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 fTHE- 
 
 PILGRIM 
 
 BOOKS 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN
 
 THE 
 PILGRIM BOOKS 
 
 General Editor 
 S. L. BENSUSAN 
 
 1. SHAKESPEARE 
 
 2. LAMB 
 
 3. WORDSWORTH 
 
 4. TENNYSON 
 
 5. RUSKIN 
 
 6. WILLIAM MORRIS 
 Others in Preparation
 
 Photo : Elliott &* Fry 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 HIS HOMES AND HAUNT,S 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES D. SYMON 
 
 WITH TWELVE DRAWINGS IN CRAYON BY 
 
 W. B. ROBINSON 
 AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 214-220 EAST 23RD STREET
 
 IN PIAM MEMORIAM 
 OPTIMA MATRIS
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD HUNTER STREET 
 
 AND HERNE HILL . * .. . ... . . 1 
 
 II. HERNE HILL AND EXCURSIONS 13 
 
 III. OXFORD . . . . 24 
 
 IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF FAME 32 
 
 V. "THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 38 
 
 VI. FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, AND ITALY .... 46 
 
 VII. OXFORD ONCE MORE : THE SLADE PROFESSOR . . 62 
 
 VIII. GATES OF THE HILLS . 70
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PORTRAIT OF RUSKIN Frontispiece 
 
 RUSKIN'S BIRTHPLACE, 54 HUNTER STREET, BRUNS- 
 WICK SQUARE, W.C . Facing p. 4 
 
 RUSKIN'S HOUSE, No. 28 HERNE HILL .... ,,16 
 RUSKIN'S HOUSE, DENMARK HILL .... ,,20 
 
 CHAMOUNI AND MONT BLANC 24 
 
 THE QUADRANGLE AND PELICAN, CORPUS CHRISTI 
 
 COLLEGE, OXFORD ....... 
 
 RUSKIN'S WALK, DENMARK HILL .... 
 
 KINNOULL . . . .... 
 
 CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD 
 
 DANIELI'S HOTEL, VENICE 
 
 ENTRANCE TO THE DOGE'S PALACE, VENICE . 
 THE MOAT OF NUREMBERG. DRAWING BY JOHN 
 
 RUSKIN ,,&2 
 
 CONISTON WATER AND THE OLD MAN ... ,,66 
 
 BRANTWOOD, CONISTON ,,60 
 
 LOIRE-SIDE, BY RUSKIN, AFTER TURNER ... ,,64 
 THE BRIDGE OF RHEINFELDEN ON THE RHINE; 
 
 BY RUSKIN, AFTER TURNER ,,68
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THIS essay is obviously an outline; it could not be 
 otherwise when the story of eighty years had to be 
 told in eighty pages. The reader will find little that 
 is new save an anecdote here and there ; but the treat- 
 ment, as regards locality, has at least the freshness of 
 its attempt to describe places and scenes not as they 
 may appear to the independent observer to-day, but 
 as they appeared to Ruskin himself. 
 
 The principal authority has therefore been the 
 works of John Ruskin, in their compass. Quota- 
 tions not directly acknowledged in the text are from 
 Prceterita. Elsewhere the sources are indicated. The 
 author also acknowledges much valuable help from 
 the biographical notes of Mr. Cook and Mr. Wedder- 
 burn in the Library Edition of Ruskin, as well as 
 from the short biographies of Mr. Collingwood and 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison. On many critical points he 
 has consulted, always with illumination, even where 
 complete agreement was denied him, the invaluable 
 monograph of Mrs. Meynell, and that of Mr. J. M. 
 Mather. In justice to himself, he may perhaps confess 
 that these pages were passed for press before he read 
 Dean Kitchin's " Ruskin at Oxford." 
 
 Cordial thanks are due to Mr. John Leith for his 
 kindness in lending for reproduction a memorable 
 letter of Ruskin's. 
 
 J. D. S. 
 
 Yli
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD HUNTER STREET 
 AND HERNE HILL 
 
 AT the birth of John Ruskin, the Fates that spin the 
 destinies of Art and Letters must have sung harmo- 
 niously to their spindles. For seldom has a man of 
 genius been so favoured by fortune as the child who 
 was born to John James Ruskin and his wife Margaret 
 on February 8, 1819, at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick 
 Square. An only child, he was from the beginning 
 marked out as one apart : his forbears were no ordinary 
 people ; his training was to be peculiar ; above all, he 
 was to be spared that which is at once the handicap 
 and the spur of great abilities, a fight with adversity. 
 He was, it is true, to become in after years a com- 
 batant among combatants, to fight gallantly for truth, 
 and to pass away grieving that the complete victory 
 he had sought was denied him ; but in the early years 
 no cloud obscured his growing powers. He grew up 
 like some rare and curious flower in a garden closed 
 and sheltered from the storms of the world, nurtured 
 
 A
 
 2 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 certainly with a strange spiritual rigour, on his mother's 
 part ; but that high austerity, unknown to the children 
 of a more favoured age, was tempered and qualified by 
 the humanity and culture of his father. 
 
 Between them, John Ruskin's parents exercised 
 upon their son forces differing in degree and in direc- 
 tion, and the resultant was the critic and stylist. A 
 third force was that of surroundings, in a merely 
 topographical sense, and in a certain sense no other 
 English writer has been so much the product and the 
 expression of that which lay about his path. For the 
 most part the dwelling-places of men of genius have 
 been an accident ; for John Ruskin, as the event 
 proved, they were an essential. It is said that 
 "home-keeping youth has ever homely wits." John 
 Ruskin, a home-keeper as few men have been, in the 
 respect that he continued to live with his parents even 
 until manhood was well advanced, managed to disprove 
 the proverb. But this close tie to the parental roof 
 and to the society of his father and mother, although 
 a tether, was a tether of elastic that stretched first 
 over England and Scotland, and afterwards across the 
 continent of Europe. The Ruskins were the last to 
 cling to the ideal method of travel, that of the post- 
 chaise, and their gentle and joyous passages through- 
 out the length and breadth of the land gave the boy 
 a temper and an experience that are inseparably inter- 
 woven with his character. Ruskin is par excellence the 
 English writer whose career and development are best 
 illuminated by a study of his Homes arid Haunts, and
 
 PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 3 
 
 that is the theme and purpose of the present essay 
 in little. 
 
 By birth a Londoner, John Ruskin was essentially a 
 Scotsman by descent and early training. The heritage 
 of his blood brought him in full measure the qualities 
 and the defects of the Northern character, wherein 
 natural breadth contends ever with an imposed rigidity. 
 In his parents severally these characteristics were per- 
 sonified : the father a strenuous man of business, 
 devoted to the arts and somewhat nebulous in his 
 religion ; the mother of the straitest sect of the 
 Evangelicals, but with a certain gracious, if some- 
 what restricted, enthusiasm for the gentler flowers of 
 the mind. She had striven during the long years 
 of her engagement to make herself the fitting com- 
 panion of the man she was to marry, a man whose 
 education was superior to her own, and the Fates 
 had ordained that that effort of hers was to find a 
 strange issue in moulding the mind of a boy who 
 was afterwards to write his name indelibly on the 
 page of English Literature and on the artistic de- 
 velopment of the world. There are some who have 
 held that Mrs. Ruskin's methods are open to criticism, 
 but surely her wisdom is justified of its child ? Her 
 rigorous instructions in the text of the English Bible 
 may sound terrible to this age, but they laid the 
 foundations of that sense of language which framed 
 the melodious close of Ruskin's periods. To the 
 Authorised Version he owed more than to disorgan- 
 ising Gibbon or judicious Hooker. But when all is
 
 4 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 said and done, models and masters play but a secon- 
 dary part. "The style," as Buffon did not say, "is 
 the man himself." It is with the man that we have 
 here principally to do. 
 
 Like most Scotsmen of account, John Ruskin had 
 a pedigree. It is interesting, but too elaborate, too 
 full of side issues to be detailed here. There is a 
 remote link with the Sir Andrew Agnew of the memor- 
 able speech at Dettingen, another with Ross the Arctic 
 explorer, but these scarcely count in any explanation 
 of his heredity. What is to the point is that he was 
 the son of a man whom he described as " an entirely 
 honest merchant," when he came to write his epitaph, 
 and the grandson of a woman of extraordinary force 
 of character. Ruskin sprang of commercial ancestry 
 on the father's side, and of seafaring people on the 
 mother's. That he came of the commercial classes he 
 tells us with a conscious candour worthy of Evan 
 Harrington. Harringtonesque, too, are his reminis- 
 cences of an aunt who kept a baker's shop in Croydon. 
 The confession is made with just that little excess of 
 geniality which betrays effort. With equal candour, 
 in the same book, he avows himself all for aristocracy, 
 though in no sense an aristocrat. No more need be 
 said. Let this glimpse of an amiable foible suffice. 
 
 Ruskin' s grandfather was an Edinburgh wine-mer- 
 chant of good position, afterwards lost by imprudence. 
 His father, John James Ruskin, was educated at the 
 High School of Edinburgh, under the famous Dr. 
 Adam. He received that excellent sound old classical
 
 PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 5 
 
 training which in those days of no specialisation fitted 
 a boy alike for the university or for business. Had 
 his father continued prosperous, J. J. Ruskin would 
 doubtless in due time have become an Edinburgh 
 student, for he showed a strong bent for Latin and 
 philosophy ; but the family affairs had gone wrong, or 
 were going wrong, and young John James went into 
 business. It was fortunate that he did so, for his 
 commercial success enabled him to surround his son 
 with those affluent influences which suffered his genius 
 to develop along its own lines. A place was found for 
 the elder Ruskin in a wine-merchant's office in London. 
 There he spent two years, and in 1809 he entered into 
 partnership with a Mr. Telford, a wealthy squire of 
 Kent, and a M. Domecq, a great grower of sherry. 
 Telford, as Mr. Collingwood notes, contributed the 
 capital, Domecq the sherry, and Ruskin the brains. 
 
 For nine years, taking no holidays that were not 
 business journeys, J. J. Ruskin exercised those brains 
 in putting his firm on a sound basis. His sensitive 
 honour had made him resolve to pay off all his father's 
 debts before he would lay by a penny for himself. 
 When that was accomplished, he went north to claim 
 the girl who had been his betrothed during all the years 
 of his servitude. Margaret Cox was his cousin, the 
 daughter of a Yarmouth skipper. For a long time she 
 had lived with J. J. Ruskin's mother in Edinburgh, 
 whither she had gone on the marriage of his sister. 
 Her own mother, the skipper's widow, kept the old 
 King's Head Inn in Croydon Market-place, and had
 
 6 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 done her best for her daughter's education. Even 
 when J. J. Ruskin declared himself in a position to 
 marry, Margaret would have delayed ; but one evening 
 he persuaded her to get married at once in the Scotch 
 fashion, and next morning the pair left for London. 
 On this happy despatch hung great issues. 
 
 Memory awoke early for the child John Ruskin in 
 his first home, that Hunter Street house where he 
 began to construct the world for himself. His picture 
 of his childhood is that of a solitary, somewhat over- 
 disciplined little boy, who was always summarily 
 whipped if he cried, did not do as he was bid, or 
 tumbled on the stairs. He had few possessions, and 
 was taught abnegation early, never being permitted for 
 one instant to hope for the possession of such things 
 as one saw in toy -shops. A bunch of keys in early 
 infancy, a cart and a ball when he was older, two 
 boxes of well-cut bricks when he was five or six, were 
 his "entirely sufficient possessions." Almost as soon 
 as he could remember, he had learned to cultivate the 
 pleasures of the imagination. 
 
 " I would pass my days contentedly in tracing the 
 squares and colours of the carpet, examining the knots 
 in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the 
 opposite houses ; with rapturous intervals of excite- 
 ment during the filling of the water-cart through its 
 leathern pipe from the dripping iron post at the pave- 
 ment edge, or the still more admirable proceedings of 
 the turncock, when he turned and turned until a 
 fountain sprang up in the middle of the street."
 
 PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 7 
 
 The sense of form, however, was his chief resource, 
 and he sought patterns in the carpet, in bed-covers, 
 dresses, and wall-papers. The critic awoke in the con- 
 templation of the carpet, arid when he was only three 
 and a half he asked Mr. Northcote, the Royal Acade- 
 mician, to whom he was sitting for his portrait, why 
 there were holes in his carpet. But the sense of colour 
 was awake also, for when the artist asked the child 
 what he would like for a background, he replied at 
 once, " Blue hills," thus presaging not only the future 
 master of colour, but the passionate lover of moun- 
 tains, alike in their picturesque and their scientific 
 significance. He was rewarded by the introduction 
 of two rounded hills " as blue as his shoes." 
 
 Already the little Ruskin's horizon had stretched 
 beyond a Bloomsbury street. Holidays spent with the 
 Croydon relations had given him his first impressions 
 of a South London still rural and beautiful, that was 
 soon to be his home for many years to come. There 
 were walks on Duppas Hill and on the heather at 
 Addington, and sometimes the family took lodgings 
 with a Mrs. Ridley at Dulwich, in a house that was 
 " the last of a row in a lane which led out into the 
 Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of 
 buttercups in spring and of blackberries in autumn." 
 He knew Hampstead also, where they lived in " real 
 cottages, not villas so called." Of his moral train- 
 ing at this remote period he remembered chiefly his 
 mother's steady watchfulness to guard him from all 
 pain and danger; her willingness to let him amuse
 
 8 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 himself as he liked, provided he was neither fretful nor 
 troublesome. Her rigour was seen in her restriction of 
 toys of which she disapproved. A " most radiant 
 Punch and Judy," the gift of his less austere aunt, 
 was accepted, but afterwards removed, with an intima- 
 tion that it was not good for him to have them. They 
 were never seen again. How strange, yet in a way 
 how salutary, is this to an age that has accepted the 
 Golliwog and the Billikin, the former innocent and 
 pleasing enough, but the latter anathema ! 
 
 But these were insignificant travels: for the child 
 in his fourth summer had seen and learned to love 
 Scotland. His father's sister Jessie was married to a 
 Mr. Richardson in Perth, and in his aunt's house at 
 Bridge End beside the Tay, towards which the garden 
 ran sloping steeply, the infant John Ruskin found new 
 impressions, to be strengthened during later visits, and 
 to be perfectly described in after-days in the pages 
 of Prceterita, that autobiography "written frankly, 
 garrulously, and at ease." 
 
 " I would not change the dreams, far less the tender 
 realities, of those early days, for anything I hear now 
 remembered by lords and dames of their days of child- 
 hood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns and lakes in 
 park- walled forest. 
 
 " Lawn and lake enough indeed I had, in the North 
 Inch of Perth, and pools of pausing Tay, before Rose 
 Terrace (where I used to live after my uncle died, 
 briefly apoplectic, at Bridge End), in the peace of the 
 fair Scotch summer days."
 
 PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 9 
 
 On this head one more passage must be quoted, 
 for the light it throws on the mind of the child, 
 thus early susceptible to the influence of the " spirit 
 of place " : 
 
 " I passed my days much as the thistles and the tansy 
 did, only with perpetual watching of all the ways of 
 running water, a singular awe developing itself in me, 
 both of the pools of Tay, where the water changed from 
 brown to blue-black, and of the precipices of Kinnoul ; 
 partly out of my own mind, and partly because the 
 servants always became serious when we went up 
 Kinnoul way, especially if I wanted to stay and look 
 at the little crystal spring of Bower's Well." 
 
 Thus, like the gods in the Euripidean chorus, 
 
 " Ever delicately marching 
 Through the most pellucid air," 
 
 the soul of John Ruskin began its pilgrimage through 
 a world to which he was to bring great and high teach- 
 ing, at much cost to his own peace. But long, tranquil 
 days of preparation were still before him, amid fairer 
 surroundings than the fascinating bricks of Hunter 
 Street. 
 
 In 1823, the year after the painting of the North- 
 cote portrait, John Ruskin the elder had so far 
 prospered in his business as to be able to think of a 
 home in a pleasanter quarter. The family removed to 
 a house with an ample garden on Herne Hill, after- 
 wards known as No. 28. It was one of a group of four,
 
 10 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 the highest blocks of buildings on the crest of the ridge, 
 three-storied with garrets, commanding a remarkable 
 view towards Windsor and Harrow. The garden was 
 rich in fruit-trees, forbidden to the child, but afterwards 
 to bear a rich literary fruit for him and for the world, 
 in the principles laid down in " Proserpina," and even 
 then early realised, that the seeds and fruit of them 
 were for the sake of the flowers, and not the flowers 
 for the fruit. 
 
 In that pleasant garden the boy spent most of his 
 summer days ; surely the weather must have been kinder 
 then ? Lessons had already begun, and as soon as he 
 could read fluently his mother began a course of sys- 
 tematic instruction which nothing was allowed to 
 interrupt. After his father had gone to town by coach, 
 John was sent to his daily task, which he was expected 
 to know by twelve o'clock. The text-book was the 
 Bible, and a passage had to be learnt by heart. Again 
 and again mother and son read the Scriptures from 
 beginning to end, with minute attention to pronuncia- 
 tion and accent, until the lightest inflexion was per- 
 fect. This discipline, ended only when Ruskin went to 
 Oxford, he counted the essential portion of his educa- 
 tion. With the formidable chapters, strictly learnt by 
 heart, his mother, as he himself says, " established his 
 soul in life." Peace lay about him, in those days, and 
 he learnt obedience and faith, also that habit of fixed 
 attention with eyes and mind which long afterwards 
 caused Mazzini to say that Ruskin had the most 
 analytic mind in Europe.
 
 He notes, however, the defects of the method 
 " calamities," he calls them. Withal he had nothing 
 to love, nothing to endure, no training in precision of 
 etiquette and manners. The last cost him a quaint 
 disquiet, humorously confessed in his account of his 
 first love affair, and the serio-comic Disraeli episode at 
 Christ Church. 
 
 The evenings at Herne Hill were no less remark- 
 able than the mornings. Mr. Ruskin came home early, 
 and while he dined his wife heard from him the events 
 of the day. From these counsels the son was rigidly 
 excluded, but in summer he joined his parents at tea- 
 time in the garden, where the rest of the evening was 
 spent. In winter or rough weather he had his bread 
 and milk in the drawing-room, in a little recess, where 
 he remained, like an idol in its niche, until bedtime, 
 listening while his father read Scott or Byron. Before 
 him was a small table, at which as he grew older he 
 practised a marvellous literature. The Muses had 
 caught him. He toiled at a conclusion of Miss Edge- 
 worth's " Harry and Lucy," with copper-plates 
 " written by a little boy and drawn," is the artless 
 legend of the title-page. His father's taste and skill in 
 water-colour had roused him to emulation. But he 
 aspired even higher. This child of seven, whom his 
 mother had fondly dedicated to the Church, had 
 already recognised a vocation. John Ruskin was to 
 be a poet. 
 
 The growth of his little lyric gift, and its renuncia- 
 tion for the highest achievement in modern English
 
 12 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 prose, lead us far away from Ruskin's childish days. 
 But it remained the leading motive of his life until he 
 stood upon the threshold of manhood. Let us follow 
 him thither through that growing boyhood, upon which 
 the shades of the prison-house seemed reluctant to 
 close.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 HERNE HILL AND EXCURSIONS 
 
 THE great event of the year for John Ruskin was 
 his father's birthday, the 10th of May. For that 
 occasion the small poet always produced a copy of 
 verses, the subject of much anxious thought during 
 the preceding weeks. But besides these special efforts 
 he was continually busy with composition, which his 
 parents encouraged. They made it, indeed, the means 
 of earning pocket-money, a custom of doubtful wisdom. 
 But the money at any rate was earned, for the child 
 did not spare himself. 
 
 Nor were his labours wholly in the field of art. 
 His passion for physical science had declared itself 
 in his fondness for minerals, and on that theme 
 he wrote learnedly. As for the reward " Homer " 
 fetched a shilling a page ; " Composition," a penny 
 for twenty lines ; " Mineralogy," a penny for each 
 article. His verses are wonderful for a mere child, 
 but like the rest of Ruskin's poetry, even the maturer 
 examples, they are little more than literary curiosities 
 to-day. He imitated Scott, Byron, and Young with 
 a quaint infusion of his own small observation and 
 experience. The close transcript of the thing seen is 
 
 13
 
 14 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 perhaps the most valuable sidelight the poems afford 
 upon the mind of the author-to-be. 
 
 But the 10th of May had another significance. 
 It marked the departure of the Ruskin family upon 
 their annual tour through England. Their way fre- 
 quently extended as far as Scotland. These leisurely 
 journeys, made in a roomy post-chaise, fitted with 
 all sorts of fascinating convenient devices, were under- 
 taken as much for business as for pleasure, and in 
 their course Mr. Ruskin called upon his chief country 
 customers, always bearing away a substantial sheaf 
 of commissions. This remarkable wine-merchant was 
 welcomed everywhere for his personality, like the great 
 Mel Harrington ; but, unlike Melchisedec, he knew how 
 to turn his popularity to sound commercial advantage. 
 
 To little John these travels were another education 
 and an inspiration. He learned to know the countries 
 of his birth and of his descent, and he reproduced his 
 impressions in a continual stream of literary works. 
 He kept journals, he composed itineraries, he cele- 
 brated the things he had seen in various verse. 
 Perched on a little cushioned seat in front of his parents, 
 he delighted in the wide unfolding view from the 
 chaise windows, and caught by the equestrian spirit, 
 he imitated the postilion, in mile-long imaginative 
 gallops. To add to the realism of this pastime, patient 
 Papa Ruskin allowed his own devoted legs to be 
 whipped, "in a quite practical and efficient manner," 
 with a silver-mounted riding-whip he had himself 
 given to the boy.
 
 HERNE HILL EXCURSIONS 15 
 
 The chronology of these early journeys is important. 
 The first visit to Scotland was made by sea in 1822. 
 In 1823 the summer tour lay through the south- 
 west of England. In 1824 they went to the Lakes, 
 Keswick, and Perth. In 1825 John made his first 
 acquaintance with the Continent, and saw Paris, 
 Brussels, and Waterloo, which last he afterwards sang 
 in a dramatic poem. He was present during this 
 tour at the coronation festivities of Charles X. In 
 1826, the year of his first poem, "The Needless 
 Alarm," they were again at the Lakes and Perth. 
 His first memory of life, he says, " meaning of things 
 chiefly precious to me afterwards," was of Friar's 
 Crag on Derwentwater, now marked by his monu- 
 ment. The limiting phrase is significant ; for he 
 had earlier memories, and it marks that passion for 
 the hills, and above all his affection for that Coniston 
 region, where he was at length to see an end of his 
 labours. At the Coniston Inn, in those early days, 
 he and his mother stayed, while his father went on 
 his business journeys to Whitehaven, Lancaster, New- 
 castle, and other northern towns. Thus at large leisure, 
 and under intelligent guidance, John Ruskin's appren- 
 ticeship went forward. Through an unspoiled England 
 he came by easy stages to his life-work. 
 
 The year 1826 not only saw the dawn of poetry, 
 but marked an epoch in Ruskin's formal education. 
 It was now time to begin Latin. To that task Mrs. 
 Ruskin was quite equal, and, with the same thorough- 
 ness that she brought to other lessons, she put her
 
 16 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 son through the Grammar of Dr. Adam, using the 
 very book that her husband had carried in his satchel 
 to the High School of Edinburgh. 
 
 The summer of 1827 found the Ruskins again at 
 Perth; next year they went to the west of England, 
 and about that time the poet projected a great work, 
 "Eudosia, a Poem on the Universe." In that year, 
 too, Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin adopted John's Perth cousin, 
 Mary Richardson, who was brought up as a sister to 
 the boy. There was no extended tour in 1829, only 
 a little sojourn in Kent. In the autumn of 1830 
 Ruskin was at length considered to have outgrown 
 his mother's tutorship. 
 
 At that time there ministered in Beresford Chapel, 
 Walworth, an excellent divine, whose oracles Mrs. 
 Ruskin attended, accompanied, "contentedly or at 
 least submissively " (says Ruskin in Prceterita), by 
 her husband. Dr. Andrews, who was the father of 
 the first Mrs. Coventry Patmore, " had the reputa- 
 tion (in Walworth) of being a good scholar," so to 
 him John was sent to learn Greek, already too long 
 delayed. It appears that Dr. Andrews 
 
 " in Greek 
 Was sadly to seek," 
 
 his method was peculiar, not to say fearful and wonder- 
 ful, but he accomplished one thing in which a more 
 accurate scholar might have failed he interested his 
 pupil, who ever retained a wistful affection for Hel- 
 lenic studies, although he was the first to confess his
 
 HEJRNE HILL EXCURSIONS 17 
 
 lamentable deficiency in grasp of the language. In 
 the sketch of his Oxford career, it will be seen how 
 he suffered from the lack of proper training. Perhaps 
 it did not matter much : the enemies of classical 
 teaching will say that it was better so ; but they mis- 
 conceive, for Ruskin would have been infinitely helped 
 by a thorough mastery of Greek, and it was impossible 
 for him ever to have sunk into a mere pedant. 
 
 With Dr. Andrews he went on with his Latin, 
 reading Virgil, and taking pleasure in his tutor's odd 
 illustrations; in Greek he read Anacreon, before he 
 knew his verbs, and of course he fell at once to verse 
 translation. It was a happy-go-lucky, genial scramble 
 up Parnassus, with more waggery afoot than sound 
 learning on both sides ; but the boy was delighted, and 
 looked forward eagerly to the three days a week on 
 which he worked with his desultory master. Some 
 suspicion of the method entered Mrs. Ruskin's shrewd 
 brain, but she could not be expected to put her finger 
 on the place. She thought, however, that Dr. Andrews 
 was " flighty," when, after six months, he proposed that 
 John should begin Hebrew ! Of Semitic studies we 
 hear no more. 
 
 All this time Ruskin's interest in Art was steadily 
 increasing. He tried to copy Cruikshank's illustrations 
 to Grimm's Fairy Tales, his first serious beginnings in 
 drawing. The " singular genius of Cruikshank " and his 
 pictures, "perhaps the finest line- work since Rembrandt's 
 etchings," he was always to hold in reverence, and he 
 would have all beginners make this their first model. 
 
 B
 
 18 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 Ruskin's work showed so much promise that his 
 father now sent him to take drawing-lessons from 
 Mr. Runciman, with whom he remained for several 
 years. Runciman was a severe and somewhat opinion- 
 ative taskmaster, but once at least he bowed to his 
 pupil's independence, and actually modified his method, 
 allowing him to use colour earlier than he would have 
 done in the case of a pupil less extraordinary. In the 
 same year, 1831, a mathematical master was engaged, 
 and with him Ruskin got a firm hold of the elements 
 of geometry, a subject which he really liked and in 
 which he attempted a little original work of a romantic 
 kind the baffling tri-section of an angle. 
 
 But a greater influence was now at hand : the boy 
 was to encounter a force in art that was afterwards 
 to make his own career, and to rescue from obloquy 
 and misunderstanding a once popular genius, who, 
 reaching after a new expression of truth, had put 
 himself of necessity out of favour with his country- 
 men. Ruskin's fourteenth birthday brought him a 
 gift which was a revelation. His father's partner 
 Mr. Telford sent him Rogers' " Italy." Perhaps the 
 giver thought only of the poetry in making his choice, 
 but Ruskin thought less of that than of the wonderful 
 illustrations, those vignettes by a marvellous man 
 Turner, who saw mountains as the boy saw them, 
 but with the eyes of a life's experience. Ruskin's 
 soul went out with a rush to this new master, in 
 whom he found what he had been seeking ever since 
 his precocious mind had begun to grope after the
 
 HERNE HILL EXCURSIONS 19 
 
 artistic concept. He set himself to copy the " Alps 
 at Daybreak," and from that moment there was for 
 him no turning back. 
 
 Travel again came to the aid of this fortunate 
 prince. That very year he saw the Alps of his 
 dreams not, however, because of the Turner book, 
 as one might suppose. The son's enthusiasm for 
 the peaks and the great silences found only a qualified 
 echo in the father ; but by a happy chance Mr. Ruskin 
 had just bought Prout's " Sketches in Flanders and 
 Germany," and being interested in Gothic, he readily 
 fell in with his wife's suggestion that they should 
 all go to see these places for themselves. In May 
 1833 they set out, and John Ruskin entered upon a 
 new phase of his mental and moral development. 
 
 By way of " customary Calais " the Ruskins began 
 their posting journey through Flanders and Germany. 
 The boy noted in after-years that he was already wise 
 enough to feel Strasburg Cathedral stiff and iron-worky, 
 but the richness of the wooden houses impressed and 
 excited him because of their promise of nearness to 
 Switzerland. " The Nature of Gothic " was not yet 
 even dimly perceived, otherwise the houses would have 
 suggested more than Switzerland. That land of his 
 desire was approached strategically after family council 
 with Salvador, their courier. Should it be Basle or 
 Schaffhausen ? At Basle there were no Alps in sight. 
 To Schaffhausen, then, be it ; and so, on a memorable 
 Sunday evening, " suddenly behold beyond 1 " 
 
 A lifetime later he paused, with remembered
 
 20 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 emotion, on these exclamatory words, and left his 
 great paragraph incomplete. Artist that he was, he 
 could not write the name of the sacred rampart of 
 Europe, but there was no need to tell his readers what 
 he had seen. He resumes : 
 
 " There was no thought in any of us for a moment 
 of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, sharp 
 on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose 
 by the sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had 
 ever thought or dreamed, the seen walls of lost Eden 
 could not have been more beautiful to us ; not more 
 awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death." 
 
 For the rest of that journey he moved in an en- 
 chanted land, with Turner for his guide. They crossed 
 the Splugen and went down into Italy, seeing Milan, 
 the Lakes, and the Mediterranean at Genoa. Then 
 they came back through the Oberland to Chamouni, 
 the scene in after-days of many labours. Already he 
 had a new great work on hand he would make an 
 Italy of his own after the manner of Mr. Rogers, and 
 be his own illustrator, after the manner of Turner. He 
 set himself to imitate the delicate vignettes, and as 
 he wrought came to a surer dexterity of hand, to be 
 further confirmed in the next year's tour. The route 
 of that second journey is recorded in his sketches : 
 Chamouni, St. Bernard, Aosta, the Oberland once 
 more, St. Gothard, Lucerne, by the Stelvio to Venice 
 and Verona, and home through the Tyrol and Ger- 
 many. But his study of the Alps was not alone
 
 .< 
 
 V. 
 

 
 HERNE HILL EXCURSIONS 21 
 
 artistic. The young man of science was also busy with 
 a geological inquiry, helped by Saussure's Voyages 
 dans les Alpes, a birthday gift from his father in 1834. 
 The mountains, he had seen, held physical secrets as 
 well as possibilities of picture-making, and these he set 
 himself to discover. 
 
 In the interval between the first and second Alpine 
 journeys, John Ruskin was sent to school as a day-boy 
 with the Rev. Thomas Dale in Grove Lane, Peckham. 
 The mere place of his new Academe had not then the 
 odd associations it bears for us to-day, although it is at 
 least quaint that he should have passed, with a brief 
 interlude of study at King's College, London, straight 
 from Peckham to Christ Church. It was now recog- 
 nised that Dr. Andrews would never prepare him for 
 college and the Church, in which the elder Ruskins 
 hoped in due time to see their genius advancing towards 
 lawn sleeves. But while he made some better progress 
 in mere school- work with Mr. Dale, Ruskin had other 
 occupations that were leading him surely away from 
 Holy Orders. 
 
 The year 1834 had seen his first appearance in print 
 with his " Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of 
 the Water of the Rhine," and another essay, " Facts 
 and Considerations of the Strata of Mont Blanc," both 
 published in London's Magazine of Natural History. 
 Nor was Poetry neglected. Through his cousin Charles, 
 a clerk in Messrs. Smith, Elder's, he had been introduced 
 to Mr. Pringle, the Editor of that sumptuous boudoir 
 annual Friendship's Offering. Mr. Pringle encour-
 
 22 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 aged Ruskin's verse-making, and even took the boy to 
 see Samuel Rogers. At that interview Ruskin knew 
 not how to play the courtier ; his talk to the poet of 
 " Italy " was all of Mr. Turner's drawings, about which 
 Rogers showed little enthusiasm, and no progress was 
 made in that direction. Mr. Pringle even administered 
 a mild rebuke on the way back to Herne Hill. But 
 Friendship's Offering for 1835 contained three poems 
 " Andernach," " St. Goar," and " Salzburg "all by 
 John Ruskin, and they w r ere illustrated with a beauti- 
 ful plate engraved by Goodall after Purser, somewhat in 
 the Turner manner. So the bard felt he might hold 
 a candle to Mr. Rogers after all. This was all very 
 giddy and exciting, no doubt, but greater joy was in 
 store, dashed, however, by a miscarriage of publication. 
 No matter, he had entered the lists and broken his first 
 lance for his hero. Blackwootfs criticism of Turner's 
 Academy pictures for 1836 roused the young man to 
 reply. Mr. Ruskin enclosed the MS. to the artist, 
 asking permission to send it to " Maga " ; but Turner, 
 while obliged, was contemptuous of attacks, desired no 
 reply, and sent the MS. to Mr. Munro of Novar, who 
 had bought the censured picture. This article, the 
 germ of " Modern Painters," was therefore lost. Dis- 
 covered long afterwards in a duplicate copy, it shows 
 Turner's champion firm in his saddle firmer, indeed, 
 than he ever was on the back of that early pony from 
 which he rolled so persistently into the mud of Nor- 
 wood lanes. 
 
 With these occupations and excitements, tempered
 
 HEKNE HILL EXCURSIONS 23 
 
 by painting lessons from Copley Fielding and by the 
 wholesome fear of the Oxford matriculation examina- 
 tion, now looming in sight, Ruskin passed the year 
 1836. In October he matriculated, and the following 
 January saw him go into residence. Like everything 
 else in his career, his entry into Oxford was unique, 
 a thing apart and purely Ruskinesque, unparalleled 
 perhaps in the history of the University. At that 
 amiable comedy we are now to assist.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 EVER desirous to do the best for his son, Mr. J. J. 
 Ruskin realised the serious importance of entering 
 him at a college that offered the highest social and 
 educational advantages. His choice fell upon Christ 
 Church, where the society was certainly unexception- 
 able in point of rank, and where scholarship was 
 represented by its Dean, the mighty Grecian Gaisford, 
 unpolished in manner but withal terribly learned. 
 
 To Gaisford Mr. Ruskin went in the early part 
 of the year 1836, to arrange for John's matriculation. 
 The son, writing of the interview long afterwards, is 
 quietly alive to its humour. Blunt Dean and earnest 
 paterfamilias must have made an odd contrast as 
 they discussed what status John should occupy in 
 college. Mr. Ruskin learned that there was a finer 
 flower of undergraduate known as the Gentleman-Com- 
 moner. Was there anything to hinder his son's being 
 enrolled as such ? It was merely a question of some 
 rather heavy fees. Money mattered not, and thus 
 it came about long afterwards that Mr. Tuckwell, 
 writing delightfully of that far-off Oxford of 1837, 
 mentions among the men of note " Young Gentleman- 
 Commoner Ruskin."
 
 BS^^s^ansP^S^^u^ IK^y-
 
 OXFORD 25 
 
 It was an Oxford somewhat hard for us of a 
 later generation to realise. Tract XC. was still three 
 years ahead, and the University was only beginning 
 to arouse herself from her long lethargy. But stirrings 
 of a new spirit were in the air, and at Oriel Newman 
 was fighting his great spiritual battle that would at 
 length separate him from his Alma Mater and from 
 the Church of his fathers, but would set a quickening 
 seal upon the place he had left. It was an age of 
 remarkable men Stanley, Matthew Arnold, Clough, 
 Lord Hobhouse, Henry Acland, Jowett. Gladstone 
 had but recently gone down. Of the greater dons 
 of that time, Dr. Routh, who had actually seen 
 Dr. Johnson, still held the Presidency of Magdalen 
 and kept the eighteenth century alive in dress and 
 manner, but he appeared rarely in the streets after 
 1836. Pusey, more or less a hermit, occupied the 
 Hebrew Chair, and formed the subject of fantastic 
 myths. Buckland, the geologist, with his surprising 
 hat and bag, was, next to the Dean, the chief 
 "character" of Christ Church, then rich in oddities. 
 Newman, taking indispensable exercise, was a familiar 
 figure on the country roads any afternoon. 
 
 Undergraduate life had less diversity, less colour, 
 than it carries with it to-day. Athletic sports were 
 unknown, football unheard of; there was only one 
 cricket field, the Magdalen ground. Boating had not 
 become a passion ; the delicate, lazy delights of punt 
 or canoe on the Cher had not yet been discovered. 
 The hunt, the drag, hurdle-jumping, and tandem-driving
 
 26 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 amused the rich. Men drank too much, and on 
 Sunday, according to Mozley, in a college affection 
 forbids us to name, they drowned, in a double measure 
 of ale, the boredom of writing out, in compulsory 
 abstract, the morning's sermon at St. Mary's. Costume 
 was stiff and formal : academic dress strictly en- 
 forced. Frock and tail coats were correct in hall ; 
 the beaver-hat was worn on the way to the boats 
 or the cricket field. No one would have appeared in 
 flannels on the High. The times were now dull, 
 now riotous as ever, since St. Scholastica's day. 
 Rowdyism moves in cycles, passing from college to 
 college as the wind blows. At the time when John 
 Ruskin went up, Christ Church seems to have been 
 lively. At first he was an augmenting cause. 
 
 If anything was needed to make his position more 
 difficult and difficult it was enough, owing to his 
 early education it was the extension of his mother's 
 care even to the gates of Christ Church. It would 
 not be fair to blame her, for Ruskin was physically 
 delicate, and needed watching over in an especial 
 degree. But it might have been well to have spared 
 him the burden of a chaperone. It is easy to imagine 
 the unholy glee of his contemporaries when it became 
 known that the Gentleman-Commoner from a Peck- 
 ham Academy had actually been accompanied to 
 college by his " Mamma," as he called her. Mrs. 
 Ruskin took lodgings in High Street, and her son 
 devoted all his evenings to her, until Tom, the great 
 bell of Christ Church, recalled him at nine o'clock
 
 OXFORD 27 
 
 to his rooms in Peckwater Quadrangle. At first he 
 had to put up with the usual furious invasions of 
 the revel-rout of undergraduates, but he lived that 
 down, helped no doubt by the diplomacy that led 
 him to lay in a bottle or two of papa's best wine. 
 But the ungodly broke his windows, rode on his 
 back round the quadrangle, and made his reading 
 of an essay in Hall the occasion for what would now 
 be called a " rag," culminating in the inevitable bon- 
 fire. His theme, alas ! had been very long and very 
 fine. He had transgressed the unwritten law that 
 no Gentleman- Commoner's composition should exceed 
 forty-eight words in length. He had behaved like 
 a vulgar reading-man, and he was taken to task ac- 
 cordingly. But in repartee he could hold his own 
 neatly enough. 
 
 There used to be an undergraduate tradition, for 
 which there is no hint of authority in Prceterita, that 
 Mrs. Ruskin did not intend her son to go into college 
 at all, but to live with her in High Street. Christ 
 Church militant, the tradition says, broke the windows 
 every night until Ruskin came into the House. But 
 this is disposed of by the testimony of the autobio- 
 graphy. Ruskin tells us that his first night in residence 
 was spent in Peckwater. The madcap ways of the 
 noble young men with whom her son was thrown were 
 inexplicable, if flattering, to Mrs. Ruskin. " It does 
 little good sporting his oak," she writes, adding that 
 Lord Desart and Grimston had climbed in through 
 the window, when John was " hard at work." The
 
 28 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 dear lady evidently imagined that it was eagerness for 
 her son's society that prompted this feat. 
 
 Brought up as he had been, Ruskin was at once 
 a little too superior and not superior enough. His 
 intolerance of undergraduate pranks is evident from one 
 of his poems, in which he describes contemptuously the 
 noise of a distant " wine." But he found staunch and 
 good friends in Acland and Liddell. The fame of his 
 drawings soon brought the curious to his rooms, and 
 Gaisford sent for his portfolio, which he returned with 
 a note of compliment. 
 
 Wretchedly prepared, Ruskin of course found his 
 mere reading a tax, and he had to work out of all 
 proportion to the average necessities of the case. In 
 these days of far severer schools, the Honours man 
 is tempted to smile at the elementary studies which 
 cost the future Professor of Fine Art so much toil. 
 Luckily, in Osborne Gordon he found a sympathetic 
 tutor, who in the fulness of time pulled him through. 
 A very pleasant part of his Christ Church days was 
 his friendship with Buckland, who pressed his artistic 
 talent into the service of the geology lecture. Some 
 of Ruskin's drawings are still in use at the House. 
 At the Bucklands' he met Darwin, and recognised 
 him at once for a man of genius. 
 
 To win the Newdigate Prize for English Verse 
 Ruskin set himself with infinite labour and patience. 
 Three times he tried. The first time Stanley beat 
 him, the second time Dart ; the third time was lucky, 
 and in 1839, coached by Keble, he recited his " Salsette
 
 OXFORD 29 
 
 and Elephanta" in the Sheldonian Theatre at Com- 
 memoration. 
 
 At this point, however, his career was interrupted 
 by serious illness, due to a disappointment. Shortly 
 before he went up to Oxford, he had fallen wildly in 
 love with one of the beautiful daughters of his father's 
 partner, Mr. Domecq. But Adele Clotilde saw nothing 
 in the awkward poetical boy of Herne Hill, and the 
 union eagerly desired by the parents of the young people 
 could not be arranged. The lady made another match. 
 During his first two years at Christ Church, Ruskin 
 ate his heart out and sang his sentimental woes. ' Then 
 he was threatened with consumption, and was carried 
 from health resort to health resort for two years. The 
 news of Adele's marriage was carefully concealed from 
 him. For the time his degree stood over, and sym- 
 pathetic relatives spoke of a blighted career, of honours 
 lost, and with them all hope of high preferment in the 
 Church. Every one who can estimate the circum- 
 stances aright understands that, despite the Newdigate, 
 John Ruskin was not on the high-road to academic 
 distinction, as the Schools account such. 
 
 Fortunately for the world, he recovered, and in 
 1842 he went up again to Oxford. Taking pass 
 Schools, he was awarded a ludicrous distinction then in 
 vogue complimentary honours, " an Honorary Double 
 Fourth." It is in no carping spirit that we are at 
 this pains to place Ruskin's scholarship at its proper 
 level ; it only makes his independent achievement the 
 more extraordinary when we realise how meagrely
 
 30 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 equipped he came to his task. Here is no wail that 
 he was not turned out a finished pedant, but one does 
 regret, on a consideration of pure economy, that he 
 lacked the training sufficient to save him from the 
 ever-lurking, insidious blunder, source of much sorrow, 
 and painful waste of time in after-years. 
 
 It is difficult to arrive at a sure knowledge of his 
 feelings towards his Alma Mater. His reticences hint 
 at a life not wholly at ease there. The Cathedral stirs 
 him, but there is no passionate affection for the stones 
 of Oxford. In all his references to the University 
 there is not one passage touched with the spirit of the 
 Scholar Gypsy. His was not the temper that would 
 turn to watch with wistful adoration 
 
 " The line of festal light in Christ Church Hall." 
 
 In its vast spaces he confessed himself always out of 
 place. 
 
 Fiercely ironical (in Fors Clavigera], he reproaches 
 Harrison for wasting time in Magdalen walks, "old- 
 fashioned thirty years ago." Why did he not seek " the 
 rapturous sanctities of Keble," the lively new zigzag 
 parapet of Tom Quad, or "the elongating suburb of 
 the married Fellows on the cock-horse road to Ban- 
 bury " ? Perhaps one may detect some enthusiasm for 
 the groves of Magdalen in his irony, some jealousy for 
 Christ Church in the protest against the parapet of 
 Tom Quad, but it is doubtful whether Wolsey's 
 foundation moved him as it has moved many. The 
 gaunt outlines of Peckwater, where he lodged, looking
 
 OXFORD 31 
 
 across to the still drearier pile of the library, impressed 
 him at first. Later he takes this as a sign of crudity. 
 But he cannot at any time have loved it. And 
 he certainly hated the "howling" of riotous under- 
 graduates. 
 
 In Arnold and Newman the spires of Oxford and 
 the snapdragon on her walls awoke a romantic longing 
 that is scarcely discoverable in Ruskin. But however 
 deep might be her offence, he was loyal to the trust 
 Oxford had given him and loyal to the idea of a 
 University. " It is," he said long afterwards to his 
 pupils, "the scholar's duty to know and love the per- 
 petual laws of classic literature and art." That was 
 the reason of their presence at the University, and 
 he warned his hearers that he had nothing to give 
 them that they could sell. " If you come to get 
 your living out of her, you are ruining both Oxford 
 and yourselves." 
 
 From reticences and implications rather than from 
 overt statements, some hint may be caught of Ruskin's 
 attitude towards his University. Of his return thither, 
 and of his work as Professor, something will be said 
 on a later page. We have now brought him to the 
 year 1842, in which he took his B.A. degree and was 
 entitled to sign himself "A Graduate of Oxford." 
 That modest title he put to a memorable use. It was 
 the signature of the first volume of " Modern Painters," 
 the work in which he found his vocation. The claims 
 of Poetry and the Church had faded away before the 
 new vision of Ruskin the Art Critic.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FAME 
 
 FOR Ruskin, the long break in his Oxford life had been 
 anything but unfruitful. He had extended his travels ; 
 he had passed by way of the Loire and the Riviera to 
 Rome ; he had visited Naples, Bologna, Venice, and 
 Basle. Although often very ill, he was never really 
 idle, and his brain was constantly accumulating im- 
 pressions, that, altered and exalted by his analytic 
 thought, were to provide the rich material of his 
 work. His pencil was always employed and dexterity 
 increased ; the mere mannerism of the drawing master 
 fell away, and Ruskin developed a style of his own. 
 The centre of his mental processes was Turner, always 
 Turner. 
 
 On his twenty-first birthday his father had given 
 him the Master's " Richmond Bridge " and " Gosport." 
 Out of his redundant pocket-money he had himself 
 purchased " Harlech Castle," an extravagance startling 
 to his indulgent parent, who was scarcely prepared for 
 this flight of hero-worship. But the incident brought 
 an introduction to the artist, and a curious friendship 
 sprang up between the elder and the younger genius. 
 Now more than ever Ruskin observed Nature in terms 
 of Turner. On the way to Naples, he saw at La
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FAME 33 
 
 Riccia that wonderful effect of winter landscape which 
 he reproduced in a passage that is a veritable Turner 
 in words. Many, on meeting it for the first time in 
 " Modern Painters," must have exclaimed when they 
 had read half-way, " But this is a Turner " ; and it is with 
 a curious thrill that one reads the opening sentence of 
 the next paragraph "Tell me who is likest this, Poussin 
 or Turner ? " The cunning with which he builds up this 
 startling climax remains one of the chief proofs, per- 
 haps the chief proof, of Ruskin's power over language. 
 This may be claimed without disputing the criticism 
 that denies classic rank to the passage in question. 
 He got his effect, but forced the means beyond due 
 classical restraint. It is the exuberant effort, one 
 had almost said the trick, of an exceptionally clever 
 boy, revelling in newly discovered powers. 
 
 Before his illness, he had published some scientific 
 papers in Loudon's Magazine, and these led the 
 Editor to tell Mr. Ruskin that his son was certainly 
 the greatest natural genius he had ever known, and 
 that one day, "when both you and I are under the 
 turf, it will be remembered in the literary history 
 of your son's life that the first article of his which 
 was published was in Loudon's Magazine of Natural 
 History" The period following his restoration to 
 health was marked also by memorable advance in 
 his conception of art. It was in the days just pre- 
 ceding his final examination, when he was reading at 
 Herne Hill with Osborne Gordon, that this formative 
 experience came to him. 
 
 c
 
 34 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 During a walk on Tulse Hill he began to draw a 
 tree trunk entwined with ivy. Schooled as he had 
 been to arbitrary " composition," he suddenly revolted 
 from the extremity of that law, in the recognition that 
 the natural disposition of the ivy was infinitely finer 
 than any conventional rearrangement of his own could 
 be. From that moment he vowed fidelity above all 
 things to Nature herself. To that hour he looked back 
 as narrowly devout men do to the instant of their con- 
 version. 
 
 One of the pleasantest periods of Ruskin's life is to 
 be found in the record of those busy days at Herne 
 Hill, when the first volume of " Modern Painters " was 
 in progress. 
 
 After his industrious morning, he would go for a 
 tramp in the Norwood lanes, and look in perhaps at 
 the Dulwich gallery ; or he might give Mr. George 
 Richmond a sitting for the full-length portrait then 
 in progress, or call on Mr. Windus, whose roomful of 
 Turner drawings were invaluable to a young man 
 fighting Turner's battle. In the evening he wrote 
 again for an hour or two, but there was no burning of 
 midnight oil. Next morning at breakfast the previous 
 day's task was read over to Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin, who 
 received their privilege with emotion, not untouched 
 with tears. We know that breakfast table from "A 
 Conversation," one of the birthday poems. It is 
 dramatic in form and serio-comic. Mrs. Ruskin feels 
 the touch of winter and complains of draughts. Mr.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FAME 35 
 
 Ruskin sighs for the skies of Italy, whereat Master 
 Ruskin interjects soulfully : 
 
 " Skies so blue, over you." 
 
 He permits himself to speak only six times in the 
 dialogue. The sayings are characteristic of the meteor- 
 ologist and of the colourist. Mr. Ruskin longs for the 
 beauties of Italian architecture, and the son echoes : 
 
 " Gems and marbles, rich and rare." 
 
 But that scene was several years earlier. One may 
 be sure that in 1842, when the newly written sheets 
 of " Modern Painters " were the breakfast-table topic, 
 Mrs. Ruskin had no care for winter and rough 
 weather. 
 
 The rough weather lay ahead for the young 
 author. John Ruskin was ready to step down into 
 the lists of the world for the combat of half a century. 
 His challenge to preconceived ideas rang clear from 
 the pages of that first volume, published (without 
 previous hawking about, as foolish rumour says) by 
 Messrs. Smith, Elder in May 1843. The new doctrines 
 raised a storm. Ruskin, already somewhat eminent, 
 found himself in the front rank of fame. The Oxford 
 Graduate's bold heresies were attacked in the Press 
 with all the slashing freedom of reviewers in those out- 
 spoken times. The defendant, Turner, was embar- 
 rassed ; he, who " never moved in these matters," had 
 been forced by young enthusiasm into the central place
 
 36 JOHN KUSKIN 
 
 of a movement. And so the battle raged, amid scandal 
 and admiration. A sad innovator, but a great writer ! 
 Such language was a revelation, although the doctrine 
 might be strange. It was terrible to hear Claude and 
 Poussin arraigned, to see the accepted favourites of 
 the hour set on a subordinate plane to the inexplicable 
 later Turner, who had swerved from things people 
 could understand towards a manner directly in defiance 
 of truth, so that he was " imagined by the majority of 
 the public to paint more falsehood and less fact than 
 any other known master." " We shall see," says 
 Ruskin, "with what reason." 
 
 The full exposition of his case, with many digres- 
 sions, was to occupy him for nearly twenty years. 
 During that period, Ruskin's untiring brain threw off 1 
 by-products that would have served very well for the 
 life-work of lesser men. His succeeding works, how- 
 ever, were to be written amid new surroundings ; for 
 what we may call, for the purposes of this sketch, the 
 first Herne Hill period, was drawing to a close. In- 
 crease of material prosperity, their son's fame, a desire 
 to rise to the occasion and to return distinguished 
 hospitality in a distinguished way, led the elder Rus- 
 kins to seek a more commodious home. " Subtlest 
 of temptations," the son called it, when he told how it 
 cost his father much of his former happiness. 
 
 The year that saw the publication of "Modern 
 Painters " was that of the Ruskins' removal to 51 Den- 
 mark Hill. There, with frequent intervals of travel
 
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 Krrmoull
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FAME 37 
 
 abroad, and with one brief interlude, to be hereafter 
 mentioned in a single word, John Ruskin lived and 
 worked until, having laid both his parents to rest, he 
 turned northward and sought those " Gates of the 
 Hills, whence one returns not."
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 "THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 
 
 WITH the new home on Denmark Hill as a base of 
 operations, John Ruskin sent his "line out through 
 all the earth." He went far afield for his material, 
 but for the most part his actual writing was done in 
 the new study, of which, as well as of the house, he 
 has left a minute record, in that chapter of Prosterita 
 entitled " The State of Denmark." 
 
 It was to his parents " a peaceful yet cheerful and, 
 pleasantly, in its suburban manner, dignified, abode of 
 their declining years." For his own part he confesses 
 that the place had little to endear it, although it had 
 every good in it except nearness to a stream. The 
 old passion for running water, discovered on the banks 
 of Tay and by the Springs of Wandel, was still alive 
 and clamant never to be stilled, in fact, while life 
 endured and Ruskin looked back with regret to that 
 early unaccomplished plan of digging a model canal 
 with real locks, which had been one of his dreams at 
 Herne Hill. 
 
 The new house stood in seven acres of ground, 
 meadow, orchard, and kitchen-garden ; there was a lawn 
 on which the breakfast-room opened, that room which, 
 he notes, was extremely pretty when its walls were
 
 "THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 39 
 
 mostly covered with lakes by Turner and doves by 
 Hunt. The dining- and drawing-rooms were " spacious 
 enough for our grandest receptions never more than 
 twelve at dinner." Guests usual on a birthday were 
 Turner, Prout, Stanfield, Leslie, Mulready, and Roberts; 
 a company where respect went hand in hand with 
 understanding, while the talk ranged from art (except 
 when Turner was there) to the last subtleties of sherry. 
 
 As for the great man's own room, fifteen feet by 
 five-and-twenty inside the bookcases, it was distinct, 
 as his, only by its large oblong table around which 
 the rest of the available space made a passage. The 
 lighting was awkward, from two windows forming a 
 bow, blank in the middle, giving a cross-light that 
 considerably fretted the student. Above was his bed- 
 room, with command of the morning clouds, until 
 the encroaching builder stole that inestimable aid to 
 healthy thought. " In such stateliness of civic domicile 
 the industry of mid-life now began." 
 
 Of that giant industry it is hopeless to give any 
 adequate account in this brief study. The most that 
 can be done is to indicate, at the risk of tedium, 
 the chronology of Ruskin's writings, and the con- 
 tributory journeyings. With the ground cleared, once 
 for ah 1 , by that synoptic survey, we follow Ruskin 
 at leisure, and with some liberty of selection and 
 omission, to the chief scenes of his inspiration in 
 France, Switzerland, and Italy. And unto these last 
 we shall come not in the spirit of the guide-book, 
 but seeking by salient illustration to catch at least
 
 40 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 a glimpse of the things Ruskin himself saw, and to 
 learn if possible in what temper he approached them. 
 
 As a central point, it is well to remember that 
 "Modern Painters " went steadily forward from 1842 
 until 1860, the dates of the first and fifth volumes. 
 The second appeared in 1846. Preparatory to its 
 production he had travelled in Switzerland, and had 
 studied old masters in the Louvre, in 1844. In 1845 
 he made his first tour alone, visiting, with memorable 
 results, Pisa ; Lucca and Florence, where he took up 
 the study of Christian Art ; Verona, which gave colour 
 to all his thought and teaching ; and Venice, where 
 he awoke to the meaning of Tintoret. The year 
 1846 found him passing through France and the 
 Jura, to Geneva, then over Mont Cenis into Italy. 
 Next year he was in Scotland. In 1848 he began 
 a pilgrimage to the English cathedrals, and visited 
 Amiens, Paris, and Normandy, and the same year 
 he threw off that wonderful parergon, " The Seven 
 Lamps of Architecture." 
 
 That work was not written at Denmark Hill, but 
 at 81 Park Street, his London residence during his 
 short and unfortunate married life. To Switzerland 
 he went again the next year, and spent the winter 
 in Venice studying missals and architecture. In 1850 
 he wrote the first volume of ' The Stones of Venice " 
 at Park Street. 1851 is memorable for the pamphlet 
 "Notes on Sheepfolds," purchased by at least one simple 
 shepherd in the belief that it was a practical guide to 
 his calling. Too late, the good man discovered that
 
 "THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 41 
 
 he had paid his florin for a tract on ecclesiastical 
 polity. The same year Ruskin made the acquaint- 
 ance of Carlyle and Frederick Denison Maurice, de- 
 fended the Pre-Raphaelites, travelled again in France 
 and Switzerland, and spent the winter and the fol- 
 lowing spring in Venice. On December 19 Turner 
 died, and Ruskin heard that he had been named an 
 executor a trust resigned as to the letter of the 
 law, but discharged with how great a fidelity of 
 spirit the Turner drawings in the National Gallery 
 declare ; for by Ruskin's infinite labour they were 
 at length rescued from neglect and arranged. 
 
 The second and third volumes of " The Stones 
 of Venice" were written in 1852. In 1853 Ruskin 
 appeared first as a lecturer, delivering at Edinburgh 
 his course on " Architecture and Painting." To Swit- 
 zerland again in 1854 with his parents, he devoted 
 himself to drawing, and on his return he founded 
 his Working Men's College. In 1855 he fluttered 
 the dovecotes of Art with his first " Academy Notes," 
 so destructive to the mere market value of some 
 men's work that Punch introduced a sad Academician 
 singing : 
 
 " I paints and paints, 
 Hears no complaints, 
 
 And sells before I'm dry ; 
 Till savage Ruskin 
 Sticks his tusk in, 
 
 And nobody will buy/' 
 
 That year (1855) saw the second and third volumes
 
 42 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 of " Modern Painters." In 1856 he wrote the " Ele- 
 ments of Drawing," and the following year is memor- 
 able for two lectures " Imagination in Architecture," 
 delivered hefore the Architectural Association ; and 
 " Political Economy of Art," at Manchester. He was 
 occupied also with the arrangement of the Turner 
 drawings. " Conventional Art " was spoken at South 
 Kensington, " Work of Iron " at Tunbridge Wells 
 in 1858, and he made his official Report on the 
 Turner Bequest. This busy year also held his " Study 
 of Art," an address to St. Martin's School. Going 
 alone to Switzerland and Italy, he studied Veronese 
 at Turin. On his return he gave the Inaugural 
 Address at the Cambridge School of Art. Three 
 lectures mark 1859 the "Unity of Art," at the 
 Royal Institution ; " Modern Manufacture and Design," 
 at Bradford; "Switzerland," at the Working Men's 
 College. This year's tour, the last he made with 
 his parents, was in Germany. "Religious Art" was 
 delivered to the Working Men's College in 1860, 
 and at length the volume of the book of " Modern 
 Painters " was closed. 
 
 But there was no resting. At Chamouni he wrote 
 " Unto this Last," and stepped forth a heretic declared. 
 The Cornhill published the papers for a time, but at 
 last Thackeray and Smith said nay. Froude gave a 
 second series another chance in Fraser's Magazine, but 
 at the fourth essay he too cried, " Hold, enough 1 " 
 For the first time Ruskin bit the gag. He had 
 turned his back on orthodoxy; he had declared that
 
 "THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 43 
 
 the time was out of joint he had even begun to in- 
 quire how it was to be set right. The world, as ever, 
 would have none of such doctrine. The Fraser papers 
 were afterwards published as " Munera Pulveris." 
 
 The studies of 1862 and of 1863 were of Luini at 
 Milan and of the Limestone Alps : 1864, the year of his 
 father's death, saw the lectures " Traffic " and " Kings' 
 Treasuries and Queens' Gardens," next year incorpo- 
 rated in " Sesame and Lilies," his most popular book. 
 Of immediately following works names and dates must 
 suffice: "Work and Play," a lecture; "The Study 
 of Architecture " and " War," the last given at Wool- 
 wich (1865); "Time and Tide" (letters to Thomas 
 Dixon, a working cork-cutter); " Modern Art" (1867); 
 "The Mystery of Life" and "The Three-legged Stool 
 of Art" (1868). "Flamboyant Architecture of the 
 Somme," "The Queen of the Air" (Greek Myths 
 of Cloud and Storm), " Hercules of Camarina," and 
 "The Future of England" were the fruit of 1869. 
 He revisited France, Switzerland, Verona, and Venice, 
 where the news reached him that he had been elected 
 Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. 
 
 Next year Ruskin took up his professorial duties 
 and delivered his first and second courses. Before 
 the Royal Institution he gave his " Verona and its 
 Rivers," one of the loveliest examples of his descrip- 
 tive and expository style. It was the memorable 
 year of the first Fors Clavigera. Again he moved 
 through Switzerland and Italy ; he made a fruitful study 
 of coins in the British Museum for his Oxford course
 
 44 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 on Greek Art, in which he now found a new signi- 
 ficance ; and the Woolwich Cadets were privileged to 
 hear him once more in the " Story of Arachne." He 
 gave them also, in 1872, " The Bird of Calm." His 
 Slade lectures for the year were " The Eagle's Nest " 
 and " Ariadne Florentina." Corpus now gave him 
 an Honorary Fellowship, which meant an Oxford 
 lodging of his own, "between a Turkey carpet and 
 a Titian," under the very shadow of Christ Church. 
 That Society had already honoured him in 1858 at 
 her first election of Honorary Students. 
 
 Here we reach the close of the Denmark Hill 
 period. After his mother's death in 1871, Ruskin 
 looked for and found a long-desired retreat among the 
 Lakes. From W. J. Linton he purchased Brantwood, 
 by Coniston Water, and there in 1872 he made his 
 home until the end. Before we leave the associations 
 of South London, it should be noted, in a retrospective 
 word, that in 1852, when he left Park Street, Ruskin 
 took the house on Herne Hill next door to his old home. 
 There he finished " The Stones of Venice." In 1868 
 he bought No. 28 itself, and used it for his rougher 
 collection of minerals, keeping only his finest specimens 
 at Denmark Hill. His reasons, given in a letter, are 
 worth recording : 
 
 " first, affection for the old house : my second, want 
 of room ; my third, the incompatibility of hammering, 
 washing and experimenting on stones, with cleanliness 
 in my stores of drawing. And my fourth is the power
 
 r;'5: S'Ss'lr 1 ^* :ry' A -*-">A-,, 
 
 < I - ' f- :' 
 
 -^=-p - f' ' . I 
 
 , I . i-rx-sr. jl I
 
 "THE INDUSTRY OF MID-LIFE" 41 
 
 1 shall have, when I want to do anything very quietly, 
 of going up the hill and thinking it out in the old 
 garden, where your green- house still stands, and the 
 aviary without fear of interruption from callers." 
 
 But Dr. Dryasdust has held us too long with these 
 statistical details. It is time, without much burden of 
 chronology, to glance at the chief scenes of Ruskin's 
 inspiration in France, Switzerland, and Italy.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, AND ITALY 
 
 " THERE have been, in sum, three centres of my life's 
 thought: Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa." So Ruskin 
 made avowal when he came late in life to review bygone 
 things. All that he did at Venice he held to be but 
 bye- work, on the strange plea that he dealt there with 
 things hitherto unknown or falsely stated. Because 
 he toiled after truth in Venetian history, because his 
 interest lay in " Tintoret virtually unseen, Veronese 
 unfelt, Carpaccio not so much as named," because, too, 
 something was due to his fondness for gliding about 
 in gondolas, he put Venice in the second place among 
 his instructors. The others had accepted lessons ready 
 to his hand. Venice he regarded, by a strange subtlety 
 of thought, as a receiver rather than a giver. He 
 taught her to read her own history aright, to acknow- 
 ledge her greatest painters. The receiver, therefore, 
 is less blessed. And the tremendous work itself was 
 pastime, because of those gliding gondolas. 
 
 It is a delightful sophistry, but, like all the Ruskin 
 sophistries, sincere. Later came the inevitable qualifi- 
 cation. To the three thought-centres he must add 
 Verona, because she gave the colouring to all they 
 taught, and virtually represented the fate and the
 
 FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 47 
 
 beauty of Italy to him. Of this he has left us proof 
 in the passage that records his Pisgah-vision of Italian 
 story as he looked, from the heights above Verona, 
 across the Lombard plain. 
 
 With so much to be examined in few words, this 
 meagre sketch can take only the lightest account of 
 Rouen. For critical work there the reader must turn 
 to the " Seven Lamps." In the Norman capital 
 Ruskin worked out for himself his grammar of the 
 flamboyant Gothic, approaching his task, as ever, by 
 easy stages, and reading, during that journey of 1835, 
 a preface in the architecture of Abbeville. Not yet 
 ready for Rouen itself, he read the foreword gladly, feel- 
 ing that " here was entrance into immediately healthy 
 labour and joy." In time he was to appreciate Rouen 
 as a critic, and the preface became an interpretation. 
 On that first visit the cathedral gave him, in a purely 
 personal sense, a thrill of delightful contrast, just such 
 a contrast as the Ruskin way of life must have pro- 
 duced time and again : 
 
 " Imagine the change between one Sunday and 
 the next, from the morning service in this building 
 (Dr. Andrews' chapel) attended by the families of the 
 small shop-keepers in the Walworth Road, in their 
 Sunday trimmings (our plumber's wife sat in the next 
 pew . . . ) ; fancy the change from this, to high 
 mass in Rouen Cathedral, its nave filled by the white- 
 capped peasantry of half Normandy 1 " 
 
 A fuller account of Rouen and its cathedral was
 
 48 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 among the unfulfilled projects of Ruskin's later life. 
 Of Abbeville, and his " cheerful, unalloyed, unwearying 
 pleasure " in getting sight of the city and St. Wulfran 
 on a fine summer afternoon, he has left a record, in one 
 phrase of which, if it reflect an actual thought of that 
 5th of June 1835, and not the afterthought of years, we 
 may trace the germ of doctrine expounded with what 
 mastery and knowledge ! in the first volume of " The 
 Stones of Venice" the unity of church Gothic and 
 domestic Gothic. Examine in particular the use of 
 the word "faithful," and learn that Ruskin used no 
 epithet at random. He has spoken of the churches 
 of Abbeville, and continues : 
 
 " Outside, the faithful old town gathered itself and 
 nestled under their buttresses, like a brood beneath the 
 mother's wings." 
 
 In those days the kinship of house and church had 
 not been disguised or swept out of remembrance by 
 modern desecrators. St. Wulfran's and St. Riquier's 
 walls and towers were alike coeval with the gabled 
 timber houses of which the busier streets chiefly con- 
 sisted when Ruskin first saw Abbeville. 
 
 One could linger long enough over the story of 
 those posting journeys to the South, with their digres- 
 sions to Dijon, where, in after-years, at the Hotel de la 
 Cloche, the master pointed out the room where, in his 
 wash-hand basin, had been bitten "with savage care- 
 lessness " the last plate for the " Seven Lamps." But 
 the limits of these pages forbid.
 
 FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 49 
 
 There was a time when Ruskin wrote of Venice : 
 " Thank God I am here ; it is the Paradise of cities. 
 This, and Chamouni, are my two bournes of Earth." 
 Once more the correcting hand descended on these 
 words. When he wrote that rhapsody, he knew neither 
 Rouen nor Pisa, though he had seen both. Geneva, 
 he notes, is meant to include Chamouni in the triad 
 of "tutresses" a word, by the way, not of the first 
 choice, and unworthy of his style. 
 
 "My true mother town of Geneva," Ruskin ex- 
 claims, when he tells how it was there, in church, to 
 the accompaniment of braying organ and doggerel 
 hymns, that the impulse came to him which threw his 
 new thought into the form of " Modern Painters." 
 He repaid his debt in a wonderful passage of descrip- 
 tion, enshrining the memory of the little town, the 
 canton four miles square, in the days of his early visits, 
 before the place was spoiled by " the people who have 
 hold of it now, with their polypous knots of houses, 
 communal with ' London, Paris, and New York.' " 
 He stayed on his first visits (1883, 1835) at the Hotel 
 des Etrangers, " one of those country houses open to 
 the polite stranger, some half-mile out of the gates." 
 There he rejoiced in a Geneva " composed of a cluster 
 of water-mills, a street of penthouses, two wooden 
 bridges, two dozen of stone houses on a little hill, and 
 three or four perpendicular lanes up and down the 
 hill." He saw it as a community well-ordered, the 
 home of honest industries, this bird's nest of a place, 
 centre of religious and social thought to all Europe, 
 
 D
 
 50 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 " Saussure's school and Calvin's, Rousseau's and 
 Byron's, Turner's " 
 
 Here Ruskin the humorist looks out. He was 
 ready, he confessed, to add that Geneva was his own 
 school as well, "but I didn't write all that last page 
 to end so." 
 
 The outsider who sees most of the game will 
 perhaps hazard the opinion that kindred Chamouni 
 was even more closely interwoven with Ruskin's life 
 and work. It was the inspiration of early poems (a 
 small matter, but worth noting) ; it was the base of 
 his constant studies in the geological structure of the 
 Alps, scene of close observation of plants and clouds, 
 subject of many drawings. There he grappled with 
 the ethical problems predestined in "The Nature of 
 Gothic," and at Mornex he gave them their first formal 
 expression in " Unto this Last," fruit of a deep anta- 
 gonism to his times; thither in 1879 he longed to 
 return, but glacial changes had made Chamouni a 
 " desolated home to him " for vanishing glaciers had 
 betrayed him. But it was at Chamouni, after all, in 
 1882, that he wrote his delightful, urbane foreshadow- 
 ing of Prceterita, the Epilogue to the reprint of 
 " Modern Painters." He had a dream to establish his 
 life on some parcel of land near the chain of Mont 
 Blanc, and once he actually bought a piece of meadow 
 in Chamouni, but only to sell it again, on foreseeing 
 the approach of the inevitable tourist, and consequent 
 ruin of those solitudes. 
 
 From the Diary of 1844, a fragment on Chamouni
 
 FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 51 
 
 seemed to Ruskin perhaps worth keeping. His sparing 
 hand is justified : 
 
 " 28th June, half-past ten. I never was dazzled by 
 moonlight until now ; but as it rose behind the Mont 
 Blanc du Tacul the full moon almost blinded me : it 
 burst forth into the sky like a vast star. For an hour 
 before, the aiguilles had appeared as dark masses against 
 a sky looking as transparent as clear sea, edged at 
 their summits with fleeces of cloud breaking into a 
 glorious spray and foam of white fire. A meteor fell 
 over the Dome as the moon rose : now it is so intensely 
 bright that I cannot see the Mont Blanc underneath 
 it ; the form is lost in its light." 
 
 Excellent as it is in feeling, this first-hand writing 
 from a journal shows how necessary it was for Ruskin 
 that his greater works should have been revised by 
 Mr. W: H. Harrison, his mentor and editor for thirty 
 years. In his charming tribute to that friend, Ruskin 
 is plainly all at sea about the technical reasons for his 
 taskmaster's severity: but he took his castigation like 
 a man, rewriting and recasting cheerfully. 
 
 In Ruskin's account of Pisa occurs an implicit 
 explanation of his curious depreciation of Venice as 
 a teacher. When he came to any place prepared for 
 what he was to seek as material for learning and found 
 it, there he recognised an informing influence. At his 
 first sight of Pisa, in 1840, he was impressed by the 
 purity of her architecture, but he had too little know- 
 ledge to make progress. His guides were chiefly
 
 52 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 Byron and Shelley. But in 1845 he had read enough 
 of Dante and of Sismondi's " Italian Republics " to know 
 what he had to seek. His picture of his works and 
 days there is altogether amiable. Still orthodox, he 
 found in the frescoes of the Campo Santo the entire 
 doctrine of Christianity. He copied the frescoes, then 
 rapidly vanishing to make way for civic monuments; 
 he sketched in the streets and drew admiring crowds of 
 companionable not common Italians, in whom he 
 recognised their wonderful natural gift for knowing 
 what was right in a picture. 
 
 At Pisa Ruskin made good friends with the Abbe* 
 Rossini, Professor of Fine Art, and heaped coals of fire 
 on his head by going patiently to hear his great lecture 
 on " The Beautiful, " although that morning the Abbs' 
 had dismissed Turner with a superficial word, " Yes, 
 yes, an imitator of Salvator." Ruskin's only revenge 
 was a conviction, after the lecture, that he knew a 
 good deal more about the Beautiful than the professor. 
 That excellent man in turn made ample amends by 
 having a scaffolding put up to enable a future Professor 
 of Fine Art in another place to make partial records 
 of the frescoes. And thus 
 
 " The days that began in the cloister of the Campo 
 Santo usually ended by my getting up on the roof of 
 Santa Maria della Spina, and sitting in the sunlight that 
 transfused the warm marbles of its pinnacles till the 
 unabated brightness went down beyond the arches of 
 the Pont-a-Mare, the few footsteps and voices of the 
 twilight fell silent in the streets, and the city and her
 
 FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 53 
 
 mountains stood mute as a dream, beyond the soft 
 eddying of Arno." 
 
 Needless, perhaps, to point out that even here, in 
 words written a good forty years later, despite Dante 
 and Sismondi, the influence of Shelley is still para- 
 mount. 
 
 These, then, were Ruskin's three great teachers, 
 and such, in the lightest outline, were the impressions 
 he drew from them while his mind was still plastic ; 
 although it is well to remember that his account is 
 written, for the most part, with the hand and thought 
 of ripe experience. 
 
 Of Lucca, where Quercia's Ilaria del Caretto became 
 for Ruskin his ideal of Christian sculpture, the mere 
 mention must suffice. Florence, at first grievously 
 misunderstood, at length took her true place; in 
 witness whereof "Val d'Arno" (most charming of 
 the Slade lectures), the " Laws of Fe'sole," and passages 
 innumerable throughout the works. 
 
 The central point of Florence was, for Ruskin, 
 Giotto's Campanile, lovingly remembered in the 
 frontispiece to " The Seven Lamps." " Mornings in 
 Florence " records his vision, one of the most significant 
 things in all his teaching, that tells how the last tradi- 
 tions of Faith and Hope of the Jewish and Gentile 
 races met for their beautiful labour at the foot of that 
 Tower. He begs the pilgrim to get right the little 
 piece of geography fixing the local relation of the 
 Campanile, the Baptistery, and Brunelleschi's Dome.
 
 54 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 For the Baptistery was the last building raised on 
 Earth by the descendants of the workmen taught by 
 Daedalus, the Tower the loveliest inspiration of the 
 men who lifted up the tabernacle in the wilderness. 
 Here is the last and noblest inspiration of living Greek 
 and living Christian work. And the Dome was the 
 latest example of the best Christian architecture just 
 before the onset of decline. Long afterwards Ruskin 
 mourned the profanation of that sacred spot by all the 
 horrors of a modernised Italy. 1 
 
 And what of Venice ? " Bye-work," he said. 
 Possibly, but not to be neglected. It was a "vain 
 temptation," he says ; but it is well that Ruskin allowed 
 himself to be tempted. He was still a boy when he 
 first saw Venice, and the beginning of everything was 
 the sight of the gondola beak coming actually inside 
 the door of Danieli's hotel. Exquisite sensation for 
 Master John Ruskin ! Of tfie approach to the city he 
 has left us his impressions in one of those long, deliberate 
 passages minute but never tedious in which he plays 
 the cunning cicerone, who withholds and withholds, 
 until his hearer is ripe for the effect. Sometimes it 
 comes with a gorgeous blaze of colour. Not so at the 
 Vestibule of V enice. 
 
 He leads us out on an autumnal morning from the 
 dark eastern gateway of Padua, and so on for hours 
 
 1 "A stand for hackney-coaches, cigars, spitting and harlot- 
 planned fineries." Students of Fors Clavigera will recall in that 
 last phrase of censure the fierce old man's plain words on the 
 provenance of high-heeled shoes.
 
 FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 55 
 
 through flat lands, past the tall white tower of Dolo, 
 until we come among the divided waters of the Brenta. 
 Then at Mestre appears the extremity of a canal, black, 
 it seems, with stagnation ; but no, it is covered with 
 the black boats of Venice. Enter one, to try if they 
 be real boats or not, and glide across the yielding water, 
 that seems to let the boat sink into soft vacancy, noting 
 as you go (for your guide is the hill-man Ruskin) how 
 all round the horizon lie the Alps of Bassano. Out of 
 the water before you rises at last what seems to be the 
 suburb of an English manufacturing town "four or 
 five domes, a sullen cloud of smoke issuing from the 
 belfry of a church. 
 
 " It is Venice." 
 
 Thus quietly, with an intentional hint of anti-climax, 
 he approaches "The Throne," where there is no stint 
 of glories. He shows us the Adriatic, a sea with the 
 bleak power of our own Northern waves, changing her 
 angry pallor to a field of burnished gold about the feet 
 of St. George of the Seaweed ; the shadowy Rialto 
 throws its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the 
 Palace of the Camerlenghi, and the Ducal Palace, 
 "flushed with its sanguined veins, looks to the snowy 
 dome of our Lady of Salvation." 
 
 But we must beware. This is a Venice that Enrico 
 Dandolo or Francis Foscari would not know. Their 
 Venice lies hidden away in many a grass-grown court 
 and silent pathway and lightless canal. And the 
 Venice to which Ruskin came first had been created 
 for him, as for Turner, by Byron. That Venice is
 
 56 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 a mere stage dream, a thing of falsities and anach- 
 ronisms, against which he was to wage a long war. 
 For when in 1849 Ruskin came, with much material 
 already collected, to write " The Stones of Venice," 
 he discovered that her history would have to be ex- 
 amined anew ; for even the accepted authorities could 
 not agree within a hundred years as to the dates of 
 her chief monuments. He must question them, stone 
 by stone. Patiently he set himself to read the riddle 
 of the Ducal Palace and of St. Mark's, and at last 
 he could say that what he had found was truth. 
 
 St. Mark's he interpreted as a piece of jewel- 
 work on the grand scale, in the sense of art: in the 
 light of his inevitable ethics, "No city had such a 
 Bible." It is a mighty humanity, perfect and proud, 
 hiding no weakness beneath the mantle, gaining no 
 greatness from the diadem. All that he said of it 
 in the earlier volumes he would have set aside in 
 later days for the more condensed study, " St. Mark's 
 Rest," but those who care most for his writings have 
 not agreed with this judgment. Yet it is well not to 
 neglect " St. Mark's Rest," were it only for the hints 
 of compensation that came to Ruskin amid a ruined 
 and desolated Venice, as she seemed to him then. 
 
 There in later days he fell in love with Carpaccio's 
 St. Ursula, worshipping her, someone has finely said, 
 as a sincere Athenian might have worshipped the 
 Queen of the Air. And in this temper, which one 
 may perhaps call Ruskin 's meteoric mood, he had 
 new visions of Venetian history, not in her painting
 
 FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 57 
 
 only but in her buildings. Take, as a single instance, 
 his interpretation of the dream of Magnus of Altinum ; 
 that quaint scripture telling how Messer Jesus Christ 
 Our Lord showed that where a red cloud rested 
 there men should build the Church of St. Salvador, 
 and where a white cloud gleamed Our Lady foretold 
 that there should rise St. Mary the Beautiful. It 
 is a subject fitted to the hand of the true air-man 
 Ruskin, he who in " Modern Painters " taught the 
 ways of the Cloud Flocks, and in the " Queen of the 
 Air " pleaded jealously for unsullied skies. It is well 
 that he did not see the " air-man " of to-day. But 
 to return to our Venetian cloud myth and Ruskin's 
 commentary : 
 
 " None cares to-day whether any God-given cloud 
 is white or red, yet a perception lingers in the old 
 fisherman's eyes of the difference between white nebbia 
 on the morning sea and red clouds in the evening 
 twilight. And the Stella Maris comes in the sea 
 cloud ; Leucothea : but the Son of Man on the 
 jasper throne." 
 
 That use of Leucothea "the white goddess" 
 is overwhelming. Ruskin the etymologist was not 
 always to be trusted, but here his genius prevailed. 
 Note, too, the student of jewels and rock-crystals rising 
 for a moment skyward to find in the red cloud a 
 throne of jasper. 
 
 Such, then, was that notable though lightly es- 
 teemed bye-work.
 
 58 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 But Venice meant more to Ruskin than even 
 this. He was to make known her painters : in her 
 Scuola di San Rocco he found assurance of his own 
 real vocation. With that crucial incident this less 
 than outline of his Venetian experience must end. 
 One day during the tour of 1845, Ruskin and J. D. 
 Harding entered for the first time the School of 
 St. Roch. There the sight of Tintoret's "Cruci- 
 fixion" took the strength out of them. Harding 
 felt like a whipped schoolboy ; not so Ruskin. 
 He writes in the Epilogue to " Modern Painters," 
 vol. ii. : 
 
 " I felt only that a new world was opened to 
 me, that I had seen that day the Art of Man in its 
 full majesty for the first time; and that there was 
 also a strange and precious gift in myself enabling 
 me to recognise it, and therein ennobling, not crush- 
 ing me." 
 
 It has already been noted that to the number of 
 his teachers Ruskin added, as an afterthought, Verona, 
 representative, to him, of the fate and the beauty 
 of Italy. His memorable up-gathering of all that 
 Verona suggested must be read at length in the 
 lecture he delivered to the Royal Institution in 1870. 
 In its beautiful opening every side of his own interests 
 and character is reflected the worshipper of moun- 
 tains, the patient geologist and botanist, the historian, 
 the artist, the poet, and, needless to say, the moralist. 
 Taking his hearers to a height overlooking the city,
 
 FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 59 
 
 he shows them, in a moment of time, all that Italy 
 meant for him. He points out the gateway of the 
 Goths, the valleys of the Inn and of the Adige ; he 
 pauses to analyse the structure of the promontory 
 whence he looks down on all the plain between Alp 
 and Apennine how it hardens from limestone, with 
 knots of splendid brown jasper, into the peach-blossom 
 marble of Verona. In the moat of the city he traces 
 the cradle of modern geological science (for in its 
 trenching Leonardo first suggested the true nature 
 of fossils) ; in its walls, the cradle of civic life ; in its 
 round tower, the first ever embrasured for artillery 
 constructed against artillery the cradle of modern war, 
 the beginning of the end of all fortification, " of a 
 system that costs millions a year and leaves England 
 without defence." There speaks the political philoso- 
 pher, but in the main his reflections are less prosaic. 
 Twelve miles away is Mantua; 1 beyond its fretted 
 outline, Parma ; to the left, at the feet of the 
 Eugansean Hills, rests Padua ; in the gleam of the 
 horizon beyond Venice. And at our feet Verona, 
 with the Scaligers' bridge, the church of San Zeno, 
 the remnants of the Palace of Theodoric Dietrich 
 of Berne. 
 
 This is but a maimed paraphrase of a picture 
 suggested, in slow detail, with wonderful gleams of 
 colour the Alps of Friuli touched by the sunset " into 
 a crown of strange rubies," bright flowing Adige, blue 
 
 1 Actually, a good twenty miles. ED.
 
 60 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 Lombard plain. The scene being set, Ruskin gathers 
 all its meaning into this : 
 
 " Now I do not think that there is any other rock 
 in all the world, from which the places, and monuments, 
 of so complex and deep a fragment of the history of its 
 ages can be visible, as from this piece of crag with its 
 blue and prickly weeds. For you have thus beneath 
 you at once the birthplaces of Virgil and Livy, the 
 homes of Dante and Petrarch, and the source of the 
 most sweet and pathetic inspiration of your own Shake- 
 speare ; the spot where the civilisation of the Gothic 
 kingdoms was founded on the throne of Theodoric, 
 and where whatever was strongest in the Italian race 
 redeemed itself into life by its leagues against Bar- 
 barossa. You have the cradle of natural science and 
 medicine in the schools of Padua ; the central light of 
 Italian chivalry in the power of the Scaligers ; the chief 
 stain of Italian cruelty in that of Ezzelin ; and lastly, 
 the birthplace of the highest art ; for among these hills, 
 or by this very Adige bank, were born Mantegna, 
 Titian, Correggio, and Veronese." 
 
 " The only mischief of the place," he wrote in June 
 1869 that late visit paid just in time to save a record 
 of the Castelbarco monument before it was " restored " 
 " the only mischief is its being too rich, a history to 
 every foot of ground and a picture on every foot of 
 wall, frescoes fading away in the neglected streets like 
 the colours of a dolphin." 
 
 During this visit, one May morning, while Ruskin 
 was sketching under a quiet Italian light in the
 
 FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, ITALY 61 
 
 beautiful square of Verona, Longfellow and his little 
 daughter came up and talked with him as he worked. 
 He hoped it was not very vain of him to wish that 
 if a photograph could have been taken of the scene, 
 some people both in England and America would have 
 liked copies of it. But of the meeting of two famous 
 men in the meeting-place of so much history, Ruskin's 
 own words remain the only record, more enduring 
 than any sun-picture.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 OXFORD ONCE MORE: THE SLADE PROFESSOR 
 
 FOR nine years before his appointment to the Slade 
 Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford, Ruskin had 
 ceased to write directly on Art. It gave him a text, 
 certainly, but everything now was subordinated to his 
 teaching of moral and political philosophy. In " Unto 
 this Last " he had, in striving to give a logical defini- 
 tion of wealth, spoken words that a materialistic and 
 money-grubbing age could not understand, or refused to 
 understand. The latter is possibly nearer the mark. A 
 system of political economy that scrupled not to call 
 the art of making oneself rich the art of making some 
 one else poor, that postulated upright and clean dealing, 
 the production of only true and honest work, and a just 
 reward for the labourer, who was to have means to 
 command for himself as much labour as he had ex- 
 pended, could not hope to win popular success. We 
 have seen the fate of these papers in the Cornhill, 
 and of their successors in Fraser's. 
 
 What Ruskin sought was to point the way to a 
 complete reform of the social system, and he was re- 
 ceived as every new Gospeller is received. For the 
 best part of a decade he lived much in solitude, at 
 Mornex on the Saleve and at Chamouni, wrestling, 
 
 02
 
 OXFORD ONCE MORE 63 
 
 often in deep gloom of spirit, with a froward world. 
 He had passed away from all orthodoxy ; old friends 
 misunderstood him ; to his parents his new views were 
 a sorrow. But his heterodoxy won him the friendship 
 and sympathy of Carlyle, who might have said to 
 Ruskin, " Thy-doxy is my-doxy." 
 
 The Oxford appointment did not win him back from 
 heresy; but it brought him, with better heart, once 
 more among the throngs of men. He took up his 
 duties in no perfunctory spirit, and completely rewrote 
 in a maturer form all his teaching on Art, qualified, of 
 necessity, with his now inevitable ethics. His first 
 lecture, delivered on his birthday, February 8, 1870, 
 was an event in the history of the University. The 
 crowd was so great that the Slade Professor's lecture- 
 room could not hold a tenth part, and the audience 
 adjourned to the Sheldonian Theatre, where, amid en- 
 thusiasm, Ruskin gave a new direction to work that 
 has had permanent and far-reaching effects upon his 
 countrymen. Of his influence the proof is our wonder 
 nowadays that he should have required, in "Modern 
 Painters" and elsewhere, to do so much clearing of 
 the ground. His introduction, then requiring proof 
 step by step, has for many of us become axiomatic. 
 
 Very soon he recognised that merely theoretical 
 teaching could be of little use unless it were reinforced 
 by the practical, and to this end he founded the Oxford 
 School of Drawing, to which came a fair number of 
 the more enthusiastic spirits. The Professor was him- 
 self the drawing- master, and he enriched his school
 
 64 JOHN EUSKIIST 
 
 with many gifts his own sketches, a few examples of 
 Tintoret, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Holman Hunt. 
 Later he endowed the school with a gift of 5000. 
 In spite of antagonisms, there can be no doubt that 
 in his Oxford work Ruskin found pleasure, if not 
 happiness. He became the centre of an interesting 
 circle of young men, who were influenced by his 
 teaching, ethical as well as artistic, and if enthusiasm 
 sometimes led them into Quixotism, well, then, their 
 state was the more gracious. 
 
 Quaintest of all the experiments in practising what 
 they preached was the endeavour of Ruskin and his 
 disciples to mend with their own hands a villainous 
 piece of road at Hincksey. The fame of that gallant 
 deed reverberated amid much kindly laughter into after- 
 times. The present writer, one of a far later brood of 
 undergraduates, remembers an afternoon at Hincksey, 
 when he chanced in miry November weather upon a 
 fearful Slough of Despond, that might by courtesy have 
 been called a highway. " That," said a cynical senior 
 man, " is the Ruskin Road." Many picks were broken 
 in the work, and one vigorous but unwary devotee, 
 it is said, drove the other end of the pick through 
 his back, and was, alas ! injured for life. But they 
 claimed to have put the road into decent order, at least 
 for the time. It was no part of their scheme to take 
 that or any other bad piece off the Surveyor's hands. 
 Enemies said that the farmers laughed the undertak- 
 ing to scorn : the truth is, they gave the workmen a 
 vote of thanks and made known certain privileges of
 
 OXFOED ONCE MORE 65 
 
 grazing rights which accrued to those who kept up 
 the road. So that even an imperfect feudal system 
 had provided some sort of proper equivalent in kind 
 as the labourer's reward. It was, as it were, an in- 
 stalment of the Ruskin theory of wages. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin's breakfasts at Corpus were famous for 
 their flow of soul, and one wishes that the Oxford of 
 a more recent day had had anything as vital and in- 
 teresting to offer. Among the young men who came 
 under the Slade Professor's immediate influence, two 
 of the most notable were Mr. W. H. Mallock and 
 the late Arnold Toynbee, the latter of whom gave the 
 Ruskin doctrine practical expression through his social 
 work in the East End of London. With Prince 
 Leopold, Ruskin also formed a warm friendship. 
 
 Of his later Oxford life Ruskin has left one very 
 amiable glimpse in Prceterita. He reveals himself as 
 unconquerably shy amid the distinguished company 
 into which from time to time he was thrust by his 
 fame. For that he blames his want of early training 
 in the mere amenities of society. It is a story within 
 a story, beginning with a dinner at Christ Church, 
 given by the Dean and Mrs. Liddell during the visit 
 of the Princess of Wales. Disraeli and Ruskin were 
 among the guests invited to meet her Royal Highness. 
 " I knew no more how to behave," says the Slade 
 Professor, " than a marmot pup." Very soon Ruskin 
 learned by intuition that a ripple of brighter conversa- 
 tion running round the table concerned himself, and 
 a glance from the Princess confirmed his suspicion. 
 
 E
 
 66 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 Some one had told a pleasant story at his expense : 
 how, an evening or two before, the gay Professor, 
 knowing that Mr. and Mrs. Liddell were to dine at 
 Blenheim, entered into a plot with the Liddell girls 
 to steal round from Corpus to the Deanery, where 
 there was to be tea and a little singing or the like. 
 Through blinding snow the Professor kept his tryst, 
 and a delightful evening was just beginning, when, lo ! 
 re-enter the Dean and Mrs. Liddell, whose carriage 
 could not get farther than the Parks, owing to the 
 drifts. " How sorry you must be to see us, Mr. 
 Ruskin ! " said Mrs. Liddell ; to which he replied, " I 
 never was more so." The Dean kindly promised not 
 to interrupt the symposium, but the spell was broken, 
 and Ruskin returned to Corpus disconsolate. 
 
 This was matter after Dizzy's own heart, and in 
 ten minutes he had every detail perfect, for future 
 deadly use. 
 
 But before the Minister could strike, Ruskin had 
 to run the gauntlet of a talk with the Princess, while 
 "the attendant stars and terrestrial beings round, 
 listened, to hear what the marmot pup had to say for 
 himself." 
 
 " In the space of, say, a minute and a half, I had 
 told the Princess that landscape painting had been 
 little cultivated by the Heads of Colleges, that it 
 had been still less cultivated by the Undergraduates, 
 and that my young lady pupils always expected 
 me to teach them how to paint like Turner in six 
 lessons."
 
 OXFOED ONCE MORE 67 
 
 Difficulties assailed Princess and Professor. Her 
 Royal Highness bowed courteously and passed on to 
 the next Professor. "A blank space," says Ruskin, 
 " formed itself round me," when suddenly there entered, 
 in full dress, Miss Rhoda Liddell, "as exquisite a little 
 spray of rhododendron ferrugineum as ever sparkled 
 in Alpine dew." 
 
 " Disraeli saw his opening in an instant. Drawing 
 himself to his full height, he advanced to meet Rhoda. 
 The whole room became all eyes and ears. Bowing 
 with kindly reverence, he waved his hand and intro- 
 duced her to the world. ' This is, I understand, the 
 young lady in whose art education Professor Ruskin 
 is so deeply interested ! ' 
 
 "And there was nothing for me but simple ex- 
 tinction, for I had never given Rhoda a lesson in my 
 life. ... I could only bow as well as a marmot might, 
 in imitation of the Minister, and get at once away to 
 Corpus, out of human ken." 
 
 One more glimpse may be given of those Oxford 
 days, or rather evenings. As far as I am aware, it has 
 never been made public, and it may, I trust, be set 
 down without offence, almost exactly as it occurs in 
 one of my old diaries, with only some identifying and 
 too intimate details omitted : 
 
 To-night when I took my usual verses to Mr. 
 
 I found him reading by the light of two wax 
 candles one long, the other short. "Look," 
 he said, " that is how Ruskin will always have
 
 68 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 it. He says it is the perfect light for the 
 student. He told me so one evening when 
 I called on him in Christ Church. I had gone 
 in fulfilment of a promise to show him the 
 silver pen with which Sir Walter wrote the 
 Waverley Novels. When I entered, Ruskin 
 was reading one of the original manuscripts of 
 the Waverley series. He took the pen, and 
 laying it reverently on the page, said, ' Ah, they 
 should never be parted.' And during the whole 
 of that visit to Oxford, and indeed for some 
 time afterwards, I had to allow him to keep 
 the pen." 
 
 The sequel is perhaps rather more humorous and 
 characteristic than the part of the story here set 
 down, but the time has not yet come to tell the 
 whole of the little comedy. What would have 
 happened, one wonders, had my tutor suggested that 
 the MS. should go with the pen, and not the pen 
 with the MS. ! 
 
 During this period a note of warmer regard for 
 Oxford may be traced in Ruskin's words, but it is 
 chiefly the Cathedral Church of Christ that has his 
 affection. Personally he was beloved, and his work 
 was valued, and there were many testimonies that 
 he had not toiled fruitlessly. But that could not 
 prevent his resignation of his Chair, when the Museum 
 permitted vivisection. And so for conscience' sake, 
 sadly convinced that he had laboured in vain for an 
 age that took no heed of his teaching, he parted
 
 ""^ 
 
 n M < 1 L4i 
 
 a >f 
 ; ltOL 
 ?\\S^Sl 

 
 OXFORD ONCE MORE 69 
 
 company with his University. That was in 1884. 
 The date somewhat anticipates the course of this 
 narrative. During the greater part of his tenure of 
 the Slade Professorship Ruskin's home had been at 
 Brantwood, near Coniston. Thither we must now 
 turn, to note the close of his work and of his life. 
 
 But a word may be said here on the permanence 
 or otherwise of his teaching. In political economy 
 he is still a force, but in Art the times seem to have 
 moved far away from Ruskin. To-day we are im- 
 pressionists, and even post-impressionists, and those 
 who know how to qualify aright the opinions of both 
 the later schools, qualify also Ruskin's dogmatic ad- 
 herence to literal truth, and recognise that in his 
 intolerance of Whistler he missed the sublimation of 
 literal truth wherein that master's work is great. The 
 sanest criticism of the present day is that which holds 
 a balance between the jarring sects. It owes much 
 to Ruskin as an initial force, but the narrowness of his 
 creed has mulcted him, as Art Critic, in the inevitable 
 penalty of the bigot.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 GATES OF THE HILLS 
 
 AMID the peace of the Lakes, Ruskin made his home 
 during the last and stormiest period of his life, and 
 there through much suffering he fought his way back 
 to some reassurance of spirit. His conflicts can be 
 traced only in the barest outline here ; but first a 
 word must be said in description of the Prophet's 
 retreat at Coniston. 
 
 On the margin of Coniston Water, Brantwood 
 stands solitary among its dark firs and larches, remote 
 by a lengthy drive from the village. It is a plain 
 house, still declaring its cottage origin, and with no 
 outward ornament save its turret-room, once the 
 master's own. For the house beautiful, in what 
 Ruskin called the vulgarly aesthetic sense, he took 
 no care. He was not disturbed by a wall-paper or 
 by early Victorian furniture. The old family things 
 served him until the end, to the grief of worshippers 
 who sought Brantwood in the spirit of Bunthorne 
 and Grosvenor. To such he made his position bluntly 
 clear in the preface to the rearranged edition of 
 "Modern Painters" (1883): 
 
 " I am entirely independent for daily happiness upon 
 
 70
 
 GATES OF THE HILLS 71 
 
 the sensual qualities of form and colour ; when I want 
 them I take them either from the sky or the fields, 
 not from my walls, which might be either whitewashed 
 or painted like a harlequin's jacket for aught I care ; 
 but the slightest incident which interrupts the harmony 
 of feeling and association in a landscape, destroys it 
 all to me, poisoning the entire faculty of contempla- 
 tion. From my dining-room, I am happy in the 
 view of the lower reach of Coniston Water, not 
 because it is particularly beautiful, but because it is 
 entirely pastoral and pure. Were a single point of 
 chimney of the Barrow ironworks to show itself over 
 the green ridge of the hill, I should never care to 
 look at it more." 
 
 To be fastidious about household gods while out- 
 side lay a miserable world, seemed to Ruskin mere 
 fiddling while Rome was burning. 
 
 Within Brantwood all was solid, old-fashioned 
 comfort, and, while the master's strength endured, a 
 wonderfully busy life. A company of young people 
 helped Ruskin in his manifold works : and the even- 
 ings were merry in a fashion that some would have 
 called Philistine. Nigger melodies were not discour- 
 aged, and there was no pose of cleverness in the 
 conversation. Down on the lake Brantwood had its 
 own little harbour and fleet of boats. The afternoons 
 were often spent in wood-chopping expeditions. 
 
 From the earliest light, and sometimes even before 
 the dawn, Ruskin, who went to bed at half-past ten, 
 was at work in his study. It is a long room, once,
 
 72 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 too, hung with Turners and papered with a design 
 taken from Marco Marziale's " Circumcision " in the 
 National Gallery. The furniture was red mahogany, 
 the upholstery bright-green leather. It was not the 
 least beautiful, but in this very place he could write 
 that loveliest and most melodious of his briefer prose 
 passages, beginning : " Morning breaks as I write, along 
 these Coniston Fells " It is familiar to everybody, 
 and, alas! now grown somewhat too hackneyed to 
 quote in full. Thus, under the shadow of Coniston 
 Old Man, the prophet lived and worked and fought, 
 and at length laid down his armour. 
 
 He saw himself in these days "a man clothed 
 in soft raiment a reed shaken by the wind 1 " The 
 words bring us to those remarkable volumes containing 
 the final results of his life's thought and teaching, Fors 
 Clavigera. The mystical title, explained in a true 
 Ruskin etymology, laborious, minute, and fanciful, sig- 
 nifies " the Fate or Force that bears the Club, or Key, 
 or Nail : that is, in three aspects as Following, or Fore- 
 ordaining, Deed (or Courage), and Patience, and Laws, 
 known and unknown, of Nature and life ; the Deed of 
 Hercules, the Patience of Ulysses, the Law of Lycur- 
 gus." These letters to the workmen and labourers of 
 Great Britain were begun in 1871, the year before 
 Ruskin settled at Brantwood, and they were continued, 
 as occasion and health served, through seven years. 
 The publication was in parts, issued through the post, 
 at sevenpence, later tenpence, by Mr. George Allen for 
 Mr. Ruskin. He did not advertise his curious magazine,
 
 GATES OF THE HILLS 73 
 
 trusting, as he said, to the public's long nose ; and the 
 public, getting wind of the affair, came to buy. " Words 
 winged with Empyrean wisdom, piercing as lightning 
 and which I do not really remember to have heard 
 the like of," was Carlyle's verdict. " To read Fors" 
 says Mr. Collingwood, " is like being out in a thunder- 
 storm." Opinion was certainly tempestuous enough, 
 as the scheme of these reforming papers gradually 
 unfolded itself. Some said the sage was mad, as he 
 brought out of his storehouse things new and old 
 pastoral, comical, historical, tragical the ripe experi- 
 ence of fifty years. The world did ill to mock ; for 
 never was it so generously taken into confidence by 
 any man of genius. Ruskin withheld nothing that he 
 thought would serve his countrymen. Bitterer than 
 all to him, the working men of Britain sent Ruskin no 
 word of reply, and at last he ceased to address them as 
 " My Friends." 
 
 In this place it is impossible to indicate all the bright 
 and sombre threads of that wonderful web, but the 
 central purpose must be outlined. It was the founding 
 of a practical scheme of social regeneration, through 
 the agency of St. George's Company, afterwards called 
 the Guild of St. George. Ruskin, Master of the Guild, 
 invited disciples to devote to the work a tithe of their 
 means. He himself led the way with a tenth of his 
 remaining fortune, once 200,000. This man clothed 
 in soft raiment was exercised in his mind as to the 
 example of St. Francis, and set about shedding his 
 wealth. Land was bought for the agricultural members
 
 74 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 of the Guild to cultivate ; mills and factories were to 
 be started or acquired for the encouragement of labour 
 that should be, for choice, manual, although machinery 
 was not wholly forbidden. Recreation and instruction 
 were to be provided; a coinage and a costume were 
 contemplated, but never realised. Ruskin framed the 
 Laws, on the fair old model of fourteenth-century 
 Florence ; you may read them in the " Laws of Fe'sole." 
 It was not Utopian, except in so far as all such dreams 
 must be Utopian in this present world. 
 
 It may not be too fanciful to find the sum and 
 substance of all Ruskin's economic teaching in that 
 inscription which it was the " pride of his life " to have 
 discovered on San Giorgio di Rialto. This, " the first 
 word Venice ever speaks aloud," runs : " Around this 
 temple let the merchant's laws be just, his weights true, 
 and his covenants faithful." 
 
 Some part of Fors* design came into actual being 
 the Sheffield Museum is to-day its most enduring 
 memorial; but trials and disappointments waited on 
 the work, and brought the Master untold bitterness. 
 In 1877, what he considered the treachery of a friend 
 so dejected him that he all but lost heart. There is of 
 that hard period one curious documentary memorial, 
 which, by the kindness of a friend, is here reproduced for 
 the first time in facsimile, although the letter itself has 
 been printed in " Arrows of the Chace." Every new 
 year, Ruskin used to send a message of good-will to 
 a correspondent, Mr. John Leith of Aberdeen, to be 
 read to his class for Scripture study. For 1878 there
 
 76 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 was no cheerful word; only two lines from Horace: 
 Epistles I. 4, 12-13. 
 
 " Inter spem curamque, tiraores inter et iras 
 Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum." 
 
 ("Amid hope and sorrow, amid fears and wrath, 
 believe every day that has dawned upon thee to be 
 thy last.") 
 
 He must have been deeply distressed not to have 
 cared to catch even the qualified optimism of Horace's 
 very next line 
 
 " Grata superveniet quae non sperabitur hora." 
 
 (" Pleasant the advent of the unhoped-for hour.") 
 
 Trials drew close about Ruskin in that year, and at 
 length ill-health compelled him to resign his Professor- 
 ship, to which he had been re-elected in 1 873. Fors, 
 the Slade lectures, and a multitude of other interests 
 had claimed his unremitting care, and the result was a 
 new and most important body of literature. For the 
 sake of keeping the record, the chief works may be 
 merely named under their years, together with an 
 indication of Ruskin's later journeys at home and 
 abroad. 
 
 In 1873 a lecture, "Nature and Authority," was 
 delivered at the Grosvenor Hotel ; " Robin, Swallow, 
 and Chough," at Oxford and Eton. The Slade course 
 for the year was the exquisite " Val d' Arno," studies in 
 Tuscan Art and Florentine History. In 1874 Ruskin 
 revisited Rome, and went on to Sicily. His Slade course
 
 GATES OF THE HILLS 77 
 
 included " Alps and Jura " and " Schools of Floren- 
 tine Art." At Eton he lectured on Botticelli. In 
 1875 he gave the Royal Institution his lecture on 
 " Glacial Action." The Slade course was " Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds." At Eton he delivered the " Spanish 
 Chapel." In 1876 he lectured at Christ's Hospital on 
 " Precious Stones," and at Woolwich on " Minerals." 
 The same year he made posting tours in England and 
 revisited Switzerland. Part of 1877 was devoted to a 
 study of Carpaccio at Venice. He lectured at Kendal 
 on " Yewdale and its Streamlets." The Slade course 
 was " Readings in Modern Painters." " Streams of 
 Westmorland" was given at Eton. In 1878 Ruskin 
 visited Prince Leopold, then very ill, at Windsor. At 
 Hawarden he came to a better understanding of Mr. 
 Gladstone, an incident generously recorded in Fors, 
 and later in a reprint, when the space formerly contain- 
 ing some hard words was left forever blank and marked 
 " A memorial of rash judgment." This was the year of 
 the Turner Exhibition in Bond Street, for which Ruskin 
 wrote a catalogue, interrupted by terrible illness, brought 
 on by innumerable worries. On his recovery he had 
 to face another ordeal the libel action brought by 
 Whistler for Fors' remarks on impressionism. Whistler 
 received a farthing damages, and an inspiration, de- 
 veloped later in his " Gentle Art of Making Enemies." 
 For a considerable time Ruskin had to take life as 
 easily as he might, but he was not idle. " Deucalion," 
 studies of crystals, and " Proserpina," an original system 
 of botany, came to birth in 1879. 1880 saw " A Cau-
 
 78 JOHN EUSKIN 
 
 tion to Snakes," suggested by Huxley's lecture on the 
 evolution of reptiles. Ruskin's treatment of the subject 
 was artistic and ethical. He wrote also his " Bible of 
 Amiens," part of his unfinished project " Our Fathers 
 have Told Us," and crossed swords with the Bishop of 
 Manchester on the question of usury. The same year 
 he revisited Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais, Chartres, and 
 Rouen. France and Italy were in the itinerary of 1882, 
 and he gave his " Cistercian Architecture " before the 
 Royal Institution. Next year he was invited to return 
 to his Professorship, and delivered the " Art of Eng- 
 land." This year he made his last tour in Scotland. 
 The Slade course for 1884, the " Pleasures of England," 
 marked his final work in Oxford. He got through it 
 without the disaster his friends dreaded, and was per- 
 suaded to cancel certain lectures containing deep cen- 
 sure of the times. His lecture the " Storm-Cloud," 
 given at the London Institution, was ominous in its 
 title. For a time clouds and darkness closed about the 
 mind of the foremost thinker of his age foremost in 
 every sense ; for it was his mere outrunning of his 
 own times that so set men against his teaching. 
 
 Gradually he recovered, and set to work again, 
 writing at intervals from 1885 to 1888 his incom- 
 parable autobiography, Prceterita, which he intended 
 to bring down to the year 1879. But his work was 
 done. At length he acknowledged that the task was 
 beyond his powers, and with one final effort, his beauti- 
 ful tribute to his cousin, Mrs. Arthur Severn, who had 
 been his mother's companion in her last years, and who
 
 GATES OF THE HILLS 79 
 
 was to watch over his own long passage towards those 
 " Gates of the hills, whence one returns not," Ruskin 
 laid down his pen forever. 
 
 But the pilgrimage had still twelve years to run. 
 It is a period of which none should write save those 
 who loved and watched over Ruskin in his declin- 
 ing days at Brantwood. From Mr. Collingwood, his 
 secretary, one word may perhaps be borrowed here, so 
 fitly does it sum up all that a writer from the outside 
 world may dare to say : 
 
 " ' Datur Hora Quieti ' : there is more work to do, 
 but not to-day. The plough stands in the furrow ; 
 and the labourer passes peacefully from his toil, home- 
 wards." 
 
 On the 20th of January 1900 the end came, with- 
 out pain or farewell. He had wished, should he die 
 at Brantwood, to be buried in Coniston Churchyard ; 
 and there he rests, his grave marked by a sculptured 
 cross, of native stone, symbolically wrought by his own 
 artificers to commemorate his life-work. There is no 
 written epitaph, merely his name and the years of his 
 coming and going. 
 
 Westminster Abbey would have opened her doors 
 to receive his dust, but when the Dean offered a grave, 
 the honour was declined. John Ruskin's true resting- 
 place is by the Gates of the Hills.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Andrews, Dr., 16 
 
 Brantwood, 44, 70 
 
 Cambridge, 42 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 41, 63 
 
 Chamouni, 20, 42, 49 
 
 Christ Church, Oxford, 24 
 
 Coniston, 15, 44, 70 
 
 Cox, Margaret, afterwards Mrs. J. J. 
 Buskin, 5 
 
 Denmark Hill, home at, 38 
 
 Dijon, 48 
 
 Disraeli, 66 
 
 Domecq, Miss, 29 
 
 Dulwich, 7 
 
 Edinburgh, 41 
 
 Florence, 53 
 
 Fora Clavigera, 43, 72 
 
 France, sojourns in, 46 
 
 Friar'i Crag, Derwentwater, 15 
 
 Friendship's Offering, young Ruskin con- 
 tributes to, 22 
 
 Geneva, 46, 49 
 
 Geological studies, 21 
 
 Herne Hill, Ruskin's early home at, 9 
 
 High Street, Oxford, 26 
 
 Hincksey, 64 
 
 Hunter Street, Ruskin's early home, 6 
 
 Italy, first visit to, 20 ; second visit, 32 ; 
 later visits, 40, 42, 43, 46 
 
 Keswick, 15 
 
 Maurice, F. D., 41 
 
 " Modern Painters," 34-36, 40 
 
 Oxford University, Ruskin goes up, 23 ; 
 life there, 24 ; " Modern Painters," 
 35 ; Slade Professor, 62 
 
 Peckham, at school at, 21 
 
 Perth, 8, 15, 16 
 
 Pisa, 46 
 
 Prceterita, 65, 78 
 
 Richardson, Jessie, Ruskin's aunt, 8 
 Mary, Buskin's cousin, 16 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 22 
 
 Rogers' "Italy," 18,20 
 
 Rouen, 46 
 
 Runciman, Ruskin's first drawing- 
 master, 18 
 
 Ruskin, John, birth and early years, 1 ; 
 lineage, 4 ; his sense of form and 
 colour, 7 ; visits Perth, 8 ; goes to 
 live at Herne Hill, 9 ; discipline, 10 ; 
 early artistic efforts, 11, 13 ; tours in 
 England with his parents, 14 ; on the 
 Continent, 15; learns Latin, 15, Greek, 
 17 ; learns drawing under Mr. Runci- 
 man, 18; visits Switzerland, 19, Italy, 
 20; geological studies, 21 ; contributes 
 to Friendship's Offering, 22 ; champions 
 Turner, 22; goes to Oxford, 23, ex- 
 periences there, 23, illness, 29, gradu- 
 ates, 31 ; activities at Denmark Hill, 
 38; "Modern Painters," 40, other 
 works, 42 ; lecturing, 43 ; Fors Clavi- 
 gera, 43 ; marriage, 40 ; Brantwood, 
 44 ; in France, Italy, and Switzerland, 
 46 ; Professor at Oxford, 62; at Brant- 
 wood, 72 
 
 Ruskin, John James, 1, 4, 11, 14, 24 
 Margaret, 1, 11, 14, 26, 44 
 
 St. Mark's, Venice, 56 
 
 Schaffhausen, 19 
 
 Slade Lectures, 44, 62 
 
 " Stones of Venice," 40, 44 
 
 Switzerland, first visit to, 21 ; later 
 visits, 41, 42, 43, 46 
 
 Turner, Ruskin's first acquaintance with 
 his work, 18 ; his admiration for, 20 ; 
 champions him, 22; acquaintance 
 with, 32 
 
 " Unto this Last," 42, 62 
 
 Venice, 46, 49, 54 
 
 Verona, 46 
 
 Whistler, J. M., 76 
 
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 Edinburgh &* London 
 
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