Full text of "John Ruskin; a sketch of his life, his work, and his opinions, with personal reminiscences"

See other formats

RUSKIN

A Sketch of His Life, His Work, and His Opinions
With Personal Reminiscences

M. H. SPIELMANN

AUTHOR OF HENRIETTE RONNER, THE
WORKS OF G. F. WATTS, R.A., ETC.
EDITOR OF THE MAGAZINE OF ART

TOGETHER WITH
A PAPER BY JOHN RUSKIN, ENTITLED

THE BLACK ARTS

AND A NOTE ON RUSKIN BY HARRISON S. MORRIS, MANAGING
DIRECTOR ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS, PHILADELPHIA, PA.

ILLUSTRATED

PHILADELPHIA

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

MDCCCC

THE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LI3RARYJ

144529

ASTOR, LENOX AND

TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

19C

J. B. Lippincott Company.

Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia.

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

MY WIFE.

A NOTE ON RUSKIN.

The dying century for which he has laboured
so valiantly marks the death of John Ruskin.

On Saturday, the twentieth of January,
1900, he passed into the brightness of that
day whose herald he has been, and his many
books alone shall henceforth speak for him.
He saw the light and caught the sounds from
beyond our ken. He was the pilot of our
race, leading the way into the realm of beauty
that alone is truth. We gave him little heed ;
we flouted his noble words ; we laughed at his
whims and worries ; we pressed forward with
steam and sordid desire in his despite. But
as surely as the odour from a flower steals

(5)

6 JOHN RUSKIN.

out and purifies the air, as irresistibly as the

brook runs into the unacknowledging sea, so do

his opinions, his ethics, his very syllables, enter

and take part in our existence. We cannot

silence them with jeers, for they are as silent
in their influence as an odour, nor can we stifle

them with ignorance. Each author, journalist,

versifier, preacher, uses unheedingly a speech

made purer by this master of our tongue, and

each must utter the code, in whatsoever form,

which the purer lips and richer brain have

made a part of our unconscious thought.

It is the mission of such a soul as John

Ruskin's to deal with contemporary things

rather than with elemental ones. He was

born a lofty antagonist of besetting ills. He

saw, indeed, the deeper purport of events,

and spoke with profound meaning of them;

the heights of erudition were early conquered,

and the meaning and purpose of life and death

were clear. But, instead of touching a creative

chord, these thrilled to the dragon at the

JOHN R US KIN. 7

gates, and he fought like a hero with the
foe.

Such a contest demands the qualities which
uplift a people ; but when the knightly lance
is forever at rest, the hero is a memory. His
work is over ; it is history, and its interest for
the generations is the interest of history, and
not the interest of living and elemental force.

Ruskin's work is over. He lies with his ereat
ancestors in the English valhalla of thought, with
Bacon and Jeremy Taylor and Burke, with
Coleridge and Haydon and Carlyle. The
good he achieved is the world's, and the world
will hold him in blessed remembrance while
beauty rests in the open landscape or rises
into forms of stone that shall endure.

His own volumes are his best exponents.
They are the ripeness of his gleanings. They
give the man's thought and mental stature ;
but they omit the man. In the pages that
follow some of the personal threads of his
great career are woven into a likeness of
him, and the reader who has drunk at his

8 JOHN RUSKIN.

" well of English undefiled " will find here
matter with which to realize the person who
animates the books.

Harrison S. Morris.

PREFATORY NOTE.

-•c*-

This book is intended to present a brief out-
line of the life and opinions of the " Sage of
Coniston," together with some account of his
personality, which I have had the opportunity
of gaining a knowledge of in his company and
in that of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Severn ; as
well as by the study of his writings and by in-
quiry into the impressions made by Ruskin
upon some of the chief writers of the day.

I have also included the recital of certain
facts and correspondence that arose out of our
intercourse, deeming them interesting enough
to be placed on record, not otherwise, perhaps,
preservable.

CONTENTS.

PAGB

Introduction 15

rllS LiIFE 17

Character, Health, and Temperament 40

Author, Bookman, and Stylist 67

1 he Artist 73

1 HE 1 EACHER ... ... ... ... .,. ... ... ... So

The Educationist 92

His View of Things 96

The Letter-Writer 103

1 HE JrOET ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 1 09

Ruskin and George Cruikshank 115

Brantwood 125

"The Angel in the House" 145

Home-Life at Coniston 157

The Portraits of Ruskin 165

"The Black Arts." By John Ruskin 199

A2j IT ± LA/O LTi • * • • • • ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• • • • ••* — - 1

X J^l XjUdfi* ••« ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• • *• ••• *•• ••• 221

ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGB

i# — John Ruskin, i83i. By Prof. Herkomer, R.A. Frontispiece
2. — „ 1822. By. James Northcote, R.A. ... 19

3.— „ 1824. „ „ ... 23

4. — Christchurch College, Oxford; showing Ruskin's

JK.OOMS ... ... ... ... ... ... ••• ... 2^

5. — The Ruskin Drawing School, Oxford 35

6. — John Ruskin, 1842. By George Richmond, R.A. ... 47
7. — „ 1S53. At Glenfinlas Waterfall. By

Sir J. Millais, Bt., R.A , 61

8. — A Page of One of Ruskin's Note-books, for " The

Stones of Venice" 77

9. — Cathedral Spire, Rouen. By John Ruskin 81

10. — John Ruskin, 1S57. By George Richmond, R.A. ... 85
11. — „ 1866. From a Photograph by Elliott

and Fry 97

12. — John Ruskin, 1876. By Georges Pilotelle 111

13. — Brantwood from Coniston Lake. By Arthur Sev-

ER^ . JX. L . ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• ^ /

14. — John Ruskin, 1877. From the Bust by Benjamin

Creswick 131

15. — Ruskin's Study at Brantwood. By Arthur Sev-

ERNj i\ , 1 . ••• ... ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• ••• *jO

iG.-^-Ruskin's Bedroom, Brantwood 141

17. — Mrs. Arthur Severn. By Joseph Severn 149

iS. — John Ruskin, 1S80. From the Bust by Sir Edgar

Boehm, Bt., R.A 153

19. — John Ruskin, 1882. From a Photograph by Bar-

RAO D ••• ••• ••• ••• •*• ••• ••• ••• /

20.— John Ruskin, 1884. From the Bust by Conrad

XJRESSLER ••• »•• ••• ••• ••• •*• ••• •*• ^^3

2 13

14 ILL USTRA TIONS.

FAGB

21. — John Ruskin, 1SS6. From a Photograph by Bar-

KAl 1 ) •*■ •■• •■• ••« ■•• ••• ••• ••• JwS

22. — Facsimile of Letter by John Ruskin 201

23. n >> ••• ••• ••• 205

24— „ „ 209

Note. — The illustrations are here published by special permission or arrange-
ment : that by Sir John Millais, by courteous permission of Sir Henry Acland, the
owner of the copyright; and the page of Ruskin's notebook, and the drawing ol
Rouen Spire, by consent of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Severn.

JOHN RUSKIN.

INTRODUCTION.

'Tis well; 'tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land.

Come then, pure hands, and bear the head
That sleeps, or wears the mask of sleep,
And come, whatever loves to weep,

And hear the ritual of the dead.

Since Tennyson died no greater loss has been
sustained by English literature in the memory
of the present generation than that of John
Ruskin. Of all men who have dominated
the Art-world of Britain during- the nine-
teenth century, Ruskin is beyond all question
and beyond all comparison the greatest, and,
by universal admission, the most individual and
most interesting. What his exact position as
a critic and preacher of Art may be, what his
rank as a scientist or a leader of thought, I
make no pretence here of determining. But

> > j

> j >

> > i

1 6 JOHN RUSK IN.

by common consent, he has been the most dis-
tinguished figure in the arena of Art-philosophy
for half-a-century and more, the philanthropist-
militant par excellence. He is the man who has
admittedly moulded the taste of the public to a
preponderating extent in matters aesthetic, and,
apart from his labours outside the pale of Art
has exerted an influence so powerful that he has
given a direction to the practice of painting and
architecture that may still be traced in some of
the happiest productions of the day. His death
has given reason for mourning to many ; no
one has more eloquently, more passionately,
pleaded the cause of the poor than Ruskin — no
one (except it be perhaps Mr. Gladstone, his
political bete noire) could boast so vast a num-
ber of friends amongst the great mass of the
public. No one was more frequently appealed
to for advice, nor to better or kindlier pur-
pose. None, indeed, has loved his country
better, or more loyally striven to serve her.
And, in the general regret, few will be found
so blind or rancorous as to remember aught
but the conscientious labours of his life, the
nobility of his sturdy efforts, and the sacrifices
that he made for public and for private good.

4 • »
I « «

CHAPTER I.

HIS LIFE.

The outline of his life is briefly this. He
was born in London, at 54, Hunter Street,
Brunswick Square, on February S, 181 9. His
father (his mother's cousin) was a Scotsman,
bringing his "good and extremely strong will,"
as the son tells us, into the firm of wine mer-
chants known as " Ruskin, Telford, and
Domecq " (agents for Peter Domecq, the great
sherry-grower of Xerez), and to such good
purpose that he speedily became a successful
and a wealthy man. John Ruskin, the son,
was an only child, and for several years he
was entirely without companions of his own
age, with hardly an amusement or boyish joy,
save such few as were allowed him by his
austere mother and austerer aunt, and "accus-
tomed to no other prospect than that of the
brick walls over the way." Always an ex-
tremely sensitive and nervous child, he became
studious, thoughtful, and observant, but lively
and impressionable withal ; so that when the
" first event of his life " took place — no less
an occasion than being taken by his eminently

b 2* 17

1 8 JOHN RUSK IN.

disagreeable nurse to the brow of Friar's Craig,
or Denventwater — the intense joy and awe he
felt sank so deeply into his soul that the love
of landscape became henceforth and for always
his prevailing passion. In the conduct of his
business Mr. Ruskin senior was constrained to
drive throughout the length and breadth of
England, travelling with post-chaise and pair ;
and as soon as his son was old enough he
carried him with him during the holidays, and
never missed showing to him all the beautiful
views, the cathedrals, castles, ruins, and picture-
galleries, public and private, near which their
course might lay. It was thus that the boy's
love of scenery and of art was first nurtured
and developed. He had already begun, at
the age of eight, to sing the praises of land-
scape in precocious verse ; and his father — a
highly intellectual and cultivated man, and no
mean artist himself — gladly recognised his
tendency, and encouraged his passion by
placing him for instruction under J. D. Harding
and Copley Fielding. By those eminent but
somewhat conventional water-colour painters —
then reckoned amongst the best teachers of
the day — his remarkable executive skill was
formed, while his ordinary education he re-
ceived first from members of his own family
and then from the testy, but kind-hearted
Canon Dale and other private tutors.

HIS LIFE. 21

It was in 1835, at the age of sixteen, that
Ruskin made his first appearance in the public
press by contributing a series of geological
articles, with illustrations by himself, to the
Magazine of Natural History. Later on,
under the pseudonym of " Kata Phusin '
("According to Nature"), he printed other
papers on Art and Architecture in Loudon's
Architectural Magazine which in 1892 were
republished in sumptuous garb under the title
of "The Poetry of Architecture." He was
but eighteen when he wrote this book. In
later years he excused the anonymity he had
preserved in respect to it by pleading that
the public would hardly have felt inclined
to accept such frank dogmatism from one
so young. When I reminded Mr. Burne-
Jones of this candid excuse, the artist re-
plied with smiling surprise: "When, then,
should one be dogmatic if not at the age of
eighteen ? "

Having entered Christchurch, Oxford, as a
gentleman commoner, he began at once his
friendship with his contemporary Dr. (now Sir
Henry) Acland — half-a-century afterwards the
indirect and unoffending cause, I believe, of his
resignation of the Slade Professorship at the
University. From Dr. Buckland he acquired
that profound geological knowledge which has

22 JOHN RUSK IN.

always been one of the mainstays of Ruskin's
writings on Art or Science, and of inestimable
service to him later, whether as critic, painter,
lecturer, or disputant. It may also be said that
to Mr. W. H. Harrison Ruskin owed much that
was not inborn of the elegance and purity of
his literary style ; just as from the Rev. Osborne
Gordon he acquired the greater part of his
general scholarship. In 1839 he gained the
Newdigate Prize, with his poem " Salsette and
Elephanta," which has since been reprinted ;
and he graduated B.A. in 1S42. It was in that
year that he wrote in support and defence of
Turner, who, now eight-and-sixty years of age,
old and alone, slighted and misunderstood by
the pubb'c, was being savagely written down by
nearly all the critics, who could neither appre-
ciate his beauties nor excuse his faults. In
1843, when twenty-four years old, and three
years after his introduction to Turner, Ruskin
expanded this explosion, penned " in the height
of black anger," into what is known as the first
volume of " Modern Painters ; By a Graduate
of Oxford." This, without doubt, was the
central event of Ruskin's life, eventful and
contentious as it has ever been.

The sensation which the book created in
artistic circles has rarely been equalled before
or since. Its reception was tremendous, and

JOHN RISK IX. 1824.

("THE THORN IN THE FOOT")
FROM AX OIL PAINTING BY JAMES NORTHCOTE, R.A.
{By permission of Arthur Severn, Esq., R.I.

{See p. 172.)

Ti-. sw yo: ;
PUBLIC LIBRARY,

ASTOFi, LENOX AND
T1LDEN FG'JNDAT,

HIS LIFE. 25

the violence and bitterness with which the
unknown author was attacked by the critics
were drowned only by the rapturous storm of
applause that arose from the Art-public at
large, who accepted with enthusiasm the bril-
liance and fire of his writing, and the force
and genius of his powerful reasoning. The
immediate effect of the work was to establish
Turner's reputation, firmly and for ever, as the
greatest landscape-painter the world has ever
seen, and his own as perhaps the greatest of
modern English prose-writers. Four more
volumes completed the work, but the last was
not published until i860 — after nearly twenty
years of laborious preparation, passed in inces-
sant study and travelling, mainly in Switzerland
and Italy, had been devoted to the task. Mr.
Hamerton, in his " Intellectual Life," points
out with truth how, in common with the Hum-
boldts, Ruskin affords a striking example of the
value of wealth to an intellectual career. Had
it not been for his material prosperity, all his
genius, force of resolution and resistance to
every temptation to indolence would not have
sufficed to enable him to carry through the
work of seventeen years' study and expensive
preparation. As Mr. Hamerton says, " Modern
Painters " is not merely a work of genius, but
of genius seconded by wealth.
b 3

26 JOHN RUSK IN.

In the meantime he had been busy with
other writings. In 1847 he contributed his
first review to the Quarterly — his text being
Lord Lindsay's " History of Christian Art."
Two years later — having been brought, during
his preparation of "Modern Painters," to turn
his attention to the Queen of the Arts — he
published his " Seven Lamps of Architecture,"
in which he sets forth the theory how in a
nation's dominant style of architecture may be
seen reflected its life and manners, and even
its passions and its religion. Following on the
lines thus laid down, Ruskin proceeded, in
"The Stones of Venice," issued in 1851 and
1853, to tell the history of the rise and fall of
Venice, as illustrated by her buildings, and to
show how the prosperity and art of a nation
are synchronous and interdependent, and how
the purity of national art and of the national
conscience and morals act and re-act each upon
the other.

It was at this time, while Ruskin was
astonishing the world with his originality and
startling it with his eager sincerity, that the
society then termed and since known as the
"Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" sprang into
being. A brilliant band of youthful enthusiasts
— comprising John Everett Millais, W. Holman
Hunt, W. M. Rossetti, Frederick G. Stephens,

-
z

—

'£

■_

—

■5

Cfl

«g

»»

»*

*—m

—

E>i

„__

ii«

—

■<

I£

H-l

—

•Q

^—

■*!

*--

*•

—

■jl

— —

"~ —

*Z.

—

•yi

'*■■'

—

Efl

—

/■.

X
■Ji

HIS LIFE.

James Collinson, Thomas Woolner, and Dante
Gabriel Rossetti — combined with the avowed
object of founding a school of painting of which
absolute truth to nature in all things, especially
in respect to detail, was to be the fundamental
principle ; a path of material truth from which
Raphael was held to have been the first to stray,
and which, by a sort of tacit consent, had been
untrodden by all others since his day. An
object and mission so worthy were precisely
such as would enlist the sympathies and fire
the generous and chivalrous nature of Ruskin,
encouraged and directed as he was by the
advice of Dyce. He straightway threw himself
heart and soul into the fray, first by his
celebrated letter to the Times, and afterwards
by his " Pre-Raphaelitism," and other writings,
whereby he not only succeeded in securing a
fair hearing and judgment for the harassed and
persecuted exponents of the creed, but in
educating the public into an appreciation of their
works. He came, in fact, to be regarded as
the prophet of the school, and his doughty
championship constitutes one of the stormiest
passages of his disputatious life. His chief, or
most obvious, reward was the ridicule of the
world, or such part of it as he especially ad-
dressed himself to. The general sentiment
aroused was fairly reflected by the well-known

3o JOHN RUSK IN.

amusing cartoon by Mr. Frederick Sandys —
himself, by the way, by no means out of sympathy
with the teaching of the school. In this clever
parody of Sir John Millais's " Sir Isumbras at
the Ford," which was then the sensation of the
Academy, Mr. Sandys humorously represented
Ruskin as the ass of burden of the P.-R.B., on
whose back Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti
were carried across the stream of shallow
waters.

In i860 Ruskin, who had by this time
become a power in the land, threw himself
into a new crusade. Truth, purity of motive,
and honesty of execution, which he had so long
and so fervently preached as essentials, not only
to the highest, but to all sincere art, he now
came to consider in relation to social science,
and he began a series of papers entitled " Unto
this Last," which he contributed to the Cornhill
Magazine. Their tendency and effect may
easily be imagined. They waged war — with all
the bitterness and all the torrentuous eloquence
of a prophet. of old — against the whole world
of commerce and its methods, and assailed
the stronghold of the political economists
with the fiery vigour of which John Ruskin,
in these latter days, has almost alone been
possessed. His principles and views, however,
being based upon quite the highest interpre-

HIS LIFE, 31

tation and application of an ethical morality
such as his master, Carlyle, had preached
before him, were rejected with anger and con-
tempt by the commercial community. So
strongly, indeed, did they resent his Utopian
philosophy that the editor (who at that time
was Thackeray), fearful for the fate of his maga-
zine, which was threatened with serious injury
by the publication of the obnoxious articles, put
a summary stoppage to their further issue. It
was, however, one of the crowning and closing
glories of Ruskin's life — at once his delight and
consolation — that in more recent times thinkers
have come to accept many of his theories and
contentions once spurned or rejected, and the
public to receive them as truths.

In 1865 and 1866 appeared "Sesame and
Lilies " and " Crown of Wild Olive," the most
popular of Ruskin's books in England and
America alike (if sales may be taken as a
criterion) and, perhaps, his masterpieces of
prose-writing. In 1867 he was elected Rede
Lecturer at Cambridge, with the honorary
degree of LL.D. ; but so far back as 1853 he
had made his debut as a lecturer, when he
addressed the Edinburgh students on " Gothic
Architecture." Moreover he, with Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and F. D. Maurice, had taken
vast interest of the teaching sort in the

32 JOHN RUSK IN.

Working Men's College in 1865. In 1870
he was appointed Professor of Fine Art at
Oxford, to the chair founded in the previous
year by Mr. Felix Slade. He was at Verona
when he received the invitation, and, as he
himself has written, "I foolishly accepted it.
My simple duty at that time was to have stayed
with my widowed mother at Denmark Hill"
[his father had died in 1864], " doing whatever
my hand found to do there. Mixed vanity,
hope of wider usefulness, and partly her plea-
sure in my being at Oxford again, took me
away from her and from myself." Mrs. Ruskin
dearly loved Oxford, where her son had
spent those three happy years at college. The
professorship he continued to hold until 1879,
delivering lectures on every phase of Art —
lectures which have since been published — and
only resigned his post when he discovered that
the enthusiasm and constant attendance of the
students were due rather to personal attach-
ment and appreciation of his original and force-
ful way of putting things, than to real interest
in the subjects upon which he discoursed.

Ruskin's famous periodical, " Fors Clavi-
gera " (" Fortune, the Club-bearer "), was begun
in 1 87 1, and for eight years was devoted to
the expositions of its author's views upon every-
thing in general, written with a nervous energy

HIS LIFE.

and an easy familiarity eminently Ruskinian,
strikingly fresh in style and catholic in scope.
It was in its pages that he announced his inten-
tion of founding the "St. George's Guild," first
established in that year — a practical attempt to
start and carry on a land-owning society con-
ducted on the principles which he would have
all landowners to adopt. On this institution he
at once settled ^7,000, and a London freehold
of the value of ,£3,500 more, and of all this
Miss Octavia Hill was appointed manageress.

In this same " Fors," on July 2, 1877,
appeared the author's famous criticism of Mr.
Whistler and his pictures, then being exhibited
at the Grosvenor Gallery. The trial has even
now become a classic ; and how Mr. Whistler
delivered his smart evidence in the witness-
box, and how Ruskin — who was at the
time confined to Brantwood with his first attack
of serious illness — was unable to defend himself
with his own testimony, and was made to pay
his prosecutor one farthing for the rare privi-
lege of saying what he thought of him — are to
this day subjects of merry conversation where
artists and lawyers meet. As a matter of fact,
the verdict, which left each litigant to pay his
own costs, made no call whatever on the purse
of Mr. Ruskin. The amount of his costs
reached, I believe, to ^350, or thereabouts; but a

34 JOHN RUSK IN.

group of devoted admirers at once subscribed the
amount, even to the last farthing — Mr. Whist-
ler's farthing — and the sum was paid forthwith.
But Mr. Ruskin never knew to the last to what
the amount of the cost attained, nor the names
of any of his enthusiastic friends, save that
of Mrs. Talbot, of Barmouth. To the end
he was not satisfied with his nominal defeat.
"I am blamed by my prudent acquaintances
for being too personal," said he; "but
truly I find vaguely objurgatory language
generally a mere form of what Plato calls
' shadow-fight.' " Similarly, when in conver-
sation with him on one occasion I touched
upon the subject, he quietly avoided it, saying,
"I am afraid of a libel-action if I open my
mouth, and if I can't say what I like about a
person, I prefer to say nothing at all."

By this time Mr. Ruskin's disciples and
admirers, who, acknowledged " Ruskinites,"
were now to be counted by thousands, rightly
perceived that if their Master's doctrines, social
and artistic, were to bear good fruit, it would
be necessary that some sort of organisation
should be formed for the dissemination of his
writings, the indexing of his works, and the
carrying of his theories into practical effect.
The result was the beginning of the foundation
of the " Ruskin Societies of the Rose," in

^ L

HIS LIFE.

1879, in London, Manchester, Sheffield, Glas-
gow, Aberdeen, Birmingham, and other centres
— bodies now collectively known as "The Ruskin
Society," which have sought and obtained
vitality by dealing generally with poetry and
art, education, morals, ethics, and all such
other subjects as the Ruskinian philosophy has
pronounced upon, apart from the narrower or
more defined teachings of Mr. Ruskin himself.
These affiliated societies are all of them in
active existence.

After presenting many valuable gifts, artistic
and mineralogical, to various institutions, en-
dowing the Taylorian Galleries at Oxford with
a school, furnishing it with exquisite works
of art as copies, and making rich presents
besides to the University, as well as to
Cambridge and to the British Museum
(whose collection of Silicas he catalogued) and
rendering many other public services of a
kindred nature, Mr. Ruskin crowned his work
in this direction by the establishment and stock-
ing of the St. George's Museum at Walkley,
near Sheffield. He chose this spot because it
was situated on the summit of a steep and
toilsome hill, which, he hoped, the workers of
Sheffield might understand to typify the ascent
of the artistic path that none but earnest
workers need care to face. But the hill proved

38 JOHN RUSK IN.

to be too generally and too successfully de-
terrent; and the removal of the reorganised
museum to the fine old Georgian mansion of
Meersbrook Park took place in 1890, when it
was opened by the Earl of Carlisle. This
beautiful museum, placed by deed under the joint
control and management of the Trustees of the
St. George's Guild and of the Corporation,
contains a large collection of works of fine
art, rare and exquisite books, Venetian casts,
missals, splendid examples from his collection
of mineralogy and natural history — all selected
with thorough knowledge and purposeful care
by "The Master " himself. And Ruskin House,
Walkley, was in 1893 turned into a Girls'
Training Home, with the hearty approval and
cordial wishes of Ruskin.

But by this time his course was nearly
run. He resigned the Slade Professorship, to
which he had been re-elected in 1876, when a
passing but distressing attack of brain-dis-
turbance warned him that he was straining too
far his powers of endurance by the multiplicity
and arduousness of his labours. In 1884, when
he was engaged in delivering another series of
lectures at Oxford, he found it necessary to
cease their public delivery, and to confine them
to students — for the rush of the outside world
to listen to the lecturer, no less than the wide

HIS LIFE.

range of subject and method of dealing with
it adopted by him — acted upon the University
authorities as an electric shock. The final split
soon came ; the Professor, it was thought, was
about to assail in his next lecture what he
considered to be the vivisectionist tendencies
of the University. Pressure was brought to
bear upon him to ''postpone" the lecture,
which, in fact, he did. Ruskin then asked
the University for a grant to permit of the
better arrangement of the Art Section under
his care. It was declined, on the ground of
the University being in debt, but a few days
later a vote was passed " endowing vivisection
in the University/' and on the following Sunday
Mr. Ruskin's resignation was in the Vice-
Chancellor's hands.

The facts connected with the matter, it
may be said, appear to have been strangely
burked. Since that time Mr. Ruskin retired
from personal contact with the public, although
for a time his pen was still busy, and the press
gave forth more than one volume of his earlier,
as well as of his later, writings. But his first
attack of illness was succeeded by others, under
which he gradually, but yet more peacefully,
sank, until there came the end which robbed
England of one of her greatest men, and, so to
speak, cast the better part of her into mourning.

CHAPTER II.

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT.

It is impossible to form any accurate esti-
mate of the literary work of Ruskin, or of the
worth of the man himself and his acts, without
taking his character and temper, as influenced
by his health, largely into account. This, of
course, is in a measure true of all men. But
with one possessed of an organisation so com-
plex and delicate as that of Ruskin, such
knowledge and careful judgment are absolutely
necessary, for they afford the clue to many
apparent inconsistencies.

The conditions of his rearing all tended to
foster self-conceit in the lad ; and the wonder is
that, being as clever as he was, and finding him-
self the object of constant applause from admir-
ing friends, of the worship of parents, and the
approval of some of the first intellects of the
day — the wonder is, in truth, that he was so
little of a prig. But his severe Bible teaching,
the oft-repeated assurance that he was to become
a preacher, and an eminent one, too, predisposed

him, perhaps, towards the early idea of being
40

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 41

appointed to be unto the public as a missionary,
and later, as an oracle and a seer. But many
of his most admirable qualities barred the way
to his complete success in these characters, and
made him feel, to his intense and abiding dis-
appointment in his later years, that he was a
very Cassandra among the prophets. " All my
life," he declared in my hearing some years ago,
" all my life I have been talking to the people,
and they have listened, not to what I say, but to
how I say it; they have cared not for the matter,
but only for the manner of my words. And so I
have made people go wrong in a hundred ways,
and they have done nothing at all. I am not,"
he added bitterly, " an art-teacher ; they have
picked up a few things from me, but I find I
have been talking too much and doing too
little, and so have been unable to form a school ;
and people have not been able to carry out
what I say, because they do not understand
it.

If we had to define the main characteristics
of Ruskin's mind, " and the keys to the secret
of all he said or did," I think we could hardly
do better than repeat the analysis he made of
Turner's ; " Uprightness, generosity, extreme
tenderness of heart, sensuality, excessive ob-
stinacy, irritability, infidelity ; ' and, we should
have to add, " impulsiveness, violent prejudice,

42 JOHN RUSK IN.

kindliest sympathy, and profound piety." But
impulsiveness, and its offspring — prejudice —
were at the root of too many of his acts and his
hastier judgments. He was supposed to hate
Jews on principle, not from religious motives,
but simply because some of the lowest and most
contemptible of them practised the usury that
persecution had forced upon them ; he despised
all bishops, because some of them died rich.
No one really deserves hanging, he says some-
where, save bankers and bishops. Perhaps this
was written at the time of his famous duel with
the late Bishop of Manchester on the subject of
usury, when his indignation was aroused by
what he imagined was the lukewarmness of his
antagonist. Yet in no man's company did he
more rejoice than in that of Dr. Harvey Good-
win, Bishop of Carlisle, whom he entertained
at Brantwood more than once, and whom he
loved and esteemed as he loved few others.
But all his prejudice is to be traced to exces-
sive generosity — a fact which, with all his
love of paradox, he never would recognise
himself.

It is not a little surprising, seeing how
delicate and troubled he was in general health,
and how numerous and actively bitter were his
adversaries, that the engaging sweetness of his
character was so often uppermost. His natural

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 43

gentleness was proof against the trying circum-
stances of his early education. At Oxford, as
he himself tells us, " I could take any quantity
of jests, though I could not make one," even
to the point of seeing with good-humour the
fruit he had sent for from London thrown
out of the window to the porter's children. No
man ever smiled more agreeably in his greet-
ing ; no man's eyes ever looked more kindly
into yours. Having nothing to conceal, he was
frank, even to a fault, making no attempt
to hide his little amiable weaknesses and venial
defects.

" I like Wilson Barrett," he said one day,
when discussing the drama ; " he flatters me so
deliciously and in such tactful taste " — an ad-
mission, by the way, confirmed long before in
a letter of instructions to his private secretary,
written from abroad : — " Send me as little as
you possibly can. Tie up the knocker — say
I'm sick — I'm dead (flattering and love-letters,
please, in any attainable quantity. Nothing
else)." Love-letters! how many did he not
write and delight in receiving — platonic for the
most part, perhaps for the whole, but the
brightest, quaintest, most humorous, merriest
love-letters imaginable ! For the respect, the
veneration, and admiration he entertained for
the beau sexe as a whole — as an institution, as

44 JOHN RUSK IN.

Artemus Ward calls it — were intensified, were
all focussed, indeed, on young, pretty, and in-
nocent femininity. Humour bubbles over the
pages of many of his books and letters, but it
is never quite so sly and quite so happy as
when charming, modest, and lively girls are the
subject or the object of them ; and I have heard
a score of anecdotes of the pretty thraldom
under which he has suffered beneath their yoke,
and the not unwelcome tricks that have oft
been played upon him. I have said that his
amorous sport was entirely platonic ; it was
more than that, it was essentially paternal :
and usually ended in his presenting to his
charmer, or tormentor, some dainty gift, with
a playful grace that was altogether peculiar to
himself.

Herein I am breaking no confidences, for
has he not told us all about it a score of
pleasant times? "My pets" — his adopted
daughter, Mrs. Arthur Severn (his veritable
" Angel in the house") and Miss Hilliard, now
Mrs. W. H. Churchill — are familiar, through
his books, to all good Ruskinites. He speaks
of them often enough in " Fors," and of others
too : " First, those two lovely ladies who were
studying the Myosotis palustris with me ; yes,
and, by the way, a little beauty from Cheshire,
who came in afterwards ; and then that charm-

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 45

ing (I didn't say she was charming, but she
was and is) lady whom I had charge of at
Furness Abbey, and her two daughters, and
those three beautiful girls who tormented me
so on the 23rd of May, 1875, and another who
greatly disturbed my mind at church only a
Sunday or two ago with the sweetest little
white straw bonnet I have ever seen, only
letting a lock or two escape of the curliest
hair ; so that I was fain to make her a present
of a Prayer-book afterwards, advising her that
her tiny ivory one was too coquettish ; and my
own pet cousin ; and I might name more, but
leave their accusation to their consciences."
On another occasion, speaking of his garden
and house at Denmark Hill, he says: "The
camelias and azaleas stand in the ante-room of
my library ; and everybody says, when they
come in, ■ How pretty ! ' and my young lady
friends have leave to gather what they like to
put in their hair when they are going to balls."
He himself once admitted that when he fell
in love in a "mildly confidential way" —
"according to my usual manner of paying
court to my mistresses, I wrote an essay for
her, nine foolscap pages long, on the rela-
tive dignity of music and painting ! ' Many
will remember with how much enthusiasm
Charles Dickens, thirty or forty years ago,

46 JOHN RUSK IN.

endorsed in All the Year Round what
Ruskin had to say of " the beauties of the
maids of merry England," and the artistic
orace of their then fashionable attire. Even
when combating an obnoxious theory, he
would sometimes revert to pretty womanhood
for an illustration, as when, in animadverting
on the Darwinian doctrine of the Descent of
Man as mischievous (in looking rather to the
growth of the flesh than to the breath of the
spirit), he says: " The loss of mere happiness
in such modes of thought is incalculable.
When I see a girl dance, I thank Heaven
that made her cheerful as well as graceful,
and envy neither the science nor sentiment
of my Darwinian friend, who sees in her only
a cross between a dodo and a daddy-long-
legs." And again, when contesting the idea
that a knowledge of anatomy is essential for
painters, he writes to Monsieur Chesneau :
"Will you please ask the next lover you
meet how far he thinks the beauty of his
mistress's fore-arm depends on the double
bones in it, and of her humerus on the single
one?' Nay, one would swear that his "little
Susie" — one of the sister ladies of Thwaite.
to whom he wrote the delightful letters which
have since been published under the title of
" Hortus Inclusus " — must have been at once

JOHN RUSKIN, 1S42.

FROM THE WATER COLOUR BY GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A.
{By permission of Arthur Severn, Esq., R.I.)

(See p. 174.)

THE K J

PUBLIC LI.

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILBEN FOUNDATIONS.

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 49

pretty and graceful, were one to judge alone by
the tone adopted in the letters he wrote her.
But, as a matter of fact, Miss Susannah Beever
— his neighbour in Coniston village, living in
a house on an eminence looking over the lake-
head — was a few years his senior, and was
seventy years of age at least when Ruskin
first knew her. To the end of her long life
this clever lady was surprisingly young, and so
bright and cheerful and sweet and charming,
that she fully deserved the daily letters that
the Master of Brantwood sent her. She had,
indeed, discovered for herself the art of growing
old beautifully, and she reaped the reward by
completely enslaving the intellectual affections
of her ageing friend.

But his love for pretty girls in no way
lessened his love for children — a passion
which inspired some of the most pathetic
and beautiful passages that have issued from
his pen. This tendency, together with his
cordial and courteous old-fashioned hospitality
and his overflowing charity, combined to form
the bright side of his character — a side so
bright that on the other there is none of his

shortcomings but is thrown into shadow and

belittled in its brilliancy. He has chosen to

refer to his nature as " a worker's and a

misers . . . though I love giving, yet my
c d 5

5o JOHN RUSK IN.

notion is not at all dividing my last crust with
a beggar, but riding through a town like a
Commander of the Faithful, having any quantity
of sequins and ducats in saddle-bags, and throw-
ing them around in radiant showers and hailing
handfuls ; with more bags to brace on when
those were empty." But herein he did himself,
as he often did, gross injustice, for I have
ample documentary evidence in my possession
that he delighted in nothing more — and almost
daily gave rein to his delight — than giving,
secretly, tactfully, and with kindliest judg-
ment.

It is not too much to say that the record
of his benefactions and almsgiving would fill a
volume. How when his father died he gave
forthwith to those relations who, he thought, had
been forgotten in the will, the sum of ^17.000,
and to a cousin advanced another ,£15,000, a
debt he promptly wiped off — " which hereby
my cousin will please observe is very heartily
done ; and he is to be my cousin as he used
to be, without any more thought of it" —
has ere now been made public. But his
thousand -and -one kindnesses — now acts of
grace and delicacy, now of substantial help
and rescue — have never reached the ken of
the public save by the confession of the
recipients. A few extracts from his letters to

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 51

his secretary during the year 1866 may give
some idea of the extent and number of his
kindly deeds, and of his solicitude and warmth
of heart, though they give little clue to the times
out of number on which the gentle Samaritan
was victimised — the usual fate of the philan-
thropist who prides himself, beyond any other
quality, on his worldly shrewdness and his
knowledge of life and character.

On February 22nd he writes with some
show of mystery —

" Here's something, please, I want done very much.
Will you please go to the Crystal Palace to-morrow or
the day after, which is the last day, but to-morrow better,
and, if it is not sold, buy the lizard canary (£1) No. 282,
page 17 of catalogue, in any name you like — not mine, nor
yours — and give the bird to anybody who you think will
take care of it, and I'll give you the price when I see you
— which must be soon."

To this canary, which was duly bought,
there evidently hung a tale, for it formed the
subject of many subsequent references and
anxious directions.

On the 5th of March he wrote —

"Did Ned speak to you about an Irish boy whom I
want to get boarded and lodged, and put to some art
schooling — and I don't know how? "

Three days afterwards he proceeded—

1 Thanks for note about the boy, and infinite thanks
for kindest offer. But I've no notion of doing as much

52 JOHN RUSK IN.

as this for him. All I want is a decent lodging — he is
now a shop-boy. I only want a bit of a garret in a
decent house, and means of getting him into some school
of art. I fancy Kensington best — and you should look
after him morally and I artistically."

On the 27th the boy from Ireland was duly
settled on Ruskin's charity, and on the same
date began the arrangement which ended in
a gift of a hundred pounds to George Cruik-
shank. Then ensued a prolonged visit to the
Continent, on the conclusion of which there
came a new request for almoner's duty : — ■

"The enclosed is from a funny, rather nice, half-
crazy old French lady (guessing at her from her letters),
and I have a curiosity to know what kind of a being it is.
Would you kindly call on her to ask for further information
about the 'predicament,' and, if you think it at all curable
or transit-able, I'll advance her 20 pounds without interest.
I've only told her you will call to ' inquire into the
circumstances of the case.' "

Although he complained that he " can't
understand the dear old lady's letters," Ruskin
decided — of course — to come to her help,
charged his secretary to "look after" her a
little, and added, "I shouldn't mind placing
the over-charge sum at her bankers, besides."

"Also look over the enclosed form from . I'm

very sorry about this man — anything more wretched than
the whole business can't be. He'll never paint, and how
to keep him from starvation and madness I can't see. I

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 53

can't keep every unhappy creature who mistakes his voca-
tion. What can I do? I've rather a mind to send him
this fifty pounds, which would be the simplest way to me
of getting quit of him — but I can't get quit of the
thought of him. Is his wife nice, do you know — or if you
don't, would you kindly go and see ? I've written to him
to write to you, or to explain things to you, if you call.

wrote to me in a worry for money the day before

yesterday. I wrote I couldn't help him. All the earlier
part of this week an old friend of my father's — a staff-writer
on the Times — was bothering and sending his wife out here
in cabs in the rain, to lend him £800, on no security to
speak of, and yesterday comes a letter from Edinburgh
saying that my old friend Dr. John Brown is gone mad —
owing to, among other matters, pecuniary affairs (after a
whole life of goodness and usefulness)."

Three days afterwards he put his foot down
— temporarily.

"Tell it's absolutely no use his trying to see me

(I don't even see my best friends at present, as you know),
and nothing is of the least influence with me but plain
facts, plainly told, and right conduct "

— a declaration that would have called a smile
to the lips of many of the impostors who
squeezed, before and since, the soft heart of the
too sympathetic and charitable professor.
On the 14th of September Ruskin wrote —

"That boy's sketches are marvellous. I should like to
see him and be of any use I could to him,"

and immediately followed it by another scheme
of charity.

54 JOHN RUSK IN.

" Please just look over enclosed," he wrote, " and see if
any little good can or ought to be done. I want you to go to
Boulogne for me to see after the widow of a pilot who died
at Folkestone of cholera. They were dear friends of mine,
both as good as gold — she now quite desolate. When could
you go, taking your cousin with you, if you like, for a few
days ? You would be well treated at the Hotel des Bains.
I'll come over to-morrow and tell you about it.

" I don't think it will be necessary," he continued, a day
or two later, " for you to stay at Boulogne longer than the
enclosed will carry you. It is more as a bearer of the
expression of my sympathy that I ask you to go than to
do much. The poor woman ought to be able to manage
well enough with her one child, if she lives, and I doubt
not she will do all she ought — but at present she is stunned,
and it will do her good to have you to speak to."

A few days afterwards another matter was
forced on his attention.

"This business is serious" [the next letter ran].

" Write to Miss that I do not choose at present to

take any notice of it, else the creditor would endeavour
to implicate me in it at once, if there was the least ap-
pearance of my having been acquainted with the transac-
tion— and I don't at all intend to lose money by force,
whatever I may do for my poor friend when she is quit of
lawyers."

Once more Ruskin lost patience at the
unreasonable demands to which he was sub-
jected, and on the 9th of November he wrote —

"All that you have done is nice and right — but I am
sorry to see that you are yourself over-worked. Also, I

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 55

will take some measures to relieve you of this nuisance by
writing a letter somewhere on modern destitution in the
middle classes. I hope to be able to do this more effec-
tively towards the beginning of the year, and to state that
for the present I must retire from the position necessarily
now occupied by a publicly recognised benevolent — or
simple — person. . . I simply have at present no more
money — and therefore am unable to help — in fact, I am a
long way within of my proper banker's balance — and I
don't choose at present to sell out stock and diminish my
future power of usefulness.

"I think I shall do most ultimate good by distinctly
serviceable appropriation of funds, not by saving here and
there an unhappy soul — I wish I could — when I hear of
them — as you well know. I am at the end of my means
just now, and that's all about it."

Wherewith he at once made a further gift of a
hundred pounds, "as I said I would." Such is
the record of a few months of a single year taken
at random ; and it may fairly be assumed that
one year much resembled another in the cycle
of the Ruskinian doctrine of Faith, Hope, and,
above all, Charity.

In his taste for amusement Mr. Ruskin
was always simple. Almost to the last he
retained his love for the theatre, and was an
admirable critic of a play. " Now that I am
getting old," he told me, "and can climb the
hills no longer, my chief pleasure is to go to
the theatre. Just as I can always enjoy
Prout, even when I sometimes tire of Turner,

56 JOHN RUSK IN.

so one of the only pleasures in my life en-
tirely undiminished is to see a good actor
and a good play. I was immensely pleased
with Claudian and Mr. Wilson Barrett's act-
ing of it." [It was during the run of that
play that this conversation took place.] " In-
deed, I admired it so much that I went to
see it three times from pure enjoyment of it,
although as a rule I cannot sit out a tragic
play. It is not only that it is the most
beautifully mounted piece I ever saw, but it
is that every feeling that is expressed in the
play, and every law of morality that is taught
in it, is entirely right. I call that charming
little play of School entirely immoral, be-
cause the teaching of it is that a man should
swagger about in knickerbockers, shoot a bull,
and marry an heiress. Now, as for the litera-
ture of modern plays, I think that in comedies
the language is often very precious and
piquant — more so in French than in English
pieces ; but I know of no tragedy, French
or English, whose language satisfies me."
And he added that he was a critical admirer,
too, with reservations, of Miss Mary Anderson
— " a sweet lady and an excellent person — but
not, I think, a great actress."

In fine weather, when he did not roam
about the moors and hills that overlook

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 57

Coniston Lake, he loved to cut brushwood
that grew in the wood behind his house ;
and in bad, when not reading, or drawing-,
or examining his fossils or other treasures,
he would revel in a earne 0f chess. He was
an excellent player, and at one time talked
of "publishing a selection of favourite old
games by players of genius and imagination,
as opposed to the stupidity called chess-
playing in modern days. Pleasant play, truly !
in which the opponents sit calculating and
analysing for twelve hours, tire each other
nearly into apoplexy or idiocy, and end in a
draw or a victory by an odd pawn."

The darker side of his nature almost balanced,
in intensity, the brighter. There is a weird,
almost Dantesque, vein running through it.
His love of life and beauty gave rise to a
perfectly morbid horror of what was ugly or
sad — illness and death were ideas utterly re-
pugnant in the terror they bore in upon him.
In a private letter he speaks of " Death and
the North Wind — both Devil's inventions as far
as I can make out." Indeed, during one of his
last visits to London, I heard him say how his
attacks of illness were brought on, or, at least,
• in a measure, induced, by the knowledge of
the gradual approach of death — not so much
the fear of death, he hastened to add, as the

58 JOHN RUSK IN.

regret at the deprivation of life, which he was
convinced he enjoyed with infinitely greater
intensity than others did.

The very idea of a funeral was abhorrent to
him. He even declined to attend that of the
Duke of Albany, of whom he was very fond ;
for the young Prince often sought his company
at Oxford, and the old man and the young
learned to appreciate the virtues of the other.
11 1 had the deepest regard and respect," he
said about the time of the Duke's death, "for
what I would call his genius, rather than his
intellect. He was entirely graceful and kind
in every thought or deed. There was no
mystery about him — he was perfectly frank
and easy with everyone. At Oxford I thought
he desired to take all the advantage that was
possible from the university course. But I did
not attend the funeral. It is ten years or more
since I went to one," he continued gravely ;
"and though there are several whom I love
very dearly, I doubt very much if I should see
them to the grave were they to die before me.
No — I shall go to no more funerals till I go
to my own." In this relation there may be
appropriately quoted the reply he sent to the
Secretary of the Church of England Funeral
Reform Association — a society of all others of
whose attentions and requests for recommenda

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT 59

tion and approval he would most cheerfully
have dispensed : —

"Sir, — I entirely approve of the object of the Funeral
Reform Association ; but if I could stop people from
wasting their money while they were alive, they might
bury themselves how they liked for aught I care.

" Faithfully yours,

" John Ruskin."

The growing knowledge of a constitutional
brain-weakness caused him acute suffering, and
he made no attempt to conceal the fact ; on the
contrary, it was a frank topic of conversation
with him. There is something profoundly
pathetic in a reference of his to his keen enjoy-
ment, in his childhood, in reading Don Quixote's
crazy life, but of the superlative sadness with
which the reference or thought of it filled him
in later years. " My illnesses, so-called," he
says somewhere else, " are only brought on
by vexation or worry, and leave me, after a
few weeks of wandering thoughts, the same
as I was before, only a little sadder and wiser.
Probably, if I am spared till I am seventy, I
shall be as sad and wise as I ever wish to be,
and will try to keep so to the end."

At the age of twenty-one he spat blood, as
a result of putting on a spurt in his study at
Oxford, and obtained a year's leave of absence
to recover. Ever since that time his letters

60 JOHN RUSK IN.

are proof of constant ailing and sometimes of
suffering,

True illness, severe enough to confine him
to his bed, he never had, from his alarming
Oxford symptoms down to 1871, when an
inflammatory illness laid him low at Matlock.
Of the manner in which he characteristically
took his treatment in great measure into his
own hands he writes thus, under date 24th
July, 1871 :—

"Really your simplicity about naughty me is the most
comic thing I know, among all my old friends. Me
docile to Doctors ! I watched them — (I had three) — to
see what they knew of the matter : did what they advised
me, for two days ; found they were utterly ignorant of
the illness & were killing me. I had inflammation of
the bowels, and they gave me ice ! & tried to nourish
me with milk ! Another 12 hours & I should have been
past hope. I stopped in the middle of a draught of iced
water, burning with insatiable thirst — thought over the
illness myself steadily — and ordered the doctors out of
the house. Everybody was in agony, but I swore and
raged till they had to give in ; ordered hot toast and
water in quantities, and mustard poultices to the bowels.
One doctor had ordered fomentation ; that I persevered
in, adding mustard to give outside pain. I used brandy
and water as hot as I could drink it, for stimulant, kept
myself up with it, washed myself out with floods of toast
and water, & ate nothing & refused all medicines. In
twenty-four hours I had brought the pain under, in
twenty-four more I had healthy appetite for meat, and
was safe ; but the agony of poor Joanna ! forced to give

JOHN RUSKIN AT GLENFINLAS WATERFALL, 1S53.

BY STR JOHN MIIXAIS, BART., R.A.
{By special permission of Sir Henry Acland, owner of the picture and copyr:

{See p. :~

THE NEW YC - -
'-RY

-- X AND

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 63

me meat, for I ordered roast chicken instantly, when the
doctors, unable to get at me, were imploring her to
prevail on me not to kill myself, as they said I should.
The poor thing stood it nobly — of course — none of them
could move me, on which I forced them to give me cold
roast beef & mustard at two o'clock in the morning ! !
And here I am, thank God, to all intents and purposes
quite well again ; but I was within an ace of the grave,
and I know now something of Doctors that — well — I
thought Moliere bad enough on them, but he's compli-
mentary to what / shall be after this."

But with the exception of this grave, tragi-
comical attack he never needed the calling in of
a doctor for any physical ill. Yet at no time
was he robust, a spine-weakness developed into
a chronic stoop, and the aches and pains of a
highly nervous, hard-worked constitution were
for ever reminding him of the weakness of all
flesh. A number of his letters are before me,
written to his secretary and assistant — with
whom, as I have already said, he was in ex-
tremely frequent communication — during the
years 1865 and 1866; and in many of them
may be seen the record of his ailing moments
and minor infirmities.

"You must think it very strange in me," he writes
under date 3rd November, 1865, "never asking you to
come and see me. But I am very languid and ill just
now — and I seem of all things to dread talking; it
seems to force me to use my head faster than it should

64 JOHN RUSK IN.

be used — I suppose I shall come out of the nervous
fit some day. I am pretty well on the whole."

In the summer of the next year (3rd August,
1866) he writes : —

"I've been very sulky and ill, and somehow have
wanted what humanity I could get, even out of letters,
so I've kept them."

Again, on the 3rd of November of the same
year, he says : —

"You can't at all think what complicated and acute
worry I've been living in the last two months. I'm
getting a little less complex now — only steady headache
instead of thorn-fillet — I don't mean to be irreverent;
but in a small way in one's poor little wretched humanity
it but expresses the differences. That's why I couldn't
think about Cruikshank or anything."

On the 2nd of December he again com-
plains : —

"I have perpetual faceache, which quinine hardly
touches, and am pulled down rather far ; but in other
respects a little better — stomach and the like."

And so things went on — never very bad,
but often bad enough to worry the neurotic
subject with his little valetudinary troubles,
while all the while his self-imposed tasks in-
creased in daily volume. At one time, indeed,
the correspondence of friends and applicants
of all kinds, and particularly of sympathisers —
those most troublesome of well-wishers — en-

CHARACTER, HEALTH, AND TEMPERAMENT. 65

croached so severely upon his time and patience,
rendering the conditions of his life almost intol-
erable, that the issue of this quaint manifesto
was decided upon : —

"Mr. Ruskin trusts that his friends will pardon his
declining correspondence in the spring, and spending
such days as may be spared to him in the fields, instead
of at his desk. Had he been well he would have been
in Switzerland, and begs his correspondents to imagine
that he is so ; for there is no reason, because he is
obliged to stop in England, that he should not be
allowed to rest there."

Little wonder, then, that his health told upon
his temper, and that nervous irritability tended
to modify his character, and, to some extent,
tended to embitter an old age that was already
full of disappointments and disillusionments.
After a lifetime of preaching to an unheeding
world, or battling with a hostile or scornful one,
finding his system of philosophy and theories
rejected, or, if accepted, accepted only as the
teaching of other and younger men, it is but
natural that he should be prompted to say,
after half-a-century of toil, "Some of me is
dead, more of me stronger. I have learned a
few things, forgotten many. In the total of
me, I am but the same youth, disappointed and
rheumatic.'' But, not beaten even to the last;
badgered and baited all through his life ; at-

e 6*

66 JOHN RUSK IN.

tacked by some, scoffed at by others — as all
fighters of original genius must ever be — he
complained not of counter-attack. It was the
supineness of those who listened and applauded,
but continued in what he held was the down-
ward road, which caused him to confess the
state of " quiet rage and wonder at everything
people say and do in which I habitually live."

CHAPTER III.

AUTHOR, BOOKMAN, AND STYLIST.

It is presumed that most of those who read
these pages are too well informed on Ruskin's
work to need any recapitulation of the order,
or the titles, or even the purpose of his books.
But it may be set down that they comprise
art-criticism, art-instruction, architecture, natural
history, political economy, morals and ethics,
mineralogy and geology, biography and auto-
biography, fairy - tale, military tactics, the
"higher journalism" and most other things
besides. But time will, perhaps, decide that
by " Modern Painters " he will both stand and
fall — a paradox which himself, I fancy, would
be the first to admit. It is the monument
he has raised to himself: but other works
rank above them in the late author's opinion,
if not for literary style, at least for concision
of manner and closeness of thought. He told
me he had "never written closer' than in
his University Lectures, known as " Aratra
Pentelici " (" and they will recognise it one

of these days"), while he has publicly declared

68 JOHN RUSK IN.

that in that book, in " Val d'Arno," and
11 Eagle's Nest," " every word is weighed with
care." " I give far more care to my lectures
than to my books," he said ; " They are for the
most part most carefully written, although I
sometimes introduce matter extemporaneously
in the delivery of them. I have taken more
pains with my Oxford lectures than with any-
thing else I have ever done, and I must say
that I am immensely disappointed at their not
being more constantly quoted and read." And
thus saying, he took down a volume of the
"Aratra" and read the concluding pages of
one of the lectures in his own powerful and
impressive manner. Then he closed the book,
softly, with a sigh.

Ruskin was, indeed, a rigorous critic of
his own work, and cut to pieces " Modern
Painters," ''Seven Lamps of Architecture,"
"Stones of Venice," and "Elements of Draw-
ing," when preparing second editions, "be-
cause in the three first all the religious
notions are narrow, and many false, and in
the fourth there is a vital mistake about out-
line, doing great damage to all the rest."
But if it is one of the disturbing faults of
Ruskin's books that he often owns to his
later change of thought, it is one of his
merits that he is ready to confess it, clearly

AUTHOR, BOOKMAN, AND STYLIST. 69

and unmistakably. These changes of thought
he once intended to tabulate, while quaintly
apologising for them. " Mostly matters of
any consequence are three-sided, or four-
sided, or polygonal ; and the trotting round
a polygon is severe work for people in any
way stiff in their opinions." At the same
time he declared that his changes were those
of a tree, by nourishment and natural growth
— not those of a cloud. And what is his
reflection on his own auctorial life ? "I am
quite horrified to see," he wrote to " Susie'
— or was it " Rosie " ? — " what a lot of books
I've written, and how cruel I've been to my-
self and everybody else whoever has to read
them."

It was in his quality of author that Ruskin
ran a-tilt at the book-selling trade, and suffered
not a little in pocket from their retaliation.
He objected to the whole system of " discount '
as it had already then degenerated. The
trade, not unnaturally, perhaps, retorted with
a very effectual boycott, and Mr. Ruskin had
to distribute his books to the public direct k
from his own special and private publisher — .
Mr. George Allen, who before had been his ;
engraver. More lately a compromise was
effected with the shops ; but, curiously enough,
the trade boycott seems to have been taken

7o JOHN RUSK IN.

up by the Press, which for a long series of
years maintained rigorous silence in respect
to Mr. Ruskin's newly - published works.
Writing in 1887, Mr. E. T. Cook remarked:
11 So, too, the professedly literary journals have
not noticed anything that one of the foremost
literary men of the time has written since
1872!" Meanwhile, his works were being
pirated in America and his own editions under-
sold— a circumstance which increased his dis-
like to the vulgarer side of American life, and
of that unhappy country "which contains neither
castle nor ruins."

There is assuredly no need to await the ver-
dict of posterity to establish Ruskin's position
as a writer of English prose. No man pos-
sessed of such a power of language, such a
wealth of imagination and beauty of thought
ever spent more care in the polishing of his
sentences. And this not only with his written
books, but with his newspaper letters, on which
— as he told me himself — he expended the
utmost pains at his command.

With such natural gifts as these, his training
was exactly such as would best develop his
powers and form his style. The extensive
Bible-reading and Bible-learning, forced upon
him when a child, laid the foundations for
pure and vigorous English, and encouraged

AUTHOR, BOOKMAN, AND STYLIST. 71

his later admiration for the manner of Dr.
Johnson. This alone would have gone far to
educate him into the accomplished rhapsodist
he soon became. But other carefully-selected
reading exerted powerful influence upon his
future style. Byron and Wordsworth he
studied carefully (and indeed knew pretty well
by heart) — the former for perfect fluency and
realistic truth of vision, and the latter for the
beauty of simplicity and naturalness of language
and expression. " Even Shakespeare's Venice
was visionary ; and Portia as impossible as
Miranda. But Byron told me of, and re-
animated for me, the real people whose feet
had worn the marble I trod on." And, finally,
Carlyle, his friend and admirer, gave the final
turn of originality of expression and that effec-
tive directness and apparent ruggedness which
endows all that Ruskin ever wrote with a rich
quality of its own, and made the man, as Mr.
Justice Pearson said. " the most eloquent writer
of English, except Jeremy Taylor." In point
of thought, Ruskin often confessed himself the
pupil of Carlyle ; but hardly less is he so in re-
spect to literary expression ; and the Sage of
Chelsea returned the compliment by declaring
to Mr. Froude that many of Ruskin's utter-
ances ''pierced like arrows into my heart."
We surely do not require the enthusiastic attes-

72 JOHN RUSK IN.

tation of Mathew Arnold, or George Eliot, or
John Morley, or the rest, of Ruskin's trans-
cendent position as a prose-writer ; but if it be
true, as indeed it is, that " Ruskin writes beau-
tifully because he thinks beautifully, because his
thoughts spring, like Pallas, ready armed," it
was not because " the fashion of the armour
costs him nothing," for his note-books exist,
like the sketch-books of a painter, with beauti-
ful descriptive sentences, sweetly turned and
carefully moulded, ready for use when required,
thus attesting the constant and almost exces-
sive care, as well as the constructive method of
his style.

Ruskin's own estimate of his work, in his
comparison of it with Tennyson's, is delightful
in its modesty, and sufficient testimony of his
critical faculty, or, at least, unselfish appreci-
ation. "As an illustrator of natural beauty
Tennyson is far beyond anything I ever did or
could have done," he says ; and elsewhere de-
clared that there is finer word-painting in the
poet's " Brook " than can be found in all his
own prose-writings put together. But, for all
that, Ruskin is and must be regarded, by friend
and foe alike, as the great modern master of
English prose — the Magician of Coniston Lake.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ARTIST.

A dozen years ago it might have been neces-
sary to defend the position of Ruskin as an
artist, or perhaps even primarily to inform the
general public of the wondrous beauty to be
found in his drawings. But since that time
Sditions de luxe have fully established his rank
as one of the most exquisite draughtsmen, both
with the point and in water-colour sketching,
that the country has produced. His work is
limited in extent, rarely completed, and never
executed for public exhibition ; but for manual
skill, microscopic truth of observation, directed
and moulded by a passionate poetic sense of
the most refined and gentle order, he has rarely
been excelled. He was, in truth, a landscape
and architectural artist of the greatest talent,
of infinite delicacy, grace, feeling, and patience ;
and the writer has more than once heard him
deplore that he had not given a greater share
of his life to the practice of art by which he
might have effected more real good than by all
his word-painting and pen-preaching : " Not

D 7 73

74 JOHN RUSK IN.

that I should have done anything great," said
he, " but I could have made such beautiful
records of things. It is one of the greatest
chagrins of my life."

In respect to his theories of art, its technique,
and execution, Ruskin entertained views which
were not shared by the majority of the greatest
painters of his day — even of most of his most in-
timate friends and admirers. Such, for exam-
ple, was the theory that all shadows should be
painted purple — a dictum which most of the
luministes of later days, the very " polar con-
traries " of Ruskin, have widely adopted,
though not perhaps to the full extent. Mr.
Goodall, R.A., told me once of the surprise
of Madame Rosa Bonheur when Ruskin laid
down this proposition to her with all the firm-
ness of conviction, and stoutly maintained
through their crisp little discussion that thus
should all her shadows be painted. " Mais out,
ma-t-il bien dity said she, in repeating the con-
versation, " rouge et bleu ; " and she further de-
clared that she was convinced that his views
on this matter, as well as on his artistic work
generally, were governed by a physical pecu-
liarity of his retina, and that he possessed be-
sides the microscopic eye of a bird: "// voit
precisement comme un oiseau!' This sugges-
tion, so swiftly and deftly made, goes a good

THE ARTIST. 75

way towards explaining Ruskin's love of ex-
haustive detail, the more accurately drawn and
exquisitely finished the better ; but it hardly
tallies with the frequent breadth of handling
and largeness of view to be found in his own
work. Perhaps it was, in a measure, his early
training in facsimile copying of great models
that rendered him so precise, encouraged
thereto by his own natural bent and genius for
criticism and subtle analysis ; but no less was
it his scientific knowledge and his cultivated
accuracy that served him so well in the making
of his innumerable sketches of natural phe-
nomena and artistic shorthand notes of every
sort of detail, to say nothing of his profound
study and elaborate drawings of architecture —
geometrical as well as picturesque. It is, per-
haps, not too much to say that his " Glacier
des Bossons, Chamouni " — in which the ice is
inimitably represented creeping down the hill-
side— with its exquisite drawing, its refinement
and delicacy, and its beauty of sparkling colour,
has never been surpassed in its own line by
any artist however eminent.

His actual masters in art, it has already been
said, were J. D. Harding (who was the first to
inspire him with the idea that there was some-
thing more soulful and philosophic in art than
appears upon the surface) and Copley Fielding.

76 JOHN RUSK IN.

Then came his love for Prout — he who above all
others appreciated " Modern Painters " to the
full when it first appeared. It was upon his
manner that Ruskin loved to form his own, as
may be seen in the early drawing of "The
Cathedral Spire, Rouen " (reproduced on page
81) and in many another work of his early
years. Of this "Rouen," by the way, pub-
lished with two other drawings in the Maga-
zine of Art in 1886, he wrote to me: "There
ought to be a separate half-page of apology for
the drawings of mine, in which the Rouen is a
little bit too childish to show my proper early
architectural power. All my really good draw-
ings are too large — and most of them at
Oxford ; but I should like you to give one of
them, some day."

He remained true to his " Proutism," which
he cultivated so assiduously, to the end ; for,
speaking of his Brantwood drawings, he said :
" Prout is one of the loves that always remain
fresh to me ; sometimes I tire of Turner, but
never of Prout." To what extent Turner was
his idol it is not necessary here to insist: for
Turner practically came for many years to be
Ru skin's raison d'etre. Then followed his love
for William Hunt and David Roberts ; and on
the work of all these men his own style of art
was founded. But his approval of Roberts was

tr^X, O-m.4 t£. ihvuUL^ CK^AJ-ui

j'J^jjU /*&*, rL^^. /*"*] • b^rd— *y

vi/h c^ ljZ& rf O^O^ J-dr^l*4

A PAGE OF ONE OF RUSKIN'S NOTE-BOOKS, MADE WHEN
HE WAS PREPARING "THE STONES OF VENICE."

{By permission of A/rs. Arthur Severn.)

■ -

THE ARTIST. 79

greatly modified by time and by Roberts' own
development and change. The story is still
recounted with a chuckle how Ruskin once felt
it necessary to print a rather severe criticism
upon Roberts' work, but wrote a private note
expressing the hope that it might make no
difference to their friendship, and how the artist
replied that when next he met him he would
punch Ruskin's head, but hoped that that would
in no way disturb their pleasant and cordial
relations.

CHAPTER V.

THE TEACHER.

The teaching of John Ruskin might for
convenience sake be divided into Art and
General Teaching, which together form a
synthetic philosophy, erratic enough at first
sight to a superficial observer, but consistent
and focussed in aim when properly under-
stood. Codified as has been his teaching by
Mr. Collingwood, Mr. Cook, and minor dis-
ciples, it is simple and clear, its fundamental
principles being honesty, piety, and sincerity in
all things — in Art as in Ethics. A philosopher
so impulsive and, at times, so hasty as Mr.
Ruskin, writing more often, as it has been
said, in the character of the pamphleteer
than in that of the academist or pundit,
naturally laid himself freely open to attack.
Of this weakness advantage was from time
to time fully taken by vigorous and pitiless
assailants. A fighter of the Puritan sort—
"as zealous, pugnacious, and self-sure a Prot-
estant as you please," as he himself has

expressed it — Ruskin hit hard, loving nothing
80

THE CATHEDRAL SPIRE, ROUEN.

DRAWN" BY B.USKIN, UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF PROUT.
{By permission of Mrs. Arthur Severn.)

IE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY,

TOR, LENOX AND
TIL JUNDATiONS.

THE TEACHER. 83

so much as to pillory acknowledged wrongs
and conventional rights. He thus made for
himself more enemies than most men, though
not so many, perhaps, as he would had
people not regarded him as something of a
prophet of old, or as a hot-tempered enthu-
siast, whose seriously over-charged brain often
carried him beyond the limits of soberer judg-
ment and moderation. Rarely has an Eng-
lishman of letters been the subject of such a
slashing and abusive attack as Ruskin but a
few years since was the victim of at the hands
of the Quarterly Review, and many others
joined with interest in the campaign of retalia-
tion. The development of his ideas with time
and maturity of judgment placed a ready
weapon in the hands of his opponents, which
they were not slow to use ; but more than once
he has turned and emptied upon them with
withering effect the vials of his wrath and
scathing invective, which have few, if any,
parallels in the language.

Early in his career he assumed the " apos-
tolic attitude " in respect, not only to art, but
to the whole principles of life. Applying the
results of his thoughts and doctrines, he came
to set up Religion and Ethics as in direct oppo-
sition to Science and Avarice ; and there we
have the philosophy of his early life in a nut-

84 JOHN RUSK IN.

shell. He was not long before he modified
this view to a sensible degree ; his Evangelical
training began to fade before his kindlier senti-
ments, and loosened its uncompromising grip.
But from the beginning to the end his motto
was "All great art is praise;" and this he
followed logically with the thesis that " the
teaching of art is the teaching of all things."
Art, he said, is to minister to a sense of beauty
— a view which enabled him to bring nearly
every subject within his net ; and then, in-
versely, he taught that beauty in all things —
actual, aesthetic, moral, and ethical — that was
the end and aim of life. It was to the propa-
gation of this idea that he set his mind — that
mind which Mazzini declared was the most
analytical in Europe ; but the length to which
he carried his arguments — such as that no man
can be an architect who is not also a metaphy-
sician— raised a veritable storm of criticism and
dissent, upon which the young philosopher rode
forward in triumph and delight.

George Eliot — who said " I venerate him as
one of the great teachers of the age : he teaches
with the inspiration of the Hebrew prophet " —
saw no reason to contest his two leading doc-
trines — a Quixotic purity of commercial morality
carried almost to the point of impracticability
and stagnation, and a religious view of higher

ZKJS&; ■

■*^

••

JOHN RUSKIN, 1857.

FROM THE PORTRAIT IN COLOURED CHALK BY GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A.

(By permission of Arthur Severn, Esq., R.I.)

(See j>. 182.)

/ " ^ LENOX .-

THE TEACHER. 87

art developed almost to the point of monastic
exclusiveness and ethical fervour. His search
after honesty and truth in Art enabled him to
claim with pride that " it was left to me, and me
alone, first to discern and then to teach — as far
as in this hurried century any such thing can be
taught — the excellence and supremacy of five
great painters, despised until I spoke of them :
Turner, Tintoret, Luini, Botticelli, and Carpac-
cio." But his happiness in the analysis and
establishment of past triumphs in art rendered
him the more dejected in the contemplation
of what he considered was its present tendency
in England. " I have only stopped grumbling,"
he exclaimed, " because I find that grumbling
is of no use. I believe that all the genius of
modern artists is directed to tastes which are
in vicious states of wealth in cities, and that,
on the whole, they are in the service of a luxu-
rious class who must be amused, or worse than
amused. There is twenty times more effort
than there used to be, far greater skill, but far
less pleasure in the exercise of it in the artists
themselves. I may say that my chief feeling
is that things are going powerfully to the bad,
but that there may be something — no one
knows how or when — which may start up and
check it. Look at those drawings of Turner

on the wall — there is nothing wrong in them ;

88 JOHN RUSK IN.

but in every exhibition there is something
wrong : the pictures are either too sketchy or
too finished ; there is something wrong with
the man — up to the very highest."

In ordinary life he thought he discovered
that manual labor and every effort of the body,
to the exclusion of all mechanical assistance,
was thrice-blessed, and the more highly sancti-
fied the baser and more menial the office.

"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman ? "

must have been more than once in his mind.
And thus it was that he learned the art of
crossing-sweeping in London from a knight of
the broom, and the art of road-making too.
It speaks eloquently for his power of per-
suasion and his sway over the affections of his
pupils, that he brought the Oxford under-
graduates, during his Slade professorship, to
play the navvy, and with pick and spade to
construct the Hincksey Road, to the delight
and amusement of all the countryside. The
road, I believe, is a very bad one, disgracefully
so, save in that small portion to which Ruskin
called in the professional help of his gardener ;
but it was made, and that was enough for him.
The story — perhaps an apochryphal one — goes
in Oxford that Mr. Andrew Lano- was one of

THE TEACHER. 89

the undergraduates ; who, with a lurking sus-
picion as to the efficacy and rightness of the
whole business, as well as with a lively sense of
the ludicrous, used to take his pickaxe and drive
down in a hansom to the scene of operations.

In fact, Muscle versus Machinery was one of
the tenets of Ruskin's vital creed. He hated
railways for three reasons : partly because they
defaced the country and fouled the air ; partly
because they were usually constructed rather
as a speculation (the immorality of gambling !),
with the sole view not to utility, but to profit
(the immorality of sordidness !) ; and chiefly
because they wiped out the good old-fashioned
travelling, with patience and industry, with
thew and muscle. Railways, he said, if rightly
understood, are but a device to make the world
smaller ; but he ignored the necessary corollary
— that they made life longer and larger, at
least to the traveller. When the abortive at-
tempt was being made to pass a Bill for the
Ambleside Railway through the Committee of
the House, I had but to refer to the scheme
which was to have brought the bane of his life
into the very heart of the Lake district, to fire
him at the- bare mention of it. " Whenever I
think of it," he cried warmly, " I get so angry
that I begin to fear an attack of apoplexy.
There is no hope for Ambleside ; the place is

go JOHN RUSK IN.

sure to be ruined beyond all that people
imagine. It is no use my writing to the Lon-
don papers on the matter, because it merely
centres in the question, have they money
enough to fight in the House of Commons ?
It does not matter what anybody says if the
damaging party can pay expenses. There are
perpetually people who are trying to get up
railways in every direction, and as it now stands
they unfortunately can find no other place to
make money from. But it is no use attacking
them ; you might just as well expect mercy
from a money-lender as expect them to listen
to reason." Nor was his animosity towards
the promoters in any way subdued by the fail-
ure of the attempt in Parliament. Even the
decoration of the railway stations he condemned
as an impertinence and an outrage on the art
of design that was disgraced by the lowliness
of its mission.

But Ruskin's hatred of railways was not so
all-consuming nor so sweeping that he had no
dislike and contempt left for that more recent
form of mechanical self-transport — cycling, as he
proved to a startled correspondent who sought
for his opinion, and apparently his approval, on
the subject. "I not only object," he wrote,
" but am quite prepared to spend all my best
' bad language ' in reprobation of bi- tri- 4- 5- 6-

THE TEACHER. 91

or 7-cycles, and every other contrivance and
invention for superseding human feet on God's
ground. To walk, to run, to leap, and to
dance are the Virtues of the human body, and
neither to stride on stilts, wriggle on wheels, or
dangle on ropes, and nothing in the training of
the human mind with the body will ever super-
sede the appointed God's ways of slow walking
and hard working."

Mr. William Morris rightly declared that
Ruskin was the only man who, during the
whole nineteenth century, made Art possible in
England. Dr. Waldstein has placed him on
an equal pedestal with Mathew Arnold as an
apostle of culture. And, further, by proclaim-
ing his service in combating the severance of
morality and economics, in " killing the fetish of
the Ouartier Latin," and in inducing the love
and study of nature and landscape-painting, he
has awarded Ruskin the palm he so passion-
ately sought for — the admission that he reached
his oroal. In short, as has been said, Ruskin
stood midway between the religious and scien-
tific lines of thought — as a theistic philosopher.
And it is claimed for him that he inaugurated
the era of scientific and methodical art-criticism,
and ranged himself beside Carlyle, Emerson,
and Hegel against the advancing materialism of
the day.

CHAPTER VI.

THE EDUCATIONIST,

Upon no subject, even upon art or railways,
did Ruskin entertain stronger views than upon
education — more especially upon the education
of the very young. Laying down primarily
that little children should be taught or shown
nothing that is sad and nothing that is ugly, he
protested with all his vigour against the blind
Three R's-system of all school education —
particularly that of the School Board. And
he further set his face against what he believed
was the latter-day tendency of scientific or eco-
nomic study amongst our youth, to the end and
conclusion "that their fathers were apes and
their mothers winkles ; that the world be^an in
accident, and will end in darkness; that honour
is a folly, ambition a virtue, charity a vice,
poverty a crime, and rascality the means of all
wealth and the sum of all wisdom." As usual,
his earnestness in asseveration and felicity in
expression carried him a little too far ; but it
certainly presented his views with considerable

accuracy.
92

THE EDUCATIONIST. 93

Few people applied to him in vain for
assistance and advice on the subject of school-
teaching ; and with his advice there often
came something more substantial in the way
of materials for object-lessons. The Cork
High School for Girls is one of the several
establishments which benefited in this way,
receiving a gift of minerals of high value
accompanied by a characteristic descriptive
catalogue. To Mrs. Magnussen, again, Ruskin
expressed the deep interest he felt in her
high school for girls in Ireland, and besought
her to " teach your children to be cheerful,
busy, and honest ; teach them sewing, music,
and cookery ; and if they want bonnets from
Paris — why, you'll have to send for them."
And many a time the village school of Conis-
ton has known his presence during school
hours, and reaped advantage and amusement
from his kindly interference.

As soon as the child has been taught to learn,
not only with its eyes and ears, but with its lips
and tongue and skin (the latter by the appointed
daily washing, to say nothing of " thrashing —
delicately — on due occasion"), its time is to
be gradually occupied with the teaching of the
natural sciences, as against mere reading and
writing. Physical science, botany, the elements
of music, astronomy, and zoology — these are

94 JOHN RUSK IN.

the subjects to be included in a system which
is to know no over-pressure, and which, by its
course of study, precludes the possibility of
writing folly for the attraction of other infantile
fools, or the reading of pestilential popular
literature and " penny dreadfuls" to the
reader's ruin. Drawing and history, accord-
ing to the Ruskinian system, were to be com-
pulsory subjects. The school-house, with
garden, playground, and cultivable land round
it, wherever possible, should have workshops
— a carpenter's and a potter's — a children's
library, where scholars who want to read
might teach themselves without troubling
the masters ; and " a sufficient laboratory
always, in which shall be specimens of
all common elements of natural substances,
and where chemical, optical, and pneumatic
experiments may be shown." And to these
subjects, others — which should not be extras :
"the laws of Honour, the habit of Truth,
the Virtue of Humility, and the Happiness of
Love."

And coming later to the ordinary University
course and University teaching, Ruskin be-
sought his students to confine themselves to
the regular curriculum. But as for languages
— their own and foreign — he told them to
learn the former at home, and the others in

THE EDUCATIONIST. 95

the various countries ; " and, after they've
learned all they want, learn wholesomely to
hold their tongues, except on extreme occa-
sions, in all languages whatsoever."

CHAPTER VII.

HIS VIEW OF THINGS.

Ruskin's originality and invariable happi-
ness of expression drew, perhaps, undue public
attention to his versatility and views of things
in general, and he was listened to with pleasure
by adversaries, as by friends and followers.
His theory of political economy was too ideal
to be acceptable to the work-a-day world ; yet
his "Time and Tide" and " Ethics of the Dust"
gained no small share of approval from non-
capitalists. With Palmerston, Gladstone, and
Disraeli, Ruskin contested for these opinions
in vigorous conversation ; though, as he him-
self admitted, with but little effect. For
Palmerston gently remonstrated with him ;
Gladstone hotly argued, and Disraeli cyni-
cally chaffed him : but Ruskin held on — the
precise attitude that might have been expected
from the character and dispositions of the four
men. On this subject he remained firm ; "my
political teaching," he said, " has never changed
in a single thought or word, and, being that
of Homer and Plato, is little likely to do so,

though not acceptable to a country whose
96

'M^miimiMmnmmummmmmmmiMmmmmMMmmim

JOHN RUSKIN, 1 866.

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLIOTT & FRY.

THE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY,

* OR, LENOX AND
I

HIS VIEW OF THINGS. 99

milkmaids cannot make butter, nor her black-
smiths bayonets."

Ardent in all things, he was an ardent,
though inactive, politician ; but he was strongly
opposed to government by party, being con-
vinced that the ablest men should be in the
positions for which they were best suited.
"I care no more for Mr. D'Israeli or Mr.
Gladstone than for two old bagpipes with
the drones going by steam," he once wrote ;
" but I hate all Liberalism as I do Beelzebub,
and, with Carlyle, I stand, we two alone now
in England, for God and the Oueen." This
is on all-fours with the sentiment he once
imparted to me, and which at the time it
was my duty to make known to the world :
" There is one political opinion I do enter-
tain, and that is that Mr. Gladstone is an old
wind-bag, who uses his splendid gifts of
orator}' not for the elucidation of a subject,
but for its vaporisation in a cloud of words "
— a sentiment, he told me afterwards, which
had given the greatest offence to Miss Glad-
stone, of whom he was so fond, and now she
wouldn't look at him ! " I am not a Liberal
— quite the Polar contrary of that. I am,
and my father was before me, a violent Tory
of the old school (Walter Scott's school) ; '
and again, " I am a violent Illiberal, but it

ioo JOHN RUSKIN.

does not follow that I must be a Conserva-
tive. I want to keep the fields of England
green and her cheeks red."

In one of his lighter moods he wrote to a
friend concerning the proposed erection of a
new public office : — " If I were he [the archi-
tect] I would build Lord P an office wTith

all the capitals upside down, and tell him it was
in the Greek style, inverted, to express typi-
cally Government by party — up to-day, down
to-morrow." And on another occasion : — " I
beg of you, so far as you think of me, not
to think of me as a Tory, or as in any wise
acknowledging party principles ; ' and, finally,
declaring- himself what amounts to a limited
Home Ruler, he piously proclaimed himself a
believer in " the minority of One ! "

There seems to be good ground for the be-
lief that, had not Art claimed Ruskin for her
own, his love of Nature would have been di-
verted into scientific channels. Dr. Buckland
and James Forbes had done much with him,
and as he believed and said with perfect can-
dour, he might have become the first geologist
in Europe. Geology, mineralogy, meteorology
— glacier movements, mountains, rocks, clouds,
and perspective, birds and plants, all severally
engaged his attention, and to good purpose
enlisted his highest powers. But for all that,

HIS VIEW OF THINGS. 101

he hated mathematics ; and having once learned,
with the rest of the children at the Coniston
school, how much seven-and-twenty pounds of
bacon would come to at ninepence farthing a
pound, "with sundry the like marvellous conse-
quences of the laws of numbers," he stopped
the mistress and diverted the delighted chil-
dren's attention to object-lessons more pictu-
resque, and, as he believed, more interesting and
useful. Yet his contributions to science are
not altogether insignificant, and Mr. Tyndall
had cause to wince under his lash when he
opposed the glacier-theory of James Forbes,
and, as Ruskin himself told me with unusual
bitterness, " put back the glacier-theory twenty
years and more — a theory which had been de-
cided before that conceited, careless schoolboy
was born ! Scientists ! " he cried, " but not men
of science. They are not students of science, but
dilettanti in the enjoyment of its superficial as-
pects. They do not examine and analyse the
milk ; they only sip at the cream, and then
chatter about it. They are of the race that say
< Keltic' for 'Celtic,' and 'Keramic' for 'Ce-
ramic,' at once the makers and the followers of
fashion in Science, and not, as they should be,
the servants of God, and the humble masters
of the universe." The Darwinian theory, as I
have already said, was in a measure hateful to

102 JOHN RUSK IN.

him ; yet few men he esteemed more than the
author of it. To the last he remembered with
delight the visits of the great naturalist to
Brantwood, and was perhaps not a little grate-
ful for the tact with which all reference to
debateable matters was carefully avoided.

In religion Ruskin may be described as a
Broad Churchman ; earnest and pious, but no
bigot, as the following passage, extracted from
a private letter, will show: — "If people in this
world would but teach a little less religion and
a little more common honesty, it would be
much more to everybody's purpose — and to
God's." As a child he was brought up in the
Evangelical faith, but soon became more catho-
lic and indulgent, and looked with horror on
the more intolerant attitude of Protestantism
or Puritanism, and with scorn upon sects and
schisms alike and their belittling quarrels.
Still, as before and later, religion in its larger
sense was the forerunning and guiding princi-
ple of his life — the passion that directed every
act and moulded every thought. Love, Faith,
Charity, and Honour were the four boundaries
of his Church — a Church which was broad
enough to cover every noble mind and every
honest heart.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE LETTER-WRITER.

One of the most delightful of Ruskin's

talents was that of letter-writing, his natural

bent for which was developed and perfected by

continual practice. But his art was not that of

the great literary epistolographers. It aimed

less, in point of fact, at literary quality and

formal composition (though it did not less for

that reason hit the mark) than at vivacity of

manner and frank expression of his thoughts

as they took form in his brain and bubbled

sparkling and flowing from his pen — now in

the ripple of boyish playfulness, now in the

stiller sweep of philosophic thought, and now

again in the torrent of hot indignation that

overwhelmed his adversaries in their flood.

To the public journals he was a prolific

correspondent, from the time when, in 1847

and again in 1853, he addressed long letters

to the Times on the dangers threatening the

National Gallery — to the dissipation of which

dangers he was able long years afterwards to

testify — down to a quite recent period. The

103

104 JOHN RUSKIN.

Times, but particularly the Daily Telegraph
and the Pall Mall Gazette, were his favourite
newspaper channels of communication with
the public, but the Morning Post, the Ma?t-
chester Examiner and Times, the Leeds Mer-
cury, the Scotsman, the Manchester City News,
the Reader, the Critic, the Literary Gazette,
the Monetary Gazette, and other journals were
selected by him from time to time for the
exposition of his views upon almost every
subject within the extended range of his
philosophy. Yet if he was a prolific news-
paper letter-writer it must not be imagined
that he was necessarily, therefore, a rapid one.
On the contrary, he more than once, to me
as well as to others, remarked upon the labour
which the inditing and publishing of such pro-
ductions entailed upon him. In a post-
script to a letter addressed to the editor of
the Pall Mall Gazette in 1887, Mr. Ruskin
wrote : —

" I have not written this letter with my usual care, for
I am at present tired and sad ; but you will enough gather
my meaning in it ; and may I pray your kindness, in any
notice you may grant in continuation of ' Prseterita,' to
contradict the partly idle, partly malicious rumours which
I find have got into other journals, respecting my state of
health this spring. Whenever I write a word that my
friends don't like, they say I am crazy; and never con-
sider what a cruel and wicked form of libel they thus pro-

THE LETTER-WRITER. 105

voke against the work of an old age in all its convictions
antagonistic to the changes of the times, and in all its com-
fort oppressed by them ;"

— a most pathetic and, as the Editor truly
commented, " sad undernote of weariness " in
respect to a charge to which all great original
thinkers have been exposed at the hands of
commonplace people " from St. Paul to Gen-
eral Gordon."

All these newspaper letters, from 1841 up
to 1880, together with a few others, were re-
printed in "Arrows of the Chace," wherein, it
must be remarked, the writer asserts, with in-
explicable self-contradiction, that most of them
were " written hastily," though he admits that
they cost him much trouble. And he further
declared, what, indeed, every man can see for
himself, that in these letters, " designed for his
country's help," there is not one word which
" has been warped by interest nor weakened
by fear," and that they are "as pure from
selfish passion as if they were spoken already
out of another world."

It is clear that letter-writing came with
singular ease to Ruskin, for it allowed him
an unconventionality of composition and ex-
pression and a forcefulness of diction that
would, perhaps, have been less permissible in
the more customary methods of essay writing.

106 JOHN RUSK IN.

For this reason, doubtless, "Time and Tide
by Weare and Tyne " was frankly thrown
into epistolary form, or left in it, precisely as
the five-and-twenty letters of which the book
is composed were indited to Mr. Thomas
Dixon, of Sunderland ; while " The Elements
of Drawing," and even " Fors Clavigera," were
in like manner issued in Ruskin's favourite
form of public address.

Apart from his letters immediately intended
for publication in the newspapers, there were
those he addressed to the comparatively un-
known correspondents who sought his help
and advice in their private affairs, or inquired
his opinions upon every sort of subject of
public curiosity ; and those, again, which he
distributed with so generous a hand among
his private friends and relations. How many
of all these letters have found their way into
print it is unnecessary to point out or inquire.
Ruskin's own general statement that " I never
write what I would not allow to be published,"
and his general declaration, duly printed in the
newspapers, that all were free to publish every
letter he ever wrote, "so that they print the
whole of them," was confirmed by him in a
characteristic letter which he wrote to James
Smetham, and which was printed in the fasci-
nating volume of " Letters " of that artist. " I

THE LETTER-WRITER, 107

have had," wrote Smetham on one occasion,
"some kind letters from Ruskin, one giving me
leave to print anywhere or anyhow any opinion
he may have expressed about my work in
private letters, in bits or wholes, or how I like,
and concluding by a very characteristic sen-
tence: 'I never wrote a private letter to any
human being which I would not let a bill-
sticker chalk up six feet high on Hyde Park
wall, and stand myself in Piccadilly and say
" I did it'"" Thus it is that Ruskin encour-
aged a system of general publicity which cer-
tainly has done his reputation no harm, while
it enlivened the columns of the public press
with a pyrotechnic sequence of letters, delight-
fully and often enough fervently expressed —
contributions for which newspaper-readers felt
themselves duly grateful.

Of the private letters, the most notable
collection is that before, referred to, which
was addressed to Miss Beever — the Younger
Lady of Thwaite, to whom the world is in-
debted for the charming selection from Modern
Painters known as " Frondes Agrestes." A
smaller selection was more recently published
for private circulation by Mr. Ellis, the book-
seller— a collection containing much that is
pleasant and interesting, bearing chiefly on
Ruskin's knowledge and love of books, but

108 JOHN RUSK IN,

hardly edited with the solicitude demanded
by the reputation of a great writer. Few men
declare themselves completely in their literary
work, so that the publication of their letters
is always looked to for the explanation of
otherwise inexplicable problems presented by
their character, to throw light upon unguessed
motives, or even to tear from their face the
mask that the heroes have laboured all their
life to mould and wear with the ease of
truth. With Ruskin it is different. His
writings declare the man in his weakness as

in his strength, simply and fully, drawing a
careful outline, so to speak, that leaves little
to be filled into the portrait, and requires no
further evidence to enable his fellow-men to
form their judgment. It is chiefly confirmatory
evidence that his letters afford — presented with
a light hand to fill in the main lines laid down
in hts books — illustrating, developing, and rep-
resenting the author in a stronger light, only
a good deal more light-hearted or more de-
pressed ; and at the same time bringing into
greater relief the dominating qualities of charity
and love which those who knew him best saw
oftenest and esteemed highest.

CHAPTER IX.

THE POET.

Ruskin, as has already been said, was in-
tended for the Church. His mother — strict
Evangelical soul — devoutly hoped that her
son would become a Bishop ; his father
firmly believed he would be a poet. And
though Ruskin belied both prophecies, it must
be admitted that he gave ample ground for
the paternal conviction. His facility in verse-
making was amazing, and from those tender
years when, still a baby, he wrote the imagina-
tive lines beginning —

" Papa, how pretty those icicles are,
That are seen so near, that are seen so far,"

he, in a short time, developed such fluency
that few writers of verse of any age could
excel him in the direction of fatal ''facility."
His literary prose style, as we have seen, had
been founded on the Bible and Dr. Johnson,
tempered by Carlyle ; his poetic Muse was
nourished on Byron, guided by Wordsworth,
and modified by Scott. As he himself wrote in
a tone of apology to Hogg, the Ettrick Shep-

io 109

no JOHN RUSK IN.

herd, when but fifteen years of age : " I fear
you are too lenient a critic, and that Mr. Mar-
shall is in the right when he says I have imi-
tated Scott and Byron. I have read Byron
with wonder, and Scott with delight ; they have
caused me many a day-dream and night-dream,
and it is difficult to prevent yourself from imi-
tating what you admire. I can only say that
the imitation was unintentional, but I fear, with
me, almost unavoidable." Yet, to his infinite
credit, it must be confessed that he early saw
that his drift into art-criticism carried him into
the right stream. Nevertheless, although the
feu sacre burned brightly within him, although
he heard on all sides that none had written
such poetic prose as he, and although his sensi-
tiveness to nature and beauty was universally
allowed him, he soon recognised that, as with
Lord Lytton, poetry was to him but a will-o'-
the-wisp — to be wooed and followed, but never,
like Fata Morgana, to be seized.

Yet, though he thus tacitly admitted, while
yet a stripling, that verse was not the weapon
with which he was to conquer the recognition
of the world, he made no objection to the re-
publication of his poems by Mr. Collingwood.
Their issue, in splendid garb, with many admir-
able facsimiles of the Master's most beautiful
drawings with pencil-point and brush, will be

i •

JOHN RUSKIN, 1S76.

SKETCHED IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY BY GEORGES PILOTELLE.

{By permission of Mr. Noseda, the owner of the copyright of the etching.)

(See p. 1S0.)

■
. . LIC LIBRARY,

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

THE POET. 113

fresh in the memory of the reader. It might
be said, and not without truth, that the pictures
formed the chief artistic value of the volumes ;
for, while the poems — with all their pretty
daintiness and occasional power — savoured a
good deal of the efforts of the precocious poet,
the pictures were full of richness of fancy,
exquisiteness of touch, and true beauty — the
attributes of natural genius. The humour
which distinguishes his unfinished autobiog-
raphy, " Praeterita," is often slyly pointed at his
youthful indiscretions — poetical and otherwise ;
but in his "Collected Poems" the verses were
put forth with a seriousness — almost a solem-
nity— which is a little out of balance with the
subject. For, while the verse-lover may smile
in sympathy with his dainty fancies, or fires,
maybe, with noble suggestions, or nods his
head gently in time to its musical cadences, the
critic can but regret that a maturer judgment
permitted them to go forth as the poetical
works of a great man, for all the exquisite
beauty of their pictorial accompaniments. He
brought as a sacrifice the harvest of his intel-
lectual wild oats to the altar of public opinion ;
but it is doubtful if he cared for the verdict — if
he ever knew of it. As in other instances, his
shaft had missed its aim. Just as a comedian
yearns for recognition as an actor of tragedy,

h 10*

114 JOHN RUSK IN.

so Ruskin ever sought for some other judgment
than that which an admiring public chose to
pass upon him. The people proclaim him an
art-critic, and he would be taken for a political
economist ; the artists welcome him as a writer,
and he would be taken for an art-preacher ;
Mr. Tyndall respected him as a controversial-
ist, when he would be taken for a man of
science ; and, lastly, we find him applauded as
an artist when he would be taken for a poet !
But it must be remembered that it was from
his young and hopeful heart that these poems
chiefly flowed, even when he set himself — as he
once amusingly observed — " in a state of mag-
nificent imbecility to write a tragedy on a Vene-
tian subject, in which Venice and love were to
be described as never had been thought of be-
fore ! ' If, however, for no other reason than
that it is the frank utterance of a young and
gentle spirit, his verse — so sweetly, so nobly
conceived — is to be welcomed beyond its inher-
ent merit. And, as it fell out, his song — pub-
lished just as he was vanishing from the world
— became in truth the song of the swan

CHAPTER X.

RUSKIN AND GEORGE CRUIKSHANK.

There was no pleasanter phase of Ruskin's
character, as has been already said, than his
charity, delicately dispensed, especially when
the recipient was worthy of his gift, and at the
same time claimed his respect. An example
in point is Ruskin's connection with George
Cruikshank in the artist's later days. The
relation of the circumstances at an interesting
period of their connection affords a plain in-
stance of the generosity of Ruskin, no less
than of his refusal to allow his sympathy of
sentiment to overcloud his faculty of criticism.

Many a time had Ruskin borne testimony to
Cruikshank's genius as a designer, as well as
to his almost unrivalled skill and facility as an
etcher.

"If ever [he wrote] you happen to meet with two vol-
umes of Grimm's ( German Stories,' which were illustrated
by George Cruikshank long ago, pounce upon them in-
stantly ; the etchings in them are the finest things, next to
Rembrandt's, that, as far as I know, have been done since
etching was invented."

And again : —

Ii6 JOHN RUSKIA

u They are of quite sterling and admirable art, in a class
precisely parallel in elevation to the character of the tales
they illustrate . . . unrivalled in masterfulness of touch
since Rembrandt (in some qualities of delineation un-
rivalled even by him). To make somewhat enlarged copies
of them, looking at them through a magnifying glass, and
never putting two lines where Cruikshank has put only one,
would be an exercise in decision and severe drawing which
would leave afterwards little to be learned in schools."

Of course, it is not only, or even mainly,
upon the Grimm plates that Cruikshank's repu-
tation rests as an etcher and a humorist of the
highest order ; for in several of his caricatures
— coarse as many of the subjects may be —
there are a boldness and a freedom of compo-
sition and execution which are perfectly aston-
ishing, even to the expert connoisseur in these
things. But it was always the Grimm plates —
executed about the year 1824 — that were upper-
most in Ruskin's mind. More than forty years
later Ruskin conceived an idea, partly in order
to be of use to Cruikshank — who (greatly
through his own fault, be it said) never knew
what assured prosperity meant— and partly to
please little children, whom he loved so well.
This was to place before the little people a
book of fairy-tales — fairy-tales just such as they
should be, and adorned with pictures exactly
fitting the stories. Not until he issued " Dame
Wiggins of Lee," in 1885, did he even par-

RUSKIN AND GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 117

tially fulfil his wish; but in 1866 he went to
considerable trouble to carry his object into
execution. On the 27th of March he wrote to
his secretary from Denmark Hill : —

" How curious all that is about the Grimm plates. I
wish you would ask Cruikshank whether he thinks he could
execute some designs from fairy-tales — of my choosing, of
the same size, about, as these vignettes, and with a given
thickness of etching line ; using no fine line anywhere? "

The reservation was a wise one, for the
vigour and excellence of Cruikshank's etched
line had degenerated sadly as he reached mid-
dle life. On the 2nd of the following month,
full of his new project, and fully decided in his
mind as to what he wanted and meant to have,
Ruskin wrote again : —

" I don't want to lose an hour in availing myself of Mr.
Cruikshank's kindness, but I am puzzled, as I look at the
fairy tales within my reach, at their extreme badness. The
thing I shall attempt will be a small collection of the best
and simplest I can find, re-touched a little, with Edward's
help, and with as many vignettes as Mr. Cruikshank will
do for me. One of the stories will certainly be the Pied
Piper of Hamelin — but, I believe, in prose. I can only
lay hand just now on Browning's rhymed rendering of it,
but that will do for the subject. I want the piper taking
the children to Koppelberg Hill — a nice little rout of
funny little German children — not too many for clearness
of figure — and a bit of landscape with the raven opening
in the hillside — but all simple and bright and clear— with
broad lines : the landscape in * Curdken running after his

nS JOHN RUSK IN.

Hat,' for instance — or the superb bit with the cottage in
'Thumbling picked up by the Giant/ are done with the
kind of line I want ; and I should like the vignette as small
as possible, full of design and neat, not a labour of light
and shade.

" I would always rather have two small vignettes than one
large one. And I will give any price that Mr. Cruikshank
would like, but he must forgive me for taking so much upon
me as to make the thick firm line a condition, for I cannot
bear to see his fine hand waste itself in scratching middle
tints and covering mere spaces, as in the Cinderella and
other later works. The ' Peewit ' vignette, with the
people jumping into the lake, I have always thought one
of the very finest things ever done in pure line. It is so
bold, so luminous, so intensely real, so full of humour,
and expression, and character to the last dot.

"I send you my Browning marked with the subject at
page 315, combining one and two; and, perhaps, in the
distance there might be the merest suggestion of a Town
Council — 3. . but I leave this wholly to Mr. Cruik-
shank's feeling.

"Please explain all this to him, for I dare not write to
him these impertinences without more really heartfelt
apology than I have time, or words, to-day to express.

" Ever affectionately yours,

"J. RUSKIN."

On the 7th of the same month Ruskin re-
turned to the subject : —

"I was so busy and tired yesterday I couldn't write
another note. That is capital and very funny about the
Pied Piper. Your subjects are all good as good can be,
but I doubt we can't afford more than one to each story,
and the final one is here the best. Please tell me of any
other stories and subjects that chance to you."

RUSKIN AND GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 119

Two days later, with the jovial spirit of a
Cheeryble Brother strong within him, he wrote
again : —

" I do not know anything that has given me so much
pleasure for a long time as the thought of the feeling with
which Cruikshank will read this list of his committee.
You're a jolly fellow — you are, and I'm very grateful to
you, and ever affectionately yours,

"J. RUSKIN.

"I enclose Cruikshank's letter, which is very beautiful.
I think you must say ^100 (a hundred) for me."

And on the 16th of April he wrote: —

"Letter just received — so many thanks. It's delightful
about Cruikshank."

So, everything being settled, the artist went
steadily to work, and in the month of July fol-
lowing, Ruskin wrote with enthusiasm : —

"I can only say to-day that I'm delighted about all
these Cruikshank matters, and if the dear old man will do
anything he likes more from the old Grimms it will be
capital. Edward and Morris and you and I will choose
the subjects together."

Meanwhile he saw and became enthusiastic
over other work of the great etcher's, and once
more wrote to his secretary, on the 2nd of
September, to tell him so : —

"I am wholly obliged to you for these Cruikshanks.
The Jack Shepherd \_sic] one is quite awful, and a miracle
of skill and command of means. The others are all splen-
did in their way ; the morning one with the far-away street

120 JOHN RUSK IN.

I like the best. The officials with the children are glorious
too ; withering, if one understands it. But who does, or
ever did ? The sense of loss and rarity of all good art —
until we are better people — increases in us daily."

A few days later he suggested : —

"Wouldn't Cruikshank choose himself subjects out of
Grimm ? If not, to begin with, the old soldier who has
lost his way in a wood, comes to a cottage with a light in
it shining through the trees. At its door is a witch spin-
ning, of whom he asks lodging. She says, ' He must dig
her garden, then.' "

At this time a missing etching was returned
to him, and he wrote : —

"I forgot to thank you for the Cruikshank plate of
fairies. I lost it out of the book when I was a boy, and
am heartily glad to have it in again. The facsimiles are
most interesting, as examples of the ///z-measurably little
things on which life and death depend in work — a fatal
truth — forced on me too sharply, long ago, in my own en-
deavours to engrave Turner."

The facsimiles referred to here were an
extraordinary series of reproductions—" for-
geries " some collectors chose to declare them
— which a French artist made of the Grimm
plates. So fine are they that it is only by one
or two minor points, as well as by the colour
of the ink in which they are printed, that the
difference between the genuine plates and the
copies can be detected. And this, it must be
remembered, was long before the means of

RUSKIN AND GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 121

photographing a design upon copper was dis-
covered. Disappointment, however, was soon
to follow. The plates were delivered ; but
brought the following charming letter from Rus-
kin — a letter as truthful in its criticism as it is
gentle and happy in its choice of expression : —

" The etching will not do. The dear old man has
dwelt on serious and frightful subjects, and cultivated his
conscientiousness till he has lost his humour. He may
still do impressive and moral subjects, but I know by this
group of children that he can do fairy tales no more.

"I think he might quite well do still what he would
feel it more his duty to do — illustrations of the misery of the
streets of London. He knows that, and I would gladly
purchase the plates at the same price.

" Ever affectionately yours, J. Ruskin.

"Give my dear love to Mr. Cruikshank, and say, if he
had been less kind and good, his work now would have
been fitter for wayward children, but that his lessons of
deeper import will be incomparably more precious if he
cares to do them. But he must not work while in the
country."

Disappointed as he was, Ruskin determined
that the artist should not share his mortifica
tion, and on the 19th November he wrote : —

"I am going to write to Rutter [Ruskin's homme
d'affaires] to release Cruikshank from the payment of that
hundred — he gave some bonds which may be useful to
him, and I shall put the hundred down, as I said I would,
to the testimonial."

The sequel of the plates is not without

F II

122 JOHN RUSKIN.

interest as having drawn from Ruskin a later
criticism on Cruikshank's work which may fitly
be recorded here. As a Cruikshank collector,
I was aware that the two plates of the Pied
Piper and the Old Soldier had disappeared
from Ruskin's possession ; and having further
ascertained that some of his late secretary's
effects had long before found their way to the
hands of various dealers, I applied myself to
discover them, if possible. By good fortune I
lighted upon them, nearly twenty years after
they were executed and years after they were
" lost," and I had the pleasure of placing them
in the possession of their rightful owner. In
a letter acknowledging the receipt of them he
wrote : —

"It was precisely because Mr. Cruikshank could not re-
turn to the manner of the Grimm plates, but etched too
finely and shaded too much, that our project came to an
end. I have no curiosity about the plates ... I
never allow such things to trouble me, else I should have
vexation enough. There's a lovely plate of "Stones of
Venice "—folio size — lost these twenty years !

" Ever faithfully yours,

"J. Ruskin."

Writing a few days later, on the 21st
January, 1884, m response to a suggestion of
mine that his latest criticism on Cruikshank
might be interesting to the public, he wrote : —

RUSKIN AND GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. 123

M It is a pleasure to me to answer your obliging letter
with full permission to use my note on Cruikshank in any
way you wish, and to add, if you care to do so, the expres-
sion of my perpetually increasing wonder at the fixed love
of ugliness in the British soul which renders the collective
works of three of our greatest men — Hogarth, Bewick,
and Cruikshank — totally unfit for the sight of women and
children, and fitter for the furniture of gaols and pigstyes
than of the houses of gentlemen and gentlewomen.

"In Cruikshank the disease was connected with his
incapacity of colour ; but Hogarth and Bewick could both
paint.

"It may be noticed in connection with the matter that
Gothic grotesque sculpture is far more brutal in England
than among the rudest continental nations; and the singu-
lar point of distraction is that such ugliness on the Conti-
nent is only used with definitely vicious intent by de-
graded artists ; but with us it seems the main amusement
of the virtuous ones !

" Ever faithfully yours,

"J. Ruskin."

There can be no doubt that Ruskin's con-
demnation of the ugliness or extreme impro-
priety in some of the works of the artists
he named is entirely just. But that must be
borne in mind which Ruskin, in his impatience
of everything that was vile or ugly, unfairly
ip-nored — that the works he denounces were
produced, with all their coarseness and vulgarity
of sentiment and colour, to suit the taste and
satisfy the demand of our great-grandfathers,
with whom grossness often passed for wit and

124 JOHN RUSK IN.

extravagance for humour ; and that it was their
very aptitude for distortion and for investing
their subject with "brutality' which enabled
such lesser lights as Williams, Woodward, and
Bunbury to take equal rank in our ancestors'
estimation with giants such as Gillray, Row-
landson, and " the inimitable George Cruik-
shank."

CHAPTER XL

BRANTWOOD.

Brantwood, the chosen lake-side home of
Ruskin during the last quarter-century of his
life, occupies one of the most favoured spots in
all England. Set in the background of a half-
encircling wood of exquisite grace and mystic
beauty, as seen in the green half-light of its
tranquil shade, and protected from the east
winds by the open moorland that stretches away
still further to the rear, it faces a long slope of
lawn that sweeps down to Coniston Water's
edge.

Behind — the moor, with the water of its

overflowing wells running swiftly down the

rocks with all the fuss of a real cascade ; and

the exalted rock of " Naboth," rising on the

outskirts of the estate, which Ruskin loved to

climb that he might gaze upon a wider view ;

and then, still higher, the great expanse of green

and purple moor which game-birds haunt down

to the very limits of the wood itself. And at

its foot the fishing pond and the soft green turf

of the natural amphitheatre.

ii* 125

126 JOHN RUSK IN.

In front — the narrow lake, sparkling in the
sun and blue as the waters of the Rhone or of
Thun, or grey and ruffling to the breeze that
sweeps swiftly across the lake, tossing Mr.
Severn's sailing boats as they lie at anchor
close by the little creek, or thwarting them and
their skipper as they seek their moorings on a
squally day. Then the rising banks beyond of
broken preen, with white-faced houses blinking
behind their trees, and the quiet, grey village
nestling away to the right ; and the Old Man
of Coniston himself, towering above the smaller
hills that close like guards around his knees.

To the left, the road that skirts the shore
loses itself quickly among the trees ; but the
full length of the lake itself is seen away down
to where the water gleams beyond Peel Island
five miles and more away.

Upon such a view, with its range of hills
draped in hanging cloud and clinging mists, or
clear cut against the summer sky, would Rus-
kin stand and gaze, peering beneath his hand
when the light was strong, many times a day ;
never tiring of the ever-changing scene, and
finding in it a reminiscence of his beloved Alps,
and deriving real consolation when his days of
travel were complete.

In the midst of this land of delight Brant-
wood stands, once the house of Mr. W. J.

e>r^> ■ y

TP. I ] EW Y

JC LIBRA

ASTQP
Til :

BRANTWOOD.

129

Linton, the great wood-engraver. How Ruskin
acquired it, he has himself amusingly told :
"Then Brantwood was offered me, which I
bought, without seeing it, for fifteen hundred
pounds (the fact being that I have no time to
see things, and must decide at a guess, or not
act at all). Then the house at Brantwood — a
mere shed of rotten timber and loose stone — had
to be furnished. . . The repairs also prov-
ing worse than complete rebuilding. . . I
got myself at last seated at my tea-table, one
summer, with my view of the lake — for a net
four thousand pounds all told. I afterwards
built a lodge, nearly as big as the house, for a
married servant, and cut and terraced a kitchen
garden cut out of the ' steep wood ' — another
two thousand transforming themselves thus
into 'utilities embodied in material objects.'"
So that he estimated the value in 1877 at five
thousand pounds. But since then Brantwood,
with its new buildings, has grown steadily up
the hill, and wells have been sunk and the
place improved with new rooms south and
north and east, until it distinctly " rambles,"
comfortably and cheerfully, more than ever it
" rambled " before.

Entering from the private road, which after-
wards disappears through an archway beneath
the house and the outbuildings, the visitor finds

i3o JOHN RUSK IN.

himself in a square hall, remarkable chiefly
for being hung with cartoon-drawings by Mr.
Burne-Jones, and other pictures besides. On
the left lies the old dining-room, where visi-
tors were permitted to smoke after the Pro-
fessor had retired for the night ; in front the
passage leading to the large dining-room —
specially constructed with a great number of
windows for the sake of the view — on the walls
of which hang those portraits of Ruskin by
Northcote, to which reference will be made
later on. Here also are the portraits of Rus-
kin's parents by the same artist, that of the
father being incontestably the finer of the two ;
and above the fireplace that splendid Titian,
"A Doge of Venice/' which played the promi-
nent part of dumb witness in the trial of
" Whistler versus Ruskin ; " and beside it a
most interesting autographic portrait of Turner,
duly inscribed sua manu and wrought, with all
its delightful errors of draughtsmanship, when
the artist was but sixteen years of age.

Doubling sharply to the right after entering the
street door is the drawing-room. Bookcases
full of best editions of the best books — his
own and others' — and displaying notable bind-
ings, stand against the walls, Scott's novels and
historical and critical works in quite a variety
of sizes appearing to preponderate. Charac-

JOHN RUSKIN, 1877.

FROM THE BUST BY BENJAMIN CRESWICK.

{See p. 1S8.)

- - ND

BRANTWOOD. 133

teristically enough, one edition of his works
does not bear the surname upon their richly-
bound backs, but "Sir Walter' only, suggest-
ing the familiar reverence in which Ruskin
held the author whose "every word," he in-
sisted, should be included among the " Hun-
dred Best Books." Exquisite examples of
Prout's pencil drawings, of Burne-Jones ("Fair
Rosamund"), and of Ruskin's own beautiful
studies of the interior of St. Mark's at Venice
-—one of them, perhaps, the most important of
all his artistic productions, together with his
copy of Botticelli's "Zipporah" — adorn the
walls as well. Cases of shells in infinite
variety, of great rarity and equal beauty, and
a few minerals of various formation reveal that
other side of Ruskin's taste and knowledge
which those forget who thought and talked of
him only as an art-critic. On the mantelpiece
are superb examples of cloisonne enamel, whose
rich blue rivals the colour of the finest products
of Nankin. And all around are books and
ornaments which the connoisseur must seek
out and appreciate for himself, for they are not
displayed or thrust forward as is commonly
the case in treasure-houses such as this.
And they serve, perhaps, to emphasize the fact
— so remarkable and striking at first — that the
furniture throughout the house has no flavour

i34 JOHN RUSK IN.

—no taint, I should say — of " high art." No
particular attempt is made at artistic beauty :
no spindle-legs make proclamation of " culture,"
nor Morris-paper of "aesthetics." The furni-
ture, for the most part, belonged to Mr. Ruskin
pere ; and, sound and solid as the day it was
made, seeming to bear its date of "1817"
carved on its face as the year of its creation.

Beside the drawing-room — and, like it, over-
looking the lake — is the study, where so many
happy working hours of the Professor were
passed. Here, about him, were many of his
most loved possessions. Beside the doorway
stands his great terrestrial globe ; above it, and
flanking the door on either hand, several fine
Turner water-colours. On the right, at the end
of the room, is the fireplace, and above it a
Madonna and Child, one of the most exquisite
examples of the faience of Lucca della Robbia,
" fashioned by the Master's own hand, and ab-
solutely perfect," as Ruskin said the first time I
saw it. Here, beside the hearth and next to the
window, was the Professor's favourite corner.
Here he would sit in his old-fashioned, high-
backed chair, with a small table before him, on
which he would have a couple of books or so,
or his writing materials, and always glasses of
flowers ; and from them he would ever and
again raise his eyes and gaze wistfully or in ad-

THE N b,VV YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY,

TIU

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

BRANTWOOD. 137

miration over the lake or at the varying skies,
which, as he once said, "I keep bottled like
my father's sherries." Bookcases abound, and
presses and cabinets. In the first low press
stretching across the room is that wonderful
collection of Turner drawings too precious to
be allowed to hang upon the walls. Framed
and hermetically sealed, they are slid upright
into grooves as plates are slid into the rack by
the scullery-maid. Further on is the writing-
desk proper, and behind it that wonderful huge
press that holds half the lions of Brantwood.
Below are the mineral-cabinets. One series of
drawers contains nothing but opals. Pulling
out one in which lumps of stone, veined or
plastered with large masses of dark-blue opal,
"There!" said the Professor, " never before, I
verily believe, have such gigantic pieces of opal
been seen — certainly not pieces that possess
that lovely colour. Fm very strong in stones,"
he went on, " and this collection of agates is
the finest in the kingdom." In another series
are the crystals, and in yet another rich speci-
mens of gold in every condition in which it has
been found ; and so forth and so forth through-
out the whole extent of the great nest of
drawers.

Above is a collection, almost unmatched, of

splendid books and manuscripts of all periods,

12*

1 38 JOHN RUSK IN.

of special interest on their own account, and
sometimes on that of previous possessors. The
engrossed mss. of the tenth, twelfth, and thir-
teenth centuries are of exceptional beauty.
"I know of no stronger proof of the healthy
condition of the Church at that time," said
Ruskin, as he showed me the books with pride,
fingering them with loving familiarity, yet some-
times, I thought, with a sort of easy indifference,
" than the evidence of these books, when they
used to write their psalm-books so beautifully
and play with their initial letters so freely and
artistically. Of course, the faces in all such
manuscripts are very badly drawn, because the
illuminators were sculptors rather than artists,
in our sense of the word."

Transcending in interest all the more modern
volumes are the original Scott manuscripts
of several of the Waverley Novels — of "The
Fortunes of Nigel," "The Black Dwarf,"
"Woodstock," " St. Ronan's Well," and " Pev-
eril of the Peak." " I think," he said, taking
down one of these well-cared-for volumes,
" that the most precious of all is this. It is
'Woodstock.' Scott was writing this book
when the news of his ruin came upon him.
He was about here, where I have opened it.
Do you see the beautiful handwriting ? Nowr
look, as I turn over the pages towards the end.

BRANTWOOD. 139

Is the writing one jot less beautiful ? Arc there
more erasures than before? That assuredly
shows how a man can, and should, bear adver-
sity." For these mss., as for the quintessence of
Scott himself, Ruskin had the profoundest rever-
ence and love, and he was ever on the watch to
increase his collection. One occasion that did
arise became a very sore recollection to him, for
leaving an unrestricted, but presumably discre-
tionary, limit with his friend and bookseller,
Mr. F. S. Ellis, he was doomed to disappoint-
ment as an ultra-fancy price was reached.
" I've been speechless with indignation," he
wrote to him, " since you let go that ' Guy
Mannering' ms." And again, later on : "What
on earth do you go missing chance after chance
like that for ? I'd rather have lost a catch at
cricket than that ' St. Ronan's.' . . . Seri-
ously, my dear Ellis, I do want you to secure
every Scott manuscript that comes into the
market. Carte blanche as to price — I can trust
your honour ; and you may trust, believe me,
my solvency." But the " St. Ronan's " was not
lost for good, for in due time it became one
of the five Scott mss. in the famous study at
Bran two od.

The first floor is leached by a stairway
parallel with the dining-room passage. Its walls
are hung — as are most of the rooms and cor-

i4o JOHX RUSK IN.

ridors — with pictures and drawings of great
interest: a noble canvas, unfinished, by Tin-
toret, and drawings by Prout, Ruskin (one in
particular very Proutish), and others. Above
the study is the guest-room, known as the
"turret-room," with its Turners and its Prouts,
and especially delightful for the look-out it
affords round three points of the compass by
day, and by night for the splendid view of the
starlit sky. At the other end of the corridor is
the room, situated over the drawing-room, of
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Severn, and between the
two the bedroom occupied by the Professor.
So small, so unassuming, one would say it was
the least important in the house. In front of
its single window, which lights it well, stands
the low table ; on the left wall a bookcase with
its precious volumes and missals — one of which,
I believe, belonged to Sir Thomas More — and
on the right the wash-hand-stand, the fireplace,
and the little wooden bedstead. The last-
named, with the doorway, occupies nearly the
whole wall facing the window ; and the little
room, as a whole, with its plain furniture and
plainer chintz, seems rather the retreat of an
anchorite than the sanctum sanctoriim of the
man whose taste was unsurpassed in England,
and whose love of beauty and daintiness was
keen and insatiable. But it is in the wonderful

- ™J_ j«t gmK

*^£pshs«"

Hm^.

- -j

-5

- -■

«-;

jimiiiiiM mi .fc»i,«

- ••

•^

. —

— s.

«f* -■ rt

—

-s

—

Z-

THE HE

-
i

BRANTWOOD 143

Turners which paper the room that its glory
lies — drawings, every one a masterpiece, that
so Mow in their white mounts and frames of
gold with all the colour and fancy and exquisite-
ness of touch and the magic of distance, that
they have long been famous in the land.

"Look around at them," said Ruskin, with-
out a shadow of the enthusiasm of the collector,
but with the quiet confidence of the connois-
seur, when he took me up for the first time to
his bedroom to act the showman to his treas-
ures. "There are twenty of Turner's most
highly-finished water-colours, representing his
whole career, from this one, when he was quite
a boy, to that one, which he executed for me.
There is not one of them which is not perfect
in every respect. Now here is what is proba-
bly the most beautiful painting that William
Hunt ever did, and it hangs among the Turners
like a brooch — with that drawing of my father's
above it. I hold this to be the finest collection
of perfect Turner drawings in existence, with
perhaps a single exception."

At right angles to the principal corridor runs
another which leads to the newer portions of
the house — to the rooms of the younger mem-
bers of the family, to the schoolroom of the
little ones, with its window built out for the
view's sake, to Mr. Arthur Severn's large

144 JOHN RUSKIN.

studio and the greater play-room. Thence ac-
cess most easily had to that lodge which Ruskin
built in the grounds, " nearly as big as the
house for a married servant," and which later
contained Miss Severn's own little temple of
ease. And about the whole place there is that
air of prosperity and comfort and taste, though
not of luxury nor display, which might be ex-
pected in such a home — an air of peace, happi-
ness, and bright contentment, of artistic and
intellectual activity.

CHAPTER XII.

"THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE."

To Ruskin's love of feminine society, and
his profound respect and admiration for the
sex, justice has already been done. But al-
though he knew well many of the most distin-
guished and accomplished women of the day,
it was in his own home that Ruskin found the
truest sympathy, the warmest affection, and,
perhaps, the most efficient aid — in the person
of his cousin and adopted daughter, Mrs.
Arthur Severn. It was in 1864, a month
after old Mr. Ruskin died, that that lady
first shed her gentle light upon his house-
hold, and soon became, what she ever con-
tinued to be, his Angel in the House. How
his mother yearned for companionship after
her husband's death, and how she "provi-
dentially" secured the affection and the society
of her little kinswoman — Joan Agnew — Ruskin
has himself told with equal simplicity and grace
in that last chapter of " Praeterita " gratefully
devoted to "Joanna's Care." "I had a notion
she would be ' nice,' and saw at once that she

g k l3 145

x46 JOHN RUSK IN.

was entirely nice, both in my mother's way and
mine ; being seventeen years old. And I very
thankfully took her hand out of her uncle's and
received her in trust, saying — I do not remem-
ber just what. . ." And later he continues :
" Nor virtually have she and I ever parted
since. I do not care to count how long it is
since her marriage to Arthur Severn, only I
think her a great deal prettier now than I did
then ; but other people thought her extremely-
pretty then, and I am certain that everybody
felt the guileless and melodious sweetness of
the face." And he goes on to describe how,
"almost on our threshold," her first conquest
was made, for Carlyle rode up the front garden
and stayed the whole afternoon, and dined ;
and, later on, paid "some very pretty com-
pliments" to the account of Miss Joan Ruskin
Agnew.

No memoir of Ruskin. however brief, can
omit mention of the influence for good that
Mrs. Severn exercised upon Ruskin's life.
She had gone to stay with Mrs. Ruskin at
Denmark Hill for seven days, while Ruskin
went to Bradford — and stayed for seven years.
And when her kinswoman died it was with one
hand in hers, while the son held the other.
Not only did she bring lightness into the house,
and filled the character of Dame Durden as

"THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE." 147

delightfully and as satisfactorily as ever Miss
Esther Summerson did for Mr. Jarndyce, but
she helped the Professor in his mineralogical
studies and arrangements. She led him — as he
himself has admitted — to a fuller understanding
of his beloved Scott and of Scottish genius ; and
she widened his knowledge and appreciation of
music.

It was with great glee, and with full sense of
paternal responsibility, that just two years after
her arrival under his mother's roof Ruskin
undertook to pilot Lady Trevelyan, her niece
— Miss Constance Hilliard — and his own charge
— Miss Agnew — for a voyage through Italy.
" Constance Hilliard," wrote Ruskin — she be-
came Mrs. W. H. Churchill later — " nine years
old when I first saw her there, glittered about
the place in an extremely quaint and witty way,
and took to me a little, like her aunt. After-
wards her mother and she . . . became
important among my feminine friendships."
And so it fell out that Ruskin undertook to
travel with them to Italy ; but the war between
Prussia and Austria fell out, too, and the plans
had to be radically altered. Concerning this
journey and annotating it, are a number of
Ruskin's letters to his private secretary which
lie before me as I write ; and from them I
quote some of the most interesting passages.

148 JOHN RUSK IN.

The tour had been carefully mapped out. The
travellers left in the last week of April, 1866,
and the first letter is as follows : —

"Paris, 27th April, 1866.

"We are getting on nicely. My address will be, Poste
Restante, Vevay, Canton Vaud, Suisse. Send me as little
as you possibly can. Tie up the knocker — say I'm sick —
I'm dead. (Flattering and love-letters, please, in any
attainable quantity. Nothing else.) Necessary business in
your own words, if possible, shortly, as you would if I was
really paralytic, or broken-ribbed, or anything else dread-
ful. And after all explanation and abbreviation don't ex-
pect any answer till I come back. But, in fact, I've a fair
appetite for one dinner a day; my cousin likes two, but I
only carve at one of them. Tell Ned this. The Conti-
nent is quite ghastly in unspeakable degradations and
ill-omenedness of ignoble vice every where."

Then Lady Trevelyan, the ill-fated com-
panion of their journey, fell ill and detained
them, first in Paris and again in Neufchatel,
whence, on the 13th of May, there came:

"I am entirely occupied to-day by the too probably
mortal illness of one of the friends I am travelling with,
but I may be yet more painfully so to-morrow. Please
post enclosed, and say to everybody whom it may concern
that that portrait of Mr. Mawkes is unquestionably Turner
by himself, and, on the whole, the most interesting one I
know. I gave Mr. Mawkes a letter to this effect six
months ago, or more."

Four days later Ruskin wrote the news of
Lady Trevelyan's death, which, together with

MRS. ARTHUR (JOAN RUSKIN) SEVERN.

FROM THE PORTRAIT IN COLOURED CHALK BY JOSEPH SEVERN.

PUBLIC LIBRARY,

ASTOR, LENOX AND
T1LDEN FOUNDATIONS.

"THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE." 151

the war in Italy, would probably alter all his

plans. Then a move was made to Thun ; and

from the lake-side Ruskin wrote the following

characteristic note : —

"Thun, 21st May.

"I've had a rather bad time of it at Neufchatel, what
with Death and the North Wind — both Devil's inventions,
as far as I can make out ; but things are looking a little
better now, and I have had a lovely three hours' walk by
the lake shore, in cloudless calm, from five to eight this
morning, under hawthorn and chestnut — here just in full
blossom, and among other pleasantnesses too good for
mortals, as the North Wind and the rest of it are too bad.
We don't deserve either such blessing or cursing, it seems
to poor moth me."

Interlaken was the next place of sojourn.
On the 26th May Ruskin wrote : —

"All you've done is right, except sending Mr. Henry
Vaughan about his business. He is a great Turner man.
Please write to him that he would be welcome to see any-
thing of mine, but I would rather show them to him my-
self. Also, don't take people to Denmark Hill, as it would
make my mother nervous. I'm pretty well ; my two
ducklings all right."

Four days later he writes from the same

place : —

"I have answered the Vice- Chancellor, saying I'll come
after the long vacation. If I ought to come before he
must tell me by a line to Denmark Hill. . . I have
had long letters to write to Lady Trevelyan's sister, and
I'm much tired. Joan is well and Constance, and there's
no one else in the inn just now, and the noise they make

1 52 JOHN RUSKIN.

in the passages is something — I was going to say i unheard
of,' but that's not quite the expression."

Another letter from Interlaken, in which he
says: "I am pretty well, much as usual; fresh
air seems to do me little good, and foul little
harm ;" and another from Meyringen announces
the arrival of the party at Lucerne, whence he
writes delightedly, on Friday, 22nd June:

"That 'nice, quiet Miss Hilliard ' was dancing quad-
rilles with an imaginary partner — (a pine branch I had
brought in to teach her botany with !) — all round the
breakfast table so long yesterday morning that I couldn't
get my letters written, and am all behind to-day in conse-
quence. . . I've got Georgie's letter. I'm too good-
for-nothing to answer such divine things."

Business communications followed from
Schaffhausen and Berne, chiefly with regard
to a certain wandering letter which was " start-
ing in pursuit of me to Interlaken and thence-
forward. It will catch me at Vevay at last, I
believe, after making its own Swiss tour." And
the writer continues : "I am sadly tired — dis-
gusted with the war and all things. I have
been very anxious about the two children since
I was left alone with them, but it would have
disappointed them too cruelly to bring them
home at once."

The 4th of July found Ruskin and "his
ducklings " at Geneva, whence he wrote :-—

JOHN RUSKIN, 1S80.

FROM THE BUST BY SIR EDGAR BOEHM, BART., R.A.

{See J>. /go.)

ARY,

OX AND
"ILBEI

"THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE." 155

"My little daisy — Miss Hilliard — is wild tc-day about
jewellers' shops, but not so wild as to have 10 love to
send you. So here you have it, and some from the other
one, too, though she's rather worse than the little one,
because of a new bracelet. They've been behaving pretty
well lately, and only broke a chair nearly in two this
morning running after each other."

Returning by way of Interlaken, Mr. Ruskin
and his wards came back to Denmark Hill,
after an absence of about three months, while
the great war was proceeding and preventing
them from reaching Italy ; but the time, as may
be seen in " Prseterita," was occupied by a
journey of such delight that Mrs. Severn has
declared that it was one of the most pleasurable
memories of her youthful days.

It was in 1870 that Miss Agnew was married
to Mr. Arthur Severn, the eminent water-colour
painter, and became the " Joan Ruskin Severn "
whose name is so closely linked with that of
the Professor as his most trusted friend and
counsellor, and the cheerful companion and
guardian of his age. He always rejoiced in
her company, and when he chanced to be ab-
sent for a brief time he would send her daily
letters of cheery import ; and the delight with
which he watched her family grow up around
him (for he would not spare her even when she
was married — especially when she was married)
equalled the pleasure he found in the friend-

156 JOHN RUSK IN.

ship of her husband. But to the last, I think,
he was always a little regretful that, although
she had married the husband whom he wel-
comed cordially as the companion best fitted
for "his darling," he could not overbear the
individuality of the artist to the point of making
him in all respects a true disciple of the
Ruskinian theory of painting.

CHAPTER XIII.

HOME-LIFE AT CONISTON.

But for the occasional access of illness in
his later years, and the periodical intrusion of
worrying attacks or harassing troubles — as the
sound of battle murmurs from afar, though
sometimes, too, of persecution nearer home —
the life of Ruskin in his retreat at Coniston
was one of sweet peace and luxurious quiet.
He lived, in a measure, by rote, ordering his
life carefully — both the time for work and the
time for leisure.

Never, indeed, was man more methodical in
his work than Ruskin, nor more precise and
regular in obedience to the rules he laid down
for his guidance. From first to last his work-
ing hours were from seven in the morning till
noon, and for no consideration would he ex-
ceed his limit. Within those five daily hours
all his work was produced — not only his books,
but his business and private correspondence.
Work in the afternoon was by himself for-
bidden, unless it took the form of reading, and
never under any circumstances, save in the ex-
tremely exceptional case of an important note,

14 157

1 58 JOHN RUSK IN.

would he write letters in the evening. On one
occasion, at a time when he was busily engaged
upon one of his books, he wrote to a gentleman
who afterwards became his confidential secre-
tary for a time :

" I am ashamed of myself when I look at the date of
your letter, but it arrived when I was far from well and in
a press of work, and as I had only to answer with sincere
thanks — and I find my gratitude will always keep — I put
off replying till I am ashamed to reply."

And nine years later, in May, 1865, writing
to the same person, who was now about to
enter on his secretarial duties and occupy the
position of friendship he afterwards forfeited,
he wrote : —

" I could not even read your letter last night. I was at
dinner, and I never answer or read letters after ' business
hours ' — I never see anybody — my best friends — but by
pre-engagement. Ask the Rossetti's or anyone else who
knows me. I can't do it, having my poor, little, weak
head and body divided enough by my day's work. But do
not the less think me — ever faithfully yours."

Those only who saw Ruskin at home can
claim properly to have known him. There
within his own atrium was little siom of the

dogmatism that characterised his appearance
in the lecture-room, or the shyness that so
often attended him in the drawing-room of
society and touched his deportment with a sus-

HOME- LIFE AT CONISTON. i$9

picion of gaucherie. Writing of him in 1855,
James Smetham said : " I wish I could re-
produce a good impression of John for you,
to give you the notion of his ' perfect gentle-
ness and lowliness.' . . He is different at
home from that which he is in a lecture be-
fore a mixed audience, and there is a spiritual
sweetness in the half-timid expression of his
eyes." As he was in 1855 so he was in 1893:
keen in respect to every subject which he dis-
cussed, modest in respect to those in which he
thought his interlocutor the better versed, and
uncompromisingly emphatic when well upon
his own ground. " Old Mrs. Ruskin," said
Smetham, " puts ' John ' down, and holds her
own opinions, and flatly contradicts him ; and
he receives all her opinions with a soft rever-
ence and gentleness that is pleasant to wit-
ness." And so he remained to the end —
opinionated, undoubtedly, as he had a right
to be, but gentle and considerate with his
friends, as he had before been filially rever-
ential to his mother.

With his life at Denmark Hill, Ruskin made
the world sufficiently acquainted in his writings.
At Brantwood his life was necessarily of a
more tranquil order, and, perhaps, more in
accordance with the habits of a country squire.
In weather that was "too fine and lovely to

160 JOHN RUSK IN.

think of rascals in," as he wrote to me once
apropos of certain artistic troubles that were
brewing in London, he would climb the hills
or walk along the lake-side, wander over the
moor or cut away the underwood ; or he
would romp with Mrs. Severn's youngest
children, or " play cricket ' (more properly
battledore and shuttlecock) with the elder
ones. For "cricket," indeed, " Di Pa' (as he
was fondly love-named) was in great request;
but, in truth, he was no great hand at the
sport, and his protest to Mr. Ellis that he
would rather have missed a catch at cricket
than that Scott manuscript must be taken
rather as a bit of humorous self-criticism than
as serious judgment of his powers at the game.
He was a tireless walker, and almost to the
last he would ramble for hours during the day,
attended by his valet, Baxter, or leaning on
Mrs. Severn's arm, when the weather per-
mitted, and the keen air threatened him with
neither neuralgia nor chilblains.

Until the latter years of his life he loved
to read Scott in the evening, and the family
was expected to sit round and listen while
he rendered one or other of the Waverley
Novels with that completeness of realisation
that few could equal. He would modify his
voice for the various characters, and would

HOME-LIFE AT CONISTON. 161

revel in the Scottish accent, which lie £ave to
perfection. As age began to tell upon him
he would sometimes drop asleep for a moment
or two in the middle of a chapter ; but on
awaking with a guilty start he would neverthe-
less continue the appointed reading just as if
nothing had happened.

On the occasion of the visit to which I have
before referred, the Scott-reading days were
over. Ruskin no longer took his meals with
the family, but alone in his study ; partly be-
cause, in accordance with the doctor's mandate,
he ate very slowly, and partly because he found
that the lively interest he took in the conversa-
tion had a deleterious effect upon his digestive
processes. He would take an early breakfast
in bed, comfortably propped by pillows and
warmly wrapped in his dressing-gown, down
the front of which his grey beard flowed with
patriarchal dignity. He would then dress and
descend to the study, when, after another break-
fast, he would go out until a half-hour before
luncheon time. Then, after resting for a time,
he would sally forth again ; and, on returning, he
would sit and think, or read. In the course of
reading he would often annotate a book ; and I
remember the amusement with which it was re-
marked that an author's declaration of what he
could " plainly see " had called forth a marginal
/ 14*

1 62 JOHN RUSK IN.

note of " you owl ! " After dinner the Professor
— or " Coz," as he was usually spoken of by Mrs.
Severn in her own house — would come into the
drawing-room and ensconce himself in his chair,
with that " back-cuddling- ' posture that was
peculiar to him. Then, as he sipped at his cup
of coffee, and afterwards at his glass of port,
the chess-table was brought out, and the Pro-
fessor and Mr. Arthur Severn, or the visitor,
would settle down to a game. For, as it has been
said, Ruskin passionately loved a game of chess.
He had been a master of it, and played with
great rapidity and considerable brilliancy. At
one time he was a constant visitor to the Mas-
kelyne and Cooke entertainment, where on at
least one occasion he took a hand in the rubber
with " Psycho ; ' and whenever a new chess-
playing automaton made a public appearance
he would endeavour to try conclusions with it.
Indeed, it was a matter of pride to him that he
had obtained more than one victory over the
famous player, " Mephisto," at the time when
it was performing at the Crystal Palace with
considerable eclat.

Towards the end of his life he would rather
listen than talk, and was readier to be amused
than to amuse. Nevertheless he entered keenlv
into the subject of conversation, and his blue
eyes flashed intelligence even when he preferred

HOME- LIFE AT CONISTON. 163

to maintain silence. Yet he would talk, and
talk well, if the humour took him. Thus, on
the last evening of my latest visit he was, I re-
member well, more than usually conversational,
and in his brightest humour. The subject of
birds was mooted, and then he fell a-thinking.
" Ah ! " he said, with his quaint-sounding r-less
articulation, " I have made a great mistake.
I have wasted my life with mineralogy, which
has led to nothing. Had I devoted myself to
birds, their life and plumage, I might have pro-
duced something worth doing. If I could only
have seen a humming-bird fly," he went on with
a wistful smile, " it would have been an epoch
in my life ! Just think what a happy life Mr.
Gould's must have been — what a happy life !
Think what he saw and what he painted. I once
painted with the utmost joy a complete drawing
of a pheasant — complete with all its patterns,
and the markings of every feather, in all its
particulars and details accurate. It seems to me
an entirely wonderful thing that the Greeks,
after creating such a play as ' The Birds,' never
went further in the production of any scientific
result. You remember that perfectly beautiful
picture of Millais' — 'The Ornithologist' — the
old man with his birds around him ? — one of the
most pathetic pictures of modern times." And
thus he talked on during the evening, on one

i64 JOHN RUSK IN.

or other of his favourite subjects, until, at half-
past ten, Mrs. Severn rose without a word and
gently took his arm to escort him to his bed-
room door. He submitted with a loving smile ;
he gently pressed his visitor's hand in both of
his, and saying jocularly, " Good night, old
'un," to Mr. Arthur Severn, and merrily, " Good
night, piggy-wiggy," to one of the young
ladies, the old man moved with genial dignity
to the door and through it made a slow and
stately exit.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSKIN.

It is not a little interesting to see what man-
ner of man was he who had but to put his pen
to paper to set the whole art-world by the ears ;
he kindled our admiration for his literary ex-
cellences even while amusing us by his originality
and his quaintness, startling us with the bitter-
ness of his scorn, with the heat of his eloquence,
and the gall of his contempt and ridicule, tick-
ling us with the delicacy of his banter, or some-
times even with the error of his parti pris, and
charming us with the wealth, beauty, and poetry
of his diction. How did his appearance, ex-
ternal and physical, impress him who had
formed his own conception of the author seen
through his own writings? Truth to tell, the
first sight was a little disappointing. It has
often been said that with Lord John Russell,
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and many more,
he shared the distinction of being one of the
great little men of his day; but this is certainly
not founded upon fact. Mrs. Arthur Severn's

testimony on this point is conclusive. " I grant,

165

166 JOHN RUSKIN.

alas ! " she wrote early in 1891, " that in the last
ten years he has stooped so much that he has
shrunk into what might be considered by some
people a little man ; but about twenty-five years
ago I should certainly have called him much
above the average height. And as a young man
he was well over five feet ten inches — indeed,
almost five feet eleven ; and people who knew
him then would have called him tall ! " This
evidence, incontrovertible by itself, is yet con-
firmed by Dr. Furnivall's preface to Mr. Mau-
rice's little book. " Ruskin," he says, " was a tall
slight fellow, whose piercing and frank blue eye
lookt through you and drew you to him." Thus,
though the slightness of his build reduced the
weight of his figure to little more than ten stone
of humanity, such was the brilliancy of the con-
versationalist that nothing remained but a com-
manding magnetic personality, the sweetness
of whose merry, fascinating smile, and the viva-
cious, deeply sympathetic expression of whose
bright blue eyes removed at once all sense of
size or comparative diminutiveness.

It is, perhaps, to be deplored that the head
and features of " the Professor " were not more
often recorded than is the case. Mr. G. F.
Watts, who has painted a prodigious number
of the most eminent men of the day, never
sought to execute a portrait of Ruskin — "it

JOHN RUSKTN, 1882.

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BARRAUD.

{See p. lOg.)

THE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY,

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILCEN FOUND \TiONS.

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSKIN. 169

would have been impossible for me to attempt
it," said he, for " I should have felt paralysed in
Ruskin's presence." Several artists of distinc-
tion have set those features on canvas, moulded
them in clay, and carved them in marble ; but
it is rather through the photographer that they
will live, with all the thousand and one changes
of expression and humour that no painter or
sculptor could hope to seize so as to give a
complete representation of the man.* More-
over, Ruskin had no special love for being
reproduced : paradoxical as it may sound, his
lack of vanity in respect to his own features

* As late as 1887 Mr. Ruskin wrote to me that "no
photograph gives any of the good in me," and he was
himself more pleased with the accurate truth than with
the obliging amiability of the camera. When the Queen
asked Chalon, the miniaturist, if his beautiful art would
not be killed by photography, then newly-invented, the
Academician replied, with a complacent bow : " Madame,
photography cannot flattere." This, in a measure, Ruskin
felt too, and, I think, a little resented. But he was en-
tirely pleased with Mr. Barraud's portraits of himself, which
he declared were " the first done of him that expressed what
good or character there was in him for his work. ' ' The plate
of himself standing by a tree-trunk was taken when he was
in one of his more frivolous moods. Young ladies and
professional beauties, he said, were taken beneath palm-
branches, or leaning gracefully against a tree, and for that
playful reason he selected the pose — very awkward for a
man of such natural grace of movement as he was — shown
in the photograph reproduced on page 195.

H 15

i7o JOHN RUSKIN.

struck me once, when we were talking on this
subject, as savouring not a little, but not un-
pleasantly, of that very weakness. Yet, on the
other hand, he certainly entertained no strong
objection to sit for his portrait — an objection
which in some men amounts to an absolute
superstition. Isaac D'Israeli keenly observes
in his "Curiosities of Literature": " Marville
justly reprehends the fastidious feelings of
those ingenious men who have resisted the
solicitations of the artist to sit for their por-
traits. In them it is sometimes as much pride,
as it is vanity in those who are less difficult in
this respect. Of Gray, Fielding, and Akenside
we have no heads for which they sat ; a cir-
cumstance regretted by their admirers and
by physiognomists." But here, by the way,
D'Israeli was wrong, for Akenside did sit for
his portrait to Pond in 1754, and it was
engraved in mezzotint by Fisher in 1772.

Certainly, Ruskin's father had no such preju-
dices and scruples, and when his son was not
more than three and a half years old he em-
ployed James Northcote, R.A., to paint a por-
trait of the child. This charming picture, the size
of life, is well known by reputation to readers
of " Fors Clavigera " and of the opening chapter
of " Praeterita." Let Mr. Ruskin himself speak :

"The portrait in question represents a

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IN. 171

very pretty child with yellow hair, dressed
in a white frock like a girl, with a broad
light-blue sash and blue shoes to match ; the
feet of the child wholesomely large in pro-
portion to its body, and the shoes still more
wholesomely large in proportion to the feet.
These articles of my daily dress were all
sent to the old painter for perfect realisation ;
but they appear in the picture more remark-
able than they were in my nursery, because
I am represented as running in a field at
the edge of a wood, with the trunks of its
trees stripped across in the manner of Sir
Joshua Reynolds ; while two rounded hills, as
blue as my shoes, appear in the distance, which
were put in by the painter at my own request,
for I had already been once, if not twice, taken
to Scotland, and my Scottish nurse having
always sung to me as we approached the
Tweed or Esk —

1 For Scotland, my darling, lies full in thy view,
With her barefooted lasses, and mountains so blue,'

the idea of distant hills was connected in my
mind with approach to the extreme felicities
of life, in my Scottish aunt's garden of goose-
berry bushes, sloping to the Tay. But that,
when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little
thinking, I fancy, to get any answer so ex-

i72 JOHX RUSKIN,

plicit) what I would like to have in the dis-
tance of my picture, I should have said 'blue
hills' instead of * gooseberry bushes/ appears
to me — and I think without morbid tendency to
think overmuch of myself — a fact sufficiently
curious, and not without promise in a child of
that a^e."

Of this picture there are two versions, the
first the life-size portrait hanging in Brant-
wood ; and the other an admirable reduced
copy of it, at Mr. Arthur Severn's house at
Heme Hill — the place which belonged at one
time to the Professor's father, and which his
own writings have endeared to all Ruskin-
dom. How far this portrait is an accurate
likeness it is impossible to say, but there is a
manifest similarity between it and the pret-
tily-conceived allegorical subject by the same
artist which represents the child naked, with a
faun or satvr — or, as Mr. Ruskin himself calls
him, " a wild man of the woods" — extracting a
thorn from the foot of the baby-shepherd.
There is no missing the resemblance between
the running child and the poor half-averted,
panic-stricken, little face. This picture, Mr.
Ruskin tells us, was painted at the special
request of old Northcote, who had previously
been so greatly charmed with the quaint repose
and excellent sitting: of the little model.

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IN. 173

Assuming that the first-named portrait gives
a fair impression of the child, we see young
John Ruskin the possessor of a fine intellectual
head, quite exceptional in one so young, with
singularly beautiful blue eyes, and a mouth of
great sensibility. Playing happily in the green
fields "among the lambs and the daisies," he
reveals the same love of nature which has
always been his strongest passion from first
to last. We may safely take it that the like-
ness is a good one, for the artist was one of
the best portrait-painters of his day ; and
although he greatly affected history-painting,
sacred as well as profane, portraiture was his
speciality. By this time, however, Northcote
was a man greatly advanced in years, of whom
Charles Westmacott, in his " Pindaric Ode,"
issued in 1824, had written —

"Northcote, the veteran, let me praise.
For works of past and brighter days."

His star was manifestlv in the descendent,
and only one of his works was afterwards
publicly shown in Somerset House, where the
Royal Academy then held its court. Yet
Ruskin always thought well of the painter,
although he has written so little about him in
his works. Showing me the artist's portrait
of Mr. Ruskin, senior, which hangs in the

15*

i74 JOHN RUSK IN.

di nine- room at Brantwood, and which at once
recalls something of Reynolds's " Banished
Lord" to the memory of the beholder, the
Professor expressed his gratification that his
father " had the good taste and the good
sense to have his portrait painted by so clever
an artist." Neither of these portraits by
Northcote was ever exhibited in the Royal
Academy.

We now come to the year 1842, when Mr.
George Richmond, R.A., painted the full-
length water-colour for Mr. Ruskin's father.
At that time the young graduate was not yet
famous. He had distinguished himself at Ox-
ford ; he had proved himself a born artist, by
the charming drawings he had produced under
the tutorship of Copley Fielding and J. D.
Harding' • ne had shown himself something of
a poet — a " minor ' one, at least — by the
verses, instinct with feeling and imagination,
which he had contributed to a magazine ; a
scientist, by the manner in which he treated
subjects, geological, mineralogical, meteorologi-
cal, and other, as already recorded, in the pages
of Loudon's Magazine of Natural History and
other learned periodicals ; and an inventor, by
his " cyanometer " — an instrument for meas-
uring the depth of blue in the sky. He
had fairly tested his keen critical faculty, as

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IN. 17 s,

the author of the series of papers on the
" Poetry of Architecture," and a work destined
to be much enlarged in defence of Turner,
who was fast becoming the butt of the igno-
rant critics. But his great work — the book
that was to bring him such immortality
as he may enjoy — was as yet unpublished.
The first volume of " Modern Painters," or,
as he was within an ace of calling it, "Turner
and the Ancients," was, indeed, not unwritten;
but it was not issued until the following year.
And when the portrait was hung in the Royal
Academy and catalogued " 1061, John Raskin,
Esq.," there was none so wise as to correct it.

For that portrait, , which is reproduced
through the kindness of Mr. Arthur Severn
and of the artist, Mr. Richmond had plenty of
opportunity for studying his sitter. His senior
by ten years, Mr. Richmond was of the Ruskin
family party which, with Mr. Joseph (otherwise
4< Keats's ") Severn, journeyed through France
and Italy for the purpose of studying nature
and aesthetics in the artistic Elysium of Europe.
He shared his enthusiasm for art and encour-
aged his aspirations ; and he was his com-
panion on other expeditions, for which reason
this first portrait of Ruskin as a man — he was
now in his twenty- fourth year — has a peculiar
interest. It is manifestly like him ; and his at-

i76 JOHN RUSK IN.

titude as he turns from his desk, at which, may
be, he had just been polishing his rounded
periods in the proof-sheets of " Modern
Painters," and was about to make some new
drawing of the distant Alps, is thoroughly
characteristic of the man. The mountain land-
scape background, too, of which Mont Blanc is
the principal feature, is what we might expect
from the boy who asked for " boo hills." But
the spectator cannot but be struck with sur-
prise at his quite unusual tallness. This is a
physical fact which we can hardly accept, tall
though Ruskin undoubtedly was in his youth ;
yet it may be that the natural slightness of the
young author and a certain smallness of the
furniture lent him a height which is misleading
only through lack of proper comparison of pro-
portion. As a work of art the portrait is in
every way charming and interesting, and an ad-
mirable example of the water-colour portraits
with which Mr. Richmond — " dear George Rich-
mond," as Ruskin calls him — was then building
up his reputation.

It shows us the Ruskin militant of those days
— not yet steeped in the bitterness of contro-
versy, but ready for the fray — good-humoured,
sensitive, shrewd, and keen, turning his gentle
and kindly face towards the friend who is paint-
ing him. To judge by the shape of his head

THE PORTRAITS OF RVSKIN. 177

and face, he already belongs to what phrenolo-
gists and physiognomists would call the " eagle
tribe " — the aquiline nose, as they would tell us,
denoting sovereignty over men ; the projecting
brows, perceptiveness with undoubted aesthetic
tendencies ; and the chin, a considerable degree
of reasoning power to direct his strongly-con-
ceived opinions, yet with hardly a correspond-
ing capacity for continuous logical deduction.
Thus has his face been read by an accredited
student of physiognomy. Yet with this version
would the subject of it certainly have disagreed ;
for Ruskin especially prided himself upon his
power of logical deduction and analysis, and
somewhere quotes Mazzini on him to the same
effect.

On these characteristics of face Sir John
Everett Millais dwelt somewhat over-much in
a chalk or pencil-drawing executed about this
time, if we are to judge by the impression it
made on those who saw it. Referring to this
drawing, the late Mr. Woolner, R.A., wrote to
me as follows : — "The Millais pencil-sketch was
in the possession of Lady Trevelyan, wife of
the late Sir Walter Trevelyan, of Wallington.
The likeness, so far as I can remember, was
very good, but the expression that of a hyena,
or something between Carker and that hilarious
animal. Enemies would call the expression

i78 JOHN RUSKIN.

characteristic, but friends would declare that it
did him injustice." Whether this portrait is
the same as that by Sir John, now belonging to
Mr. Severn, I cannot say.

In 1853 Sir John Millais began his brilliant
portrait of the now celebrated art-critic. Ruskin
was known as the author of " Modern Painters,"
he had published his " Seven Lamps of Archi-
tecture," the "Stones of Venice," and other
things, and had assumed the position of the
champion of the cause of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood — a champion plus royaliste que le
roi, more Pre-Raphaelite than the Pre-Raphael-
ites, and with more impetuous enthusiasm in his
own nervous brain and frame than in those
of the whole other seven put together. This
movement had for the last five years profoundly
exercised the minds of the art-world, and no
pen but Ru skin's could have fought its battle
so fiercely, so powerfully, and so eloquently,
nor with so great a measure of success. In
acknowledgment of the yeoman's service he
had rendered and was still rendering, Millais
painted this portrait, which its possessor, Sir
Henry Acland, of Oxford, has so courteously
allowed me to reproduce. Both painter and
sitter were in Scotland, whither the young
author had gone to deliver his " Lectures on
Architecture and Painting," and there, standing

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IN. 179

by the waterfall of Glenfinlas, Millais painted
him, religiously abiding in the execution of the
picture by all the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelite
faith. Ruskin says somewhere that the English-
man is content to have his portrait painted any
way but praying, which was the chosen delight
of the Venetian noble ; and similarly here,
though not on his knees, but wrapped in loving-
reverence of nature, full of that spirit of hu-
mility and reverential awe which all men feel
at times, is the young preacher represented, as
he stands bare-headed by the little cataract
that rushes and dances down the " grey-white
valley' : to join the waters of Loch Lomond.
With rare conscientiousness has Millais ren-
dered every detail in the scene. The geologist
can detect no flaw in the painting of the rocks,
nor can the botanist find aught to carp at in
the representation of lichen, plant, or flower,
Detail was never more truthfully and accurately
set on canvas than here in this small frame,
measuring in all but eight-and-twenty inches
by twenty-four, while in respect to technique
the painter has rarely excelled the perfect
execution of this work, which he completed
in 1854, the year after his election into the
Academy.

Nor is the character of the figure at all
unworthy of the still-life in this remarkable

180 JOHN RUSK IN.

picture. The man is seen at a moment when
his enthusiasm is lost in contemplation. The
hair, always luxuriant, even to the last, is
thrown back in somewhat heavy masses from
his temples, and reveals once more, and, per-
haps, more successfully than heretofore, the
stamp of man he was. Drawn between profile
and three-quarter face, the upper part of the
head is perfectly rendered ; but the aquilinity
of the nose is not sufficiently emphasized, nor
is the full sensibility of the mouth made quite
as much of as it deserves — and his mouth
was one of his most remarkable features. In
this connection a further extract from Mr.
Woolner's private reminiscences of Ruskin's
appearance may be appropriately quoted : —

"As to Ruskin's mouth, it would be hard
for anyone to read that feature. Rossetti told
me that wThen a boy Ruskin had part of one of
his lips bitten off by a dog. The mouth is the
most expressive of all features, and tells the
history of its owner's nature better than any
other ; but under the circumstances how would
it be possible to read it accurately ? To fill up
the gaps in Sappho's verse would be but a
schoolboy's exercise compared to such a task.
Lavater might give a hint, or the Greek expert
who discovered that Socrates was a sensual
fellow, but I don't think any modern physiog-

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IN. 181

nomist could do much with this modern in-
stance. Of course, the main force of his head
is perception, this faculty being unusually de-
veloped ; but, so far as I remember, I do not
think there is anything else out of the common
in the shape of it. His expression is varied
beyond all example in my experience."

Sanguineness and sweetness of tempera-
ment, when not crossed, appear to have been
his chief characteristics at that time. Writing
to me about our friend, as he knew him in
those early days, Mr. Holman Hunt has re-
corded his interesting recollections as follows : —

" When I first met him I was struck by his
great slenderness of build, which was not yet
without remarkable gracefulness of motion in
quiet life. In manner, his persevering polite-
ness and untiring pains to interest me and
others in his possessions almost surprised me,
and it would have been really unbearable to
receive so much attention had he not shown
so much pleasure in gratifying his guests. On
further acquaintance he was quite capable of
expressing the most extreme discontent that
his friends would not adopt all his views. He
was displeased with me for my determination
to £o to the East, and that I did not set
myself to work to found a school. I was
often amused at his ignoring the state of

182 JOHN RUSK IN.

paralysis I was generally in from want of
means. He would ask me why I did not go
to Scotland for a few weeks or months for a
holiday when I appeared overworked? and
more than once he urged me not to delay
leaving England for the purpose of seeing
Italy — when in truth my purse would have
been empty at Dover, and there would have
been no means of making sure of a home
had I returned on foot from the coast. It
was quite strange to witness how this life-
long experience of finding all things that he
wanted at hand had made him, not incapable
of talking of poverty, but without power of
realising how straitness of means prevented
a man from obeying the inclinations of his
mind and body at every turn. Whatever
feeling he professed towards one's purposes,
I can say that I never found him anything
but most gentle and tenderly affectionate, and
although for some years circumstances made
us unable to see one another much, I never
had any reason to think him other than one
of the truest men I had ever met as a noble
friend." It is not uninteresting to seek for
the traits set forth in Mr. Holman Hunt's
generous testimony in the admirable synchro-
nous portrait by Millais.

Three years later, in 1857, Mr. Richmond

JOHN RUSKIN, 1884.

FROM THE BUST BY COXRAD DRESSLER.

iSee J>. IQJ.)

[the new yor
JBLIC LIBRAE'

TOR, LENOX AND

1DATIONS.

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IN. 183

executed a head in chalk, also for Mr. Ruskin
the elder, which is an excellent specimen of
the artist's skill in this kind of portraiture. In
this drawing, as in the water-colour, Mr. Rich-
mond has preferred to show us the gentleness,
thoughtfulness, and brilliance of the friend,
rather than the vigour, the combativeness, and
the earnestness of* the crusader — characteristics
which at the time were most impressed on
the public mind. In both his charming works
it is " Ruskin at Home ' whom the artist has
recorded, not Ruskin the Teacher nor Ruskin
the Missionary. This portrait, which hangs
at Brantwood, and which was brilliantly
engraved by Francis Holl, A.R.A. — Frank
Holl's father — and issued in a reduced size in
one of Mr. Allen's publications, was exhibited
at the Royal Academy in the year it was made.
Mrs. Severn tells me the following pretty cir-
cumstance concerning this head: — "When the
1857 portrait was done by dear, courteous Mr.
Richmond, some friends thought it flattered
Mr. Ruskin ; but Mr. Richmond said, ' No ; it
is only the truth, lovingly told.' "

A few years after Mr. George Richmond
painted his large water-colour head of Professor
Ruskin, Rossetti produced his portrait of his
friend. It is a crayon drawing, not unlike those

which he executed of other members of the Pre-

16*

1 86 JOHN RUSK IN.

Raphaelite Brotherhood. It is simply executed
in coloured chalks, of which the prevailing tint
is red, and represents the young enthusiast in
an attitude in which the artist often placed his
sitters — nearly full-face and looking down. It
is life-size, vignette in form, and belonged to the
late Dr. Pocock, of Brighton ; it is now at Oxford.

Nearly another decade elapsed before any
portrait other than photographic was produced
that I know of. Mr. Ruskin's water-colour
portrait of himself, which is at Heme Hill, was
painted in 1864, or perhaps a year later — a
three-quarter view in pencil, lightly and skil-
fully washed in ; this and another life-size head
belong to Mrs. Arthur Severn. Ten years
afterwards the Professor made two more auto-
graphic efforts, one in pencil and the other in
water-colour — both of which he presented to
his American friend and fellow-traveller, Pro-
fessor C. A. Norton. In 1875, or thereabouts,
a clever modeller, by name Mr. Charles Ash-
more, of Aston, a suburb of Birmingham, pro-
duced a plaster medallion that is an excellent
likeness of Ruskin's features ; but it fails to
impart any vivacity to the face or to give any
of the expression of intellectuality which was
never absent from it. This work, however,
probably took a photograph for its basis.

The following year — that which saw his

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IN. 187

re-election to the Slade Professorship in the
University of Oxford — his features were cleverly
caught by M. Georges Pilotelle, who chanced
upon the Professor as he stood before Turner's
" Python " in the National Gallery. The "light-
ning artist' made a faithful sketch of th^e
thoughtful face, and, re-drawing it in dry-point
upon copper, he introduced it into the series of
portraits of notabilities which he was then pro-
ducing for Mr. Noseda, by whose permission it
appears on page 1 1 1 of the present volume.
It is not uninteresting to compare this head with
that in the Millais picture painted two-and-
twenty years before, and to see how little time
has worked upon the living face, and how
lightly it has dealt with the flowing locks. Here
he is as we of the younger generation knew
him, his favourite sky-blue stiff satin tie wound
round his neck and falling in a bow in the
familiar, double-breasted waistcoat, and match-
ing the deep azure of his clear and fearless
eyes. There is more indecision than might be
expected about the lips, but that, I take it, is
rather the fault of the etcher's needle than of
the Professor's mouth. It may be observed
that the hair is parted on the opposite side — a
merely accidental representation, owing to the
direct sketch upon the copper being reversed
in the printing.

1 83 JOHN RUSK IN.

To the same period, or nearly so, belong
two other portraits: the first, a miniature by
Mr. Andrews, which was exhibited at the Royal
Academy in 1877, and which, being based upon
a previously-produced likeness, need find no
place here ; and the second, a water-colour
drawing by Mr. Arthur Severn. This interest-
ing little picture, painted in full-length, together
with the chalk drawing by Millais, is in the
hands of the painter, and I respect his wishes
in reserving any description of it.

Towards the close of the same year — Sep-
tember, 1877 — Mr. Benjamin Creswick pro-
duced his bust under circumstances of some
interest. The sculptor was one of the many
artists whose talent Mr. Ruskin "discovered'
in his long life of beneficent watchfulness, and
whose education he personally undertook, while
charging himself with the cost of their worldly
necessities. Mr. Creswick, in later years
Lecturer to the Birmingham School of Art,
sought to express his gratefulness for the
generosity and interest of his patron— who, I
understand, paid all expenses, not only for
himself during four years, but also for his
family (for he married young) and his aged
parents — by modelling the bust in his tenderest
mood, into which he aimed at throwing all the
love and reverence he entertained for his bene-

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IX. 189

factor. Mr. Creswick's introduction to Ruskin
was through the late Mr. Swan, when the late
curator of the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield
was on a visit to the Professor at Brantwood.
" Whilst there," writes Mr. Creswick in refer-
ence to this incident, " he induced him to
give me a sitting for a bust. This was early
in September, 1877. After the first sitting
of an hour the Professor asked me how many
more I should require. ' Five,' I replied.
'After what I have seen of your work,' said
he, 'I will give you as many as you want' " —
for Ruskin took a quite Pre-Raphaelite delight
in watching for how long a time, and with
how much patience, the sculptor would work
at obtaining an expression which the briefest
glance had enabled him to observe. The re-
sult is a bust which has pleased those most
concerned, Ruskin declaring it, while it was
still in progress, as unsurpassed in modern
sculpture except by Thorwaldsen ; while others
regard it as being specially successful in real-
ising one of the sitter's most beautiful ex-
pressions, and entirely characteristic of his
animation when interested by sympathetic con-
versation. The bust, which is in the Ruskin
Museum at Meersbrook Park, Sheffield, repre
sents the Professor in the gown of his degree.
There is also distinctly indicated the slight

190 JOHN RUSK IN.

stoop, or bend, that his friends knew so well,
which afterwards became so much accentuated.
For my own part, judging from the photo-
graph which Dr. Bendelack Hewetson has
kindly taken for me, I cannot help thinking
that, pleasing as it is in expression, the bust
is neither striking as a likeness nor, to be
frank, in point of vigour likely to occupy so
high a position as a work of art, as others have
freely declared. Yet, as I said before, it is a
favourite work with some who are considered
good judges and who certainly were well ac-
quainted with the Professor. A duplicate of the
bust is in the possession of Sir Henry Acland.
The late Sir J. Edgar Boehm, R.A., modelled
a bust of Ruskin for the Ruskin School in
the University Galleries in 1880, and there it
is now placed, carried out in marble upon a
pedestal, in the centre of the large room. The
portrait can hardly be considered a sympa-
thetic one. Not that the sculptor was out of
sympathy with his sitter — as the reader may
judge by the words of the artist, who, writing
to me a short while befoie his death on the
subject of the work, said, "I never saw any
face on which the character and the inside of
the man were so clearly written. He can
never have tried to dissimulate." How true
this is will be felt by all Ruskin' s acquaint-

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IN. 191

ance. Not only could he never have tried
to dissimulate, but that man must have been
hardened indeed who would try to dissimulate
in his magnetic presence, for so fearlessly
truthful was his look that the quiet gaze from
the bright blue eyes must have been strangely
disarming. What appears unsatisfactory about
Sir Edgar's bust is a certain hardness of ex-
pression about the mouth — an absence of those
qualities which rarely failed to endear him at
once to whomever entered into conversation
with him. It is the scholar, the thinker, and
the disputant, rather than the man, that Sir
Edgar shows us.

We now come to the large life-size por
trait by Professor Hubert Herkomer, R.A.
In this likeness, it seems to me, the artist
has sought to place upon the face of his
predecessor in the Slade Chair all the kind-
liness which Sir Edgar Boehm omitted, all
the cheery gentleness and old-world sweet-
ness of disposition that distinguished him.
The Boehm bust shows us something of a
misanthrope ; the Herkomer portrait places
before us the philanthropist, quiet, kindly, and
self-possessed. The brow is, perhaps, a little
too broad, and the projection of the eyebrows
hardly enough insisted upon ; but the character
of the nose and the quaint, expressive mouth

192 JOHN RUSKIN.

are perfectly rendered. This admirable por-
trait is nominally a water-colour; but that
medium, strongly aided by body-colour, is
reinforced with a pulpy substance, and resem-
bles in method of execution the artist's well-
known picture of " Grandfather's Pet." It was
exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1881,
and was etched by the painter in the same
year, the plate being published for him by the
Fine Art Society.

The year 1884 saw a new portrait of " the
Master." Being in London he visited Miss
Kate Greenaway, and there sat to her for the
commencement of a likeness which was never
completed. It was there, doubtless, that his
great admiration for her art sprang up, with
the result with which we are all familiar — the
Oxford lecture on " The Art of England," the
illustrations in " Fors," and many a kindly
reference of enthusiastic approval alike for the
artist's dainty simplicity of style, and for her
original beauty of draughtsmanship. But the
portrait with which the year is to be credited
was the pencil-drawing by Mr. Blake Wirg-
man, subsequently published in the Graphic in
April, 1886. In consenting to sit, the Professor
wrote to the lady who pleaded for Mr. Wirg-
man : " I'll have this portrait different from any
that have been yet — only I always fall asleep

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSKIN. 193

in a quarter of an hour, so everything in the
way of expression must be got, tell the artist,
in ten minutes." Soon after this alarming
notification the first sitting took place at Den-
mark Hill, Ruskin pointing out the particular
view the artist was to take ; and the second in
Mr. Burne-Jones' studio. When the drawing
was finished, and the background worked up
from the study at Denmark Hill, Ruskin put
a few finishing touches to it himself — touches
having chiefly reference to the hair and eye-
brows, about which he was very particular —
and the work went off to the engraver, and has
now found a resting-place in my own collection.
Passing over as unauthentic and unofficial
the portraits by Mr. Emptmeyer and Miss
Webling, both exhibited at the Academy in
1888, I arrive at the bust of Mr. Conrad
Dressier, executed by him in 1884, and ex-
hibited at the New Gallery in 1889. This head,
apart from its inherent merits as a work of art,
is of special interest and value, as being the
only one (so far as I know) which represents
Mr. Ruskin with a beard, as he was known to
his friends since 1881. As a likeness, I must
admit that the engraving hardly does justice to
Mr. Dressler's work — the characteristic stoop,
erect though bent, and the falling cheeks, the
slightly hooked nose, the open, sensitive nos-

I n 17

1 94 JOHN RUSK IN.

trils, the pendant base of the septum, and the
bony brows, do not appear as clearly in the en-
graving as they should— the fault manifestly
lying with the lighting of it in the photograph
from which the block was cut. Speaking to me
of this same bust, which he said was " better
than Boehm's," Mr. Ruskin once said — with a
strong touch of pathos, yet with a look of irre-
sistible humour, " Ah ! it makes me look far
more frantic than ever I've been !" In point
of fact, Ruskin was, as I began by saying, very7
tender as regards his personal appearance ; and
I well remember his unfeigned pleasure when I
told him upon one occasion that he certainly
did not look his years. Readers of " Pras-
terita " will remember the delightful story of
''Little Rosie," when in 1858 Mr. Ruskin paid
a visit to her mother : — " Rosie says never a
word, but we continue to take stock of each
other 'I thought you so ugly,' she told me
afterwards. She didn't quite mean that," the
writer hastens to add ; " but only, her mother
having talked so much of my ' greatness ' to
her, she had expected me to be something like
Garibaldi, or the Elgin Theseus, and was ex-
tremely disappointed." And again he confided,
with mock despondency, to the Lady of Thwaite
how he had recently had his photograph taken ;
that, although the likeness was good, he had

JOHN RUSKIN, 1SS6.

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY HARRAUD.

(See p. ibq.)

THE PORTRAITS OF RUSK IN. i97

come out, as usual, as an ouran^-outancr " I
thought with my beard I was beginning to be
just the least bit nice to look at. I would give
up half my books for a new profile."

Some years ago we were talking about his
portraits, when he took occasion to tell me, in
a sweeping sort of way, that he was dissatisfied
with all that had been done of him, and the
truer and the more candid they were the less he
cared for them. "I like to be flattered, both
by pen and pencil, so it is done prettily and in
good taste," he said, with a candid smile, not at
all ashamed of the little confession. It is, how-
ever, in no sense discreditable to Mr. Dress-
ier if he has not given just that touch of flattery
— even conceding a lack of truth — of which the
Professor admitted his fondness.

" I cannot tell how many sittings we had,"
wrote the sculptor, in a letter in which he de-
scribed with glowing- enthusiasm the fascination
of his visit to the Professor in the spring of
1884. "They took place in the out-house, a
very convenient place for my purpose ; and I
had as many as I wanted, some long and some
short, as the humour served. I had, with the
help of the old valet, made a little platform for
the Professor to sit upon, and from this position
he would watch me at my work for a couple of

hours, sometimes talking the whole of the time,

17*

198 JOHN RUSK IN.

. . . My deepest recollection of Professor Rus-
kin is as he stood one evening after dinner
(during which the conversation had been about
his life and work, and had been more animated
and touching than usual) at the open window
overhanging the lake. The sun had gone down,
and he wistfully looked over towards the Old
Man of Coniston, behind which the sky was still
aglow. He seemed to be mentally reviewing
his life's work. His head was held up, although
his body was slightly stooping, his right hand
behind his back, and his left held on to the case-
ment for support. I was deeply impressed with
the expression of mystery in his face, and deter-
mined to endeavour to reproduce it in my bust.
I have failed in my ideal ; but that is what I tried."
With that picture I close this chapter. The
sun has indeed gone down behind the Grand
Old Man of Coniston ; while the sky is still all
aglow with the fire of his words and the gold
of his beneficent acts. His portrait, his true
portrait, does not exist — it could not exist — not
until the artist's hand can picture in paint or
mould in clay the ever-varying, never-ending
expression and the thousand moods, change-
able but always honest, uncertain in temper but
always good and kind and tender and righteous,
that go to make up the face so lovingly remem-
bered by his friends as that of John Ruskin.

CHAPTER XV.

"THE BLACK ARTS: A REVERIE IN THE

STRAND."

BY JOHN RUSKIN.

[Note. — In the autumn of 1887 Ruskin was
in London, staying, as usual, at Morley's Hotel,
Trafalgar Square, whence a two minutes' walk
would carry him into the National Gallery.
His window overlooked the gallery "where the
Turners are," he said markedly ; but not caring
for the light, he sat with his back towards it,
drawing himself up into one side of it, with his
knees and feet together in his characteristic atti-
tude. The Editorship of the Magazine of Art had
just been confided to me, and my announce-
ment of it seemed to awaken his sympathetic
enthusiasm. He clapped his hands and cried,
" Bravo ! I'm so glad. You have a great
opportunity now for good," and immediately
proposed to contribute an article to its pages.
It was agreed that the paper in question should
appear in the January number, and that it
should be followed by at least one other.
Then he went off to Sandgate to recuperate,

whence he wrote : " I find the landlord and his

199

200 JOHN RUSK IN.

wife so nice and the rooms so comfortable that
I've settled down (so far as I know) till Christ-
mas. But please don't tell anybody where I
am." And a few days later : " When do you
want your bit of 'pleasant' writing? Did I
say it would be pleasant? I have no confi-
dence in that prospect. What I meant was
that it wouldn't be deliberately //^pleasant ;
and I will further promise it shall not be tech-
nical. But I fear it will be done mostly in gri-
saillet. I don't feel up to putting any sparkle
in — nor colour neither." " For one thing," he
wrote on another occasion — for he had now
grown quite enthusiastic over the magazine,
and wras offering a good deal of very accepta-
ble advice, " I shall strongly urge the publica-
tion of continuous series of things, good or
bad. Half the dulness of all art books is their
being really like specimen advertisement books,
instead of complete accounts of anything."
Then followed the announcement: "I have fin-
ished the introductory7 paper ; six leaves like
this, written as close. It will, perhaps, be
shorter than you wished in print, but you will
see it chats about a good many things, and I
couldn't tack on the principal one to the tail of
them ; so that you had better begin your Janu-
ary number with Watts' more serious paper.
Then came the article, but with no title to it ;

*rn

(.U^w

.O-M-^

e*»

'l^W,

M_^

- J <— v~* ^~" W J

^> ^ <^^\ -/■

£_

THE N EW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY,

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

" THE BLACK ARTSr 203

and as the press was waiting a telegram was
despatched to him to supply the omission. The
characteristic reply came : " I never compose
by telegram, but call it ' The Black Arts,' if you
like." A subsequent letter of confirmation
supplied as a substitute "A Reverie in the
Strand " ; and, while protesting against the
telegram, which " always makes me think some-
body's dead," he replied to a question of mine
as to the amount owing to him for the article :
u You are indebted to me a penny a line ; no
more and no less. Of course, counted two-
pence through the double columns." Subse-
quent letters, as well as previous ones, contain
further counsel and criticisms in respect to the
Magazine of Art, and details of arrangement
concerning the articles which were to follow
the first — chiefly bearing on "body-colour
Turners," as a contrast to the introductory
matter, and on " pure composition, as far as I
can without being tiresome ; and there will be
something about skies and trees, and I'll under-
take that the drawings I send shall be repre-
sentable, and not cost much in representing."
But a period of indisposition followed, in which
to his correspondence was appended the vale-
dictory, "And I'm ever your cross old J. R. ; '
and a subsequent journey and return to Brant-
wood, with another spell of illness, made him

204 JOHN RUSK IN.

seek for a spell of complete rest, upon which
it would have been cruel to break in. And so
his intended series of papers remained incom-
plete, and "The Black Arts" remains as much
a fragment of an intended whole as "Proser-
pina," " Love's Meinie," "Deucalion," "The
Laws ol Fesole," " Our Fathers Have Told
Us," and even " Praeterita " itself.]

It must be three or four years now* since
I was in London, Christmas in the North coun-
try passing scarcely noted, with a white frost
and a little bell-ringing, and I don't know Lon-
don any more, nor where I am in it — except
the Strand. In which, walking up and down
the other day, and meditating over its wonder-
ful displays of etchings and engravings and
photographs, all done to perfection such as I
had never thought possible in my younger days,
it became an extremely searching and trouble-
some question with me what was to come of all
this literally "black art," and how it was to in-
fluence the people of our great cities. For the
first force of it — clearly in that field everyone
is doing his sable best : there is no scamped
photography nor careless etching ; and for
second force, there is a quantity of living char-

* October, 1887.

iS //_-

ke hj-^~~z^J<

lo^

LIC LI" U

X AND

" THE BLACK ARTS." 207

acter in our big towns, especially in their girls,
who have an energetic and business-like " know-
all-about-it " kind of prettiness which is widely
independent of colour, and which, with the
parallel business characters, engineering and
financial, of the city squiredom, can be vividly
set forth by the photograph and the schools of
painting developed out of it ; then for the third
force, there is the tourist curiosity and the sci-
entific naturalism, which go round the world
fetching big scenery home for us that we never
had dreamed of: cliffs that look like the world
split in two, and cataracts that look as if they
fell from the moon, besides all kinds of anti-
quarian and architectural facts, which twenty
lives could never have learned in the olden
time. What is it all to come to? Are our
lives in this kingdom of darkness to be indeed
twenty times as wise and long as they were in
the light ?

The answer — what answer was possible to
me — came chiefly in the form of fatigue, and a
sorrowful longing for an old Prout washed in
with Vandyke brown and British ink, or even a
Harding forest scene with all the foliage done
in zigzag.

And, indeed, for one thing, all this labour
and realistic finishing makes us lose sight of
the charm of easily-suggestive lines — nay, of

208 JOHN RUSK IN.

the power of lines, properly so called, alto-
gether.

There is a little book, and a very precious
and pretty one, of Dr. John Brown's, called
"Something about a Well." It has a yellow
paper cover, and on the cover a careful wood-
cut from one of the Doctor's own pen-sketches ;
two wire-haired terriers begging, and carrying
an old hat between them.

There is certainly not more than five minutes'
work, if that, in the original sketch ; but the
quantity of dog-life in those two beasts* — the
hill-weather that they have roughed through to-
gether, the wild fidelity of their wistful hearts,
the pitiful, irresistible mendicancy of their eyes
and paws — fills me with new wonder and love
every time the little book falls out of any of the
cherished heaps in my study.

No one has pleaded more for finish than I in
past time, or oftener, or perhaps so strongly
asserted the first principle of Leonardo, that a
good picture should look like a mirror of the
thing itself. But now that everybody can mir-
ror the thing itself — at least the black and white
of it — as easily as he takes his hat off, and then
engrave the photograph, and steel the copper,
and print piles and piles of the thing by steam,
all as good as the first half-dozen proofs used
to be, I begin to wish for a little less to look at,

v^**-*^ W

*^C tioJ—K.L Ar-*"^ UU^JtA

" THE BLACK ARTS." 211

and would, for my own part, gladly exchange
my tricks of stippling and tinting for the good
Doctor's gift of drawing two wire-haired ter-
riers with a wink.

And truly, putting all likings for old fashions
out of the way, it remains certain that in a given
time and with simple means, a man of imagina-
tive power can do more, and express more, and
excite the fancy of the spectator more, by frank
outline than by completed work ; and that as-
suredly there ought to be in all our national art
schools an outline class trained to express them-
selves vigorously and accurately in that man-
ner. Were there no other reason for such les-
soning, it is a sufficient one that there are
modes of genius which become richly produc-
tive in that restricted manner ; and yet by no
training could be raised into the excellence of
painting. Neither Bewick nor Cruikshank in
England, nor Retsch, nor Ludwig Richter, in
Germany, could ever have become painters ;
their countrymen owe more to their unassuming
instinct of invention than to the most exalted
efforts of their historical schools.

But it must be noted, in passing, that the
practice of outline in England, and I suppose
partly in continental academies also, has been
both disgraced and arrested by the endeavour
to elevate it into the rendering of ideal and

212 JOHN RUSK IN.

heroic form, especially to the delineation of
groups of statuary. Neither flesh nor sculp-
tured marble can be outlined ; and the en-
deavour to illustrate classical art and historical
essays on it, by outlines of sculpture and archi-
tecture, has done the double harm of making
outline common and dull, and preventing the
public from learning that the merit of sculp-
ture is in its surfaces, not its outlines. The
essential value of outline is in its power of sug-
gesting quantity, intricacy, and character, in
accessory detail, and in the richly-ornamented
treatment which can be carried over large
spaces which in a finished painting must be
lost in shade.

But I have said in many places before now,
though never with enough insistence, that
schools of outline ought to be associated with
the elementary practice of those entering on
the study of colour. Long before the patience
or observation of children are capable of draw-
ing in light and shade, they can appreciate the
gaiety, and are refreshed by the interest of
colour ; and a very young child can be taught
to wash it flatly, and confine it duly within limits.
A little lady of nine years old coloured my
whole volume of Guillim's heraldry for me
without one transgression or blot ; and there is
no question but that the habit of even and ac-

"THE BLACK ARTS." 213

curately limited tinting is the proper foundation
of noble water-colour art.

In the original plan of " Modern Painters,"
under the head of " Ideas of Relation," I had
planned an exact inquiry into the effects of
colour-masses in juxtaposition ; but found when
I entered on it that there were no existing
data in the note-books of painters from which
any first principles could be deduced ; and that
the analysis of their unexplained work was far
beyond my own power, the rather that the
persons among my friends who had most
definitely the gift of colour-arrangement were
always least able to give any account of their
own skill.

But, in its connection with the harmonies of
music, the subject of the relations of pure
colour is one of deep scientific and — I am sorry
to use the alarming word, but there is no other
— metaphysical interest ; and without debate,
the proper way of approaching it would be to
give any young person of evident colour-faculty
a series of interesting outline subjects, to colour
with a limited number of determined tints, and
to watch with them the pleasantness, or dul-
ness — a discord of the arrangements which, ac-
cording to the nature of the subjects, might be
induced in the colours.

It is to be further observed that although

214 JOHN RUSK IN.

the skill now directed to the art of chromo-
lithotint has achieved wonders in that mecha-
nism, the perfection of illustrated work must
always be in woodcut or engraving coloured by
hand. No stamped tint of water-colour can
ever perfectly give the gradation to the sharp
edge left by a well-laid touch of the pencil.
And there can be no question (it has so long
been my habit to assert things — at all events
very questionable in the terms I choose for
them — in mere love of provocation, that now in
my subdued state of age and infirmity I take
refuge, as often as possible, in the Unquestion-
able) that great advantage might be gained in
the geography classes of primary schools by
a system of bright color adapted to dissected
maps. In the aforesaid condition of age and
infirmity which I sometimes find it very difficult
to amuse, I have been greatly helped by get-
ting hold of a dissected map or two — four, to
be accurate — Europe, France, England, and
Scotland, and find it extremely instructive
(though I am by way of knowing as much
geography as most people) to put them to-
gether out of chance-thrown heaps, when I am
good for nothing else. I begin, for instance,
in consequence of this exercise, to have some
notion where Wiltshire is, and Montgomery-
shire ; and where the departments of Haute

THE BLACK ARTS."

«5

Loire and Haute Garonne are in France, and
whereabouts St. Petersburg is, in Russia. But
the chief profit and pleasure of the business to
me is in colouring the bits of counties for my-
self, to my own fancy, with nice, creamy body-
colour, which covers up all the names, leaves
nothing but the shape to guess the county by
(or colour when once determined), and opens
the most entertaining debates of which will be
the prettiest grouping of colours on the con-
dition of each being perfectly isolated.

By this means, also, some unchangeable facts
about each district may at once be taught, far
more valuable than the reticulation of roads
and rails with which all maps are now, as a
matter of course, encumbered, and with which
a child at its dissected map period has nothing
to do. Thus, generally reserving purple for
the primitive rock districts, scarlet for the vol
canic, green for meadow-land, and yellow for
corn-fields, one can still get in the warm or cold
hues of each colour variety enough to separate
districts politically — if not geologically distinct ;
one can keep a dismal grey for the coal coun-
tries, a darker green for woodland — the forests
of Sherwood and Arden, for instance — and
then giving rich gold to the ecclesiastical and
royal domains, and painting the lakes and rivers
with ultra-marine, the map becomes a gay and

2i6 JOHN RUSK IN.

pleasant bit of kaleidoscopic iridescence with-
out any question of colour-harmonies. But for
the sake of these, by a good composer in varie-
gation, the geological facts might be ignored,
and fixing first on long -confirmed political ones,
as, for instance, on the blanche-rose colour and
damask-rose for York and Lancaster, and the
gold for Wells, Durham, Winchester, and Can-
terbury, the other colours might be placed as
their musical relations required, and lessons of
their harmonic nature and power, such as could
in no other so simple method be enforced,
made at once convincing and delightful.

I need not say, of course, that in manuscript
illumination and in painted glass, lessons of
that kind are constant, and of the deepest
interest ; but in manuscript the intricacy of
design, and in glass the inherent quality of the
material, are so great a part of the matter that
the abstract relations of colour cannot be ob-
served in their simplicity. I intended in the
conclusion of this letter to proceed into some
inquiry as to the powers of chromolithotint ;
but the subject is completely distinct from that
of colouring by hand, and I have been so much
shaken in my former doubts of the capability
of the process by the wonderful facsimiles of
Turner vignettes, lately executed by Mr. Long,
from the collection in the subterranean domain

" THE BLACK ARTS." 217

of the National Gallery, that I must ask per-
mission for farther study of these results before
venturing on any debate of their probable range
in the future.

CHAPTER XVI.

EPILOGUE.

There is little for me to add to this essay. I
have purposely refrained from enlarging on
Ruskin's many-sided character and achieve-
ments, lest the size of the book should be car-
ried far beyond the appointed limits. But I
have, I think, done enough to direct the atten-
tion of the reader to many of the chief — the
most important or the most amusing— of Rus-
kin's views, and to awaken a desire in some to
study the works of one of the most original
thinkers and most interesting writers of the day.
Opinions may vary as to the practicability of
his synthetic philosophy, and as to the sound-
ness of what he held to be the basis and root-
foundation of all true art. He may have
regarded art too much as a moralist and too
little as a technician ; he may have raised cer-
tain individual workers too high in the compara-
tive scale of art, so that the fall from off
their perches has been inevitable. To all such
errors and more a great reformer is liable,

who single-handed, fierce and determined, and
218

EPILOGUE. 219

in face of all opposition, has sought to lift the
art of his country into a mighty power for
good, and to raise her conscience at the same
time to a level of purity and morality. But
whatever be the fate of his teaching, whatever
the destiny of his artistic fame, he will always
be numbered among the mighty ones of the
pen ; one of the greatest, best, and kindest
creatures who ever fought the people's fight of
righteousness and truth.

INDEX.

Acland, Sir Henry, 21

Agates, Ruskin's collection of, 137

Agnew, Miss, see Mrs. Arthur

Severn
Albany, Duke of, 58
Anderson, Miss Mary, 56
Andrews, Mr., Miniature of Rus-

kin by, 188
Aratra Pentelici, 67
Architectural Magazine, Contri-
butions to the, 21
Architecture and Painting, Rus-

kin lectures on, 178
Architecture, Ruskin's views on, 26
Arrows of the Chace, 105
Art and Architecture, Papers on, 2 1
Art Books, Dulness of, 200
Art of England, Lecture on the,

192
Art, Ruskin's views of, 74, 84
Artist, Ruskin as, 73 et sea.
Ashmore, Charles, Plaster Medal-
lion of Ruskin, 186
Author, Bookman, and Stylist,
Ruskin as, 67 et sea.

Barraud's Portrait of Ruskin, 169
Barrett, Wilson, 43
Bedroom, Ruskin's, 140
Beever, Miss Susannah, 49, 107
Bewick, Ruskin's criticism of, 123
Birds, Ruskin's love of, 163
Bishop of Carlisle, Ruskin's friend-
ship with the, 42
Bishop of Manchester, Discussion

with the, 42
Bishops, Ruskin on, 42
Boehm, Sir J. Edgar, R.A., Bust

of Ruskin by, 190
Bonheur, Madame Rosa, on Rus-
kin, 74

Books, Collection of, 130, 137

Bookselling Trade, Disagreement^
with the, 69

Botticelli, S7, 133

Brantwood, 125 et sea. ; Acquisi-
tion of, 129; Description of,
129 et sea. ; Daily life at, 159

Brown, Dr. John, 208

British Museum, Ruskin arranges
Silicas, 37

Buckland, Dr., Influence on Rus-
kin, 21, IOO

Burne-Jones, Drawings by, 130

Byron, Influence on Ruskin, 71,
109

Carlyle and Ruskin, 31, 71, 99;
visits Brantwood, 146

Carpaccio, 87

Character, Health, and Tempera-
ment of Ruskin, 40 et sea.

Characteristics, Main, of Ruskin's
mind, 41

Charity, Ruskin's, 47, 50 et sea.,

55,93
Chesneau, E., 46

Chess, Ruskin as a player of, 57,
162

Children, Ruskin's love for, 49 ;
Education of, 92, 212

Churchill, Mrs. W. H., 44; trav-
els with Ruskin, 147

Claudian, Ruskin on, 56

Cook, E. T., 70, 80

Cornhill Magazine, Contributions
to, 30, 31

Creswick, Benjamin, Bust of Rus-
kin by, 188

Critic, Ruskin on the, 104

Crown of Wild Olive, 31

9* 221

222

INDEX.

Cruikshank, George, Ruskin's
dealings with and views on,
115 et seq.

Cycling, Ruskin's dislike of, 90

Daily Telegraph, 104

Dale, Canon, as Ruskin's tutor, 18

Dame Wiggins of Lee, 1 16

Darwin visits Brantwood, 102;
Ruskin's views upon his the-
ory, 46, 101

Death, Ruskin's horror of, 57

Degree, Ruskin receives B.A.,
22; LL.D., 31

Discount, Ruskin objects to sys-
tem of, 69

Disraeli and Ruskin, 96

Dixon, Thomas, 106

Drama, Criticism on the Modern,

56
Draughtsman, Ruskin as, 75
Dressier, Conrad, Bust of Ruskin
by, 193 ; Impressions of Rus-
kin, 197
Dyce, W., Advice to Ruskin of, 29

Eagle's Nest, 68

Education, Ruskin's views on, 92

et seq., 2.12.
Elements of Drawing, 68, 106
Ethics of the Dust, 96

Fielding, Copley, Ruskin's early

teacher, 18, 75
Forbes, James, teaches geology to

Ruskin, 1 00
Fors Clavigera, 32, 106
Frondes Agrestes, 107
Funerals, Ruskin's horror of, 58

Generosity of Ruskin, 37, 48 et

seq., 50, 93
Geography, Suggestions for im-
proved teaching of, 214
Geology, Ruskin's study and love

of, 21, 100
Glacier des Bossons, Chamouni, 75
Gladstone, Mr., and Ruskin, 96, 99
Goodwin, Dr. Harvey, Ruskin's
friendship for, 42

Gordon, Rev. Osborne, influence
on Ruskin, 22

Graphic, Portrait of Ruskin pub-
lished in, 192

Greenaway, Miss Kate, Portrait ot
Ruskin begun by, 192; ad-
miration of Ruskin for the
art of, 192

Grimm, Plates of Cruikshank for,
Ii6

Hamerton, P. G., on Ruskin, 25
Harding, J. D., Ruskin's early

teacher, 18, 75
Harrison, W. H., Influence on

Ruskin of, 22
Health, Ruskin's, and its influ-
ence, 40 et seq.
Herkomer, Prof. Hubert, R.A.,

Portrait of Ruskin by, 191
Hill, Miss Octavia, and Ruskin, 33
Hilliard, Miss, see Mrs. Churchill
History of Christian Art, 26
Hogarth, Ruskin on, 123
Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, Let-^

ter to, 109
Holl, Francis, A.R.A., Engraving

of Ruskin by, 185
Home life at Coniston, 157 et

seq.
Hortus Inclusus, 46
Hunt,W. Holman, 26, 76, 143, 181

Illness, Attacks of, 38, 60
Illustrated work, Perfection of, 214
Italy, Ruskin's trips to, 25, 147

Journalistic correspondence of
Ruskin, 103

Lang, Andrew, 88
Leeds Mercury, 104
Letter-writer, Ruskin as,l03 et seq.
Letters, Private, 107
Life of Ruskin, 17 et seq.
Linton, W. J., owned Brantwood,

126
Literary Gazette, The, 104
Long, W., Chromo-lithotints by,

216
Luini, 87

IXDEX.

223

Magazine of Art, Ruskin con-
tributes to, 199 et seq.
Magazine of Natural History, 21
Manchester City News, 104
Manchester Examiner and Times,

104
Manuscript illumination, 216
Mathematics, Ruskin's dislike of,

101
Maurice, Rev. F. D., 31
Millais, Sir John Everett, R.A.,
26; Portrait of Ruskin bv,
178
Mineral Collection, Ruskin's, 137
Mineralogist, Ruskin as, 137
Modern Painters, Publication of,
22 ; Ruskin's valuation of,
67, 213
Monetary Gazette, The, 104
Morning Post, The, 104
Morris, William, on Ruskin, 91
Muscle versus Machinery, 89

Northcote, James, R.A., Portraits
of Ruskin, 130, 170; Rus-
kin's esteem for, 173

Norton, Professor C. A., Gift of
Portrait to, 186

Outline, Value of, 211

Oxford, Ruskin enters Christ-
church, 21; endows Taylor-
ian Galleries, 37; Lectures,
68

Pall Mall Gazette, 104

Palmerston and Ruskin, 96

Paris, Ruskin in, 148

Philosophy, Ruskin's early, 83

Picture, Ruskin's summary of a
good, 208

Pilotelle, Georges, sketch of
Ruskin, 187

Poems, Publication of Ruskin's,
109

Poet, Ruskin as, 109 et seq.

Poetry of Architecture, 21

Political Economy, Ruskin's the-
ory of, 96

Politician, Ruskin as, 99

Portraits of Ruskin, 165 et seq;
Barraud, 169; James North-
cote, R.A., 170; George
Richmond, R.A., 174, 1S2;
Sir John Everett Millais, R. A.,
177; Engraved by Francis
Holl, A.R.A., 165 ; Rossetti,
185; by himself, 186; Mod-
elled by Charles Ashmore,
186; Georges Pilotelle, 187;
Andrews, 188; Arthur Sev-
ern, 188; Benjamin Creswick,
188; Modelled by Sir J.
Edgar Boehm, R.A., 190;
Professor Hubert Herkomer,
R.A., 191 ; Miss Kate Green-
away, 192; T. Blake Wirg-
man, 192 ; Modelled by Con-
rad Dressier, 193

Preterit a, 1 13. 194

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rus-
kin and the, 26, 29, 178

Press, Attitude of, towards Rus-
kin, 70

Prout, Esteem of Ruskin for, 76;
Drawings of, 133

Quarterly Rezinu, Ruskin con-
tributes to the, 26; attacks
Ruskin, S3

■ Railways, Ruskin's hatred of, S9

Reader, The, 104

Religious opinions of Ruskin, 102

Richmond, George, R.A., Por-
traits of Ruskin, 174, 182;
travels with Ruskin, 175

Roberts, David, Ruskin's ameni-
ties with, 76

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 29 ; Por-
trait of Ruskin by, 185

Rossetti, W. M., 26

Rouen Cathedral Spire, Drawing
of, 76

Ruskin, John, birth of, 17; his
love of scenery and art de-
veloped, 18; first painting
lessons of, 18; first appear-
ance in public press, 21 ; en-
ters Christchurch,Oxford, 21 ;

224

INDEX.

gains Newdigate Prize, 22 ;
graduates B.A., 22 ; publishes
Modern Painters, 22 ; cen-
tral event of his life, 22;
founds a school of painting,
26; wages war against ex-
isting commercial morality,
30 ; elected Rede Lecturer at
Cambridge, 31 ; appointed
Professor of Fine Art at Ox-
ford, 32 ; begins Fors Clavi-
gera, 32; gifts to public in-
stitutions, 37 ; first attacked
by illness, 38; resigns Slade
Professorship, 38 ; rupture
with Oxford University, 39;
retires from personal contact
with public, 39 ; as a chess
player, 57, 162; critic of his
own works, 68, 72 ; theories
of art, 74, 211 ; deplores the
decadence of art, 87 ; ac-
quires the art of crossing-
sweeping, $8 ; the apotheosis
of the navvy, 88; a theistic
philosopher, 91 ; as politician,
99 ; as geologist, 100 ; corre-
spondent of the public jour-
nals, 103; intended for the
Church, 109; facility in verse-
making, 109; travels abroad,
147, 175; methodical ways,
157; daily life, 157, 159, 161;
a tireless walker, 160; as in-
ventor, 174; portrait of him-
self, 186 ; dissatisfied with all
his portraits, 197; enjoys
judiciously applied flattery,
197; amused by dissected
maps, 214

Ruskin, John, Senior, Portrait of,
173; death of, 32

Ruskin, Mrs., 32, 135

Ruskin Societies of the Rose
founded, 34

Salsette and Elephanta, 22
Sandys, Frederick, 30
School Board, Ruskin 's views on
the, 92

Scotland, Ruskin in, 178

Scotsman, The, 1 04

Scott, Sir Walter, no; Ruskin's

admiration of, 133; original
manuscripts of, 138; read
aloud by Ruskin, 160

Sesame and Lilies, 31

Seven Lamps of Architecture, 26,
68

Severn, Arthur, R.I., Portrait of
Ruskin by, 188

Severn, Mrs. Arthur, 44, 145, 147,

155
Shells, Ruskin's collection of, 133

Smetham, James, Letters to, 106 ;
description of Ruskin by, 159
Slade Professor, Ruskin appointed
in 1870, 32; re-elected in
1876, 38 ; resigned in 1879, 32
Stature of Ruskin, 166
Stephens, Frederick G., 26
St. George's Guild established, t>Z
St. George's Museum at Walkley
established, 37 ; transferred
to Meersbrook Park, 38
St. Mark's Venice, Ruskin's stud-
ies of, 133
Stones of Venice, 68
Study at Brantwood, 134
Stylist, Ruskin as, 67 et sea.
Switzerland, Ruskin in, 151

Taylorian Galleries at Oxford,

Gifts to, ^"j
Teacher, Ruskin as, So
Thackeray, Editor of Cornhill, 31
Theatre, Ruskin's love for the, 55
The Angel in the House, 145 etseq.
Time and Tide by Weare and

Tyne, 96, 106
Times, Ruskin's celebrated letter

to the, 29, 103
Tintoret, 87 '
Trevelyan, Lady, travels abroad

with Ruskin, 147 ; her death,

148
Turner, Ruskin's defence of, 22,

87; Ruskin's admiration of,

76; portrait of, 1 30; draw

ings by, 137

INDEX.

225

Tyndill, Professor, Ruskin on,
101, 115

Ugliness, Ruskin 's condemnation

of, 123
Unto this Last, 30

Val D'Arno, 68

Venice, 26, 68

Verse-making, Ruskin 's facility

in, 109
View of things, Ruskin's, 96 et

stq.
Vivisection, Ruskin opposed to, 39

Waldstein, Dr., on Ruskin, 91

Watts, G. F., R.A., and Ruskin,
166

Waverley Novels, Manuscripts of
the, 138

Whistler, Ruskin's criticism on,
and subsequent trial, 33

Wirgman, T. Blake, Portrait of
Ruskin by, 192

Women, Ruskin's sentiments to-
wards, 43

Woolner, T., R.A., 29, 177, 180

Working Men's College, Rus-
kin's interest in the, 31

jaw 21 19«

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "John Ruskin; a sketch of his life, his work, and his opinions, with personal reminiscences"

See other formats