideration of pure economy, that he
lacked the training sufficient to save him from the
ever-lurking, insidious blunder, source of much sorrow,
and painful waste of time in after-years.
It is difficult to arrive at a sure knowledge of his
feelings towards his Alma Mater. His reticences hint
at a life not wholly at ease there. The Cathedral stirs
him, but there is no passionate affection for the stones
of Oxford. In all his references to the University
there is not one passage touched with the spirit of the
Scholar Gypsy. His was not the temper that would
turn to watch with wistful adoration —
" The line of festal light in Christ Church Hall."
In its vast spaces he confessed himself always out of
place.
Fiercely ironical (in Fors Clavigera), he reproaches
Harrison for wasting time in Magdalen walks, "old-
fashioned thirty years ago." Why did he not seek "the
rapturous sanctities of Keble," the lively new zigzag
parapet of Tom Quad, or "the elongating suburb of
the married Fellows on the cock-horse road to Ban-
bury " ? Perhaps one may detect some enthusiasm for
the groves of Magdalen in his irony, some jealousy for
Christ Church in the protest against the parapet of
Tom Quad, but it is doubtful whether Wolsey's
foundation moved him as it has moved many. The
gaunt outlines of Peckwater, where he lodged, looking
OXFORD 31
across to the still drearier pile of the library, impressed
him at first. Later he takes this as a sign of crudity.
But he cannot at any time have loved it. And
he certainly hated the "howling" of riotous under-
graduates.
In Arnold and Newman the spires of Oxford and
the snapdragon on her walls awoke a romantic longing
that is scarcely discoverable in Ruskin. But however
deep might be her offence, he was loyal to the trust
Oxford had given him and loyal to the idea of a
University. " It is," he said long afterwards to his
pupils, " the scholar's duty to know and love the per-
petual laws of classic literature and art." That was
the reason of their presence at the University, and
he warned his hearers that he had nothing to give
them that they could sell. "If you come to get
your living out of her, you are ruining both Oxford
and yourselves."
From reticences and implications rather than from
overt statements, some hint may be caught of Ruskin's
attitude towards his University. Of his return thither,
and of his work as Professor, something will be said
on a later page. We have now brought him to the
year 1842, in which he took his B.A. degree and was
entitled to sign himself "A Graduate of Oxford."
That modest title he put to a memorable use. It was
the signature of the first volume of " Modern Painters,"
the work in which he found his vocation. The claims
of Poetry and the Church had faded away before the
new vision of Ruskin the Art Critic.
CHAPTER IV
THE BEGINNINGS OF FAME
FOR Ruskin, the long break in his Oxford life had been
anything but unfruitful. He had extended his travels ;
he had passed by way of the Loire and the Riviera to
Rome ; he had visited Naples, Bologna, Venice, and
Basle. Although often very ill, he was never really
idle, and his brain was constantly accumulating im-
pressions, that, altered and exalted by his analytic
thought, were to provide the rich material of his
work. His pencil was always employed and dexterity
increased ; the mere mannerism of the drawing master
fell away, and Ruskin developed a style of his own.
The centre of his mental processes was Turner, always
Turner.
On his twenty-first birthday his father had given
him the Master's " Richmond Bridge " and " Gosport."
Out of his redundant pocket-money he had himself
purchased " Harlech Castle," an extravagance startling
to his indulgent parent, who was scarcely prepared for
this flight of hero-worship. But the incident brought
an introductipn to the artist, and a curious friendship
sprang up between the elder and the younger genius.
Now more than ever Ruskin observed Nature in terms
of Turner, On the way to Naples, he saw at La
THE BEGINNINGS OF FAME 33
Riccia that wonderful effect of winter landscape which
he reproduced in a passage that is a veritable Turner
in words. Many, on meeting it for the first time in
"Modern Painters," must have exclaimed when they
had read half-way, " But this is a Turner " ; and it is with
a curious thrill that one reads the opening sentence of
the next paragraph — "Tell me who is likest this, Poussin
or Turner ? " The cunning with which he builds up this
startling climax remains one of the chief proofs, per-
haps the chief proof, of Ruskin's power over language.
This may be claimed without disputing the criticism
that denies classic rank to the passage in question.
He got his effect, but forced the means beyond due
classical restraint. It is the exuberant effort, one
had almost said the trick, of an exceptionally clever
boy, revelling in newly discovered powers.
Before his illness, he had published some scientific
papers in Loudon's Magazine, and these led the
Editor to tell Mr. Ruskin that his son was certainly
the greatest natural genius he had ever known, and
that one day, "when both you and I are under the
turf, it will be remembered in the literary history
of your son's life that the first article of his which
was published was in Loudon's Magazine of Natural
History" The period following his restoration to
health was marked also by memorable advance in
his conception of art. It was in the days just pre-
ceding his final examination, when he was reading at
Herne Hill with Osborne Gordon, that this formative
experience came to him.
c
34 JOHN RUSKIN
During a walk on Tulse Hill he began to draw a
tree trunk entwined with ivy. Schooled as he had
been to arbitrary " composition," he suddenly revolted
from the extremity of that law, in the recognition that
the natural disposition of the ivy was infinitely finer
than any conventional rearrangement of his own could
be. From that moment he vowed fidelity above all
things to Nature herself. To that hour he looked back
as narrowly devout men do to the instant of their con-
version.
One of the pleasantest periods of Ruskin's life is to
be found in the record of those busy days at Herne
Hill, when the first volume of " Modern Painters " was
in progress.
After his industrious morning, he would go for a
tramp in the Norwood lanes, and look in perhaps at
the Dulwich gallery ; or he might give Mr. George
Richmond a sitting for the full-length portrait then
in progress, or call on Mr. Windus, whose roomful of
Turner drawings were invaluable to a young man
fighting Turner's battle. In the evening he wrote
again for an hour or two, but there was no burning of
midnight oil. Next morning at breakfast the previous
day's task was read over to Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin, who
received their privilege with emotion, not untouched
with tears. We know that breakfast table from "A
Conversation," one of the birthday poems. It is
dramatic in form and serio-comic. Mrs. Ruskin feels
the touch of winter and complains of draughts. Mr.
THE BEGINNINGS OF FAME 35
Ruskin sighs for the skies of Italy, whereat Master
Ruskin interjects soulfully :
" Skies so blue, over you."
He permits himself to speak only six times in the
dialogue. The sayings are characteristic of the meteor-
ologist and of the colourist. Mr. Ruskin longs for the
beauties of Italian architecture, and the son echoes :
" Gems and marbles, rich and rare."
But that scene was several years earlier. One may
be sure that in 1842, when the newly written sheets
of " Modern Painters " were the breakfast-table topic,
Mrs. Ruskin had no care for winter and rough
weather.
The rough weather lay ahead — for the young
author. John Ruskin was ready to step down into
the lists of the world for the combat of half a century.
His challenge to preconceived ideas rang clear from
the pages of that first volume, published (without
previous hawking about, as foolish rumour says) by
Messrs. Smith, Elder in May 1843. The new doctrines
raised a storm. Ruskin, already somewhat eminent,
found himself in the front rank of fame. The Oxford
Graduate's bold heresies were attacked in the Press
with all the slashing freedom of reviewers in those out-
spoken times. The defendant, Turner, was embar-
rassed ; he, who " never moved in these matters," had
been forced by young enthusiasm into the central place
36 JOHN BUSKIN
of a movement. And so the battle raged, amid scandal
and admiration. A sad innovator, but a great writer !
Such language was a revelation, although the doctrine
might be strange. It was terrible to hear Claude and
Poussin arraigned, to see the accepted favourites of
the hour set on a subordinate plane to the inexplicable
later Turner, who had swerved from things people
could understand towards a manner directly hi defiance
of truth, so that he was " imagined by the majority of
the public to paint more falsehood and less fact than
any other known master." " We shall see," says
Ruskin, "with what reason."
The full exposition of his case, with many digres-
sions, was to occupy him for nearly twenty years.
During that period, Ruskin's untiring brain threw off
by-products that would have served very well for the
life-work of lesser men. His succeeding works, how-
ever, were to be written amid new surroundings ; for
what we may call, for the purposes of this sketch, the
first Herne Hill period, was drawing to a close. In-
crease of material prosperity, their son's fame, a desire
to rise to the occasion and to return distinguished
hospitality in a distinguished way, led the elder Rus-
kins to seek a more commodious home. " Subtlest
of temptations," the son called it, when he told how it
cost his father much of his former happiness.
The year that saw the publication of "Modern
Painters " was that of the Ruskins' removal to 51 Den-
mark Hill. There, with frequent intervals of travel
Krnoouif
THE BEGINNINGS OP FAME 37
abroad, and with one brief interlude, to be hereafter
mentioned in a single word, John Ruskin lived and
worked until, having laid both his parents to rest, he
turned northward and sought those " Gates of the
Hills, whence one returns not."
CHAPTER V
"THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE"
WITH the new home on Denmark Hill as a base of
operations, John Ruskin sent his "line out through
all the earth." He went far afield for his material,
but for the most part his actual writing was done in
the new study, of which, as well as of the house, he
has left a minute record, in that chapter of Prceterita
entitled " The State of Denmark."
It was to his parents " a peaceful yet cheerful and,
pleasantly, in its suburban manner, dignified, abode of
their declining years." For his own part he confesses
that the place had little to endear it, although it had
every good in it except nearness to a stream. The
old passion for running water, discovered on the banks
of Tay and by the Springs of Wandel, was still alive
and clamant — never to be stilled, in fact, while life
endured — and Ruskin looked back with regret to that
early unaccomplished plan of digging a model canal
with real locks, which had been one of his dreams at
Herne Hill.
The new house stood in seven acres of ground,
meadow, orchard, and kitchen-garden ; there was a lawn
on which the breakfast-room opened, that room which,
he notes, was extremely pretty when its walls were
"THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 39
mostly covered with lakes by Turner and doves by
Hunt. The dining- and drawing-rooms were " spacious
enough for our grandest receptions — never more than
twelve at dinner." Guests usual on a birthday were
Turner, Prout, Stanfield, Leslie, Mulready, and Roberts;
a company where respect went hand in hand with
understanding, while the talk ranged from art (except
when Turner was there) to the last subtleties of — sherry.
As for the great man's own room, fifteen feet by
five-and-twenty inside the bookcases, it was distinct,
as his, only by its large oblong table around which
the rest of the available space made a passage. The
lighting was awkward, from two windows forming a
bow, blank in the middle, giving a cross-light that
considerably fretted the student. Above was his bed-
room, with command of the morning clouds, until
the encroaching builder stole that inestimable aid to
healthy thought. " In such stateliness of civic domicile
the industry of mid-life now began."
Of that giant industry it is hopeless to give any
adequate account in this brief study. The most that
can be done is to indicate, at the risk of tedium,
the chronology of Ruskin's writings, and the con-
tributory journeyings. With the ground cleared, once
for all, by that synoptic survey, we follow Ruskin
at leisure, and with some liberty of selection and
omission, to the chief scenes of his inspiration in
France, Switzerland, and Italy. And unto these last
we shall come not in the spirit of the guide-book,
but seeking by salient illustration to catch at least
40 JOHN RUSKIN
a glimpse of the things Ruskin himself saw, and to
learn if possible in what temper he approached them.
As a central point, it is well to remember that
" Modern Painters " went steadily forward from 1842
until 1860, the dates of the first and fifth volumes.
The second appeared in 1846. Preparatory to its
production he had travelled in Switzerland, and had
studied old masters in the Louvre, in 1844. In 1845
he made his first tour alone, visiting, with memorable
results, Pisa ; Lucca and Florence, where he took up
the study of Christian Art ; Verona, which gave colour
to all his thought and teaching; and Venice, where
he awoke to the meaning of Tintoret. The year
1846 found him passing through France and the
Jura, to Geneva, then over Mont Cenis into Italy.
Next year he was in Scotland. In 1848 he began
a pilgrimage to the English cathedrals, and visited
Amiens, Paris, and Normandy, and the same year
he threw off that wonderful parergon, "The Seven
Lamps of Architecture."
That work was not written at Denmark Hill, but
at 81 Park Street, his London residence during his
short and unfortunate married life. To Switzerland
he went again the next year, and spent the winter
in Venice studying missals and architecture. In 1850
he wrote the first volume of " The Stones of Venice "
at Park Street. 1851 is memorable for the pamphlet
"Notes on Sheepfolds," purchased by at least one simple
shepherd in the belief that it was a practical guide to
his calling. Too late, the good man discovered that
"THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 41
he had paid his florin for a tract on ecclesiastical
polity. The same year Ruskin made the acquaint-
ance of Carlyle and Frederick Denison Maurice, de-
fended the Pre-Raphaelites, travelled again in France
and Switzerland, and spent the winter and the fol-
lowing spring in Venice. On December 19 Turner
died, and Ruskin heard that he had been named an
executor — a trust resigned as to the letter of the
law, but discharged with how great a fidelity of
spirit the Turner drawings in the National Gallery
declare; for by Ruskin's infinite labour they were
at length rescued from neglect and arranged.
The second and third volumes of " The Stones
of Venice " were written in 1852. In 1853 Ruskin
appeared first as a lecturer, delivering at Edinburgh
his course on "Architecture and Painting." To Swit-
zerland again in 1854 with his parents, he devoted
himself to drawing, and on his return he founded
his Working Men's College. In 1855 he fluttered
the dovecotes of Art with his first " Academy Notes,"
so destructive to the mere market value of some
men's work that Punch introduced a sad Academician
singing :—
" I paints and paints,
Hears no complaints,
And sells before I'm dry ;
Till savage Ruskin
Sticks his tusk in,
And nobody will buy."
That year (1855) saw the second and third volumes
42
JOHN RUSKIN
of " Modern Painters." In 1856 he wrote the " Ele-
ments of Drawing," and the following year is memor-
able for two lectures — " Imagination in Architecture,"
delivered before the Architectural Association; and
" Political Economy of Art," at Manchester. He was
occupied also with the arrangement of the Turner
drawings. " Conventional Art " was spoken at South
Kensington, "Work of Iron" at Tunbridge Wells
in 1858, and he made his official Report on the
Turner Bequest. This busy year also held his " Study
of Art," an address to St. Martin's School. Going
alone to Switzerland and Italy, he studied Veronese
at Turin. On his return he gave the Inaugural
Address at the Cambridge School of Art. Three
lectures mark 1859— the "Unity of Art," at the
Royal Institution ; " Modern Manufacture and Design,"
at Bradford; "Switzerland," at the Working Men's
College. This year's tour, the last he made with
his parents, was in Germany. "Religious Art" was
delivered to the Working Men's College in 1860,
and at length the volume of the book of " Modern
Painters " was closed.
But there was no resting. At Chamouni he wrote
" Unto this Last," and stepped forth a heretic declared.
The Cornhill published the papers for a time, but at
last Thackeray and Smith said nay. Froude gave a
second series another chance in Fraser's Magazine, but
at the fourth essay he too cried, "Hold, enough!"
For the first time Ruskin bit the gag. He had
turned his back on orthodoxy; he had declared that
"THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 43
the time was out of joint — he had even begun to in-
quire how it was to be set right. The world, as ever,
would have none of such doctrine. The Fraser papers
were afterwards published as " Munera Pulveris."
The studies of 1862 and of 1863 were of Luini at
Milan and of the Limestone Alps : 1864, the year of his
father's death, saw the lectures " Traffic " and " Kings'
Treasuries and Queens' Gardens," next year incorpo-
rated in " Sesame and Lilies," his most popular book.
Of immediately following works names and dates must
suffice : " Work and Play," a lecture ; " The Study
of Architecture " and " War," the last given at Wool-
wich (1865); "Time and Tide" (letters to Thomas
Dixon, a working cork-cutter); " Modern Art" (1867);
" The Mystery of Life" and "The Three-legged Stool
of Art" (1868). "Flamboyant Architecture of the
Somme," "The Queen of the Air" (Greek Myths
of Cloud and Storm), " Hercules of Camarina," and
" The Future of England " were the fruit of 1869.
He revisited France, Switzerland, Verona, and Venice,
where the news reached him that he had been elected
Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford.
Next year Rusk in took up his professorial duties
and delivered his first and second courses. Before
the Royal Institution he gave his " Verona and its
Rivers," one of the loveliest examples of his descrip-
tive and expository style. It was the memorable
year of the first Fors Clavigera. Again he moved
through Switzerland and Italy ; he made a fruitful study
of coins in the British Museum for his Oxford course
44 JOHN RUSKIN
on Greek Art, in which he now found a new signi-
ficance ; and the Woolwich Cadets were privileged to
hear him once more in the " Story of Arachne*" He
gave them also, in 1872, " The Bird of Calm." His
Slade lectures for the year were "The Eagles Nest"
and "Ariadne Florentine" Corpus now gave him
an Honorary Fellowship, which meant an Oxford
lodging of his own, "between a Turkey carpet and
a Titian," under the very shadow of Christ Church.
That Society had already honoured him in 1858 at
her first election of Honorary Students.
Here we reach the close of the Denmark Hill
period. After his mother's death in 1871, Ruskin
looked for and found a long-desired retreat among the
Lakes. From W. J. Linton he purchased Brantwood,
by Coniston Water, and there in 1872 he made his
home until the end. Before we leave the associations
of South London, it should be noted, in a retrospective
word, that in 1852, when he left Park Street, Ruskin
took the house on Herne Hill next door to his old home.
There he finished " The Stones of Venice." In 1868
he bought No. 28 itself, and used it for his rougher
collection of minerals, keeping only his finest specimens
at Denmark Hill. His reasons, given in a letter, are
worth recording : —
" first, 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 drawing. And my fourth is the power
"THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 45
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 green-house still stands, and the
aviary — without fear of interruption from callers."
But Dr. Dryasdust has held us too long with these
statistical details. It is time, without much burden of
chronology, to glance at the chief scenes of Ruskin's
inspiration in France, Switzerland, and Italy.
CHAPTER VI
FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, AND ITALY
" THERE have been, in sum, three centres of my life's
thought: Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa." So Ruskin
made avowal when he came late in life to review bygone
things. All that he did at Venice he held to be but
bye- work, on the strange plea that he dealt there with
things hitherto unknown or falsely stated. Because
he toiled after truth in Venetian history, because his
interest lay in "Tintoret virtually unseen, Veronese
unfelt, Carpaccio not so much as named," because, too,
something was due to his fondness for gliding about
in gondolas, he put Venice in the second place among
his instructors. The others had accepted lessons ready
to his hand. Venice he regarded, by a strange subtlety
of thought, as a receiver rather than a giver. He
taught her to read her own history aright, to acknow-
ledge her greatest painters. The receiver, therefore,
is less blessed. And the tremendous work itself was
pastime, because of those gliding gondolas.
It is a delightful sophistry, but, like all the Ruskin
sophistries, sincere. Later came the inevitable qualifi-
cation. To the three thought-centres he must add
Verona, because she gave the colouring to all they
taught, and virtually represented the fate and the
FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 47
beauty of Italy to him. Of this he has left us proof
in the passage that records his Pisgah-vision of Italian
story as he looked, from the heights above Verona,
across the Lombard plain.
With so much to be examined in few words, this
meagre sketch can take only the lightest account of
Rouen. For critical work there the reader must turn
to the " Seven Lamps." In the Norman capital
Ruskin worked out for himself his grammar of the
flamboyant Gothic, approaching his task, as ever, by
easy stages, and reading, during that journey of 1835,
a preface in the architecture of Abbeville. Not yet
ready for Rouen itself, he read the foreword gladly, feel-
ing that " here was entrance into immediately healthy
labour and joy." In time he was to appreciate Rouen
as a critic, and the preface became an interpretation.
On that first visit the cathedral gave him, in a purely
personal sense, a thrill of delightful contrast, just such
a contrast as the Ruskin way of life must have pro-
duced time and again : —
"Imagine the change between one Sunday and
the next, — from the morning service in this building
(Dr. Andrews' chapel) attended by the families of the
small shop-keepers in the Walworth Road, in their
Sunday trimmings (our plumber's wife sat in the next
pew . . . ) ; fancy the change from this, to high
mass in Rouen Cathedral, its nave filled by the white-
capped peasantry of half Normandy ! "
A fuller account of Rouen and its cathedral was
48 JOHN RUSKIN
among the unfulfilled projects of Ruskin's later life.
Of Abbeville, and his " cheerful, unalloyed, unwearying
pleasure " in getting sight of the city and St. Wulfran
on a fine summer afternoon, he has left a record, in one
phrase of which, if it reflect an actual thought of that
5th of June 1835, and not the afterthought of years, we
may trace the germ of doctrine expounded — with what
mastery and knowledge 1 — in the first volume of " The
Stones of Venice" — the unity of church Gothic and
domestic Gothic. Examine in particular the use of
the word "faithful," and learn that Ruskin used no
epithet at random. He has spoken of the churches
of Abbeville, and continues : —
" Outside, the faithful old town gathered itself and
nestled under their buttresses, like a brood beneath the
mother's wings."
In those days the kinship of house and church had
not been disguised or swept out of remembrance by
modern desecrators. St. Wulfran's and St. Riquier's
walls and towers were alike coeval with the gabled
timber houses of which the busier streets chiefly con-
sisted when Ruskin first saw Abbeville.
One could linger long enough over the story of
those posting journeys to the South, with their digres-
sions to Dijon, where, in after-years, at the Hotel de la
Cloche, the master pointed out the room where, in his
wash-hand basin, had been bitten "with savage care-
lessness " the last plate for the " Seven Lamps." But
the limits of these pages forbid.
FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 49
There was a time when Ruskin wrote of Venice :
" Thank God I am here ; it is the Paradise of cities.
This, and Chamouni, are my two bournes of Earth."
Once more the correcting hand descended on these
words. When he wrote that rhapsody, he knew neither
Rouen nor Pisa, though he had seen both. Geneva,
he notes, is meant to include Chamouni in the triad
of "tutresses" — a word, by the way, not of the first
choice, and unworthy of his style.
"My true mother town of Geneva," Ruskin ex-
claims, when he tells how it was there, in church, to
the accompaniment of braying organ and doggerel
hymns, that the impulse came to him which threw his
new thought into the form of "Modern Painters."
He repaid his debt in a wonderful passage of descrip-
tion, enshrining the memory of the little town, the
canton four miles square, in the days of his early visits,
before the place was spoiled by " the people who have
hold of it now, with their polypous knots of houses,
communal with 'London, Paris, and New York.'"
He stayed on his first visits (1883, 1835) at the Hotel
des Etrangers, " one of those country houses open to
the polite stranger, some half-mile out of the gates."
There he rejoiced in a Geneva " composed of a cluster
of water-mills, a street of penthouses, two wooden
bridges, two dozen of stone houses on a little hill, and
three or four perpendicular lanes up and down the
hill." He saw it as a community well-ordered, the
home of honest industries, this bird's nest of a place,
centre of religious and social thought to all Europe,
50 JOHN RUSKIN
" Saussure's school and Calvin's, — Rousseau's and
Byron's, — Turner's — "
Here Ruskin the humorist looks out. He was
ready, he confessed, to add that Geneva was his own
school as well, "but I didn't write all that last page
to end so."
The outsider who sees most of the game will
perhaps hazard the opinion that kindred Chamouni
was even more closely interwoven with Ruskin's life
and work. It was the inspiration of early poems (a
small matter, but worth noting) ; it was the base of
his constant studies in the geological structure of the
Alps, scene of close observation of plants and clouds,
subject of many drawings. There he grappled with
the ethical problems predestined in "The Nature of
Gothic," and at Mornex he gave them their first formal
expression in " Unto this Last," fruit of a deep anta-
gonism to his times; thither in 1879 he longed to
return, but glacial changes had made Chamouni a
"desolated home to him" — for vanishing glaciers had
betrayed him. But it was at Chamouni, after all, in
1882, that he wrote his delightful, urbane foreshadow-
ing of Prceterita, the Epilogue to the reprint of
" Modern Painters." He had a dream to establish his
life on some parcel of land near the chain of Mont
Blanc, and once he actually bought a piece of meadow
in Chamouni, but only to sell it again, on foreseeing
the approach of the inevitable tourist, and consequent
ruin of those solitudes.
From the Diary of 1844, a fragment on Chamouni
FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 51
seemed to Ruskin perhaps worth keeping. His sparing
hand is justified : —
" 28th June, half-past ten. — I never was dazzled by
moonlight until now ; but as it rose behind the Mont
Blanc du Tacul the full moon almost blinded me : it
burst forth into the sky like a vast star. For an hour
before, the aiguilles had appeared as dark masses against
a sky looking as transparent as clear sea, edged at
their summits with fleeces of cloud breaking into a
glorious spray and foam of white fire. A meteor fell
over the Dome as the moon rose : now it is so intensely
bright that I cannot see the Mont Blanc underneath
it ; the form is lost in its light."
Excellent as it is in feeling, this first-hand writing
from a journal shows how necessary it was for Ruskin
that his greater works should have been revised by
Mr. W: H. Harrison, his mentor and editor for thirty
years. In his charming tribute to that friend, Ruskin
is plainly all at sea about the technical reasons for his
taskmaster's severity: but he took his castigation like
a man, rewriting and recasting cheerfully.
In Ruskin's account of Pisa occurs an implicit
explanation of his curious depreciation of Venice as
a teacher. When he came to any place prepared for
what he was to seek as material for learning and found
it, there he recognised an informing influence. At his
first sight of Pisa, in 1840, he was impressed by the
purity of her architecture, but he had too little know-
ledge to make progress. His guides were chiefly
52
JOHN RUSKIN
Byron and Shelley. But in 1845 he had read enough
of Dante and of Sismondi's " Italian Republics " to know
what he had to seek. His picture of his works and
days there is altogether amiable. Still orthodox, he
found in the frescoes of the Campo Santo the entire
doctrine of Christianity. He copied the frescoes, then
rapidly vanishing to make way for civic monuments ;
he sketched in the streets and drew admiring crowds of
companionable — not common — Italians, in whom he
recognised their wonderful natural gift for knowing
what was right in a picture.
At Pisa Ruskin made good friends with the Abbe^
Rossini, Professor of Fine Art, and heaped coals of fire
on his head by going patiently to hear his great lecture
on " The Beautiful, " although that morning the Abb6
had dismissed Turner with a superficial word, " Yes,
yes, an imitator of Salvator." Ruskin's only revenge
was a conviction, after the lecture, that he knew a
good deal more about the Beautiful than the professor.
That excellent man in turn made ample amends by
having a scaffolding put up to enable a future Professor
of Fine Art in another place to make partial records
of the frescoes. And thus —
" The days that began in the cloister of the Campo
Santo usually ended by my getting up on the roof of
Santa Maria della Spina, and sitting in the sunlight that
transfused the warm marbles of its pinnacles till the
unabated brightness went down beyond the arches of
the Pont-a-Mare, — the few footsteps and voices of the
twilight fell silent in the streets, and the city and her
FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 53
mountains stood mute as a dream, beyond the soft
eddying of Arno."
Needless, perhaps, to point out that even here, in
words written a good forty years later, despite Dante
and Sismondi, the influence of Shelley is still para-
mount.
These, then, were Ruskin's three great teachers,
and such, in the lightest outline, were the impressions
he drew from them while his mind was still plastic;
although it is well to remember that his account is
written, for the most part, with the hand and thought
of ripe experience.
Of Lucca, where Quercia's Ilaria del Caretto became
for Ruskin his ideal of Christian sculpture, the mere
mention must suffice. Florence, at first grievously
misunderstood, at length took her true place; in
witness whereof — "Val d'Arno" (most charming of
the Slade lectures), the " Laws of F^sole," and passages
innumerable throughout the works.
The central point of Florence was, for Ruskin,
Giotto's Campanile, lovingly remembered in the
frontispiece to "The Seven Lamps." "Mornings in
Florence " records his vision, one of the most significant
things in all his teaching, that tells how the last tradi-
tions of Faith and Hope of the Jewish and Gentile
races met for their beautiful labour at the foot of that
Tower. He begs the pilgrim to get right the little
piece of geography fixing the local relation of the
Campanile, the Baptistery, and Brunelleschi's Dome.
54 JOHN RUSKIN
For the Baptistery was the last building raised on
Earth by the descendants of the workmen taught by
Dasdalus, the Tower the loveliest inspiration of the
men who lifted up the tabernacle in the wilderness.
Here is the last and noblest inspiration of living Greek
and living Christian work. And the Dome was the
latest example of the best Christian architecture just
before the onset of decline. Long afterwards Ruskin
mourned the profanation of that sacred spot by all the
horrors of a modernised Italy.1
And what of Venice? "Bye- work," he said.
Possibly, but not to be neglected. It was a "vain
temptation," he says ; but it is well that Ruskin allowed
himself to be tempted. He was still a boy when he
first saw Venice, and the beginning of everything was
the sight of the gondola beak coming actually inside
the door of Danieli's hotel. Exquisite sensation for
Master John Ruskin ! Of the approach to the city he
has left us his impressions in one of those long, deliberate
passages — minute but never tedious — in which he plays
the cunning cicerone, who withholds and withholds,
until his hearer is ripe for the effect. Sometimes it
comes with a gorgeous blaze of colour. Not so at the
Vestibule of Venice.
He leads us out on an autumnal morning from the
dark eastern gateway of Padua, and so on for hours
1 " A stand for hackney-coaches, cigars, spitting and harlot-
planned fineries." Students of Fors Clavigera will recall in that
last phrase of censure the fierce old man's plain words on the
provenance of high-heeled shoes.
FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 55
through flat lands, past the tall white tower of Dolo,
until we come among the divided waters of the Brenta.
Then at Mestre appears the extremity of a canal, black,
it seems, with stagnation; but no, it is covered with
the black boats of Venice. Enter one, to try if they
be real boats or not, and glide across the yielding water,
that seems to let the boat sink into soft vacancy, noting
as you go (for your guide is the hill- man Ruskin) how
all round the horizon lie the Alps of Bassano. Out of
the water before you rises at last what seems to be the
suburb of an English manufacturing town — "four or
five domes, a sullen cloud of smoke issuing from the
belfry of a church.
" It is Venice."
Thus quietly, with an intentional hint of anti- climax,
he approaches "The Throne," where there is no stint
of glories. He shows us the Adriatic, a sea with the
bleak power of our own Northern waves, changing her
angry pallor to a field of burnished gold about the feet
of St. George of the Seaweed; the shadowy Rialto
throws its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the
Palace of the Camerlenghi, and the Ducal Palace,
"flushed with its sanguined veins, looks to the snowy
dome of our Lady of Salvation."
But we must beware. This is a Venice that Enrico
Dandolo or Francis Foscari would not know. Their
Venice lies hidden away in many a grass-grown court
and silent pathway and lightless canal. And the
Venice to which Ruskin came first had been created
for him, as for Turner, by Byron. That Venice is
56 JOHN RUSKIN
a mere stage dream, a thing of falsities and anach-
ronisms, against which he was to wage a long war.
For when in 1849 Ruskin came, with much material
already collected, to write "The Stones of Venice,"
he discovered that her history would have to be ex-
amined anew ; for even the accepted authorities could
not agree within a hundred years as to the dates of
her chief monuments. He must question them, stone
by stone. Patiently he set himself to read the riddle
of the Ducal Palace and of St. Mark's, and at last
he could say that what he had found was truth.
St. Mark's he interpreted as a piece of jewel-
work on the grand scale, in the sense of art: in the
light of his inevitable ethics, "No city had such a
Bible." It is a mighty humanity, perfect and proud,
hiding no weakness beneath the mantle, gaining no
greatness from the diadem. All that he said of it
in the earlier volumes he would have set aside in
later days for the more condensed study, " St. Mark's
Rest," but those who care most for his writings have
not agreed with this judgment. Yet it is well not to
neglect " St. Mark's Rest," were it only for the hints
of compensation that came to Ruskin amid a ruined
and desolated Venice, as she seemed to him then.
There in later days he fell in love with Carpaccio's
St. Ursula, worshipping her, someone has finely said,
as a sincere Athenian might have worshipped the
Queen of the Air. And in this temper, which one
may perhaps call Ruskin's meteoric mood, he had
new visions of Venetian history, not in her painting
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s^-':'?:'"^- .
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FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 57
only but in her buildings. Take, as a single instance,
his interpretation of the dream of Magnus of Altinum ;
that quaint scripture telling how Messer Jesus Christ
Our Lord showed that where a red cloud rested
there men should build the Church of St. Salvador,
and where a white cloud gleamed Our Lady foretold
that there should rise St. Mary the Beautiful. It
is a subject fitted to the hand of the true air-man
Ruskin, he who in " Modern Painters " taught the
ways of the Cloud Flocks, and in the " Queen of the
Air " pleaded jealously for unsullied skies. It is well
that he did not see the " air-man " of to-day. But
to return to our Venetian cloud myth and Ruskin's
commentary : —
" None cares to-day whether any God-given cloud
is white or red, yet a perception lingers in the old
fisherman's eyes of the difference between white nebbia
on the morning sea and red clouds in the evening
twilight. And the Stella Maris comes in the sea
cloud; — Leucothea: but the Son of Man on the
jasper throne."
That use of Leucothea — "the white goddess" —
is overwhelming. Ruskin the etymologist was not
always to be trusted, but here his genius prevailed.
Note, too, the student of jewels and rock-crystals rising
for a moment skyward to find in the red cloud a
throne of jasper.
Such, then, was that notable though lightly es-
teemed bye-work.
58 JOHN RUSKIN
But Venice meant more to Ruskin than even
this. He was to make known her painters: in her
Scuola di San Rocco he found assurance of his own
real vocation. With that crucial incident this less
than outline of his Venetian experience must end.
One day during the tour of 1845, Ruskin and J. D.
Harding entered for the first time the School of
St. Roch. There the sight of Tintoret's "Cruci-
fixion" took the strength out of them. Harding
felt like a whipped schoolboy ; not so Ruskin.
He writes in the Epilogue to "Modern Painters,"
vol. ii. : —
" I felt only that a new world was opened to
me, that I had seen that day the Art of Man in its
full majesty for the first time ; and that there was
also a strange and precious gift in myself enabling
me to recognise it, and therein ennobling, not crush-
ing me."
It has already been noted that to the number of
his teachers Ruskin added, as an afterthought, Verona,
representative, to him, of the fate and the beauty
of Italy. His memorable up-gathering of all that
Verona suggested must be read at length in the
lecture he delivered to the Royal Institution in 1870.
In its beautiful opening every side of his own interests
and character is reflected — the worshipper of moun-
tains, the patient geologist and botanist, the historian,
the artist, the poet, and, needless to say, the moralist.
Taking his hearers to a height overlooking the city,
FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 59
he shows them, in a moment of time, all that Italy
meant for him. He points out the gateway of the
Goths, the valleys of the Inn and of the Adige; he
pauses to analyse the structure of the promontory
whence he looks down on all the plain between Alp
and Apennine — how it hardens from limestone, with
knots of splendid brown jasper, into the peach-blossom
marble of Verona. In the moat of the city he traces
the cradle of modern geological science (for in its
trenching Leonardo first suggested the true nature
of fossils) ; in its walls, the cradle of civic life ; in its
round tower, the first ever embrasured for artillery —
constructed against artillery — the cradle of modern war,
the beginning of the end of all fortification, "of a
system that costs millions a year and leaves England
without defence." There speaks the political philoso-
pher, but in the main his reflections are less prosaic.
Twelve miles away is Mantua;1 beyond its fretted
outline, Parma ; to the left, at the feet of the
Eugansean Hills, rests Padua ; in the gleam of the
horizon beyond — Venice. And at our feet Verona,
with the Scaligers' bridge, the church of San Zeno,
the remnants of the Palace of Theodoric — Dietrich
of Berne.
This is but a maimed paraphrase of a picture
suggested, in slow detail, with wonderful gleams of
colour — the Alps of Friuli touched by the sunset " into
a crown of strange rubies," bright flowing Adige, blue
1 Actually, a good twenty miles. — ED.
60 JOHN EUSKIN
Lombard plain. The scene being set, Ruskin gathers
all its meaning into this : —
" Now I do not think that there is any other rock
in all the world, from which the places, and monuments,
of so complex and deep a fragment of the history of its
ages can be visible, as from this piece of crag with its
blue and prickly weeds. For you have thus beneath
you at once the birthplaces of Virgil and Livy, the
homes of Dante and Petrarch, and the source of the
most sweet and pathetic inspiration of your own Shake-
speare ; the spot where the civilisation of the Gothic
kingdoms was founded on the throne of Theodoric,
and where whatever was strongest in the Italian race
redeemed itself into life by its leagues against Bar-
barossa. You have the cradle of natural science and
medicine in the schools of Padua ; the central light of
Italian chivalry in the power of the Scaligers ; the chief
stain of Italian cruelty in that of Ezzelin ; and lastly,
the birthplace of the highest art ; for among these hills,
or by this very Adige bank, were born Mantegna,
Titian, Correggio, and Veronese."
" The only mischief of the place," he wrote in June
1869 — that late visit paid just in time to save a record
of the Castelbarco monument before it was "restored "
— " the only mischief is its being too rich, 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 a dolphin."
During this visit, one May morning, while Ruskin
was sketching under a quiet Italian light in the
•
>' :> *
FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 61
beautiful square of Verona, Longfellow and his little
daughter came up and talked with him as he worked.
He hoped it was not very vain of him to wish that
if a photograph could have been taken of the scene,
some people both in England and America would have
liked copies of it. But of the meeting of two famous
men in the meeting-place of so much history, Ruskin's
own words remain the only record, more enduring
than any sun-picture.
CHAPTER VII
OXFORD ONCE MORE: THE SLADE PROFESSOR
FOR nine years before his appointment to the Slade
Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford, Ruskin had
ceased to write directly on Art. It gave him a text,
certainly, but everything now was subordinated to his
teaching of moral and political philosophy. In " Unto
this Last " he had, in striving to give a logical defini-
tion of wealth, spoken words that a materialistic and
money-grubbing age could not understand, or refused to
understand. The latter is possibly nearer the mark. A
system of political economy that scrupled not to call
the art of making oneself rich the art of making some
one else poor, that postulated upright and clean dealing,
the production of only true and honest work, and a just
reward for the labourer, who was to have means to
command for himself as much labour as he had ex-
pended, could not hope to win popular success. We
have seen the^ £g,te of these papers in the Cornhill,
and of their successors in Fraser^s.
What Ruskin sought was to point the way to a
complete reform of the social system, and he was re-
ceived— as every new Gospeller is received. For the
best part of a decade he lived much in solitude, at
Mornex on the Saleve and at Chamouni, wrestling,
OXFORD ONCE MORE 63
often in deep gloom of spirit, with a froward world.
He had passed away from all orthodoxy ; old friends
misunderstood him ; to his parents his new views were
a sorrow. But his heterodoxy won him the friendship
and sympathy of Carlyle, who might have said to
Ruskin, " Thy-doxy is my-doxy."
The Oxford appointment did not win him back from
heresy; but it brought him, with better heart, once
more among the throngs of men. He took up his
duties in no perfunctory spirit, and completely rewrote
in a maturer form all his teaching on Art, qualified, of
necessity, with his now inevitable ethics. His first
lecture, delivered on his birthday, February 8, 1870,
was an event in the history of the University. The
crowd was so great that the Slade Professor's lecture-
room could not hold a tenth part, and the audience
adjourned to the Sheldonian Theatre, where, amid en-
thusiasm, Ruskin gave a new direction to work that
has had permanent and far-reaching effects upon his
countrymen. Of his influence the proof is our wonder
nowadays that he should have required, in "Modern
Painters" and elsewhere, to do so much clearing of
the ground. His introduction, then requiring proof
step by step, has for many of us become axiomatic.
Very soon he recognised that merely theoretical
teaching could be of little use unless it were reinforced
by the practical, and to this end he founded the Oxford
School of Drawing, to which came a fair number of
the more enthusiastic spirits. The Professor was him-
self the drawing-master, and he enriched his school
64 JOHN RUSKIN
with many gifts — his own sketches, a few examples of
Tintoret, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Holman Hunt.
Later he endowed the school with a gift of £5000.
In spite of antagonisms, there can be no doubt that
in his Oxford work Ruskin found pleasure, if not
happiness. He became the centre of an interesting
circle of young men, who were influenced by his
teaching, ethical as well as artistic, and if enthusiasm
sometimes led them into Quixotism, well, then, their
state was the more gracious.
Quaintest of all the experiments in practising what
they preached was the endeavour of Ruskin and his
disciples to mend with their own hands a villainous
piece of road at Hincksey. The fame of that gallant
deed reverberated amid much kindly laughter into after-
times. The present writer, one of a far later brood of
undergraduates, remembers an afternoon at Hincksey,
when he chanced in miry November weather upon a
fearful Slough of Despond, that might by courtesy have
been called a highway. " That," said a cynical senior
man, " is the Ruskin Road." Many picks were broken
in the work, and one vigorous but unwary devotee,
it is said, drove the other end of the pick through
his back, and was, alas ! injured for life. But they
claimed to have put the road into decent order, at least
for the time. It was no part of their scheme to take
that or any other bad piece off the Surveyor's hands.
Enemies said that the farmers laughed the undertak-
ing to scorn : the truth is, they gave the workmen a
vote of thanks and made known certain privileges of
OXFORD ONCE MORE 65
grazing rights which accrued to those who kept up
the road. So that even an imperfect feudal system
had provided some sort of proper equivalent in kind
as the labourer's reward. It was, as it were, an in-
stalment of the Ruskin theory of wages.
Mr. Ruskin's breakfasts at Corpus were famous for
their flow of soul, and one wishes that the Oxford of
a more recent day had had anything as vital and in-
teresting to offer. Among the young men who came
under the Slade Professor's immediate influence, two
of the most notable were Mr. W. H. Mallock and
the late Arnold Toynbee, the latter of whom gave the
Ruskin doctrine practical expression through his social
work in the East End of London. With Prince
Leopold, Ruskin also formed a warm friendship.
Of his later Oxford life Ruskin has left one very
amiable glimpse in Prceterita. He reveals himself as
unconquerably shy amid the distinguished company
into which from time to time he was thrust by his
fame. For that he blames his want of early training
in the mere amenities of society. It is a story within
a story, beginning with a dinner at Christ Church,
given by the Dean and Mrs. Liddell during the visit
of the Princess of Wales. Disraeli and Ruskin were
among the guests invited to meet her Royal Highness.
" I knew no more how to behave," says the Slade
Professor, " than a marmot pup." Very soon Ruskin
\< -,'inied by intuition that a ripple of brighter conversa-
tion running round the table concerned himself, and
a glance from the Princess confirmed his suspicion.
66 JOHN RUSKIN
Some one had told a pleasant story at his expense :
how, an evening or two before, the gay Professor,
knowing that Mr. and Mrs. Liddell were to dine at
Blenheim, entered into a plot with the Liddell girls
to steal round from Corpus to the Deanery, where
there was to be tea and a little singing or the like.
Through blinding snow the Professor kept his tryst,
and a delightful evening was just beginning, when, lo 1
re-enter the Dean and Mrs. Liddell, whose carriage
could not get farther than the Parks, owing to the
drifts. " How sorry you must be to see us, Mr.
Ruskin!" said Mrs. Liddell; to which he replied, "I
never was more so." The Dean kindly promised not
to interrupt the symposium, but the spell was broken,
and Ruskin returned to Corpus disconsolate.
This was matter after Dizzy's own heart, and in
ten minutes he had every detail perfect, for future
deadly use.
But before the Minister could strike, Ruskin had
to run the gauntlet of a talk with the Princess, while
"the attendant stars and terrestrial beings round,
listened, to hear what the marmot pup had to say for
himself."
" In the space of, say, a minute and a half, I had
told the Princess that landscape painting had been
little cultivated by the Heads of Colleges, — that it
had been still less cultivated by the Undergraduates,
and that my young lady pupils always expected
me to teach them how to paint like Turner in six
lessons/'
OXFORD ONCE MORE 67
Difficulties assailed Princess and Professor. Her
Royal Highness bowed courteously and passed on — to
the next Professor. "A blank space," says Ruskin,
" formed itself round me," when suddenly there entered,
in full dress, Miss Rhoda Liddell, " as exquisite a little
spray of rhododendron ferrugineum as ever sparkled
in Alpine dew."
" Disraeli saw his opening in an instant. Drawing
himself to his full height, he advanced to meet Rhoda.
The whole room became all eyes and ears. Bowing
with kindly reverence, he waved his hand and intro-
duced her — to the world. ' This is, I understand, the
young lady in whose art education Professor Ruskin
is so deeply interested ! '
"And there was nothing for me but simple ex-
tinction, for I had never given Rhoda a lesson in my
life. ... 1 could only bow as well as a marmot might,
in imitation of the Minister, and get at once away to
Corpus, out of human ken."
One more glimpse may be given of those Oxford
days, or rather evenings. As far as I am aware, it has
never been made public, and it may, I trust, be set
down without offence, almost exactly as it occurs in
one of my old diaries, with only some identifying and
too intimate details omitted : —
To-night when I took my usual verses to Mr.
I found him reading by the light of two wax
candles— one long, the other short. "Look,"
he said, "that is how Ruskin will always have
68 JOHN RUSKIN
it. He says it is the perfect light for the
student. He told me so one evening when
I called on him in Christ Church. I had gone
in fulfilment of a promise to show him the
silver pen with which Sir Walter wrote the
Waverley Novels. When I entered, Ruskin
was reading one of the original manuscripts of
the Waverley series. He took the pen, and
laying it reverently on the page, said, * Ah, they
should never be parted.' And during the whole
of that visit to Oxford, and indeed for some
time afterwards, I had to allow him to keep
the pen."
The sequel is perhaps rather more humorous and
characteristic than the part of the story here set
down, but the time has not yet come to tell the
whole of the little comedy. What would have
happened, one wonders, had my tutor suggested that
the MS. should go with the pen, and not the pen
with the MS. !
During this period a note of warmer regard for
Oxford may be traced in Ruskin's words, but it is
chiefly the Cathedral Church of Christ that has his
affection. Personally he was beloved, and his work
was valued, and there were many testimonies that
he had not toiled fruitlessly. But that could not
prevent his resignation of his Chair, when the Museum
permitted vivisection. And so for conscience' sake,
sadly convinced that he had laboured in vain for an
age that took no heed of his teaching, he parted
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OXFORD ONCE MORE 69
company with his University. That was in 1884.
The date somewhat anticipates the course of this
narrative. During the greater part of his tenure of
the Slade Professorship Ruskin's home had been at
Brantwood, near Coniston. Thither we must now
turn, to note the close of his work and of his life.
But a word may be said here on the permanence
or otherwise of his teaching. In political economy
he is still a force, but in Art the times seem to have
moved far away from Ruskin. To-day we are im-
pressionists, and even post-impressionists, and those
who know how to qualify aright the opinions of both
the later schools, qualify also Ruskin's dogmatic ad-
herence to literal truth, and recognise that in his
intolerance of Whistler he missed the sublimation of
literal truth wherein that master's work is great. The
sanest criticism of the present day is that which holds
a balance between the jarring sects. It owes much
to Ruskin as an initial force, but the narrowness of his
creed has mulcted him, as Art Critic, in the inevitable
penalty of the bigot.
CHAPTER VIII
GATES OF THE HILLS
AMID the peace of the Lakes, Ruskin made his home
during the last and stormiest period of his life, and
there through much suffering he fought his way back
to some reassurance of spirit. His conflicts can be
traced only in the barest outline here ; but first a
word must be said in description of the Prophet's
retreat at Coniston.
On the margin of Coniston Water, Brantwood
stands solitary among its dark firs and larches, remote
by a lengthy drive from the village. It is a plain
house, still declaring its cottage origin, and with no
outward ornament save its turret-room, once the
master's own. For the house beautiful, in what
Ruskin called the vulgarly aesthetic sense, he took
no care. He was not disturbed by a wall-paper or
by early Victorian furniture. The old family things
served him until the end, to the grief of worshippers
who sought Brantwood in the spirit of Bunthorne
and Grosvenor. To such he made his position bluntly
clear in the preface to the rearranged edition of
"Modern Painters" (1883):—
" I am entirely independent for daily happiness upon
70
GATES OF THE HILLS 71
the sensual qualities of form and colour ; when I want
them I take them either from the sky or the fields,
not from my walls, which might be either whitewashed
or painted like a harlequin's jacket for aught I care ;
but the slightest incident which interrupts the harmony
of feeling and association in a landscape, destroys it
all to me, poisoning the entire faculty of contempla-
tion. From my dining-room, I am happy in the
view of the lower reach of Coniston Water, not
because it is particularly beautiful, but because it is
entirely pastoral and pure. Were a single point of
chimney of the Barrow ironworks to show itself over
the green ridge of the hill, I should never care to
look at it more."
To be fastidious about household gods while out-
side lay a miserable world, seemed to Ruskin mere
fiddling while Rome was burning.
Within Brantwood all was solid, old-fashioned
comfort, and, while the master's strength endured, a
wonderfully busy life. A company of young people
helped Ruskin in his manifold works : and the even-
ings were merry in a fashion that some would have
called Philistine. Nigger melodies were not discour-
aged, and there was no pose of cleverness in the
conversation. Down on the lake Brantwood had its
own little harbour and fleet of boats. The afternoons
were often spent in wood-chopping expeditions.
From the earliest light, and sometimes even before
the dawn, Ruskin, who went to bed at half-past ten,
was at work in his study. It is a long room, once,
72
JOHN BUSKIN
too, hung with Turners and papered with a design
taken from Marco Marziale's "Circumcision" in the
National Gallery. The furniture was red mahogany,
the upholstery bright-green leather. It was not the
least beautiful, but in this very place he could write
that loveliest and most melodious of his briefer prose
passages, beginning : " Morning breaks as I write, along
these Coniston Fells — " It is familiar to everybody,
and, alas! now grown somewhat too hackneyed to
quote in full. Thus, under the shadow of Coniston
Old Man, the prophet lived and worked and fought,
and at length laid down his armour.
He saw himself in these days "a man clothed
in soft raiment — a reed shaken by the wind ! " The
words bring us to those remarkable volumes containing
the final results of his life's thought and teaching, Fors
Clavigera. The mystical title, explained in a true
Ruskin etymology, laborious, minute, and fanciful, sig-
nifies " the Fate or Force that bears the Club, or Key,
or Nail : that is, in three aspects — as Following, or Fore-
ordaining, Deed (or Courage), and Patience, and Laws,
known and unknown, of Nature and life ; — the Deed of
Hercules, the Patience of Ulysses, the Law of Lycur-
gus." These letters to the workmen and labourers of
Great Britain were begun in 1871, the year before
Ruskin settled at Brantwood, and they were continued,
as occasion and health served, through seven years.
The publication was in parts, issued through the post,
at sevenpence, later tenpence, by Mr. George Allen for
Mr. Ruskin. He did not advertise his curious magazine,
GATES OF THE HILLS 73
trusting, as he said, to the public's long nose ; and the
public, getting wind of the affair, came to buy. " Words
winged with Empyrean wisdom, piercing as lightning
— and which I do not really remember to have heard
the like of," was Carlyle's verdict. " To read Fors"
says Mr. Collingwood, " is like being out in a thunder-
storm." Opinion was certainly tempestuous enough,
as the scheme of these reforming papers gradually
unfolded itself. Some said the sage was mad, as he
brought out of his storehouse things new and old —
pastoral, comical, historical, tragical — the ripe experi-
ence of fifty years. The world did ill to mock ; for
never was it so generously taken into confidence by
any man of genius. Ruskin withheld nothing that he
thought would serve his countrymen. Bitterer than
all to him, the working men of Britain sent Ruskin no
word of reply, and at last he ceased to address them as
" My Friends."
In this place it is impossible to indicate all the bright
and sombre threads of that wonderful web, but the
central purpose must be outlined. It was the founding
of a practical scheme of social regeneration, through
the agency of St. George's Company, afterwards called
the Guild of St. George. Ruskin, Master of the Guild,
invited disciples to devote to the work a tithe of their
means. He himself led the way with a tenth of his
remaining fortune, once £200,000. This man clothed
in soft raiment was exercised in his mind as to the
example of St. Francis, and set about shedding his
wealth. Land was bought for the agricultural members
74 JOHN RUSKIN
of the Guild to cultivate ; mills and factories were to
be started or acquired for the encouragement of labour
that should be, for choice, manual, although machinery
was not wholly forbidden. Recreation and instruction
were to be provided; a coinage and a costume were
contemplated, but never realised. Ruskin framed the
Laws, on the fair old model of fourteenth-century
Florence ; you may read them in the " Laws of Fesole."
It was not Utopian, except in so far as all such dreams
must be Utopian in this present world.
It may not be too fanciful to find the sum and
substance of all Ruskin's economic teaching in that
inscription which it was the " pride of his life " to have
discovered on San Giorgio di Rialto. This, " the first
word Venice ever speaks aloud," runs : " Around this
temple let the merchant's laws be just, his weights true,
and his covenants faithful."
Some part of Fors* design came into actual being
— the Sheffield Museum is to-day its most enduring
memorial; but trials and disappointments waited on
the work, and brought the Master untold bitterness.
In 1877, what he considered the treachery of a friend
so dejected him that he all but lost heart. There is of
that hard period one curious documentary memorial,
which, by the kindness of a friend, is here reproduced for
the first time in facsimile, although the letter itself has
been printed in "Arrows of the Chace." Every new
year, Ruskin used to send a message of good-will to
a correspondent, Mr. John Leith of Aberdeen, to be
read to his class for Scripture study. For 1878 there
76 JOHN RUSKIN
was no cheerful word; only two lines from Horace:
Epistles I. 4, 12-13.
" Inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras
Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum."
("Amid hope and sorrow, amid fears and wrath,
believe every day that has dawned upon thee to be
thy last.")
He must have been deeply distressed not to have
cared to catch even the qualified optimism of Horace's
very next line —
" Grata superveniet quae noil sperabitur hora."
(" Pleasant the advent of the unhoped-for hour.")
Trials drew close about Ruskin in that year, and at
length ill-health compelled him to resign his Professor-
ship, to which he had been re-elected in 1873. Pars,
the Slade lectures, and a multitude of other interests
had claimed his unremitting care, and the result was a
new and most important body of literature. For the
sake of keeping the record, the chief works may be
merely named under their years, together with an
indication of Ruskin's later journeys at home and
abroad.
In 1873 a lecture, "Nature and Authority," was
delivered at the Grosvenor Hotel; "Robin, Swallow,
and Chough," at Oxford and Eton. The Slade course
for the year was the exquisite " Val d' Arno," studies in
Tuscan Art and Florentine History. In 1874 Ruskin
revisited Rome, and went on to Sicily. His Slade course
GATES OF THE HILLS 77
included " Alps and Jura " and " Schools of Floren-
tine Art." At Eton he lectured on Botticelli. In
1875 he gave the Royal Institution his lecture on
" Glacial Action." The Slade course was " Sir Joshua
Reynolds." At Eton he delivered the " Spanish
Chapel." In 1876 he lectured at Christ's Hospital on
"Precious Stones," and at Woolwich on "Minerals."
The same year he made posting tours in England and
revisited Switzerland. Part of 1877 was devoted to a
study of Carpaccio at Venice. He lectured at Kendal
on " Yewdale and its Streamlets." The Slade course
was " Readings in Modern Painters." " Streams of
Westmorland" was given at Eton. In 1878 Ruskin
visited Prince Leopold, then very ill, at Windsor. At
Hawarden he came to a better understanding of Mr.
Gladstone, an incident generously recorded in Fors,
and later in a reprint, when the space formerly contain-
ing some hard words was left forever blank and marked
" A memorial of rash judgment." This was the year of
the Turner Exhibition in Bond Street, for which Ruskin
wrote a catalogue, interrupted by terrible illness, brought
on by innumerable worries. On his recovery he had
to face another ordeal — the libel action brought by
Whistler for Fors' remarks on impressionism. Whistler
received a farthing damages, and an inspiration, de-
veloped later in his " Gentle Art of Making Enemies."
For a considerable time Ruskin had to take life as
easily as he might, but he was not idle. " Deucalion,"
studies of crystals, and " Proserpina," an original system
of botany, came to birth in 1879. 1880 saw "A Can-
78 JOHN RUSKIN
tion to Snakes," suggested by Huxley's lecture on the
evolution of reptiles. Ruskin's treatment of the subject
was artistic and ethical. He wrote also his " Bible of
Amiens," part of his unfinished project " Our Fathers
have Told Us," and crossed swords with the Bishop of
Manchester on the question of usury. The same year
he revisited Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais, Chartres, and
Rouen. France and Italy were in the itinerary of 1882,
and he gave his " Cistercian Architecture " before the
Royal Institution. Next year he was invited to return
to his Professorship, and delivered the " Art of Eng-
land." This year he made his last tour in Scotland.
The Slade course for 1884, the " Pleasures of England,"
marked his final work in Oxford. He got through it
without the disaster his friends dreaded, and was per-
suaded to cancel certain lectures containing deep cen-
sure of the times. His lecture the " Storm-Cloud,"
given at the London Institution, was ominous in its
title. For a time clouds and darkness closed about the
mind of the foremost thinker of his age — foremost in
every sense; for it was his mere outrunning of his
own times that so set men against his teaching.
Gradually he recovered, and set to work again,
writing at intervals from 1885 to 1888 his incom-
parable autobiography, Prceterita, which he intended
to bring down to the year 1879. But his work was
done. At length he acknowledged that the task was
beyond his powers, and with one final effort, his beauti-
ful tribute to his cousin, Mrs. Arthur Severn, who had
been his mother's companion in her last years, and who
GATES OF THE HILLS 79
was to watch over his own long passage towards those
" Gates of the hills, whence one returns not," Ruskin
laid down his pen forever.
But the pilgrimage had still twelve years to run.
It is a period of which none should write save those
who loved and watched over Ruskin in his declin-
ing days at Brantwood. From Mr. Collingwood, his
secretary, one word may perhaps be borrowed here, so
fitly does it sum up all that a writer from the outside
world may dare to say : —
" ' Datur Hora Quieti ' : there is more work to do,
but not to-day. The plough stands in the furrow;
and the labourer passes peacefully from his toil, home-
wards."
On the 20th of January 1900 the end came, with-
out pain or farewell. He had wished, should he die
at Brantwood, to be buried in Coniston Churchyard;
and there he rests, his grave marked by a sculptured
cross, of native stone, symbolically wrought by his own
artificers to commemorate his life-work. There is no
written epitaph, merely his name and the years of his
coming and going.
Westminster Abbey would have opened her doors
to receive his dust, but when the Dean offered a grave,
the honour was declined. John Ruskin's true resting-
place is by the Gates of the Hills.
INDEX
Andrews, Dr., 16
Brantwood, 44, 70
Cambridge, 42
Carlyle, Thomas, 41, 63
Chamouni, 20, 42, 49
Christ Church, Oxford, 24
Coniston, 15, 44, 70
Cox, Margaret, afterwards Mrs. J. J.
Buskin, 5
Denmark Hill, home at, 38
Dijon, 48
Disraeli, 66
Domecq, Miss, 29
Dulwich, 7
Edinburgh, 41
Florence, 53
Fors Clavigera, 43, 72
France, sojourns in, 46
Friar's Crag, Derwentwater, 15
Friendship's Offering, young Ruskin con-
tributes to, 22
Geneva, 46, 49
Geological studies, 21
Herne Hill, Ruskin's early home at, 9
High Street, Oxford, 26
Hincksey, 64
Hunter Street, Ruskin's early home, 6
Italy, first visit to, 20 ; second visit, 32 ;
later visits, 40, 42, 43, 46
Keswick, 15
Maurice, F. D., 41
" Modern Painters," 34-36, 40
Oxford University, Ruskin goes up, 23 ;
life there, 24; "Modern Painters,"
35 ; Slade Professor, 62
Peckham, at school at, 21
Perth, 8, 15, 16
Pisa, 46
Prceterita, 65, 78
Richardson, Jessie, Ruskin's aunt, 8
„ Mary, Ruskin's cousin, 16
Rogers, Samuel, 22
Rogers' " Italy," 18, 20
Rouen, 46
Runciman, Ruskin's first drawing-
master, 18
Ruskin, John, birth and early years, 1 ;
lineage, 4 ; his sense of form and
colour, 7 ; visits Perth, 8 ; goes to
live at Herne Hill, 9 ; discipline, 10 ;
early artistic efforts, 11, 13 ; tours in
England with his parents, 14 ; on the
Continent, 15; learns Latin, 15, Greek,
17 ; learns drawing under Mr. Runci-
man, 18; visits Switzerland, 19, Italy,
20; geological studies, 21 ; contributes
to Friendship's Offering, 22 ; champions
Turner, 22 ; goes to Oxford, 23, ex-
periences there, 23, illness, 29, gradu-
ates, 31 ; activities at Denmark Hill,
38; "Modern Painters," 40, other
works, 42 ; lecturing, 43 ; Fors Clavi-
gera, 43; marriage, 40; Brantwood,
44 ; in France, Italy, and Switzerland,
46 ; Professor at Oxford, 62 ; at Brant-
wood, 72
Ruskin, John James, 1,4, 11, 14, 24
„ Margaret, 1, 11, 14, 26, 44
St. Mark's, Venice, 56
Schaffhausen, 19
Slade Lectures, 44, 62
" Stones of Venice," 40, 44
Switzerland, first visit to, 21; later
visits, 41, 42, 43, 46
Turner, Ruskin's first acquaintance with
his work, 18 ; his admiration for, 20 ;
champions him, 22; acquaintance
with, 32
" Unto this Last," 42, 62
Venice, 46, 49, 54
Verona, 46
Whistler, J. M., 76
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