BY 
 
 ARTHUR G. BENSON 
 
 FELLOW OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 THE UPTON LETTERS 
 
 FROM A COLLEGE 
 WINDOW 
 
 BESIDE STILL WATERS 
 THE ALTAR FIRE 
 THE . SCHOOLMASTER 
 AT LARGE 
 
 THE GATE OF DEATH 
 THE SILENT ISLE
 
 RUSKIN 
 
 A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 
 
 BY 
 ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON 
 
 Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge 
 
 . . . et vox priina, quam audivi, tamquam tubae, 
 loquentis mecum, dicens : Ascende hue et 
 ostendam tibi quae oportet fieri post haec. 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 NEW YORK ftND LONDON 
 fmicfcerbocfcer press 
 1911
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1911 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON 
 
 the fmfcfccrbocher press, flew .1 Jorfe
 
 STUART ALEXANDER DONALDSON 
 MASTER OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE 
 
 THIS BOOK 
 
 IS BY HIS OLD FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE 
 RESPECTFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 
 
 2022753
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE following volume consists of seven 
 lectures on the life and work of Euskin, 
 delivered in the Hall of Magdalene Col- 
 lege, Cambridge, in the Michaelmas term 
 of 1910. I had intended vaguely to recast 
 them in a more formal shape; not because 
 they were not carefully compiled and com- 
 posed, but because they were written as 
 lectures to be heard, and not as a book 
 to be read. But I found on reflection that 
 this would entail rewriting the whole book 
 on an entirely different scheme. Nor in- 
 deed do I think that another small bio- 
 graphy of Euskin is required, though a great 
 and full biography of him is needed, and 
 is being written, I understand, by Mr. E. 
 T. Cook, the editor of the large standard 
 series of Euskin's complete works. The
 
 vi Preface 
 
 situation is, of course, at present some- 
 what complicated by nearness of view and 
 considerations of personal intimacies; but 
 the time is not far off when we shall be 
 able to realise what the ultimate effect of 
 his work and message has been upon the 
 world. 
 
 I felt then that these lectures might, as 
 lectures, have a certain freshness which 
 they would lose if transmuted into a treat- 
 ise; and they must be looked upon rather 
 as an attempt to emphasise and bring home 
 certain salient features and characteristics 
 of the man than as an attempt at synthesis 
 and summary. This book is, accordingly, 
 a sketch and not a finished portrait; it 
 is frankly compiled from accessible sources ; 
 but it is written with a sincere love and 
 admiration, and with a strong belief that 
 Kuskin's message and example have a very 
 real truth and strength of their own, ur- 
 gently needed in these hasty and impulsive 
 days. It would be absurd to say that the 
 fame and name of Kuskin are eclipsed, but
 
 Preface vii 
 
 his works have passed into that region of 
 deferential acceptance, in which they are 
 more respected than examined, and more 
 reverenced than read; and this state of 
 things I earnestly desire to alter. I have 
 written these pages, then, with the hope of 
 provoking a discriminating interest in the 
 man's life and work, and with the wish to 
 present a picture of one of the most sug- 
 gestive thinkers, the most beautiful writers, 
 and the most vivid personalities of the last 
 generation. 
 
 ARTHUR C. BENSON. 
 
 THE OLD LODGE, 
 
 MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, 
 Feb. 17, 1911.
 
 NOTE 
 
 My thanks and acknowledgments are due to Mr. Alexander 
 Wedderburn, K.C., and Mr. E. T. Cook, not only for gen- 
 erous permission to reproduce copyright material, but for 
 many criticisms and suggestions; to Mr. Sydney C. Cocker ell, 
 Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, who has 
 read the book in proof, and given me kind advice and com- 
 ment ; to Professor Collingwood and Mrs. Meynell, for free 
 permission to make use of their respective volumes ; to Mrs. 
 Arthur Severn for approval and encouragement; and to Mrs. 
 Vincent for careful revision and criticism. 
 
 A. C. B.
 
 RUSKIN 
 
 A STUDY IN PERSONALITY
 
 Ruskin: A Study in 
 Personality 
 
 BEFORE I begin to speak of the life and 
 work of Ruskin, I must suggest to you a 
 few books which it would be an advantage 
 to you to read, or at all events to glance 
 at. Ruskin's was a long life, full of work 
 and energy, and moreover he came into 
 contact with many very prominent and 
 active persons, to whom I shall be bound 
 to allude. It will therefore be difficult for 
 you to follow the drama of his life with- 
 out knowing something about the people 
 with whom he came into close touch.
 
 2 Ruskin 
 
 There is an admirable Life of Ruskin by 
 Professor Collingwood, from which I shall 
 have occasion to quote, and to which I am 
 much indebted. Professor Collingwood was 
 Ruskin's secretary for some years. The 
 Life is both faithful and picturesque, and 
 much enriched by appropriate quotations, 
 though much material now accessible was 
 not then available. But the effect of Rus- 
 kin was so overpowering upon his im- 
 mediate circle that Professor Collingwood, 
 in his devotion and piety, and with the 
 memory of his hero so fresh and vivid in 
 his mind, could not possibly be frankly 
 critical. The book is certainly by far the 
 best existing study of Ruskin's life and 
 personality, and my debt to it, throughout 
 all the biographical part of these lectures, 
 is obvious and great. 
 
 Then there is a stimulating and sugges- 
 tive monograph by Mr. Frederic Harrison 
 in the Men of Letters series. Mr. Harri- 
 son combines an intense admiration for 
 Ruskin with a power of clear-sighted and
 
 A Study in Personality 3 
 
 judicious criticism. The only point about 
 the volume which does not seem to me 
 wholly satisfactory is its scale and pro- 
 portion. But of course this is a matter 
 of individual taste and judgment, and the 
 book undoubtedly contains the best critical 
 estimate of Ruskin, and is very just and 
 illuminating. 
 
 Then there is a charming sketch of the 
 intimate side of Ruskin's personality, by 
 Lady Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter, in a 
 little volume called Tennyson, Ruskin, and 
 Browning. 
 
 There is a readable book called Ruskin 
 and his Circle,, by Miss Earland, which 
 furnishes a good background for the life. 
 
 There is also a little book in the Modern 
 English Writers series, by Mrs. Meynell, 
 which gives an able and judicious sum- 
 mary of Ruskin's principal writings. The 
 book is highly concentrated, and the style, 
 which maintains a high level of literary 
 beauty, is almost inevitably allusive and 
 even intricate. I would warmly recom-
 
 4 Ruskin 
 
 mend the book to any one who wishes to 
 grasp the drift and inner spirit of Ruskin's 
 writings. And I would here express my 
 own sense of high obligation to the vol- 
 ume, for the guidance which, in its sug- 
 gestiveness, it has afforded me. 
 
 Of course I need hardly say that to get 
 any real conception of the scope of Rus- 
 kin's work it is advisable to read some of 
 his own books. I can hardly expect that 
 many of my hearers will work faithfully 
 through the great edition in thirty-seven 
 volumes. It is a monumental work, full 
 of exact information and elaborate refer- 
 ences; the introductions are admirably 
 written, and the pictorial illustrations are 
 excellent. But fortunately most of the 
 best-known works are available in cheaper 
 and lighter editions. And so I would ask 
 my hearers to read if possible the Pr&terita 
 of Ruskin, one of the most beautiful books 
 in the English language, an autobiography 
 which he never finished. 
 
 I would also ask you to read Sesame and
 
 A Study in Personality 5 
 
 Lilies, a book about books, which gives a 
 fine example of his style and of his thought. 
 And those who wish to get an idea of 
 Ruskin's economical theories must carefully 
 read his book, Unto this Last, without 
 which it is impossible to understand his 
 principles. And further, any one who is 
 interested in his artistic ideas might find 
 it possible to read the little shilling book 
 published by George Allen The Nature of 
 Gothic which is a chapter out of The 
 Stones of Venice, and has the immense ad- 
 vantage of having a short preface by 
 William Morris, which emphasises both 
 forcibly and beautifully the strong points of 
 Ruskin's art-teaching. Of course I hope 
 that those who get so far will be inclined 
 to go further afield; because lectures like 
 these are not intended to give a sub- 
 stitute for Ruskin, in a tabloid form, but 
 to act if possible as an invitation to 
 study the man's own heart and mind; for 
 no one ever gave so prodigally of both to 
 his readers as Ruskin did, or, as the
 
 6 Ruskin 
 
 old text says, so laid his " body as the 
 ground, and as the street, to them that 
 went over." 
 
 John Ruskin was born at 54 Hunter 
 Street, Brunswick Square, on the 8th of 
 February, 1819. You may pass the house 
 any day driving west from St. Pancras or 
 King's Cross. The street is a semi-respect- 
 able one; parts of it are sordid and poverty- 
 stricken, but as it draws near to Brunswick 
 Square it settles down to a drab and dingy 
 decorum, very characteristic of our great 
 metropolis ; and the house itself is precisely 
 and typically the very house in which you 
 w r ould not expect so rare a flower of genius 
 to bloom, and least of all adapted to nur- 
 ture a passionate lover of beauty. But I 
 never pass the place without a thrill of 
 pleasure that there should have been born 
 just there, on that particular spot of the 
 earth and no other, where the sooty yellow- 
 brick geometrical house-fronts rise into the
 
 A Study in Personality 7 
 
 smoke-stained skies of London, one who was 
 to love so intensely the earth and all that 
 grows out of the earth, and lies hid in it 
 both its hills and forests, its plains and 
 lakes, as well as its trees and flowers, its 
 rocks and mineral forms and not only 
 these; for the child that was born in that 
 unlovely street was to love, with the kind 
 of love that most men reserve for mistress 
 or child, the stately cities of the world, their 
 churches and palaces, their facades and 
 columns; and not only to love them and 
 grieve over their ruin and restoration alike, 
 but to interpret their loveliness to others, 
 and multiply that sense of beauty a 
 thousand-fold. 
 
 That house is now distinguished from the 
 rest by a tablet, a disc like the top of a 
 chocolate birthday-cake, with a record 
 meanly written. I am glad too that it 
 should be so ugly and sensible a halo. The 
 worshippers of Ruskin might perhaps have 
 put up some so-called appropriate design, 
 an angel holding on to a balustrade, or
 
 8 Ruskin 
 
 a Delia Robbia plaque, to be grimed and 
 stained by London smoke. But I rejoice 
 that when we build the sepulchre of a 
 prophet to whom we would not listen, we 
 should do it in our own solid and com- 
 mercial spirit, reckoning his reputation as 
 a national asset, and grudging him to other 
 nations, not because we prize his sweet and 
 noble spirit, but because he brings money 
 and credit into the country; just as the 
 townsmen of Assisi hurried St. Francis 
 home that he might die there, not because 
 they could not bear that others should see 
 his pain, or for love of his parting smiles, 
 but because they wanted to have authentic 
 miracles of their owm. 
 
 The father of John Kuskin was a man 
 of sterling virtue, an excellent man of 
 business, a wine-merchant, as his father 
 was before him. With this difference, that 
 his father lost a fortune and died in- 
 solvent; while the son not only paid his 
 father's debts, but left a fortune of nearly 
 two hundred thousand pounds. But he
 
 A Study in Personality 9 
 
 was not only " an entirely honest mer- 
 chant," as the inscription on his tomb runs; 
 he was also a man of taste and serious 
 culture, a lover of good books and pictures 
 and scenery, and transmitted to his son a 
 deep and perfectly natural passion for 
 beautiful things and beautiful thoughts. 
 The mother must be confessed to have been 
 a grim figure, with an intense devotion 
 to her home circle, and an unconcealed 
 contempt for the sloppiness of people in 
 general. Ruskin gave many tender and 
 humorous reminiscences of her in later life. 
 He wrote once of her : " I don't think 
 women were in general meant to reason. 
 I never knew but one rational woman in 
 my life, and that is my own mother (when 
 one does n't talk about actors or Mr. Glad- 
 stone, or anybody she has taken an anti- 
 pathy to)." He recorded too that he had 
 often seen his mother travelling from sun- 
 rise to sunset of a summer's day without 
 ever leaning back in the carriage. And he 
 wrote in Prwterita: " Whenever I did any-
 
 io Ruskin 
 
 thing wrong or stupid or hard-hearted 
 < and I have done many things that 
 were all three my mother always said, 
 ' It is because you were too much ir- 
 dulged.' ' 
 
 Much that is tedious has been written 
 about the origin of the family tedious, 
 because at present we know so little about 
 heredity and descent. Some day, no doubt, 
 when Mendelisrn and eugenics are per- 
 fected, we shall breed a genius as easily 
 as we breed a greyhound. And doubtless 
 the secret of Buskin's greatness is hidden 
 safely enough in his austere pedigree. But 
 there are one or two points of real inter- 
 est about it. The name itself is of doubt- 
 ful origin; and it matters little whether it 
 is the same word as Erskine, or a mere 
 nickname, Roughskin, or whether it is a 
 diminutive, meaning the little red man. 
 But it falls under the law which seems to 
 assign to English men of genius quaint, 
 striking, or beautiful names and this is 
 especially true of great writers; there is
 
 A Study in Personality n 
 
 hardly a great English writer who has not 
 borne a seemly name. 
 
 And then, too, there is another point 
 Ruskin was the son of first cousins. This 
 is apt to produce disasters of constitution, 
 but it also produces greatness, for the 
 simple reason that such an origin tends 
 to accentuate and emphasise whatever 
 qualities are there, by simple accumulation. 
 If Ruskin owed to his birth the terrible 
 mental collapse of his later life, it was per- 
 haps the natural price he paid for his force 
 and swiftness of spirit. And in this re- 
 spect men of a later date, comfortably 
 flattened out by eugenics into an even paste 
 of virtue and efficiency, may look back 
 with a romantic regret to the days when 
 irregularities of temperament were made 
 possible by our want of sense and 
 knowledge. 
 
 Then, too, Ruskin was three parts Scotch, 
 and what is more, Lowland Scotch. It can- 
 not be mere chance that so many of our 
 most forcible later writers, such as Car-
 
 12 Ruskin 
 
 lyle and Walter Scott and Stevenson, have 
 been sealed of the same tribe. I believe 
 myself that the temperament of the Low- 
 land Scotch is at once fiery and restrained, 
 that it is naturally eloquent and emotional 
 and religious, not sentimentally, but with 
 a certain uplifted solemnity of heart; and 
 then, too, the Lowland Scotch vocabulary is 
 a singularly rich and elastic one, with all 
 the resources of English, and with many 
 fine indigenous words. It is at least cer- 
 tain, in Buskin's case, that he owed much 
 to his inflexible Biblical training, of which 
 I will speak in detail later. One whose 
 memory was so retentive, and whose ear 
 for the music of words so sensitive, did 
 indisputably gain an incredible mastery of 
 cadence and serious rhetoric from the re- 
 strained economy and the noble passion of 
 Scriptural traditions. To tell a story with 
 austere simplicity and stately directness; 
 to be denunciatory without being abusive; 
 to be indignant without ever losing self- 
 control; not to be ashamed of deep and
 
 A Study in Personality 13 
 
 grand emotion; never to deviate into com- 
 monness or verbiage these were some of 
 the things that Ruskin acquired from his 
 Bible reading; and this was a direct con- 
 sequence of his Scotch descent. 
 
 And lastly, I have always thought it a 
 supreme blessing that by birth and family 
 he touched both ends of the social scale. 
 A Scotchman never loses a certain pride 
 of birth, however menial his state may be. 
 Ruskin could trace his descent to more 
 than one baronial family the blood of old 
 Robin Adair ran in his veins; but his grand- 
 mother kept an inn at Croydon; his aunt 
 was married to a baker of the same place; 
 his father's sister married a tanner of Perth. 
 I have a feeling that Ruskin did not quite 
 like the homeliness of these associations; 
 but with a noble sort of loyalty he not 
 only did not disguise the facts, but put 
 them prominently and literally forward. 
 And it was perhaps the best point about 
 his sheltered and secluded upbringing, that 
 he was brought so closely into contact with
 
 14 Ruskin 
 
 simple people and lowly ways. It gave 
 him an enormous power of making friend- 
 ships rather than condescending alliances 
 with servants and ordinary folk, and taught 
 him to recognise that refined feeling and 
 generous qualities are not the private pro- 
 perty and the monopoly of well-to-do per- 
 sons. Of course in these democratic days 
 we know that " the rank is but the guinea- 
 stamp''; but how many of us act upon it? 
 How many of us would sincerely prefer 
 to be befriended by a high-minded green- 
 grocer rather than to be tolerated by a 
 commonplace Viscount? There is a good 
 deal of feudal deference in our subconscious 
 instincts still and the melancholy fact re- 
 mains that we follow very faithfully the 
 Scriptural precept to make to ourselves 
 friends of the mammon of unrighteousness ; 
 and if we fail, there are always the ever- 
 lasting habitations! 
 
 The point really is that Ruskin, by being 
 brought up in a simple household where 
 the servants were friends rather than hired
 
 A Study in Personality 15 
 
 assistants, and having never learnt to keep 
 his distance, did undoubtedly learn what 
 rich people often do not learn, to meet 
 men and women of every class on perfectly 
 equal and natural terms ; and made friends 
 accordingly with all, as far as it was in 
 his power to make friends. For what 
 strikes one as much as anything about 
 Euskin is that, in spite of his charm and 
 grace and eager courtesy, he was an es- 
 sentially lonely man; partly because of his 
 dreams a dreamer can never be very in- 
 timate with others and partly, too, because 
 he gave his heart away to beauty; and we 
 have none of us more than a certain amount 
 of love to give away. Thus the artist who 
 must put not his mind only but his heart 
 into his work must always have something 
 incommunicable about him, beyond the 
 reach of human fellowship. 
 
 In most respects, at first sight, there 
 was nothing characteristically Scotch about 
 Ruskin ; the typical Scot is apt to be a 
 little grim, a little unapproachable; genial
 
 16 Ruskin 
 
 he can be after a solid fashion; but he has 
 little of the emotional abandon of the Celt, 
 and little of the sentimentality of the Eng- 
 lishman. A character in the Frogs of 
 Aristophanes, when he thinks he is being 
 unreasonably dictated to, says: "Don't 
 come trespassing on my mind you have 
 a house of your own." And the typical 
 Scot has the same detachment. He will 
 never, for instance, allow emotion to in- 
 vade business. He is canny, in fact. But 
 Euskin was not superficially canny. He 
 met people, young and old alike, with a 
 delightful welcome and open arms. He 
 had an almost caressing address, and a 
 cordial sweetness of manner. He was 
 quixotically generous about money; there 
 can have been few men who have ever given 
 away in their lifetime so large a fortune. 
 But there was a good deal of dogmatism 
 and sternness behind, as his letters abun- 
 dantly show; he had no slobbering chajrity 
 for the world, or for the mistakes and fail- 
 ures of humanity. He was a merciless
 
 A Study in Personality 17 
 
 judge of frailty, and had the sceva indig- 
 natio of the satirist. He was, too, in his 
 way a wary man of business; he made in 
 later years as large an income by his books 
 as he would have derived from his departed 
 capital. He trod the narrow path between 
 sentiment and silliness, saving himself from 
 the former by causticity and from the latter 
 by dryness. He did many things that 
 seemed alien to common-sense, but when 
 he let himself go it was rather in the 
 direction of condemnation than in the di- 
 rection of forgiveness. He was more on 
 the side of punishment and obedience than 
 on the side of rewards and freedom. And 
 then, too, he had the spirit of loyalty and 
 fidelity to lost causes and forlorn hopes, 
 the spirit that has come out again and 
 again in Scotch history. And thus the re- 
 sult of our investigation is that though a 
 man of genius is a unique thing, and must 
 be judged on his own merits, yet there 
 are a good many traceable elements in 
 the character and temperament of Ruskin
 
 i8 Ruskin 
 
 which he owed to his race and to his 
 nationality. 
 
 I shall not here attempt to tell the story 
 of Ruskin's early life in any detail. My 
 chief reason is that it has been told with 
 such inimitable grace and felicity in his 
 PrcKterita that it is impossible to retell it. 
 But a few points must be noted. When 
 he was four years old his portrait was 
 painted by Northcote, the R.A., of whom 
 he inquired, after sitting for a few min- 
 utes, why there were holes in the carpet; 
 and when the little boy was asked by the 
 old painter what he would have as the 
 background, he said " Blue hills," which is 
 a significant reply. He was fond, too, of 
 preaching sermons from a convenient chair- 
 back. " People, be good," ran the first 
 sentence of the first recorded address. It 
 was what he was saying for the rest of 
 his life, though he varied the expression 
 a little!
 
 A Study in Personality 19 
 
 A few words must be said as to his edu- 
 cation; it was absolutely unconventional, 
 and though human temperament has a way 
 of surviving a good many rough experi- 
 ments in communicating bias, it is impos- 
 sible not to see that his nurture affected 
 him. In one respect his upbringing was 
 ascetic. He had very few toys, he had to 
 learn to amuse himself on the simplest 
 lines; he was soundly whipped whenever 
 he was naughty or wilful, and he was shel- 
 tered to an extraordinary extent from all 
 external influences. He says that he never 
 saw his parents lose their temper, or heard 
 their voices raised in anger, or saw even 
 a glance of irritation pass between them, 
 but that he suffered from having nothing 
 to love. He states that he no more loved 
 his parents than he would the sun and 
 moon. They were just a part of the order 
 of the universe. But people cannot be 
 taught love, any more than they can be 
 prevented from loving; and it is clear that 
 his preternatural activity of observation
 
 2O Ruskin 
 
 and intelligence were what really drained 
 his emotions. He read the Bible witli his 
 mother, chapter by chapter; whether they 
 were genealogical or improper, it mattered 
 nothing. He was taught to draw, and he 
 was dangerously encouraged to w r rite. The 
 day was seldom long enough for all he had 
 to do. He wrote poetry and diaries and 
 compilations. Indeed, through the whole 
 of his early life his bent and his ambitions 
 were poetical, though he hardly ever wrote 
 a line of verse which is worth preserving 
 on its intrinsic merits. He had no poetical 
 invention whatever, and very little sense of 
 rhythm. He had constant illnesses, and 
 was never sent to school ; and he thus lived 
 a very comfortable and self-centred life with 
 the two elderly parents, saved from dis- 
 content by intense activity of mind and 
 great sweetness of disposition. His father's 
 health w r as not good; he travelled con- 
 stantly, both for business and pleasure, col- 
 lecting orders for sherry, and visiting 
 scenes and places of interest. Ruskin gained
 
 A Study in Personality 21 
 
 in this atmosphere one remarkable char- 
 acteristic, the power of applying himself to 
 his work with complete absorption, wher- 
 ever he might happen to be. His father 
 intended him for the Church, and hoped 
 to see him a Bishop; but he was to preach 
 to a larger audience than a diocese could 
 afford, and on wider lines than those of 
 orthodox Anglicanism. But besides all this 
 dilettante literature and sketching, he 
 worked seriously enough at problems of 
 geology and mineralogy. And he lived, too, 
 in an atmosphere of culture; the family 
 had moved out of London to Herne Hill, 
 then a pleasant leafy suburb on the edge 
 of the open country. His father bought 
 pictures, and entertained artists and inter- 
 esting people in a quiet way. It was a 
 thoroughly precocious childhood, but one 
 dares not say what should have been 
 altered. Probably he lived too much with 
 his elders, and thus acquired a certain 
 touch of old-maidishness which never left 
 him. There was lacking an element, not
 
 22 Ruskin 
 
 of virility, but of masculinity; and then, 
 too, his mental activity was perilously 
 stimulated. Perhaps the irritability of brain 
 which worked havoc in his later life was 
 partly caused by his prodigious precocity; 
 but, on the other hand, the atmosphere of 
 school life might have given him conven- 
 tional standards and taken the edge off 
 his originality; and one is thankful for 
 the net result, whatever its drawbacks may 
 have been. 
 As he wrote in Prceterita: 
 
 I was different, be it once more said, from 
 other children even of my own type, not so 
 much in the actual nature of the feeling, but 
 in the mixture of it. I had, in my little clay 
 pitcher, vialfuls, as it were, of Wordsworth's 
 reverence, Shelley's sensitiveness, Turner's ac- 
 curacy, all in one. A snowdrop was to me, 
 as to Wordsworth, part of the Sermon on 
 the Mount; but I never should have written 
 sonnets to the celandine, because it is of a 
 coarse yellow, and imperfect form. 
 
 He fell deeply in love at the age of seven- 
 teen with the daughter of his father's part-
 
 A Study in Personality 23 
 
 ner, Mr. Domecq. Adele Domecq was a 
 French girl, brought up in the best Parisian 
 society, and a Roman Catholic. She and 
 her sister came to stay at Herne Hill, and 
 Ruskin fell a victim to a Byronic passion, 
 accompanied by intense self-consciousness. 
 The lively girls thought the clever boy 
 rather a queer creature, and could not 
 make him out; but it was a serious and 
 devastating business, lasting for three years, 
 and the result was a serious breakdown 
 in health with symptoms of consumption. 
 
 Meanwhile he had been entered at Christ 
 Church; and here again his parents be- 
 haved with characteristic prudence. He was 
 made a Gentleman-commoner, which threw 
 him into the society of the richest and most 
 fashionable undergraduates; and his mother 
 came up to Oxford to look after him. The 
 danger was that he would become a gigantic 
 joke; but his amazing simplicity and charm 
 triumphed over all obstacles. He w r as half 
 tolerated and half petted; but he made 
 firm friends both among younger and older
 
 24 Ruskin 
 
 men; he won the Newdigate Prize Poem, 
 and he plunged into print in the region 
 of artistic controversy. He described his 
 view of the Oxford life very characteristic- 
 ally in Pr&terita: 
 
 I am amused, as I look back, in now per- 
 ceiving what an aesthetic view I had of all 
 my tutors and companions how consistently 
 they took to me the aspect of pictures, and 
 how I from the first declined giving any at- 
 tention to those which were not well painted 
 enough. My ideal of a tutor was founded on 
 what Holbein or Dtirer had represented in 
 Erasmus or Melanchthon, or, even more 
 solemnly, on Titian's Magnificoes or Boni- 
 fazio's Bishops. No presences of that kind 
 appeared either in Tom or Peckwater; and 
 even Doctor Pusey (who also never spoke to 
 me) was not in the least a picturesque or 
 tremendous figure, but only a sickly and rather 
 ill put together English clerical gentleman, 
 who never looked one in the face, or appeared 
 aware of the state of the weather. 
 
 It was at this time that his father began 
 to buy Turner's pictures, and Kuskin made 
 the acquaintance of the great artist whose
 
 A Study in Personality 25 
 
 fame he was afterwards to establish on so 
 secure a basis. He wrote: 
 
 I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen- 
 mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded gen- 
 tleman; good-natured evidently, bad-tempered 
 evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, 
 perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the 
 powers of the mind not brought out with any 
 delight in their manifestations, or intention 
 of display, but flashing out occasionally in a 
 word or a look. 
 
 The account of his early years forms an 
 extraordinary record of vigour and en- 
 thusiasm; but all this was suspended by 
 his breakdown in health, caused undoubt- 
 edly by his love affair, and thus there fell 
 on him in the middle of all his prosperity 
 the first initiation into suffering of body 
 and mind, the first taste of the cup of 
 which he was afterwards to drink so deep. 
 But he recovered, and finished his time at 
 Oxford; and it was then he learnt, as if 
 by accident, his first lesson in that prin- 
 ciple of art which he was afterwards to 
 extol so matchlessly. It came in a drawing-
 
 26 Ruskin 
 
 lesson, where he made a study of an 
 ivy tendril. Up to that time he had in- 
 stinctively submitted to the artistic fallacy 
 of the day, which treated artistic material 
 as a thing to be manipulated and composed 
 on conventional lines. It struck him that 
 nature was not to be improved upon, and 
 that absolute sincerity and fidelity were the 
 first articles of the artistic creed. With 
 what matchless rhetoric he persuaded him- 
 self and others to believe that Turner, who 
 idealises landscape beyond all power of 
 recognition and identification, was the su- 
 preme exponent of this principle we shall 
 see later. But this little incident was the 
 first step on the ladder that he was about 
 to climb, and must be allowed its due signi- 
 ficance. And it was then that he aban- 
 doned all his dilettante pursuits. He made 
 no more of his old composed drawings; he 
 flung his pencil aside. " A few careful 
 studies of grass-blades and Alpine-rose bells 
 ended my Proutism, and my trust in draw- 
 ing things out of my head for ever." He
 
 A Study in Personality 27 
 
 took up the task of vindicating the hero- 
 ism of art; and he determined to show the 
 world that the foundations of art w T ere 
 sincerity and truth. 
 
 Thus then at the age of twenty-three, 
 this young man, with his mind as clear as 
 light, and as full of eager vigour as a 
 mountain stream, sat down in a light- 
 hearted fashion to write one of the great 
 books of the century great not so much 
 for its artistic permanence of form as for 
 its driving and inspiring force. He wrote 
 it in joy and delight, conscious of strength 
 and purity, and this is written large over 
 the page. He gave up all idea of being a 
 bishop, and he refused disdainfully to enter 
 the sherry business. And what was it that 
 he intended to do? He meant, first of all, 
 in Modern Painters, to take a little thesis; 
 to prove at the outset that Turner was 
 right in what he saw and what he drew 
 of nature, and that most other painters
 
 28 Ruskin 
 
 had been wrong. How little lie knew of 
 other painters he was to show before long; 
 but at present his equipment was this: he 
 knew the works of a few English artists 
 well, such as Gainsborough, Cox, de Wint, 
 Copley Fielding, Prout, and Constable. He 
 had seen, too, a good many English galleries, 
 and he knew what of older landscape artists 
 the patrons of art conspired to admire 
 Salvator Rosa, Gaspar Poussin, Claude, 
 and Hobbema. And he meant to dispose 
 once and for all, as he says in a fine in- 
 vective, of " the various Van somethings 
 and Back somethings, more especially and 
 malignantly those who have libelled the sea." 
 All this he intended to overthrow and set 
 right; and he meant, too, to lay down a new 
 and a comprehensive philosophy of art. 
 
 He wrote the book at Herne Hill in the 
 early mornings and for half the day; and 
 he read it aloud, in simple childlike fash- 
 ion, to papa and mamma, and received with 
 outward deference their admiring criticisms. 
 
 The first principle that he states and
 
 A Study in Personality 29 
 
 maintains is that of Truth and Fidelity. 
 He says that all the evil of the older land- 
 scape art has arisen from the painter en- 
 deavouring to modify the works of God, 
 " casting' the shadow of himself on all that 
 he sees." But if this fidelity were all, art 
 would become a mere imitation, and the 
 photographer would be the best artist. 
 Ruskin begins by showing that you do not 
 see all that you think you see. If you 
 see a brick wall at a distance, you know 
 it is a brick wall, and therefore in a spirit 
 of fidelity you set to work to paint the 
 bricks; but you do not actually see them. 
 What you have really to paint is the effect 
 which a brick wall has on the eye at a 
 distance, that effect that makes you infer 
 that it is made of bricks, even though you 
 cannot see them; and he tells the story of 
 a naval officer objecting to a picture by 
 Turner of a man-of-war at a distance, that 
 there were no port-holes the fact being 
 that at a distance you cannot see the 
 port-holes.
 
 3O Ruskin 
 
 But the other side of the thesis is that 
 the true artist must select and combine, 
 but never sacrifice reality. If you set your- 
 self to paint all that you see, you might 
 spend a long lifetime on a single picture, 
 and leave it unfinished at the end. " There 
 is ... more ideality," he wrote, " in a 
 great artist's selection and treatment of 
 roadside weeds and brook-worn pebbles, 
 than in all the struggling caricatures of 
 the meaner mind, which heaps its fore- 
 ground with colossal columns and heaves 
 impossible mountains into the encumbered 
 sky." 
 
 But here we are met by a difficulty at 
 the outset; it begs the question to say that 
 an artist must not cast his own shadow 
 on his works, if the next moment it is 
 maintained that the strength of the artist 
 lies in his power of selection and combina- 
 tion. The real truth is that no one exactly 
 knows what lies behind the pleasure of art; 
 or rather that it is so complicated a pleas- 
 ure, and lies so much in the taste and
 
 A Study in Personality 31 
 
 power of the recipient, that it is impossible 
 to lay down exact rules. What really mat- 
 ters is the quality of the mind that selects 
 and interprets, and the charm which in- 
 vests his skill. Art may be intensely life- 
 like without being like life. What makes 
 the difference is the personality of the 
 artist, the way in which he interprets na^ 
 ture, and the emotions he can arouse by 
 his presentation of it. 
 
 What somewhat vitiates the principles 
 enunciated by Kuskin is that he admired 
 Turner so intensely that he could not see 
 his faults indeed he loved them. Euskin 
 takes occasion, for instance, to praise the 
 foregrounds of Turner, the figures and the 
 detail. He scoffs at Claude for making 
 the people in the foregrounds of his pic- 
 tures principally occupied in carrying about 
 red trunks with locks. But as a matter 
 of fact the figures in Turner's foregrounds 
 are often grotesque and ridiculous, and the 
 detail childishly inaccurate and absurd. 
 The glory of Turner is in his vast sweep
 
 32 Ruskin 
 
 of mellow distances, indicating, by some 
 subtle magic, forest and leafy hill and sun- 
 lit glade and winding river; in the incredi- 
 ble spaciousness of his air, the secret gold 
 of his cloud-veiled suns, the prodigal splen- 
 dour of dawning or waning light. And 
 Turner by his amazing assiduity and un- 
 tiring observation, by years of hourly labour 
 and by unerring fidelity of memory, saw 
 and presented a whole host of things that 
 no artist seems ever before to have dared 
 to see, much less to paint. The perversity 
 of Euskin lay not in his praising Turner, 
 but in his discrediting the work of those 
 other great artists each of whom, except 
 perhaps Salvator Rosa, who is a merely 
 melodramatic scene-painter, has his own 
 charm. 
 
 Turner left two great pictures by his will 
 to the National Gallery, with the condition 
 that they should be hung side by side 
 with two great Claudes, with the intention 
 that his own work should gain by juxtaposi- 
 tion with what was so false and unreal.
 
 A Study in Personality 33 
 
 For a time, no doubt, the patient sheep- 
 like gazer obediently saw all the glory of 
 Turner and all the vileness of Claude 
 which Ruskin bade him see. But now any 
 one who will look calmly at the two, will 
 see that the Claudes have an incomparable 
 charm of their own. The golden sunlight 
 of a great summer day falls with a mellow 
 richness on vale and promontory, where the 
 waves lap gently in the haze-hung bays. 
 There is a sense of meditative content 
 about the whole, the happy weariness that 
 thinks gratefully of the end of labour and 
 the coming in of the night. The scene is 
 full of incommunicable romance; the ruined 
 grass-grown temples, the embattled villas, 
 the dim figures of men and women, all have 
 a life of their own, if one could but pene- 
 trate its secret. To deny the charm of 
 Claude is to deny the sense of romance, the 
 power of imagination which can build a 
 wistful dream of what life could have been 
 like, by disregarding for the moment the 
 harsher elements, and leaving only the
 
 34 Ruskin 
 
 pure and beauty-haunted visions in which 
 hope and memory are so rich, but which 
 our human world, with its strange admix- 
 ture of pain and darkness, makes it so hard 
 to realise and retain. The real fact was, 
 and it may at once be stated, that Ruskin 
 was not largely endowed with imagination. 
 He had so clear a vision for the precise 
 and definite forms of beauty which he could 
 see, the world was to him so rich and vari- 
 ous, that he did not or could not enter into 
 the promise of poetry. If this is not clearly 
 understood, one is under an entire mis- 
 conception, both of his powers and his 
 limitations. His strength lay in his intense 
 perception of what was there; but he was 
 a moralist and not a poet; he had little 
 sense of symbols, he had little touch of 
 music in his composition. He saw the light 
 on things so clearly that he did not see 
 the hidden light that falls through things. 
 " I was only interested," he wrote, " by 
 things near me, or at least clearly visible 
 and present." He paid a heavy penalty
 
 A Study in Personality 35 
 
 for this in his days of later darkness; but 
 in those early days, the rapture of light 
 and colour and form so filled his heart and 
 mind that he did not see those further 
 secrets which can only be guessed at and 
 perceived, hardly shared or uttered, but the 
 truth of which, if a man has once tasted 
 them, has a sacredness that is beyond all 
 words. 
 
 What further did he set himself to do? 
 No less, as I have said, than to make a 
 reasoned philosophy of all art. And he 
 did this, not in a loose or vague' way, but, 
 arguing like Aristotle and Euclid, as co- 
 gently and strictly as he knew how. Now 
 it seems to me that though here he at- 
 tempted an impossibility, it was all on the 
 right lines; it is only by the application 
 of the scientific method to psychological 
 things that we can penetrate human psy- 
 chology ; and though one may not be wholly 
 convinced by Ruskin's reasoning, it is good 
 to send one's mind to school with him. He 
 sets out with a large scheme, as Plato, in
 
 36 Ruskin 
 
 the Republic, set out to analyse the na- 
 ture of Justice. We end, perhaps, when 
 we have read the Republic, by knowing 
 little more about Justice than when we 
 began. We feel like St. Augustine, who 
 replied to the pert question, " What is 
 time? " " I know when you do not ask 
 me." But we have caught glimpses of 
 many beautiful things as we proceed. The 
 force of Ruskin's work lies not in the argu- 
 ment, which is inconclusive enough, but in 
 the shower of stimulating and enlightening 
 things he lets fall by the way. These pages 
 of close reasoning are relieved at intervals 
 by passages of wonderful and luscious 
 beauty, those great musical sentences, so 
 full of colour and movement, so clear and 
 sweet of cadence, which dapple the sun- 
 scorched path as with a burst of shad*e and 
 bloom. It was this which gave the book 
 its appeal; and Ruskin used to complain 
 that the public loved his pretty sentences 
 and cared nothing for his principles. It 
 was true enough; the sentences were amaz-
 
 A Study in Personality 37 
 
 ingly beautiful, the principles were dry and 
 inconclusive. 
 
 Let me quote one instance, in passing, of 
 the sort of admirable sidelight he throws 
 upon art. He says that the untrained mind 
 is unduly impressed by the first sketch, the 
 beginnings of the picture. That five chalk 
 touches bring a head to life, and that no 
 other five touches in the course of the 
 sketch will ever do so much. But he shows 
 clearly enough that the trained onlooker 
 is not thus misled, and that the true ap- 
 preciation of art lies in the recognition of 
 the intellectual and technical power that 
 completes and develops the picture. 
 
 The first volume of Modern Painters was 
 published by the father's advice anony- 
 mously " by a graduate of Oxford." It 
 won an instant recognition. Tennyson, 
 Sydney Smith, Sir Henry Taylor, agreed 
 that here was a new spirit and a new 
 voice. The world found out the secret, and 
 laid hands on the author; and Ruskin be- 
 gan to learn the truth of the famous say-
 
 38 Ruskin 
 
 ing which he afterwards uttered, that the 
 artist must fit himself in all ways for the 
 best society, and then must abjure it. 
 
 And then there came a sudden revulsion. 
 He went to the Louvre in 1844, and there 
 suddenly burst upon him the knowledge, 
 which he had never previously suspected, 
 of the greatness of the Venetian school of 
 Italian painters Titian, Veronese, Bellini. 
 He rushed to Italy in the following year, 
 and began a fierce study of mediaeval art; 
 and he did not merely look and observe 
 he drew, day after day, for eight or nine 
 hours, copying pictures and frescoes. And 
 then all in a moment he saw the Tinto- 
 rettos at Venice, and the current of his 
 future life was altered: it was an artistic 
 conversion. He realised, in an instant, that 
 the art of the sixteenth century was su- 
 premely and undeniably great, when, by all 
 his ingrained religious theories, it ought to 
 have been base and vile. He had been 
 brought up in the straitest evangelicalism, 
 and sincerely believed that any art based
 
 A Study in Personality 39 
 
 upon or springing from Catholic influences 
 must be inherently degraded. It was not 
 the realisation of Italian art generally, but 
 of the art of the Renaissance in particular, 
 which knocked his early theories to pieces. 
 We must not too hastily blame him for 
 rashness and carelessness. Nowadays, with 
 all the photographs and reproductions of 
 great pictures which are accessible to all, 
 it is possible for the most sedentary per- 
 son to form some idea of the varied treas- 
 ures of Italian art. But all this was 
 non-existent then ; indeed it is Ruskin's in- 
 fluence that is mainly responsible for the 
 change. 
 
 At Venice he took a fever, and a time 
 of horrible depression followed. And now 
 for the first time in his life he says he 
 had the experience of intense and agonised 
 prayer to God, a prayer which was in- 
 stantly answered. But this sense of a 
 direct relation with God did not last, and 
 he drifted away into the " darkness of the 
 Underworld."
 
 4Q Ruskin 
 
 It must be remembered, as I have said, 
 that he had been brought up in the 
 severest evangelicalism. He had been con- 
 tinually finding out the limitations and 
 inconsistencies, and even errors, of the old 
 grim creed ; and now he wrote pathetically : 
 " It seemed to me quite sure since my 
 downfall of heart . . . that I had no part 
 nor lot in the privileges of the saints; but, 
 on the contrary, had such share only in 
 the things of God as well-conducted beasts 
 and serenely minded birds had." 
 
 And then he plunged into the second 
 volume of Modern Painters, which he said 
 was written " at the moulting-time " of his 
 life, and drew out the theory of beauty. 
 But it was characteristic of Ruskin that 
 though the revelation of Italian art had 
 knocked his former theory to bits, he never 
 thought of abjuring it, or of reconstructing 
 a new theory. He only attempted to fit 
 into the old scheme the new principles, 
 with what confusion of thought may be 
 seen in that second volume.
 
 A Study in Personality 41 
 
 The book is not easy reading; it is closely 
 and rigidly argued, with some mistakes in 
 fact, but with a marvellous copiousness of 
 illustration. He was trying, on the Aristo- 
 telian method, in the manner of Locke, 
 and in the style of Hooker, to argue 
 principles out of facts. His aim was to 
 present a theory of Beauty perhaps the 
 most difficult thing in the world, be- 
 cause it is so impossible to see into other 
 people's minds in such a matter, or to know 
 what they admire and why they admire it. 
 The perception of beauty is all such a sub- 
 jective thing, and so bound up with tradi- 
 tions and associations, that it is next to 
 impossible to generalise at all about it, be- 
 cause half one's facts must be drawn from 
 one's own experience; and who can say 
 what inheritance of use and circumstance 
 may not dictate the limits of our own taste 
 and distaste? Take for a simple instance 
 the ideals of Japanese art. In the case of 
 details like flowers or leaves, insects or 
 birds, it is obvious that a Japanese artist
 
 42 Ruskin 
 
 is trying to draw what he sees, and to 
 catch what he thinks beautiful in them. 
 But Japanese artists have inherited a tra- 
 dition of representation which makes one 
 wonder if indeed they see at all what we 
 1 see. The flatness of the whole design, 
 the lack of depth and perspective and 
 shadow, compel us to recognise that they 
 are on the look-out for a set of qualities 
 that we do not see, and unconsciously 
 neglecting a whole set of qualities on which 
 to our own mind the whole lifelikeness of 
 a picture depends. The only evidence which 
 we can quote in our own favour, is that a 
 photograph seems nearer to an English 
 picture than it is to a -Japanese. The great 
 bare streaks and patches of a Japanese pic- 
 ture, which make the whole look like a 
 mosaic of suspended vignettes the treat- 
 ment of water, with indigo streaks and 
 spongy crumpled foam, with no indication 
 of motion or depth or continuity; these 
 things make us see that there are different 
 conventions in the art of different nations,
 
 A Study in Personality 43 
 
 and that we expect in a picture, not what 
 we see in nature, but what we have learnt 
 to expect on a canvas. But Ruskin was 
 not daunted by such considerations ; he had 
 observed so much, drawn it so faithfully 
 and loved it so intensely, that he was quite 
 ready to evolve a theory of beauty out of 
 his own consciousness. And thus the book 
 is not really a philosophical treatise, but a 
 close analysis of his own sensations, the 
 whole written with a vehemence and an in- 
 tellectual passion that make it at all events 
 an extremely suggestive document. The 
 theory is all dominated by Ruskin's hitherto 
 unshaken religious sense. He accounts for 
 our sense of beauty by referring it to the 
 attributes of God. Ruskin knew far more 
 about God in those days than he dared 
 to know later; and the treatise really puts 
 art on a moral basis, by referring it to 
 the " heavenward duty " of mankind. But 
 Ruskin hated metaphysics he had been 
 saved by Dr. Johnson, he once said, from 
 being caught in the cobwebs of German
 
 44 Ruskin 
 
 metaphysics, or sloughed in the English 
 drainage of Theism. And thus he swept 
 speculation aside, and laid down the prin- 
 ciple that beauty is the bread of the soul, 
 and that we must advance, as we live on, 
 from what is brilliant to what is pure. And 
 thus he was led to the conclusion that a 
 false-hearted and impious man could not 
 be a great imaginative painter. This judg- 
 ment must be here quoted, because of all 
 Ruskin's deliberate judgments it is perhaps 
 the one that has done him most harm as an 
 aesthetic philosopher, since it is a judgment 
 that is directly opposed to facts; and it 
 is opposed to facts, because it takes no ac- 
 count whatever of the strange admixture 
 of good and evil in so many lives, and 
 most of all in the lives of artists. A man 
 may see what is glorious and pure, and 
 represent it, if he has skill of hand and 
 eye; but he may also see what is beautiful 
 without being pure, and be sorrowfully en- 
 slaved by it : and perhaps some of the finest 
 of all art is born out of that very struggle.
 
 A Study in Personality 45 
 
 What would Kuskin have made, if he had 
 known it, of the strange grossness and 
 coarseness of fibre that lay beneath the life 
 of his beloved Turner? When he did learn 
 it, later on, he found himself unable to 
 write the life of the artist, as he had planned 
 to do. Of course neither lofty imagination 
 nor technical skill which demands for its 
 continuous strength and clearness the sim- 
 plicity of the ascetic and the training of an 
 athlete can be expected from a man hope- 
 lessly abandoned to sensuality. To achieve 
 mastery, whether of thought or art, a man 
 must be self-restrained and temperate. We 
 have a way of limiting our use of the word 
 sin to sins of the body; but sins of the 
 mind and heart we class with political crime 
 as hardly discreditable misdemeanours. And 
 indeed the gloomy pride of Michelangelo, 
 the acrid irritability of Beethoven, did not 
 mar the spirituality of their art. 
 
 5 
 
 Ten years were to pass before the vol-
 
 46 Ruskin 
 
 urnes III. and IV. of Modern Painters were 
 to see the light; and they were the years 
 of Buskin's life of which we know the least. 
 The family had moved to a larger house on 
 Denmark Hill, a big villa, with seven acres 
 of garden and paddock, with glass-houses 
 and stables, fowl-houses and piggeries, 
 where the pigs spoke excellent Irish; but 
 all this was the natural enough consequence 
 of growing wealth for old Mr. Ruskin was 
 now becoming a very rich man. Yet the 
 change gave but little proportionate pleas- 
 ure to any of the three that had come from 
 the simpler delights of Herne Hill. Ruskin 
 himself passed through a time of much de- 
 spondency. And one unhappy episode can- 
 not be wholly passed over, though he never 
 said a word of it himself in his own 
 autobiography. He married in 1848, half 
 thoughtlessly, half wilfully, the daughter 
 of old family friends, a girl, Euphemia 
 Gray, for whom some years before he had 
 written his charming allegory, The King of 
 the Golden River. It was a marriage only
 
 A Study in Personality 47 
 
 in name. There was little in common be- 
 tween the pair, Mrs. Ruskin's interests 
 being mainly social and personal. 
 
 They settled in London, and Ruskin 
 wrote the Seven Lamps of Architecture, 
 which may be held to have had a stronger 
 practical effect on English architectural art 
 than any other of his writings: it shook 
 conventional ideas rudely and roughly 
 about. The Seven Lamps, which he con- 
 fessed he had great difficulty in not mak- 
 ing into eight or nine, are seven great moral 
 qualities Truth, Beauty, Power, Sacrifice, 
 Obedience, Labour, and Memory. The one 
 cardinal principle was that buildings ought 
 to look what they are, and to serve their 
 purpose; that it is an architect's business 
 to decorate construction and not to con- 
 struct decoration. These and other like 
 principles have become so much a matter 
 of course that one is apt to forget how 
 novel and how precise they were at the 
 time, and from what unmeaning muddle 
 of false ideas they rescued us. The art
 
 48 Ruskin 
 
 which Ruskin selected to praise as innately 
 beautiful was the art of Italian fourteenth- 
 century Gothic. I believe myself that it 
 will be seen some day that the book, by 
 its force and vehemence, caused an artificial 
 interruption or suspension of the develop- 
 ment of our native architecture. The novels 
 of Walter Scott and the Oxford Movement 
 had cut sharply across the classical ideals 
 so nobly initiated by Wren, but which in 
 the distracted apathy of the eighteenth 
 century its greedy materialism, its ugly 
 indifference to the arts of peace had be- 
 come every year more tame and dull. But 
 it was an interruption for all that, and the 
 mid- Victorian Gothic is a very shallow 
 ripple on the tide of art. We seem to be 
 feeling our way at present, through great 
 restlessness and wilfulness, to a style of 
 which classical art is the ground-work. 
 This might have been done earlier, but 
 for Buskin and Pugin; but English archi- 
 tecture was indeed a valley of dry 
 bones, which needed a shaking and a sort-
 
 A Study in Personality 49 
 
 ing before they could stand upon their 
 feet. 
 
 I will here quote a description of the life 
 lived at Denmark Hill, written by a strange 
 pietistic artist called James Smetham, who 
 never fulfilled the promise of his youth: 
 
 I walked there [writes Smetham] through 
 the wintry weather, and got in about dusk. 
 One or two gossiping details will interest you 
 before I give you what I care for; and so 
 I will tell you that he has a large house with 
 a lodge, and a valet and footman and coach- 
 man, and grand rooms glittering with pictures, 
 chiefly Turner's, and that his father and mother 
 live with him, or he with them. His father is 
 a fine old gentleman, who has a lot of bushy 
 grey hair, and eyebrows sticking up all rough 
 and knowing, with a comfortable way of com- 
 ing up to you with his hands in his pockets, 
 and making you comfortable, and saying, in 
 answer to your remark, that " John's " prose 
 works are pretty good. His mother is a ruddy, 
 dignified, richly-dressed old gentlewoman of 
 seventy-five, who knows Chamonix better than 
 Camberwell; evidently a good old lady, with 
 the Christian Treasury tossing about on the 
 table. She puts " John " down, and holds her
 
 50 Ruskin 
 
 own opinions, and flatly contradicts him; and 
 he receives all her opinions with a soft rev- 
 erence and gentleness that is pleasant to 
 witness. 
 
 I wish I could reproduce a good impression 
 of " John " for you, to give you the notion 
 of his " perfect gentleness and lowlihood." He 
 certainly bursts out with a remark, and in a 
 contradictious way, but only because he be- 
 lieves it, with no air of dogmatism or conceit. 
 He is different at home from that which he 
 is in a lecture before a mixed audience, and 
 there is a spiritual sweetness in the half-timid 
 expression of his eyes; and in bowing to you, 
 as in taking wine, with (if I heard aright) 
 " I drink to thee," he had a look that has 
 followed me, a look bordering on tearful. 
 
 He spent some time in this way. Un- 
 hanging a Turner from the wall of a dis- 
 tant room, he brought it to the table and put 
 it in my hands; then we talked; then he went 
 up into his study to fetch down some illus- 
 trative print or drawing: in one case, a literal 
 view which he had travelled fifty miles to make, 
 in order to compare with the picture. And 
 so he kept on gliding all over the house, hang- 
 ing and unhanging, and stopping a few minutes 
 to talk. 
 
 But in the life of Kuskin a catastrophe
 
 A Study in Personality 51 
 
 was close at hand. He himself was bored 
 and tired by society, and his young wife 
 was absorbed in it. In 1853 the pair went 
 to Scotland, Millais came to stay with them 
 and painted their portraits. The face of 
 Euphemia Ruskin may be seen to this day 
 in the beautiful and tender picture, the 
 Order of Release, where the young bare- 
 footed Scotch Bride, with a tranquil pride, 
 presents the document for the freedom of 
 her husband to the kindly gaoler. Not long 
 after, Mrs. Ruskin left her home and re- 
 turned to her parents. A suit for nullity 
 was brought against her husband, and was 
 not defended; and she shortly afterwards 
 married Millais. The first marriage had 
 been a mistake from beginning to end, and 
 was best annulled. Ruskin returned to his 
 own family circle, and devoted himself to 
 his work with ever-increasing tenacity and 
 perseverance. 
 
 It was during his married life that he 
 made his studies for The Stones of Venice, 
 six hundred quarto pages of notes, as he
 
 52 Ruskin 
 
 tells us; and the book was finished in 1852. 
 It was nobly illustrated too, with engrav- 
 ings done under his close superintendence 
 from his own drawings. 
 
 The theory of the book was to teach the 
 laws of constructive art, and the depend- 
 ence of all human work or edifice on the 
 happy life of the workman. Here is struck 
 the first note of his later theories of social 
 reform. The strange thing is that he ran 
 his theory violently against all facts. The 
 Parthenon, the Pantheon, St. Sophia's, St. 
 Paul's, which will be admitted to be four 
 of the finest buildings in the world, all 
 sprang from periods conspicuous for moral 
 and social corruption, and what is more, 
 from periods when the workman was merci- 
 lessly sweated and mechanically coerced; 
 they are in fact the product of the rankest 
 and most violent individualism. But here 
 again, though the root idea was a false one, 
 the book is splendidly suggestive and ur- 
 gently inspiring. William Morris summed 
 up the teaching of the book so forcibly and
 
 A Study in Personality 53 
 
 enthusiastically that I will quote his judg- 
 ment here. He wrote: 
 
 The lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is 
 that art is the expression of man's pleasure 
 in labour; that it is possible for man to 
 rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may 
 seem to us to-day, there have been times when 
 he did rejoice in it; and> lastly, that unless 
 man's work once again becomes a pleasure to 
 him, the token of which change will be that 
 beauty is once again a natural and necessary 
 accompaniment of productive labour, all but 
 the worthless must toil in pain, and there- 
 fore live in pain ... if this be true ... it 
 follows that the hallowing of labour by art is 
 the one aim for us at the present day. If 
 politics are to be anything else than an empty 
 game, more exciting but less innocent than 
 those which are confessedly games of skill or 
 chance, it is towards this goal of the happiness 
 of labour that they must make. 
 
 But the strange thing is that at the very 
 time when Kuskin was preaching that jus- 
 tice, mercy, and pure religion are the soil 
 in which great art flourishes, that " fidelity 
 to the legible laws of an undoubted God "
 
 54 Ruskin 
 
 was the mainspring of art, his old rigid 
 Calvinistic creed was collapsing. He knew 
 nothing of history, and still less of ecclesi- 
 astical history; nothing at all of sociology. 
 He found himself saying that Catholicism 
 was the most debasing and degrading of 
 all creeds, while he was being forced to 
 uphold the fervour and sincerity of the 
 best Catholic art. But he acted character- 
 istically enough. He saw the truth in a 
 flash. A humbler man might perhaps have 
 set to work to read history and study 
 philosophy; but this Ruskin could not do, 
 and we cannot desire that he should have 
 done so. The evils which he saw and testi- 
 fied against were there; the truths he up- 
 held were there: but he had not the least 
 idea of the marvellous interplay and com- 
 plexity of social and vital forces; there 
 was no middle ground for him. A quality, 
 an age, a person was to Ruskin entirely 
 and indisputably noble, or hopelessly and 
 irredeemably vile. And so without reflec- 
 tion, but with indignation and vehemence,
 
 A Study in Personality 55 
 
 he started on a crusade against all re- 
 ligious and social and philosophical ortho- 
 doxies, and became a sorrowful prophet 
 enough; but his sorrow had a fruitful ap- 
 peal which his dogmatism had never 
 possessed.
 
 n 
 
 I HAVE now traced the story of the first 
 three decades of Ruskin's life, up to the 
 age of thirty or thereabouts, while he was 
 still an art critic. I will now attempt to 
 define briefly his relation to the art of his 
 time; and the point I wish to make clear, 
 a point which requires to be firmly stated, 
 is this: Ruskin was never in the technical 
 sense an art critic at all. He wrote about 
 art, it is true, and he wrote about it with 
 considerable technical knowledge. He was 
 a real artist himself, and he thus had a 
 considerable practical knowledge of the 
 aims, the difficulties, the obstacles, the 
 theory, and the treatment of art. But to 
 be a comprehensive critic of art, and it was 
 56
 
 A Study in Personality 57 
 
 this which Ruskin undertook to be, a man 
 must have a comprehensive view of art 
 he must be erudite, he must have a know- 
 ledge at once wide and detailed; and this 
 Euskin did not possess. His acquaintance 
 with pictorial art was partial and limited. 
 He came to the task with furious pre- 
 ferences and almost fanatical preposses- 
 sions. He knew something about the two 
 great English schools of art portraiture 
 and landscape. He knew a very little of 
 Italian art, but, as I have shown, there 
 were whole schools, such as the Venetian 
 and the Florentine schools which, when he 
 began his work, were as sealed books to 
 him. He was intolerant of Dutch art, and 
 of French and Spanish schools he knew 
 nothing whatever. He did not exactly 
 claim omniscience, but he claimed an ab- 
 solute certainty and a Tightness of judg- 
 ment which nothing but omniscience could 
 have justified him in claiming. 
 
 But, as I say, he was not really criticis- 
 ing and comparing and analysing art at
 
 58 Ruskin 
 
 all. The pictures he knew were but as 
 glowing brands which kindled his emotion 
 and his mind. His real concern was the 
 philosophy of art, or rather the ethics of 
 art. Moral ideas were what he was in 
 search of all along. It may be said roughly 
 that all idealists are really in search of 
 one and the same thing, though they call 
 it by different names. They are all in 
 search of a certain transforming and up- 
 lifting power, something which may stand 
 up " above the howling senses' ebb and 
 flow," some force which may bring man- 
 kind tranquillity and inner happiness not 
 a listless and indolent happiness, but the 
 happiness which comes of having an aim 
 and a goal, a cause to fight for, a secret 
 to interpret, a message to announce, a 
 dream which is to be brighter and purer 
 than material dreams, a vision which is to 
 outlast life and to help on the regeneration 
 of the world. 
 
 He wrote long after of his own qualifica- 
 tions as a critic of art:
 
 A Study in Personality 59 
 
 If I have powers fitted for this task (and 
 I should not have attempted it but in convic- 
 tion that I have); they are owing mainly to 
 this one condition of my life, that, from my 
 youth up, I have been seeking the fame and 
 honouring the work of others never my own. 
 I first was driven into literature that I might 
 defend the fame of Turner; since that day I 
 have been explaining the power, or proclaim- 
 ing the praise, of Tintoret of Luini of 
 Carpaccio of Botticelli of Carlyle; never 
 thinking for an instant of myself; and sacri- 
 ficing what little faculty and large pleasure I 
 had in painting either from nature or noble art, 
 that, if possible, I might bring others to see 
 what I rejoiced in, and understand what I 
 had deciphered. There has been no heroism in 
 this, nor virtue but only, as far as I am 
 myself concerned, quaint ordering of Fate; but 
 the result is, that I have at last obtained an 
 instinct of impartial and reverent judgment, 
 which sternly fits me for this final work, to 
 which, if to anything, I was appointed. 
 
 Ruskin then believed the secret of life 
 as well as of art to lie in a sort of heavenly 
 obedience, a triumphant energy, a fiery con- 
 templation. The reason why he clothed his 
 message at first in terms of art is a mere
 
 60 Ruskin 
 
 question of faculty. To Ruskin the purest 
 delight of which his spirit was capable came 
 through the eye, through the mysteries of 
 light and colour, of form and curve the 
 devices which make such a man say in a 
 rapture of spiritual satisfaction, " Yes, it 
 is like that ! " He had both the eye for 
 effect and the eye for detail, sight at once 
 extended and microscopical. He wrote of 
 himself, " I had a sensual faculty of 
 pleasure in sight, as far as I know un- 
 paralleled." 
 
 But if he had been a musician he would 
 have attacked the problem in precisely the 
 same way, only with a different terminology. 
 We may be sure that in music he would 
 have had some three or four supreme favour- 
 ites; he would have swept the rest aside 
 with one impartial gesture. He would 
 have asserted with impassioned rhetoric 
 that the inspiring musician was also the 
 virtuous man. If the facts had been against 
 him, he would have maintained that the 
 great musician, though disfigured by glar-
 
 A Study in Personality 61 
 
 ing faults, had still some inner righteous- 
 ness of soul, while he would have blackened 
 the record of musicians whose music he 
 believed to be on the wrong lines! 
 
 It was noble and enthusiastic theorising, 
 most of it, and no deficiency of knowledge 
 can detract from the inspiration of it. It 
 could and it did kindle the seed of flame 
 in many a generous mind; but it was not 
 art criticism. No one can be a critic who 
 is deeply and obviously biassed, who is from 
 first to last a partisan. He may, it is true, 
 reveal the special merit of the artists whom 
 he admires, but he cannot arrive patiently 
 at the principles of art, because he cannot 
 really compare artists; he can only eulogise 
 or vilify. Buskin was never just. But 
 that mattered little, because justice is re- 
 quired of the philosopher or the statesman, 
 not of the poet and the prophet. And thus 
 it is impossible to make a greater mistake 
 than to consider Buskin to have been a 
 critic of art: he was a prophet of art, a 
 rhetorician, a moralist, but he was not
 
 62 Ruskin 
 
 a judge nor an arbiter, and still less a his- 
 torian of art. 
 
 In those first fifteen years, while his joy 
 was mainly in art, and while he wished to 
 share his joy with others, he preached from 
 that one text. His disillusionment came 
 not with art but with humanity. When 
 he found that the ordinary man did not 
 care for art, and could neither be inspired 
 nor scolded into regarding it seriously, he 
 plunged into the study of the causes which 
 made men so indifferent, so brutal, so 
 materialistic: that was the period of his 
 political economy and of his social studies. 
 
 And then when he was headed off again, 
 and found again that he could not reform 
 or regenerate the world in the twinkling of 
 an eye, that men would not he never per- 
 ceived that they could not see what was 
 to himself so evident, so glorious, so divine, 
 then he surrendered himself to a sort of 
 despair; and even that was beautiful, be- 
 cause he never lost his gracious tenderness, 
 his delicate irony of utterance.
 
 A Study in Personality 63 
 
 We must then keep this in mind that 
 art criticism was to Ruskin not more than 
 the habit and vesture of the priest, but 
 that all the time his hand was raised to 
 consecrate and to bless, and his heart was 
 set upon the divine mystery, of which the 
 bread on the gleaming dish and the wine 
 in the jewelled chalice were but the fair 
 and seemly symbols. 
 
 There is a theory of art which is sedu- 
 lously put forward nowadays and passion- 
 ately defended that art alone, of all the 
 provinces of human activity, must exist for 
 its own sake. The theory is that it is the 
 expression that matters, that it need not 
 even be beauty of which the artist is in 
 search : that he must observe, must keep 
 his eye on the object, and make a sincere 
 and perfect presentment of it, whatever the 
 object may be a mental conception, an in- 
 tellectual idea, a landscape, a face, and so
 
 64 Ruskin 
 
 on down to things mean and pitiful and 
 grotesque. 
 
 The theory is to me so meaningless from 
 the outset that I cannot perhaps do jus- 
 tice to it. It may be true of exact sciences 
 like mathematics, philosophy, history, where 
 the thing aimed at is the disentangling 
 of some definite truth, some equation of 
 values which is an altogether intellectual 
 process. But when the process is an emo- 
 tional one, the theory appears to me to have 
 no meaning. You cannot so restrict and 
 confine vital processes. Of course art is 
 vitiated, as everything else is vitiated, if 
 you are not really pursuing it at all, but 
 something else. If you write a novel, the 
 purport of which is not to present a story, 
 but to further the cause of Foreign Mis- 
 sions, the art of your writing will be hurt 
 exactly in so far as you allow your ulti- 
 mate aim to modify the truth and vitality 
 of your picture. Art is partly a question 
 of method and form, partly of subject and 
 impulse. Anything which awes or inter-
 
 A Study in Personality 65 
 
 ests or charms or amuses the human mind 
 is fit to be treated of by art: religion, 
 morals, sociology, science all alike can be 
 treated artistically. I will go further, and 
 say that most of the best literary art of 
 the nineteenth century in England consists 
 in the treatment of moral ideas Words- 
 worth, Browning, Tennyson, Carlyle, Bus- 
 kin, all were moralists. In fact Ruskin by 
 himself seems to me, once and for all, to dis- 
 pose of the theory of art for art's sake. He 
 began by treating mainly of art, and while 
 he did so, his handling of it was artistic 
 enough; but when moral ideas took pos- 
 session of and dominated his mind, so far 
 from his art being vitiated by the inrush 
 of this stronger tide, it grew in delicacy 
 and perfection every year; and what is yet 
 more surprising, when he took to writing 
 Fors Clavigcra, and threw overboard all 
 consideration of form, the thing became 
 more beautiful still, so that he reached the 
 perfection of his art by preoccupation with 
 moral ideas, and deliberate neglect of form. 
 
 5
 
 66 Ruskin 
 
 That is the worst, and in 'another way the 
 best, of these dominant geniuses, that they 
 knock to bits all pedantic theories of art, 
 and force dogmatists to reconstruct their 
 principles. And thus they tend to show 
 that art is really a question of inspiration 
 and instinct, and not a question of rules 
 and precedents. The vital thing is to have 
 something to say, and the next thing is to 
 be able to say it cogently, persuasively, 
 clearly, and beautifully: and in Buskin's 
 case, as in the case of others, the art of 
 expression gained, the less he studied it. 
 Of course his practice told, but what really 
 gave his words force and charm was the 
 intense desire to convince and to persuade 
 that lay behind it all. 
 
 The opposite result is well illustrated by 
 the case of Tennyson. When in early days 
 Tennyson said what was in his mind as sin- 
 cerely and as beautifully as possible, his art 
 was at its strongest, but when he began to 
 try to express what he did not really care 
 about, but what he thought would be ap-
 
 A Study in Personality 67 
 
 proved of by the public what was expected 
 of him, what he ought to care about he be- 
 came popular and inartistic. Now, Euskin 
 became popular in spite of himself. He 
 thought that the aims, the hopes, the pleas- 
 ures, the ideals of the world in which he 
 lived, were not only low but becoming lower. 
 He protested, he vituperated, he broke out 
 into irony and expostulation ; where he went 
 wrong was when he dogmatised about the 
 limits of what was beautiful and desirable; 
 when he scolded people for caring about 
 the art for which he himself did not happen 
 to care, or held up as models of unimpeach- 
 able beauty the slight and trivial books 
 and pictures in which he detected a con- 
 genial motive. But his influence was due 
 partly to the fact that he did care vehe- 
 mently and passionately for certain forms 
 of expression and certain ideals of life, and 
 partly too to the fact that he could invest 
 what lie said with the indescribable quality 
 called charm, which has as yet escaped the 
 severest critical analysis.
 
 68 Ruskin 
 
 But the mistake which men make who 
 uphold art for art's sake, is the mistake 
 which is made by those who think that 
 good manners can be cultivated apart from 
 the unselfishness and the sympathy of which 
 they are the natural expression, or by the 
 ecclesiastical persons who believe that re- 
 ligion is wholly bound up with ceremonies. 
 Art is nothing but the love of beauty find- 
 ing utterance. Like water, it will flow in 
 natural channels; its rules are not arbitrary 
 regulations, but the self-created form of its 
 ow r n secret laws; and to confine it under 
 the sway of precedents is as though a 
 botanist were to condemn an unknown 
 flower because it violated the principles de- 
 duced from the flowers he knows. The only 
 fruitful kind of criticism is that which 
 recognises and welcomes a new force in 
 art, a new form of expression, not the criti- 
 cism which lays down a precise and inelastic 
 code. In all provinces of life which deal 
 with vital and progressive emotions, the 
 only people who are certainly wrong are
 
 A Study in Personality 69 
 
 the orthodox, because the orthodox are 
 those who think that development has 
 ceased, and that the results can be tabu- 
 lated. And thus they resent any further 
 development, because it interferes with their 
 conclusions, and gives them a sense of in- 
 security and untidiness, and the upsetting 
 of agreeable arrangements. In his artistic 
 criticism Ruskin began by being unortho- 
 dox, and in breaking, like Mahomet, the 
 idols of the land. But he ended by creat- 
 ing his own orthodoxy, and arriving at a 
 sort of Papal infallibility, which was per- 
 fectly rigid and entirely impenetrable. Yet 
 he never made the mistake of regarding art 
 as an end in itself. As his outlook wid- 
 ened, he began to regard the due accept- 
 ance of his own preferences in art as a 
 sign and symptom of moral healthiness, and 
 any deviation from that loyalty seemed to 
 him an offence not against taste but against 
 morals. In his views upon art and life he 
 was really intensely denominational. He 
 was the master of a sheepfold, and all out-
 
 70 Ruskin 
 
 side were thieves and robbers. He required 
 absolute obedience, but he had not that note 
 of personal dominance which distinguishes 
 the founder of a school. The real way to 
 read and to follow Ruskin is to share his 
 generous enthusiasms, and frankly to dis- 
 regard his personal dictation. He is a 
 great guide but an unsafe ruler. One may 
 thankfully start on pilgrimage with him, 
 but one must be prepared to part company 
 with him where the roads divide over the 
 hill. 
 
 And now there followed a very full and 
 vigorous period of ten years, from 1851 to 
 1860. Ruskin began his crusade with a 
 curious little volume: Notes on the Con- 
 struction of Sheepfolds. It is said that a 
 good many copies of this pamphlet were 
 bought by Yorkshire and Cumberland farm- 
 ers, under the impression that it was an 
 essay in technical agriculture, and that they 
 were vexed to find it an appeal for Christ-
 
 A Study in Personality 71 
 
 ian unity. It was a plea to Anglicanism 
 to abandon Catholic pretensions, and to 
 Presbyterianism to adopt Episcopalianism. 
 Of course most religious men have been 
 appalled, at one time or another, to find 
 Christians more divided from each other 
 than from the heathen by intense convic- 
 tion and violent indignation over points the 
 significance of which would be almost un- 
 intelligible, by reason of their similarity, to 
 a convinced Buddhist. Of course com- 
 promise seems easy and reasonable enough, 
 but reason is a very secondary force com- 
 pared with consistency and tradition. And 
 Ruskin was distressed to find how firmly 
 the adders of artistic orthodoxy stopped 
 their ears against the voice of the wisest 
 of charmers. 
 
 In these years he went much into society 
 and made many of his best friendships. He 
 took up the cause of the Pre-Raphaelites, 
 Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, and 
 Millais, and invested that singular revolt 
 with an interest which it has never lost.
 
 72 Ruskin 
 
 Buskin's relations with Rossetti are ex- 
 tremely interesting, for this reason. Ros- 
 setti was certainly one of the strongest 
 personalities in the region of art that the 
 last century produced. He was an absolute 
 pagan, and an almost inconceivable indi- 
 vidualist. He took not the slightest inter- 
 est in history or philosophy or movements 
 of any kind. He once divided the human 
 race into two classes : artists, and the people 
 whose duty it was to admire art and to 
 pay for its production. But he had a mag- 
 netic force and a royal generosity of spirit, 
 that made him one of the most dominant 
 personalities of the world of art. The ac- 
 quaintance began with sympathy and de- 
 ference. Ruskin exhorted Rossetti to work, 
 bought his pictures, petted him, lectured 
 him, criticised him. But it was an impos- 
 sible alliance. Rossetti was indifferent to 
 the claims of morality, and inflamed by the 
 holy fire of art. The inevitable rupture 
 followed. Ruskin found himself calmly 
 disregarded, and Rossetti went on his own
 
 A Study in Personality 73 
 
 dark way into sorrow and silence. Each 
 descended into hell; but Ruskin's inferno 
 led him out into a clearer air, while the 
 torture-chamber of Rossetti was the grim 
 cul-de-sac from which the soul must some- 
 how or other retrace her burdened steps in 
 anguish. But for a time they worked in 
 concert, till the gulf opened beneath their 
 feet. Here is one of Ruskin's letters to 
 Rossetti, which gives so curious an account * 
 of his own disposition, as it appeared to 
 himself, and in so intimate a strain, that 
 it is worth considering: 
 
 You constantly hear a great many people 
 saying I am very bad, and perhaps you have 
 been yourself disposed lately to think me very 
 good T am neither the one nor the other. I 
 am very self-indulgent, very proud, very ob- 
 stinate, and very resentful; on the other side, 
 I am very upright nearly as just as I sup- 
 pose it is possible for man to be in this world 
 exceedingly fond of making people happy, 
 and devotedly reverent to all true mental or 
 moral power. I never betrayed a trust never 
 wilfully did an unkind thing and never, in 
 little or large matters, depreciated another
 
 74 Ruskin 
 
 that I might raise myself. I believe I once 
 had affections as warm as most people; but 
 partly from evil chance, and partly from fool- 
 ish misplacing of them, they have got tumbled 
 down and broken to pieces. ... I have no 
 friendships and no loves. . . . My pleasures 
 are in seeing, thinking, reading, and making 
 people happy (if I can consistently with my 
 own comfort). And I take these pleasures. 
 
 And at this time too began for Ruskin 
 the career as a lecturer, which was perhaps 
 to bring him closer to the hearts of men 
 even than his great books. It is character- 
 istic to note the view which the secluded 
 household at Denmark Hill took of the 
 occupation. His father sorrowfully per- 
 mitted the venture the son invariably had 
 his own way but said that it was degrad- 
 ing for a man to expose himself to journal- 
 istic comment and personal references. The 
 mother, more lost in privacy, said grimly 
 that he was too young, though lie was a 
 married man of thirty-four. " I cannot 
 reconcile myself," she wrote, " to the 
 thought of your bringing yourself person-
 
 A Study in Personality 75 
 
 ally before the world till you are somewhat 
 older and stronger." 
 
 In 1853 Kuskin was at work writing 
 notes for the Arundel Society on Giotto's 
 frescoes at Padua. This little book, since 
 reprinted, has a special charm, because 
 Giotto was one of Kuskin's particular 
 heroes. He constantly returns to Giotto, 
 and Giotto is one of the few artists whom 
 he criticised, against whom he was never 
 betrayed into saying a single disparaging 
 word. It was to him that Buskin traced 
 the guiding and originating principle of 
 Florentine art. Giotto's life was romantic, 
 even legendary, but there is something of 
 the inner spirit of beauty in all that came 
 from his hand. Moreover there is a strong 
 and impressive intellectual quality in all 
 that he did the same sort of quality which 
 comes out in Leonardo da Vinci and Michel- 
 angelo. One feels in all Giotto's work the 
 pressure of a vigorous mind, the presence 
 of the fundamental brain-work, which Ros- 
 setti held to be the essence of the finest
 
 76 Ruskin 
 
 art; he never falls into sentimentality or 
 into monotony. There is something fresh 
 and unexhausted about him, both in his 
 choice of subjects, his handling of detail, 
 and his power of contrast. All this was 
 deeply congenial to Kuskin; and we must 
 not forget this episode of his life, because 
 here his power of detecting serene greatness 
 in art, and presenting it faithfully and 
 impartially, without bitterness and undue 
 depreciation, comes out most strongly. 
 
 At this time too, in 1854, was inaugurated 
 the Working Men's College, the theory of 
 w r hich was to bring the serener sort of 
 academic culture within reach of working 
 men. But this was all part of the great 
 Chartist movement, which Charles Kings- 
 ley, F. D. Maurice, Tom Hughes, and 
 Carlyle did so much to welcome, and to 
 guide into peaceful channels. Kuskin 
 joined the Pre-Kaphaelites in the inception 
 of the idea; he subscribed largely, he lec- 
 tured, he taught drawing, and for four 
 years he was perhaps the chief inspiring
 
 A Study in Personality 77 
 
 force of the College. His reasons for sever- 
 ing his connection with the work were given 
 some years later in a letter to Maurice. 
 
 It is not [he wrote] from any failure in 
 my interest in this class that I have ceased 
 from personal attendance. But I ascertained 
 beyond all question that the faculty which 
 my own method of teaching chiefly regarded, 
 was necessarily absent in men trained to me- 
 chanical toil, that my words and thoughts 
 respecting beautiful things were unintelligible 
 when the eye had been accustomed to the 
 frightfulness of modern city life. 
 
 The episode is interesting, as denoting 
 his change of front and his broadening of 
 horizon. Till now he had been rather a 
 brilliant individualist than anything else. 
 But he began to turn in the direction of 
 social reform; he began to see that the 
 hope of the future lay in the education 
 of the democracy. The problem of the di- 
 vergence of class interests and class feel- 
 ings began to concern him; and he saw that 
 what was needed was that the wealthier 
 class, who had hitherto possessed a sort of
 
 78 Ruskin 
 
 monopoly of culture, should come forward 
 personally, and give freely whatever of 
 taste and beauty and inspiring motive they 
 possessed; not in a condescending and 
 patronising spirit, doling out attractive 
 selections of cheap culture, but sharing 
 generously and freely the good things 
 which society had hitherto conspired to se- 
 cure only to the rich and leisured classes. 
 Kuskin began to perceive that the fortune 
 which his father secured him was in the 
 main nothing more nor less than a sub- 
 scription levied from the labours of those 
 through whose uncheered toil the fortune 
 was made. 
 
 F. D. Maurice, for all his deep conscien- 
 tiousness and generosity of purpose, was 
 not an ideal head for such a movement; 
 he was an essentially puzzle-headed man. 
 Ruskin said of him that he reconciled 
 Biblical difficulties by turning them up- 
 side down, like railway cushions. He ar- 
 rived at orthodoxy, not by the direct road, 
 but by labyrinthine paradoxes. On one
 
 A Study in Personality 79 
 
 occasion Maurice, who was a strict Sabba- 
 tarian, was asked what be felt about tbe 
 opening of museums on Sunday. It was 
 thought that he was cornered for once, and 
 would have to give a plain answer. But 
 Maurice was equal to the dilemma. He 
 said that museums should certainly be 
 opened on Sundays, but he trusted that 
 working men would have too much respect 
 for the Sabbath to think of frequenting 
 them! 
 
 All this time Ruskin was throwing off 
 books with marvellous celerity. Indeed the 
 incredible amount of finished literary work, 
 which he combined w T ith indefatigable draw- 
 ing, mineralogical study, teaching, and 
 lecturing, shows the wonderful vitality 
 which was half the secret of his force. He 
 recuperated from one sort of toil by an- 
 other; and I would not have you overlook 
 the gigantic industry of the man ! His 
 work seems and was so facile, that one is 
 apt to forget in what urgency of stress it 
 was done.
 
 8o Ruskin 
 
 The Elements of Drawing a master- 
 piece of clear statement and logical ex- 
 pression belongs to this date; and also 
 The Harbours of England, which is a pa- 
 triotic prose poem of the loftiest and most 
 resounding eloquence. He began, too, his 
 annual Notes on the Academy Exhibition, 
 and he was hard at work arranging and 
 selecting the mass of Turner's studies and 
 drawings which had been left to the nation. 
 There were nearly 20,000 of these, rolled 
 up into great cylinders, rammed into 
 drawers, stuffed into bulging portfolios, 
 many of them drawn on both sides of the 
 paper; and the whole damp, dusty, and 
 neglected. All the time, too, he was at 
 work on the last volume of Modern 
 Painters, of which the final fifth volume 
 appeared in 1860. 
 
 The work of one of these years is well 
 summarised in a letter written to Mrs. 
 Carlyle in the autumn of 1855, which 
 conveys a singularly vivid picture of the 
 restless brain with all its schemes and ideas.
 
 A Study in Personality 81 
 
 He begins by saying that he has written 
 some six hundred pages since the spring, 
 and that he has great hopes of disturbing 
 the public peace in various directions by 
 what he has to suggest. He has also pre- 
 pared, he says, thirty drawings for the 
 engravers, some of which he has himself 
 etched, and all of which he has retouched, 
 He has been reading up various subjects, 
 such as German Metaphysics, Political 
 Economy, Cookery, Music, Geology, Dress, 
 Horticulture, and Education. He has been 
 sketching in the open air, designing a win- 
 dow, learning Spanish. He has drawn up 
 a new system of Botany, on his own lines, 
 and re-arranged his collection of Minerals. 
 But perhaps the main interest of the letter 
 is his confession that he has discovered 
 that all previous theories of Political 
 Economy are wrong, and that he is engaged 
 in an independent investigation of the 
 nature of Wealth. 
 
 The letter shows clearly enough the drift 
 of Ruskin's mind in the direction of social 
 
 6
 
 82 Ruskin 
 
 problems; but it is mainly interesting as 
 illustrating the perilous activity of his 
 brain. No doubt the fact that he varied 
 his studies, and interspersed a good deal 
 of mechanical handiwork, relieved the strain 
 to a certain extent; but it is a revelation 
 of great restlessness, and of a furious appe- 
 tite for mental occupation, which presages 
 disaster. 
 
 Of course there are plenty of people in 
 the world who work hard, and work con- 
 tinuously; mechanical labour, either of 
 brain or hand, undoubtedly makes for 
 health and sanity; but the danger with 
 Kuskin was the emotional strain involved. 
 He could not keep his thoughts to him- 
 self, and be content to accumulate his 
 studies quietly and stolidly. He was forced 
 to share his opinions, and to confute re- 
 ceived theories; and it was here that the 
 difficulty lay. He was always occupied in 
 a sort of mental strategy, conducting a 
 campaign against complacent orthodoxy. 
 His persuasive charm carried his own cir-
 
 A Study in Personality 83 
 
 cle to a great extent along with him; but 
 he formed his own theories hastily, and 
 expressed them strongly; and though it is 
 perhaps safe to say that all stereotyped 
 opinion is erroneous, because it is essential 
 to the life of ideas that they should grow 
 and develop, yet the expansion of thought 
 needs a combination of patience and exact- 
 ness, which Ruskin seldom attained; and 
 the battle, in a sense, cost him his life. 
 
 And here I may say a few words about 
 the later volumes of Modern Painters. 
 They did little more than expand and re- 
 iterate the principles originally laid down. 
 The third volume is really a collection of 
 scattered essays on art. It begins with an 
 essay on the Grand style, or Dignity in 
 art, in which, with infinite variety of illus- 
 tration, the somewhat indisputable proposi- 
 tion is stated that you can tell greatness 
 of style by the greatness of an artist; 
 and if you want to go further and detect
 
 84 Ruskin 
 
 the greatness of an artist, the only way 
 to arrive at it is through the greatness of 
 his style. There is a delightful chapter on 
 the Grotesque in Art, and a famous chap- 
 ter on the Pathetic Fallacy, the point being 
 that we are apt to put human emotion be- 
 hind natural forces to think of the storm 
 as angry, of the sea as cruel, of the sun- 
 light as beneficent, and of the pestilence 
 as malignant. Whereas the truth is that 
 even the pestilence has no malicious intent. 
 It is merely so many colonies of vigorous 
 bacteria hard at work enjoying themselves 
 in congenial circumstances. The result is 
 the decimation of human society, and the 
 discomfort of many individuals; but the 
 bacteria in question are thinking, if they 
 reflect at all, about their own eugenics and 
 their own social development, and not the 
 least about the bereavements they unin- 
 tentionally cause. There is too a good deal 
 of dogmatism about poetry, which is little 
 more than a justification of Ruskin's own 
 preferences, and shows that he had but an
 
 A Study in Personality 85 
 
 imperfect appreciation of his subject; and 
 there is much beautiful writing about the 
 spirit of domestic landscape, tamed wood- 
 land, and tilled field, and a wild plea to 
 the nation not to annihilate time and space 
 by steam. 
 
 And here I would draw attention to a 
 particular limitation of Ruskin's, because 
 it is strongly characteristic of him. He 
 spent himself at intervals in frantic ob- 
 jurgations of steam as abbreviating lei- 
 surely travel, and as nullifying dignified 
 and tranquil manual labour. The fact is 
 that here came out both his bourgeois 
 tradition and his innate Toryism. The post- 
 chaise and the travelling carriage repre- 
 sented to Ruskin the height of locomotive 
 convenience; but it is impossible to resist 
 the conviction, that had he lived before 
 horses had been used for purposes of loco- 
 motion, he would have passionately resisted 
 their introduction, as interfering with the 
 natural dignity and appropriateness of 
 pedestrian ism. Similarly had he been
 
 86 Ruskin 
 
 brought up to gain his early experiences 
 of travel by railways, he would have copi- 
 ously praised railway travelling as the nat- 
 ural and seemly method of voyaging, and 
 would have spent himself in bitter dia- 
 tribes against the impiety and horror of 
 aerial navigation. 
 
 So too with his hatred of steam as a 
 mechanical force. He praised the human 
 use of wind and water; he wanted to do 
 the work of the world by tide-mills; the 
 waterwheel and the windmill seemed to him 
 to be comely and homely additions to the 
 landscape. But it is wholly unreasonable 
 to dictate at what point human invention 
 is to cease. The telephone is not more 
 morally hateful and repugnant to the sense 
 of dignity than the penny post; and to be 
 consistent, Ruskin should have insisted 
 upon the disuse of all mechanical contriv- 
 ances for shortening labour ; he should have 
 implored men to bite and tear cloth in- 
 stead of using scissors, and to till the earth 
 with their hands instead of using spade
 
 A Study in Personality 87 
 
 and plough. He did not see that the one 
 chance of giving men leisure in an over- 
 populated community is to save mechanical 
 and disheartening labour by every possible 
 means; and instead of raving against manu- 
 facturers for filling the air with sulphurous 
 fumes and the earth with cinder-heaps, he 
 should have had the faith to see that all 
 tlie turning of the forces of the earth to 
 serve human life and security is a step in 
 the direction of giving men time to cultivate 
 higher pleasures and to follow finer pur- 
 suits. It is here that a certain childish 
 petulance, amusing enough if it were not 
 also so irritating, comes out in the man. 
 
 The fourth volume of Modern Painters 
 carries on the thought of the pictorial 
 vision, of the right use of Mystery. Here 
 Buskin's love of strong paradox emerges; 
 together with his insistence on exactness 
 of detail, comes such a statement as this: 
 " All distinct drawing must be bad draw- 
 ing, and . . . nothing can be right till it 
 is unintelligible." " Excellence of the high-
 
 88 Ruskin 
 
 est kind, without obscurity, cannot exist " ; 
 but this is qualified by the celebrated 
 phrase, " the right of being obscure is not 
 one to be lightly claimed." It may be 
 asked what coherent theory of art can be 
 deduced from these contradictions? The 
 answer is that they are all true statements ; 
 and the mistake lay not in the statements, 
 but in the fact that Ruskin began by 
 dogmatising, and that his view of the pos- 
 sibilities of art widened, through simple 
 experience, as he wrote. A less positive 
 man, a man less determined to teach and 
 to uphold a theory, might have abandoned 
 the task in despair, on finding that a larger 
 experience of art made havoc of earlier 
 theories. But Buskin did not do this; he 
 merely enunciated his later discoveries just 
 as decisively as he had announced his pre- 
 vious discoveries, heedless, and rightly 
 heedless, that the new patch tore the old 
 garment to tatters. But the new dicta en- 
 larged the old. What broke in pieces was 
 the old exclusive theory. But the only peo-
 
 A Study in Personality 89 
 
 pie who are the worse for that are those 
 who go to Buskin for a scientific statement 
 of the ultimate principles of art. His 
 statement is throughout poetical and rhe- 
 torical, suggestive rather than exhaustive; 
 and while Buskin did not attain to any 
 explanation or synthesis of art, he did con- 
 trive to present a splendid analysis of it, 
 and disentangled much that was pro- 
 foundly interesting and true about the 
 motives of art and its sources of inspiration. 
 
 The rest of the volume is mostly taken 
 up with the subject of Mountains in art, 
 and is a direct study of nature; and here 
 again he tried to probe too deeply, and 
 attempted to attribute to the effects of 
 natural scenery the dispositions and emo- 
 tions of those who inhabit mountainous 
 country, the causes of which lie far deeper 
 than the mere slope of ledge and ridge, the 
 sweep of mist, and the noise of falling 
 streams. 
 
 The fifth volume is a further study of 
 landscape, treating of tree and leaf, of
 
 90 Ruskin 
 
 cloud and sea, and ends with a fine sum- 
 mary of the aims and executions of great 
 landscape schools; and here we may note 
 the singular and almost pettish exclusion 
 of the noble school of modern French land- 
 scape painters, such as Corot and Millet, 
 which he names with bated breath, and 
 with a sort of shuddering horror. The 
 cause, we may safely affirm, was that he 
 knew nothing of these painters, and had not 
 studied them. The book returns to a great 
 panegyric upon Turner, and a burst of 
 passionate grief that he was so little 
 appreciated and understood in his lifetime. 
 And so the great book draws to an end; 
 and surveying it all as we can do, after 
 an interval of fifty years, we can see that, 
 though it fails in its argument, though its 
 effect upon art was in a way misleading, 
 because it only substituted one convention 
 for another and overbore a serene adopted 
 tradition of admiration for certain received 
 forms of art by a passionate individual 
 preference, yet it did something which it
 
 A Study in Personality 91 
 
 never set out to do. Only recently has art 
 recovered from the despotism of Ruskin ; 
 it has learnt that he was right, but not 
 exclusively right. We have come to see 
 that art must find its own path, and can- 
 not run meekly in prescribed channels; and 
 we have learnt too, that the victory lies 
 with those who can see for themselves, and 
 admire and love, rather than with those 
 who can repeat the dicta of critics, and 
 belittle and despise. 
 
 But it has done far more than that. It 
 has put art in quite a different position, 
 not as the indolent privilege of a few but 
 as the stirring inheritance of many; and 
 it has shown too that art, as well as moral- 
 ity and religion, is one of the many stair- 
 ways that lead men out of the pit of 
 materialism to the higher and purer glories 
 of mind and spirit; that life must be a 
 choice and a battle; and that the spiritual 
 nature can only grow by exercise and en- 
 deavour; and that an indolent surrender 
 to mere sensuous experience in art is as
 
 92 Ruskin 
 
 dangerous to the soul as an unrestrained 
 sensualism to the body. 
 
 And all this is presented not only with 
 a matchless vigour and courage, but with 
 a style that now thunders like a falling 
 cataract, and now croons as sweetly as a 
 dove hidden among trees; a style that can 
 scathe with fiery invective, and stab with 
 piercing truth, that can rouse as with 
 martial music on a day of battle, and can 
 in a moment be as the thought of one who 
 saunters, full of joy, in a day of early 
 spring, among the daffodils and windflowers 
 of an English copse. And then in a mo- 
 ment comes a touch of exquisite pathos, 
 or of lambent irony, or of that delicious 
 humour that shows how closely akin 
 laughter is to tears. Nothing is so notable 
 about the book as its swift transitions, 
 which give no sense of an interrupted 
 mood or of an un governed vagueness of 
 thought, but which just draw the mind 
 onwards, with a sense of true companion- 
 ship, so that one shares alike the joy and
 
 A Study in Personality 93 
 
 the sorrow of the writer, and finds both 
 beautiful. 
 
 Before I leave this period I must mention 
 a letter which Iluskin wrote to Professor 
 Norton from Venice in 1859. It has this 
 special interest that he was on the verge 
 of a great crisis, and it was almost the 
 last thing he ever wrote in the old self- 
 confident manner. I confess that there is 
 to me in the letter a hint of strain, almost 
 of shrillness, as of one whose nerves are 
 strung too highly; and in the tense and 
 almost exaggerated humour of the whole, 
 there is a touch of what the Scotch call 
 " fey " a kind of feverish gaiety on the 
 edge of the shadow, presaging calamity. 
 
 He describes himself as the victim of 
 all kinds of " provocations " frostbitten 
 
 fingers, impatient gondoliers, unpunctual 
 i 
 sacristans and servants, bells, wind, rain, 
 
 tides, and mud. It is clear that he was 
 working very hard, and always on the edge
 
 94 Ruskin 
 
 of great irritability; but the letter is more 
 interesting still for another reason, which 
 I can only explain by a parable. 
 
 We must all know perhaps we realise 
 it more as we grow older a curious sense, 
 partly amusing and partly pathetic, which 
 arises on seeing a child absolutely intent 
 and absorbed in some self-chosen occupation 
 or game, which may seem to an older per- 
 son extraordinarily trivial or wearisome, 
 yet which the child pursues day after day 
 with unabated persistence, though it inter- 
 rupts his relations with others and renders 
 him apparently, for the time being, oblivi- 
 ous of affection and even emotion. 
 
 This letter of Ruskin's gives me the same 
 mixed sense of pathos and of amusement. 
 There is at the surface the freakish kind 
 of humour over it all, which shows how 
 easily he could stand outside of himself, 
 and see the absurdity of his pettishness. 
 Then there comes in the pathos of it; and 
 this I think resides in the wonder that he 
 could have thought what he was doing to
 
 A Study in Personality 95 
 
 be really important! Of course one must 
 not in this world throw away lightly treas- 
 ures of accumulated beauty and tradition, 
 and still less sacrifice it all ruthlessly to 
 brutal indifferences or mere material con- 
 veniences. But to feel about any human 
 handiwork as Ruskin was feeling then is 
 extravagant, and faithless as well. It can 
 only be excused if one really feels that the 
 human race has exhausted its possibilities 
 of beautiful conception and delineation. 
 Perhaps the strongest reason why the art- 
 istic expression of our time seems weak 
 and faltering is because we have lost our 
 hearts too much to the ancient beauty of 
 art and song; and despairing of ever re- 
 gaining that sweet early fragrance, that 
 almost childlike delight of untrammelled 
 utterance, we have lived too much in retro- 
 spect, and too little in touch with the 
 marching age. 
 
 I do feel that there is something unreal 
 and unbalanced in these half-frenzied la- 
 ments over what the world takes away,
 
 96 Ruskin 
 
 laments not counterbalanced by any appar- 
 ent belief or hope that life was giving or 
 holding in store anything of beauty that 
 could replace or supersede the old! 
 
 And then too there runs through the 
 whole letter the sense that Ruskin is only 
 writing of the outer life after all; that it 
 is more or less make-believe; that he is en- 
 deavouring to persuade himself and others 
 that his life is active, enthusiastic, vivid, 
 lived in eager ecstasy with forms and 
 colours; while all the while one seems to 
 distinguish beyond and beneath all this 
 laughter and emphatic talk, some dark 
 current of desolate waters, a tide deriving 
 its motion and ebb from forces far re- 
 moved from earth and things trivial, from 
 the pulse of some vast, cold, gleaming 
 thing moving silently in the abyss, which 
 was bearing away this frail and delicate 
 spirit for all its well-bred excitement and 
 fine enthusiasm on a very different journey 
 and to a voyage of which the end might 
 not be known.
 
 A Study in Personality 97 
 
 It is the presence of this deep-seated sus- 
 picion in Ruskin's mind, hardly even con- 
 sciously realised, that he had been hitherto 
 pursuing the wrong thoughts and the shal- 
 low things, which gives, I believe, the curi- 
 ous ring to his letters about this time. One 
 sees him trying to lift, or in some cases 
 to pull down, the curtains of his mind, to 
 enlighten, or to beguile his nearest and 
 dearest friends; and I will therefore quote 
 two extracts from letters, in his own most 
 intimate and confiding strain, which show 
 what was going on in the innermost strong- 
 hold of his mind and heart. Moreover, 
 these two letters, written before the great 
 change and crisis of his life, gain much 
 interest and significance by being written 
 to the two great poets of the age, Robert 
 Browning and Tennyson. 
 
 The first was written in January, 1859, 
 and not to Browning only, but to his wife 
 as well. 
 
 I am much helped by all you say in your 
 letters being apt, in spite of all my certainty
 
 98 Ruskin 
 
 of being right in the main, to be seized with 
 great fits of vexation for the truth is that 
 my own proper business is not that of writ- 
 ing; I am never happy as I write; never want 
 to utter for my own delight, as you singers 
 do (with all your pretences to benevolence and 
 all that, you know you like singing just as 
 well as the nightingales). But I 'm truly bene- 
 volent, miserably benevolent. For my own 
 pleasure I should be collecting stones and 
 mosses, drying and ticketing them reading 
 scientific books walking all day long in the 
 summer going to plays, and what not, in 
 winter never writing nor saying a word 
 rejoicing tranquilly or intensely in pictures, 
 in music, in pleasant faces, in kind friends. 
 But now about me there is thus terrific ab- 
 surdity and wrong going on. People kill my 
 Turner with abuse of him make rifle targets 
 of my Paul Veroneses make themselves, and 
 me, unendurably wretched by all sorts of ridi- 
 culous doings won't let me be quiet. I live 
 the life of an old lady in a houseful of wicked 
 children can do nothing but cry out they 
 won't leave me to my knitting-needles a mo- 
 ment. And this working in a way contrary to 
 one's whole nature tells upon one at last 
 people never were meant to do it. They were 
 meant to be able to give quiet pieces of ad- 
 vice to each other, and show, without any
 
 A Study in Personality 99 
 
 advice, how things should be done properly 
 (such as they had gift and liking for). But 
 people were never meant to be always howling 
 and bawling the right road to a generation of 
 drunken cabmen, their heads up through the 
 trapdoor of the hansom, faces all over mud 
 no right road to be got upon after all nothing 
 but a drunken effort at turning, ending in 
 ditch. I hope to get just one more howl exe- 
 cuted, from which I hope great effect upon 
 the moon and then, see if I don't take to 
 kennel and straw, comfortably. 
 
 And then there is the letter to Tennyson, 
 who had just sent Ruskin a present of his 
 Idylls. 
 
 I am not sure [he says] but I feel the art 
 and finish in these poems a little more than I 
 like to feel it. ... As a description of vari- 
 ous nobleness and tenderness the book is with- 
 out price; but I shall always wish it had been 
 nobleness independent of a romantic condition 
 of externals in general. 
 
 In Memoriam, Maud, The Miller's Daughter, 
 and such-like will always be my own pet 
 rhymes, but I am quite prepared to admit this 
 to be as good as any, for its own peculiar audi- 
 ence. Treasures of wisdom there are in it, 
 and word-painting such as never was yet for
 
 TOO Ruskin 
 
 concentration : neverthless it seems to me that 
 so great power ought not to be spent on visions 
 of things past, but on the living present. For 
 one hearer capable of feeling the depth of this 
 poem, I believe ten would feel a depth quite 
 as great if the stream flowed through things 
 nearer the hearer. And merely in the facts of 
 modern life not drawing-room, formal life, 
 but the far-away and quite unknown growth 
 of souls in and through any form of misery or 
 servitude there is an infinity of what men 
 should be told, and what none but a poet can 
 tell. I cannot but think that the intense, mas- 
 terful, and unerring transcript of an actuality, 
 and the relation of a story of any real human 
 life, as a poet would watch and analyse it, 
 would make all men feel more or less what 
 poetry was, as they felt what Life and Fate 
 were in their instant workings. . . . The feel- 
 ing continually weighs upon me, day by day, 
 more and more, that not the grief of the world 
 but the loss of it is the wonder of it. I see 
 creatures so full of all power and beauty, with 
 none to understand or teach or save them. 
 The making in them of miracles, and all cast 
 away, for ever lost, as far as we can trace. 
 And no " in memoriam." 
 
 Before I say a word about the thought 
 in these two memorable letters, I would
 
 A Study in Personality 101 
 
 wish you to notice what an example they 
 are of the extraordinary sensitiveness of 
 Ruskin's mind, in the delicate reflection 
 they give, in style and language, of the 
 persons to whom they were written. It is 
 not fanciful to see in the quick, broken, 
 allusive letter to the Brownings even in 
 the constant omission of the article, that 
 the very texture of the letter was being 
 coloured, as it was being written, by im- 
 aginative sympathy with the method of 
 thought and expression of the recipients. 
 And then in the Tennyson letter, the same 
 effect is observable, in the solemn and 
 stately cadences into which the sentences 
 fall. They are both letters to people as 
 well as letters from a person. 
 
 And then observe how the whole ebb of 
 thought is running, swiftly and surely, 
 away from old beauty and sweet dreams 
 of peace, towards the cataract of modern 
 needs and problems! He is turning his 
 back on the past; he is engrossed in the 
 present. In the Browning letter, indeed,
 
 102 Ruskin 
 
 in spite of all its tenderness and humour, 
 there peeps out what I cannot but call 
 the ugly part of Ruskin's mind the ten- 
 dency to blame and censure, to feel that 
 every one else is on the wrong tack, and 
 that he himself is divinely appointed to 
 set them right. There is a deep-seated im- 
 patience and irritability about it, which I 
 cannot praise. It may be said that the 
 pure-hearted clear-sighted man has a right 
 not to be what is horribly called mealy- 
 mouthed. But it reminds me, for all that, 
 of the thankless servant in the parable, 
 who had been forgiven a great debt, and 
 went out from his Lord's presence to harry 
 his own humble debtors. It may be, as I 
 have heard it plausibly urged, that the serv- 
 ant was actuated by a severe sense of 
 honesty, and desired to pay back perhaps 
 a halfpenny in the pound. But he had 
 mistaken the meaning of forgiveness for 
 all that! 
 
 And thus the letter to Tennyson strikes 
 a humbler and a greater note the sorrow
 
 A Study in Personality 103 
 
 of the waste of the world, and " the un- 
 known growth of souls in and through any 
 form of misery and servitude." He was 
 close upon the prison-door himself, where 
 he was to learn the sharp lesson of the 
 awf ulness of humbled pride ; he was to learn 
 that each man's life is a mystery, a secret 
 between himself and God a secret not to 
 be plumbed by confident eyes, and a mys- 
 tery not to be made plain by any clearest 
 stream of human eloquence. And here I 
 leave him, at the threshold of the dark 
 doorway.
 
 Ill 
 
 AND now in Ruskin's fortieth year, when 
 he had lived out half his days, there came 
 the cardo rerum, the hinge of destiny, of 
 which the Roman poets speak, and this 
 strange vivid life turned slowly on its pivot. 
 I think that this is the right moment to 
 look backwards and to look forwards. The 
 earlier current of his life may be said to 
 interpret itself, like a bright stream of 
 living water, rippling lightly enough in 
 woodland places, with here and there a 
 fall and a waterbreak, yet passing easily 
 enough by sunny pools and shining reaches. 
 But now there comes a change, and at first 
 sight a tragic change, so much so, indeed, 
 that it wants a few words of preparation. 
 104
 
 A Study in Personality 105 
 
 Let me look backwards first. And I 
 would say that we cannot make a greater 
 mistake or an easier mistake, in reading 
 the record of a great life, than to credit 
 its earlier moods and passages with some- 
 thing of the glory and greatness that 
 crowned its close. We think of the earlier 
 days of famous men as in some way gilded 
 and decorated with the trophies of renown, 
 the path made easier to tread, inspirited 
 by approval and applause. The exact re- 
 verse is generally the case. Many great 
 men who have died early have never had 
 the consciousness of fame at all. Keats, 
 for instance, was to himself and his friends 
 an indolent and consumptive poetaster, 
 without money or prospects. Shelley was 
 a man banned and branded in respectable 
 society, a byword for fantastic immorality, 
 a crank, and worse than a crank. Kuskin 
 himself, had he died at this date, would 
 have been little more than a very brilliant 
 and rather fantastic art-critic, enabled by 
 his wealth to live an artistic life, and to
 
 io6 Ruskin 
 
 indulge in heterodox and unusual views, 
 master of a fine eloquent style, and with 
 leisure to evolve an elaborate and rather 
 inconclusive theory of art. He was known 
 too by a few as a man of great social 
 charm, whimsical, humorous, and sym- 
 pathetic. He had fame, of course, of a 
 kind, but not the sort of renown which 
 came to him later. Perhaps a few clear- 
 sighted people saw that there was something 
 nobler and richer behind, and suspected 
 that he was speaking, under symbols of 
 art, of something larger and more vital 
 than the appreciation of style in architect- 
 ure and painting. And then if we look 
 at the man himself, there is hitherto some- 
 thing unreasonable, over-vehement, incon- 
 siderable about it all. He had arrived at 
 his conclusions by instinct, and believed 
 that he had attained them by reason. He 
 had been brought up in a narrow and 
 secluded atmosphere; his mother an un- 
 compromising Puritan, his father a man 
 of deferential artistic tastes, with a dim
 
 A Study in Personality 107 
 
 consciousness of thwarted powers, and en- 
 ergies devoted to an unromantic trade, suc- 
 cessful enough in a shy sort of way, yet 
 with a dumb resentment against life which 
 he was too proud to admit. Kuskin was 
 hitherto the creature of circumstance. He 
 had been trained as a moralist and as a 
 connoisseur; his eye absorbed in critical 
 observation, his hand versed in delineation, 
 and his mind set upon dominating opinion 
 and regulating morality. He had taken 
 his innate Puritanism into his criticism, 
 and had tried to conform the lawlessness 
 of art to the dictates of Evangelical moral- 
 ity. He had had his troubles, but they had 
 not borne fruit; he had escaped from them 
 into his own walled and moated paradise; 
 he had lived for himself, though quite will- 
 ing to help other people, as he confessed, 
 if it did not interfere with his own com- 
 fort; and he had displayed a bigoted and 
 self-centred temper. There is little that is 
 wise or noble about the man hitherto. It 
 had been a career of unbroken success of
 
 io8 Ruskin 
 
 a small and self-centred kind; his genius 
 had showed itself in his incredible labori- 
 ousness, and in a vitality of immense elas- 
 ticity and toughness. But not by these 
 things is the world changed! 
 
 And now he w r as to be given a new heart. 
 He was to see and to feel; he was to be 
 mocked and derided ; he was to wrestle with 
 hateful thoughts; he was to torment himself 
 over the evils of society; he was to build up 
 an elaborate scheme for its amelioration. 
 His scheme was to fail, and not even to fail 
 nobly; it was to be viewed not only with 
 indifference, but with open ridicule and 
 contempt. He was at first just kindly 
 silenced, and bidden to concern himself 
 with his art, sent back like a child to its 
 toys; and when he persisted, he was to be 
 called crazy and fantastic. And worse 
 still, he was to bear one of the heaviest 
 trials that can fall to the lot of man; he 
 was to pass into the delirious shadow-world 
 of insanity, to be mocked by his own 
 visions, in that awful twilight-land in which
 
 A Study in Personality 109 
 
 a man cannot distinguish between truth 
 and hallucination. He was to fix his pure 
 affections with all the fiery intensity of a 
 virginal nature upon a girl far younger 
 than himself, and he was to be rejected 
 on grounds of the narrow Evangelicalism 
 which he had once preached, and of which 
 he had burst the bonds. The sights and 
 sounds of earth, the pageantry of art, in 
 which he had lived so delicately and so 
 strenuously, were to become mere mocking 
 echoes and scornful voices, taunting him 
 with a joy he could no longer feel; and he 
 was to struggle on, with the tempest beat- 
 ing over him in crash after crash, until his 
 own sweet utterance was quenched, and he 
 was forced into silence and inaction. He 
 was to fade into imbecility and invalidism, 
 petted and soothed tenderly enough, but 
 with the thwarted and pent-up energy 
 breaking out into irritable bitterness and 
 angry suspicion. He who had seen so 
 clearly, had judged so rigidly, and had de- 
 livered so peremptory a message, was to
 
 i io Ruskin 
 
 learn that there was a stronger force still, 
 and that God had a will and a way of His 
 own, larger and mightier, but at the same 
 time infinitely more dilatory and labyrin- 
 thine than the scheme which the prophet 
 would have enforced. He was to learn to 
 the full the awful forces of stupidity and 
 prejudice, of self-interest and baseness, of 
 cruelty and injustice, which made hourly 
 and daily havoc of life and joy. He did 
 not learn to endure this or to acquiesce in 
 it, but he was to be bewildered and afflicted 
 with the sorrow of the soul that sees what 
 is amiss, but is helpless to stop it or to 
 amend it. Yet he was to become, without 
 knowing it, in his humiliation and pain, 
 more august, more pathetic, more noble, 
 more divine, till he was to appear in the 
 minds of all who cared for purity and good- 
 ness and beauty like a seamed and scarred 
 mountain peak, above the peaceful valleys, 
 cold and lonely and isolated, and yet look- 
 ing out across the fields of life to some 
 awful sunrise of truth, climbing and glim-
 
 A Study in Personality in 
 
 mering over shining tracts and unknown 
 seas. 
 
 There have been men of genius, men like 
 Browning and Wordsworth, whose life, but 
 for some natural sorrows temperately borne, 
 has been a joyful and equable progress 
 from strength to strength. But as a rule 
 the penalty or the privilege of genius is to 
 sorrow more bitterly, to labour more sternly 
 than other men; to torment itself beyond 
 endurance over the woes that seem so 
 tamely and trivially incurred, which it is 
 powerless to alter; not to know fame till 
 it is valueless, and to find renown the poor- 
 est of flimsy shields against the stings of 
 self-reproach and the agonies of conscious 
 failure. Is there one here I hope with 
 all my heart that there is more than one 
 who seeks not vainly or meanly, like the 
 Apostles of old, a seat of glory in the king- 
 dom of God? If so, he must be prepared 
 to drink of the bitter cup, and to find the 
 crown a crown of thorns. It is sweet and 
 seemly, dulce et decorum, to desire to
 
 Ruskin 
 
 deserve fame, and natural enough to desire 
 it whether it be deserved or no. But it is 
 higher still to put that all aside! 
 
 And now there settled upon Ruskin's 
 mind a kind of cloud: who shall say how 
 much of it was experience and thought, 
 how much of it the exhaustion of eager 
 work and faculties overstrained? After he 
 had thus exultantly and with intensity of 
 conviction expressed his joy in art, he be- 
 gan to wonder why it was that others did 
 not see what he saw, did not admire and 
 enjoy what he admired and enjoyed. At 
 first, in his earlier writings, one can see 
 the belief, the youthful belief, I must add, 
 which animated him. He took for granted 
 that the spirit which loved and admired 
 and welcomed beauty, and drank at its 
 springs, was there in humanity, but as the 
 years went on he began to see that it was 
 not so. He saw that, all the world over, 
 the majority of the human race had no 
 care or love for these things at all. He 
 had believed that human beings were dull,
 
 A Study in Personality 113 
 
 only because they admired, or tried to ad- 
 mire, the wrong things, and he had thought 
 that they had only to be shown the right 
 tilings to admire and love them. But he 
 found that people were at heart indifferent, 
 and worse than indifferent; that the world 
 was full of ugly desires and low delights; 
 that men were selfish and cruel and sen- 
 sual; that they loved wealth and comfort 
 and display; that many people lived from 
 childhood to age under the shadow of base 
 influences and devastating tyrannies; and 
 so he began to see that if they were to 
 admire and love what was pure and noble, 
 it was not enough just to point out the 
 work of great artists, but the nature of 
 man must be somehow purged and changed. 
 And then he began to speculate as to the 
 causes of all this baseness and ugliness, 
 and, as I say, a shadow crept over him. He 
 had been fond of society and friendship and 
 comfortable domestic life ; but now he with- 
 drew into solitude and sad reflection. He 
 Iiv 7 ed much alone in the Alps brooding and
 
 Ruskin 
 
 meditating over tlie darkness of the 
 world. 
 In February, 1861, he wrote to a friend : 
 
 I was in terrible doubt as to what to do for 
 a long time this last summer and winter. It 
 seemed to me that to keep any clearheaded- 
 ness, free from intellectual trouble and other 
 pains, no life would do for me but one as 
 like Veronese's as might be, and I was seri- 
 ously, and despairingly, thinking of going to 
 Paris or Venice and breaking away from all 
 modern society and opinion, and doing I don't 
 know what. Intense scorn of all I had 
 hitherto done or thought, still intenser scorn 
 of other people's doings and thinkings, espe- 
 cially in religion . . . and almost unendurable 
 solitude in my own home, only made more 
 painful to me by parental love which did not 
 and never could help me, and which was cruelly 
 hurtful without knowing it; and terrible dis- 
 coveries in the course of such investigations as 
 I made into grounds of old faith were all 
 concerned in this. ... As for things that 
 have influenced me, I believe hard work, love 
 of justice and of beauty, good-nature and great 
 vanity, have done all of me that was worth 
 doing. I 've had my heart broken, ages ago, 
 when I was a boy then mended, cracked,
 
 A Study in Personality 115 
 
 beaten in, kicked about old corridors, and 
 finally, I think, flattened fairly out. 
 
 But he was to go down deeper yet into 
 sorrow. In March, 1863, he wrote from 
 Mornex to his friend Norton: 
 
 The loneliness is very great, and the peace 
 in which I am at present ... is only as if 
 I had buried myself in a tuft of grass on a 
 battle-field wet with blood for the cry of the 
 earth about me is in my ears continually if I 
 do not lay my head to the very ground. 
 
 And to similar effect a few months later : 
 
 I am still very unwell, and tormented be- 
 tween the longing for rest and for lovely life, 
 and the sense of the terrific call of human 
 crime for resistance, and of human misery for 
 help though it seems to me as the voice of 
 a river of blood which can but sweep me down 
 in the midst of its black clots, helpless. 
 
 Moreover he saw that, though much of 
 the havoc was wrought by men who were 
 consciously selfish and tyrannical, yet the 
 worst horrors of the system were per- 
 petuated by kindly orthodox and respect-
 
 n6 Ruskin 
 
 able people, who enjoyed their comforts, 
 and never troubled their head as to what 
 lay behind, nor reflected how many lives 
 of cheerless labour were sacrificed that they 
 might fare delicately and sleep comfortably. 
 And here one begins to see a hint of the 
 true genius of the man, in his power not 
 of sorrowing mildly and ineffectively over 
 evils that he could not mend, but in his 
 power of tormenting himself over the 
 troubles of others, his determination to 
 sacrifice himself and his fame to mending 
 what he could, his resolution to use his 
 power and his position to make plain 
 the bitter truth, and to summon all true 
 and brave and compassionate spirits to join 
 him in a desperate crusade against the evils 
 and miseries of the world. 
 
 And now he suffered the pain of finding 
 himself utterly withdrawn in spirit from 
 the familiar circle. His parents could not 
 understand what he was about, or why he 
 should desert the path of easy triumph and 
 respectable display for a lonely and thorny
 
 A Study in Personality 117 
 
 path among brambles and stones. What 
 made it worse was that his confident 
 temper, his sense of right vision and just 
 judgment, seemed to hand him instantly the 
 key to these mysteries. With Ruskin, to 
 see a problem was to see the solution of 
 it. The difficulties melted away, the ob- 
 stacles vanished. It was the stupidity of 
 the world that brought about the mischief, 
 not its malevolence or its indifference. He 
 had but to point out the truth, and all 
 well-meaning and reasonable people would 
 see and follow it. So he prepared his lan- 
 tern again, and this time its flame was fed 
 with far different hopes and desires. 
 
 Even as late as the year 1860, which is 
 the year of the great change in Ruskin's 
 mind, his whole ideal of life was a hope- 
 ful one. He gave evidence in that year 
 before a Committee of the House of Com- 
 mons on Public Institutions, in which he 
 spoke of his schemes for educating and in-
 
 n8 Ruskin 
 
 structing the labouring classes, and noted 
 in them a " thirsty desire " for culture and 
 improvement. But this was really the 
 flicker of an expiring flame, and was said 
 more to persuade himself that it was so, 
 than because he really believed it to be so. 
 He was in the summer of that year at 
 Chamonix; but he did little drawing, ex- 
 cept in a half-hearted and distracted way. 
 He walked much in the pine-woods, and 
 was thinking out a set of papers, which 
 he wrote with infinite care, and read aloud 
 to his companions at the breakfast-table. 
 The problem he had at heart was a social 
 one. It was no less than an attempt to 
 analyse the meaning of the word wealth, 
 and to give a logical definition of it. And 
 as this book and the next that he wrote 
 were considered by him to be the most im- 
 portant and valuable contributions he ever 
 made to literature, and as also the ideas 
 he promulgated have become in many ways 
 familiar to and accepted by the present gen- 
 eration, it will be as well to pay careful
 
 A Study in Personality 119 
 
 attention to them. Now I am very far from 
 saying or believing that these ideas were 
 invented or originated by Buskin. That is 
 not the way in which great ideas spring up. 
 They arise, I believe, naturally, by a per- 
 fectly inevitable development in the minds 
 of a generation. They are talked about, 
 hinted at, thought about, half enunciated 
 by a great many speakers and writers; and 
 then some one author of force and position 
 focusses the scattered rays, and a definite 
 school of thought springs up. 
 
 The title Ruskin gave his book was Unto 
 this Last. It is taken from the words of 
 the parable about the labourers in the vine- 
 yard, who at the end of the day were all 
 paid alike " I w T ill give unto this last even 
 as unto thee." His idea was roughly thus 
 and here I would say that I am follow- 
 ing closely Mrs. Meynell's masterly ana- 
 lysis of the book that wages of labour 
 should be a fixed thing, not varying accord- 
 ing to competition. He said that soldiers 
 and sailors, government officials, railway-
 
 120 Ruskin 
 
 men, servants, and schoolmasters received 
 fixed wages, varying more by the import- 
 ance of their work than by its actual 
 quality; and that moreover revolutionary 
 and socialistic ideas did not spread among 
 people thus paid, while they did spread 
 among people whose wages varied in sym- 
 pathy with commercial competition. If 
 this was so, why, he asked, should not la- 
 bour be paid on the same lines? He main- 
 tained that the work of people paid on 
 fixed lines did not suffer in quality because 
 of the comparative sense of security; that 
 the unnatural thing was that the bad work- 
 man should be able to offer his work at a 
 lower price, so as to undersell the good 
 workman ; and that the natural course was 
 to regulate this, not to leave it unregulated. 
 He believed that the inequalities of employ- 
 ment, the feverish over-production of one 
 period, and the languid under-production 
 of another, would be harmonised and tran- 
 quillised by the regulation of wages, while 
 education would tend to diminish the num-
 
 A Study in Personality 121 
 
 ber of bad workmen. He thought too that 
 the employers would come to realise the 
 administrative nature of their functions, 
 like the lawyer and the bishop and the 
 statesman, and regard themselves as serv- 
 ants of the State, whose duty was to pro- 
 vide and supply commodities, rather than 
 as men aiming at grabbing what profit they 
 could at the expense of the community. He 
 held that the commercial system was based 
 upon the art of keeping others poor, if pos- 
 sible; and that people were misled by see- 
 ing a class enriched into thinking that 
 the community was therefore richer. The 
 economists of the day maintained that de- 
 mand and supply could not be controlled 
 by human legislation. To this Kuskin re- 
 plied : " Precisely in the same sense . . . 
 the waters of the world go where they are 
 required. Where the land falls the water 
 flows. . . . But the disposition and the 
 administration . . . can be altered by hu- 
 man forethought." 
 
 Of course this is all really socialistic, be-
 
 122 Ruskin 
 
 cause it is opposed to irresponsible indi- 
 vidualistic forces, such as competition and 
 monopoly; but Kuskin maintained that he 
 was a Free Trader, though on grounds 
 wholly opposed to the popular theories of 
 Free Trade. He went on to define wealth 
 as the possession of a large stock of use- 
 ful articles which we can use; and his plea 
 was for publicity about all commercial deal- 
 ing. " The general law," he writes, " re- 
 specting just or economical exchange is 
 simply this: there must be advantage on 
 both sides (or if only advantage on one, 
 at least no disadvantage on the other) . . . 
 and just payment for his time, intelligence, 
 and labour to any intermediate person 
 effecting the transaction. . . . And what- 
 ever advantage there is on either side, and 
 whatever pay is given to the intermediate 
 person, should be thoroughly known." 
 
 His main solution was this. " Not greater 
 wealth, but simpler pleasure. . . . Waste 
 nothing and grudge nothing. Care in no- 
 wise to make more of money, but care to
 
 S Study in Personality 123 
 
 make much of it; remembering always the 
 great, palpable, inevitable fact that what 
 one person has, another cannot have. . . . 
 And if, on due and honest thought over 
 these things, it seems that the kind of ex- 
 istence to which men are now summoned 
 by every plea of pity and claim of right 
 may, for some time at least, not be a lux- 
 urious one; consider whether, even sup- 
 posing it guiltless, luxury could be desired 
 by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides 
 the suffering which accompanies it in the 
 world . . . the crudest man living could 
 not sit at his feast, unless he sat 
 blindfold." 
 
 Now does all this seem a fantastic dream, 
 or does it seem, at this date, only a some- 
 what belated perception of obvious truths? 
 All this translated into modern English is 
 but the principle of the living wage, the 
 old-age pension, public education, improved 
 housing, and compensation for improve- 
 ments. These are all ideas upon which 
 there is some difference of opinion, but the
 
 124 Ruskin 
 
 principles are familiar, and accepted by all 
 reasonable people. 
 
 Yet what was the reception of Buskin's 
 book? He sent the papers to the Cornhill, 
 of which his friend Thackeray was the 
 editor. Three papers appeared; and then 
 Thackeray, writing frankly and kindly, said 
 that they were so universally condemned 
 and disliked that he could only admit one 
 more and this to a man who was known 
 as one of the most brilliant and popular 
 writers of the day. He himself took his 
 defeat very hard, and fell into great depres- 
 sion. " I sulked," he wrote of himself, 
 through the winter, drawing a good deal, 
 and working fitfully, but in enfeebled 
 health. Later on in the following year he 
 went off to Switzerland, and established 
 himself in a little chalet near Geneva, two 
 thousand feet up, at the end of all carriage 
 roads. He thought of buying and restoring 
 a fine old chateau. But he gave up the idea, 
 saying " that I never had the gift, nor had 
 I then the energy, to make anything of a
 
 A Study in Personality 125 
 
 place." So lie rambled about and wrote a 
 set of papers on political economy, now 
 known as Munera Pulveris, which he sent 
 to Froude, then editor of Fraser's Magazine. 
 The result was even more disastrous than 
 before. " Only a genius like Mr. Ruskin 
 could have produced such hopeless rub- 
 bish," said a leading newspaper. His 
 father, then not far from his end, spoke 
 his mind in sorrow and bitterness; not only 
 did he hate the sacrifice of reputation in- 
 volved, and the obloquy which resulted, but 
 he thought the whole theory absurd and 
 perverse. 
 
 Carlyle, almost alone of his friends, stood 
 by Ruskin. He said of the two books that 
 he approved of them in every particular; 
 that in every part of Unto this Last, just 
 published in book form, he found " a high 
 and noble sort of truth, not one doctrine 
 that I can intrinsically dissent from or 
 count other than salutary in the extreme, 
 and pressingly needed in England above 
 all."
 
 126 Ruskin 
 
 But the public would have none of it. 
 The publisher of Eraser's told Froude 
 flatly that the series must stop, and only 
 four papers appeared. Carlyle, talking to 
 Froude on the subject, said " that when 
 Solomon's Temple was building it was 
 credibly reported that at least ten thousand 
 sparrows sitting on the trees round declared 
 that it was entirely wrong quite contrary 
 to received opinion hopelessly condemned 
 by public opinion, etc. Nevertheless it got 
 finished, and the sparrows flew away and 
 began to chirp in the same note about 
 something else." 
 
 But all this helped Kuskin little. He fell 
 into great despondency, which he tried to 
 relieve by a study of Alpine Geology. And 
 then a fresh sorrow fell upon him. His 
 father died in 1864. He showed his con- 
 fidence in his son by bequeathing him a 
 great fortune, 120,000 in cash, besides 
 much house property, and leaving the house
 
 A Study in Personality 127 
 
 and 37,000 to his wife. Father and son 
 had come together again in the last few 
 months, to Ruskin's infinite happiness. The 
 first use he made of his fortune was to 
 hand over some 17,000 to relatives to 
 whom the arrangements of the will had 
 caused disappointment, and to spend nearly 
 as much in setting up a relative in trade, 
 who promptly lost the whole sum. The 
 money melted away like snow in his hands ; 
 he devoted himself to his mother and tried 
 to fill the gap : he was always the tenderest 
 and most dutiful of sons. 
 
 The epitaph he inscribed over his father's 
 grave in the churchyard of Shirley, near 
 Croydon, is so beautiful and so character- 
 istic that I may here quote it: 
 
 Here rests from day's well sustained bur- 
 den John James Ruskin, born in Edinburgh 
 May 10th, 1785. He died in his house in Lon- 
 don, March 3rd, 1864. He was an entirely 
 honest merchant, and his memory is to all 
 who keep it dear and helpful. His son, whom 
 he loved to the uttermost, and taught to speak 
 truth, says this of him."
 
 128 Ruskin 
 
 Yet at the same time he had been enjoying 
 a happy and compensating experience. The 
 head-mistress of a big girls' boarding-school 
 at Winnington in Cheshire had taken some 
 pupils to hear him lecture in Manchester, 
 and persuade him to pay the school a visit. 
 It was a great old-fashioned country house, 
 in a park of fine trees sloping down to a 
 river. The idea was to make the whole 
 thing as homelike as possible. Euskin was 
 always fond of girlhood, though there is no 
 evidence that he took the slightest interest 
 in boyhood. He had never been at school 
 himself, and little boys were to him like 
 miniature savages, in whom the selfishness, 
 the cruelty, and the boisterousness of hu- 
 manity had not been chastened or refined 
 by experience. One cannot have every- 
 thing in everybody; and it is idle to deny 
 a certain feminine touch in Ruskin's na- 
 ture, instinctive and fostered by seclusion, 
 which made him all his life more at ease 
 in the society of women than of men. Per- 
 haps he overvalued sympathy and demon-
 
 A Study in Personality 129 
 
 strative affection and petting and tender 
 ways of life; sometimes the long-haired 
 maidens of Winnington betrayed him into 
 a sort of semi-paternal sentimentality. But 
 to sneer at it all, or to grudge him the 
 sort of happiness he derived from it, is a 
 cheap and coarse cynicism. He was a very 
 unhappy man at this time, feeling the 
 weight of the world, conscious of failure 
 and ineffectiveness. And the children at 
 Winnington gave him what he needed, and 
 what only a few very wise and tender- 
 hearted men friends like Carlyle, Burne- 
 Jones, Norton, and Acland could give him ; 
 like the little maid in Guenevere, these 
 merry and wholesome-minded girls "pleased 
 him with a babbling heedlessness that often 
 lured him from himself." He devised games 
 and dances for them; he told them stories, 
 taught them drawing: for ten years he was 
 a constant visitor. He wrote a little book 
 for them, Ethics of the Dust, a set of con- 
 versational lectures on Crystals; but the 
 girls to whom the book was playfully dedi-
 
 130 Ruskin 
 
 cated did not wholly appreciate it. They 
 recognised their own portraits, drawn with 
 a gentle perception of their little failings; 
 but nearly twenty years after, the book, 
 which had wholly hung fire, bounded into 
 popularity, and it was seen that in educa- 
 tion, as in many other things, Ruskin had 
 been a few steps in advance of his time. 
 
 In 1866 he had more melancholy experi- 
 ences. His great friend Lady Trevelyan 
 was ordered abroad, and Ruskin took his 
 cousin Joanna with him to join her. The 
 day that he started, he called at Carlyle's 
 house at Cheyne Walk, to leave a few 
 flowers as a parting gift with Mrs. Car- 
 lyle, that wonderfully gifted, sharp-tongued, 
 courageous, devoted woman, whose life had 
 been so full of strange suffering, and who 
 won such intense affection from her friends. 
 He was told at the door that Mrs. Carlyle 
 had died suddenly in her carriage that 
 afternoon, from the shock of trying to save 
 her dog from being run over. Carlyle was 
 away in Scotland, after delivering a Rec-
 
 A Study in Personality 131 
 
 torial address at Edinburgh. Kuskin wrote 
 to Carlyle, and received in reply from the 
 old man, writing in the depth of his re- 
 morseful agony of spirit, one of the noblest 
 letters I know in literature: 
 
 Your kind words were welcome to me ; thanks. 
 I did not doubt your sympathy in what has 
 come; but it is better that I see it laid be- 
 fore me. You are yourself very unhappy, as 
 I too well discern heavy-laden, obstructed, 
 and dispirited; but you have a great work 
 still ahead, and will gradually have to gird 
 yourself up against the heat of the day, which 
 is coming on for you, as the Night too is com- 
 ing. Think valiantly of these things. . . . 
 
 . . . my life all laid in ruins, and the one 
 light of it as if gone out. . . . Come and see 
 me when you get home; come oftener and see 
 me, and speak more frankly to me (for I am 
 very true to your highest interests and you) 
 while I still remain here. You can do nothing 
 for me in Italy; except come home improved 
 [i. e., in health]. 
 
 But before the letter reached Ruskin, 
 Lady Trevelyan was dead, after a few days' 
 illness at Neuchatel. He threw himself into
 
 132 Ruskin 
 
 the sad task of trying to comfort and sus- 
 tain the rest of the party, and wrote to a 
 friend in England: 
 
 I 've had a rather bad time of it at Neu- 
 chaiel; what with death and the north wind; 
 both devil's inventions as far as I can make 
 out. But things are looking a little better 
 now, and I had a lovely three hours' walk by 
 the lake shore, in cloudless calm, from five to 
 eight this morning, under hawthorn and chest- 
 nut here just in full blossom and among 
 other pleasantnesses too good for mortals, as 
 the North Wind and the rest of it are too bad. 
 We don't deserve either such blessing or such 
 cursing, it seems to poor moth me. 
 
 And now he flung himself again into 
 schemes for social reform. There was a 
 working man of Sunderland, a cork-cutter 
 called Thomas Dixon, who wrote to Ruskin, 
 raising several practical points. Kuskin 
 replied in a series of twenty-five letters, in 
 which he constructed a kind of Utopia, 
 an ideal commonwealth on mediaeval and 
 feudal lines. He designed a system of 
 trade guilds, a state church, a theory of
 
 A Study in Personality 133 
 
 government. It is semi-socialistic and 
 semi-individualistic indeed it is hard to 
 classify; but the point is that outward 
 liberty can only be based on inward law. 
 
 The book was mercilessly derided, and it 
 is impossible not to feel that he almost 
 courted derision by elaborating fantastic 
 details. The same thing vitiated his work 
 later on. The prophet must indicate laws 
 rather than lay down ordinances; and 
 there were plenty of people who could not 
 understand the nobility of the book, who 
 were quite able to laugh at the idea of 
 young unmarried people being examined in 
 moral culture, and receiving a degree or 
 diploma they were to be called respectively 
 bachelors and rosicres before they could 
 obtain a license to marry. Ruskin never 
 quite understood that humanity must set- 
 tle its own details, and will not make a 
 clean sweep of accustomed traditions. But 
 Time and Tide, by Wear and Tyne, as the 
 book is beautifully called, has a real value, 
 for all its pretty absurdities, and must be
 
 134 Ruskin 
 
 studied by all who wish to discern the 
 progress of Kuskin's mind. 
 
 In these distracted years he wandered 
 much about England, lost himself a little 
 in the study of Mineralogy, invented a new 
 theory of mountain cleavage, experimenting 
 with custard and dough. It is a desultory 
 record. No doubt his health had much to 
 do with his feverish and fitful interests; 
 and he had a private sorrow deep in his 
 heart; but through it all one discerns what 
 I have before spoken of, and if one over- 
 looks this, one misses the real significance 
 of Euskin's life the intense preoccupation 
 with the idea of helping and improving the 
 life of humanity. Mental depression is 
 often a physical thing and an unreal thing; 
 but it does one thing it brings out what 
 is deepest in a man, though it exaggerates 
 and darkens the picture. Such sorrows 
 show what a man really cares about at the 
 bottom of his heart; and though one may 
 say that Kuskin took a distorted and pessi- 
 mistic view of life and its issues, yet grief
 
 A Study in Personality 135 
 
 revealed his true hopes and fears. An 
 idler and a shallower man would have 
 drifted into hypochondria and invalidism. 
 Ruskin tormented himself into something 
 like insanity over the unintelligible riddle 
 of the world. 
 
 But one need not darken the picture. He 
 was a man who could rule himself. And 
 there were countless people at this time who 
 wrote to him and met him, who found him 
 the truest of friends and the most delight- 
 ful of companions. Men and women in 
 trouble and doubt and perplexity wrote to 
 him from all over England, and received in 
 reply letters full of humour and shrewdness 
 and good sense. Hardly a letter ever came 
 from his pen which has not some delicious 
 stroke of humour, some deep and arresting 
 phrase; while to his companions his very 
 desultoriness had an incessant charm. He 
 would pass from subject to subject, show 
 pictures or minerals with marvellous per- 
 ception of their motive and quality; and it 
 is 'strange that one whose utterances are
 
 136 Ruskin 
 
 often so dogmatic, and even so perverse, 
 should have been in private life so cour- 
 teous and winning, so gay and modest. 
 Few people probably suspected the strain 
 at which he was living, or the helpless dis- 
 tress with which in his solitary moments 
 he fell into despondency and even fury of 
 misery over the wrongs and sufferings of 
 
 the world. And all the time he was lee- 
 
 
 
 turing, sketching, revising, writing, with an 
 industry that burnt like a steady flame. 
 He went to Venice in order to correct his 
 Stones of Venice; here he had a great joy, 
 the discovery of Carpaccio's pictures; and 
 for a little while he seemed to recover 
 the joy of his youth. He was enraptured 
 by the frescoes of the life of St. Ursula; 
 and the study of her legend played so curi- 
 ous a part in his after life that I must say 
 a few words about it. He may almost have 
 been said to have fallen in love with St. 
 Ursula, with a spiritual passion such as 
 Dante's. She became a living ideal, a sort 
 of patron saint to him. Her patience and
 
 A Study in Personality 137 
 
 her sweetness became to him a pattern and 
 an example; and the thought of her, as one 
 of his old friends wrote, " led him not al- 
 ways, but far more than his correspondents 
 knew to burn the letters of sharp retort 
 upon stupidity and impertinence, and to 
 force the wearied brain and overstrung 
 nerves into patience and a kindly answer." 
 There followed a time of quiet work at 
 home; there was much business to be 
 done. His cousin Joanna Agnew, now 
 Mrs. Severn, was installed at Herne Hill. 
 This had a very beneficial result upon 
 Ruskin's health and state of mind. The 
 business drew off his thoughts from the 
 problems of life and from his own sense 
 of failure, in the direction of hard me- 
 chanical tangible work. His cousin I may 
 venture to say this, because it is an open 
 secret to her innumerable friends was the 
 most perfect sisterly influence that had 
 ever come into his life. She was, and is, 
 one of the most tender-hearted, sympathetic, 
 and blithe of beings. She had great prac-
 
 138 Ruskin 
 
 tical energy, complete unselfishness, and 
 abounding cheerfulness; and she threw the 
 whole of her large-hearted nature into the 
 congenial and instinctive task of making 
 her immediate circle happy. Indeed, her 
 companionship was one of the supreme 
 blessings of Ruskin's life she shone like 
 the sun upon his mournful temperament. 
 And then too a bereavement has a won- 
 derful way of evoking love. People often 
 learn, in the shadow of a great loss, how 
 little all the restless aims of humanity 
 really count, when compared with the nur- 
 ture and tendance of devoted affection. 
 They sorrow over old coldnesses and past 
 instances of selfishness and hardness. They 
 try to do better, to be more tender, more 
 self-effacing. Ruskin himself, with all his 
 wistful longings for human sympathy, was a 
 lonely man; and his harsh old mother, for 
 all her grimness and censoriousness, had a 
 spring of exquisite devotion in her heart. 
 The two tried hard, in this dark time, to 
 be more to each other, and built up a new
 
 A Study in Personality 139 
 
 bond, rooted in sorrow, which never after- 
 wards wholly failed them. 
 
 His mother was now nearly ninety years 
 of age, almost blind, but in full vigour of 
 mind, and ruling her household and her son 
 with inexorable kindness. She had quite a 
 retinue of aged and inefficient servants, 
 none of whom was ever sent away, and for 
 whom duties proportioned to blindness and 
 decrepitude had to be invented. Grim she 
 was, but she loved her son " like an old 
 fierce lioness," and though she snubbed him 
 unmercifully herself and ordered him about, 
 she would allow no one else to disparage 
 him. She died in the last month of the 
 year 1871, saying that she did not hope 
 to be so high in heaven as to be with her 
 husband, but perhaps near enough to see 
 him. And Ruskin was left with a surpris- 
 ing sense of loneliness. " Here, beside my 
 father's body," he wrote on her tomb, " I 
 have laid my mother's: nor was dearer 
 earth ever returned to earth, nor purer life 
 recorded in heaven."
 
 140 Ruskin 
 
 He wrote, long years after, to a great 
 friend : 
 
 There is no human sorrow like it. The 
 father's loss, however loved he may have been, 
 yet can be in great part replaced by friend- 
 ship with old and noble friends. The mother's 
 is a desolation which I could not have con- 
 ceived, till I felt it. When I lost my mistress, 
 the girl for whom I wrote Sesame and Lilies, 
 I had no more nor have ever had since, nor 
 shall have any joy in exertion : but the loss 
 of my mother took from me the power of 
 Rest. 
 
 And Carlyle too opened his heart wide 
 to the friend who was set on speaking whole- 
 some truth to the world, and who had been 
 so sternly rebuffed. We can hear the echoes 
 of Carlyle's talks and Carlyle's ideas the 
 " heroic, aristocratic, stoic ideals," as they 
 have been finely called in Buskin's work. 
 Carlyle was much interested then in the 
 question of public libraries, and gave Rus- 
 kin's mind an impulse in this direction.
 
 A Study in Personality 141 
 
 The result was a book three lectures 
 which is perhaps the most popular of all 
 Ruskin's writings, and also one of the best 
 and most memorable of his utterances the 
 little volume known whimsically enough as 
 Sesame and Lilies. No one has ever rightly 
 fathomed the meaning of the title. Sesame 
 is, I believe, a kind of oily seed or grain 
 that used to be made into biscuits it has 
 nothing here to do with the charm " Open 
 Sesame " in the story in the Arabian 
 Nights, at which all doors flew open; and 
 there is a quotation from Isaiah, which 
 Ruskin makes, about lilies blooming in the 
 desert. I suppose the things symbolised 
 are solid nurture and pure loveliness. 
 
 The first lecture, Of King's Treas- 
 uries, under cover of being a plea for 
 solid reading, is really a denunciation of 
 mere reading, and particularly of purpose- 
 less reading. Kuskin makes a kind of 
 Index Expurgatorius; and as he bans and 
 excludes all theologians, except Jeremy 
 Taylor, and the work of all non-Christian
 
 142 Ruskin 
 
 moralists, except the Morte d' Arthur, Sopho- 
 cles, and Euripides, all modern historians, 
 all philosophers, all Thackeray, George 
 Eliot, Kingsley, Swift, Hume, Macaulay, 
 and Emerson, to mention just a few of his 
 bugbears, the result is not a very wide 
 range of reading. But here, as so often 
 in Kuskin, the book is only a statement of 
 passionate personal preferences; and as 
 Kuskin, side by side with impassioned bless- 
 ing, could never refrain from copious curs- 
 ing, the verdict need not be taken as final. 
 His main thesis was, that as life was short 
 and leisure scanty, no time should be wasted 
 in reading worthless books. 
 
 He begins by laying down a principle 
 about the effects of reading. He says that 
 the ordinary reader, on laying down a book, 
 is apt to say : " How good that is that 's 
 exactly what I think!" The right feeling, 
 Euskin says, is rather : " How strange that 
 is! I never thought of that before, and 
 yet I see that it is true, or if I do not, I 
 hope I shall some day " ; and he adds the
 
 A Study in Personality 143 
 
 advice : " Be sure that you go to the author 
 to get at his meaning, not to find yours." 
 
 From this principle I humbly and heart- 
 ily dissent. My own belief is rather that 
 no human being is ever taught anything 
 unless he knows it already; that one goes 
 to books to recognise and not to learn; 
 that the best and most inspiring authors 
 are not those who tell you what they be- 
 lieve, but who show the reader what he 
 believes; and that the writers who really 
 move an age are those who express clearly 
 and forcibly what most people are feeling 
 lamely and obscurely, while the authors 
 who fail to get a hearing I am speaking 
 of course of men of proved and unques- 
 tioned power are those who are either be- 
 hind the age or in advance of it. That is 
 only my own opinion, and you are quite at 
 liberty to believe Ruskin! 
 
 Then there is a curious passage about the 
 intent study of words. And this again is 
 vitiated by prejudice. Ruskin regretted the 
 introduction into English of Greek and
 
 144 Ruskin 
 
 Latin words, and viewed their intrusion as 
 lie might view a torrent of mud poured 
 into a crystal pool " our mongrel tongue " 
 he calls it. And this declaration I must 
 not only combat, I must firmly and seri- 
 ously deny it. The extraordinary richness 
 and elasticity of English, our incomparable 
 language, is entirely due to the fact that we 
 have had no fastidious delicacy or pedantic 
 severity about taking words for our use. 
 If we want a word, we find one; if a word 
 gets limited to a nuance, we take another 
 word for another shade of meaning. Lan- 
 guage was made for man, not man for 
 language. We do not always choose eupho- 
 niously, or with due regard for the seemly 
 sight and sound of words; and we have 
 too a rather illiterate admiration for poly- 
 syllabic vocables. But I have no patience 
 whatever with purists who would arrest 
 the development of a language. In lan- 
 guage, I am all for free trade rather than 
 for protection. Buskin's own writing, pure 
 and melodious as it is, is a perpetual con-
 
 A Study in Personality 145 
 
 tradiction to his own principles. Of course 
 there is an exquisite beauty in sweet old 
 large homely words; but as thought be- 
 comes finer and more subtle, language must 
 grow more elastic. And I must beg of you 
 not to be misled in this matter by the 
 pedants whose economy of language corre- 
 sponds to leanness of thought. 
 
 The second lecture is Of Queens' Gar- 
 dens. It is addressed to the women of the 
 leisured classes, and Kuskin draws out his 
 ideal of pure womanhood as the counter- 
 part of knightly chivalry. He shows what 
 the heroic temper of womanhood ought to 
 be, and how it may be achieved. " The 
 fashion of the time," he says, "renders 
 whatever is forward, coarse, or senseless 
 in feminine nature, palpable to all men." 
 The girl is to be trained in accurate 
 thought ; not to be brought up in a prudish 
 and unreal mystery, but to learn the love- 
 liness, and the inevitableness too, of nat- 
 ural laws. She is " to follow," he says, " at 
 least some one path of scientific attainment
 
 146 Ruskin 
 
 as far as to the threshold of that bitter 
 Valley of Humiliation, into which only the 
 wisest and bravest of men can descend, 
 owning themselves for ever children, gath- 
 ering pebbles on a boundless shore." 
 
 Then he turns to the girl herself. He 
 shows that men are bound by law and cir- 
 cumstance, but that " against the sins of 
 womanhood there is no legislation, against 
 her destructiveness no national protest, no 
 public opinion against her cruelty." He 
 implores her to learn not to be idle, but to 
 cultivate her natural compassion with all 
 her might, and to use it daily and hourly 
 to heal the pain of the world. 
 
 Here Kuskin is at his very noblest and 
 highest, on sure and incontestable ground. 
 And the visible pulse and thrill of his 
 thought gains a poignant intensity from the 
 fact that he had one particular girl in view, 
 of whom I must speak later, the love of 
 whom was the deepest passion of Ruskin 's 
 life, and her rejection of his love the deep- 
 est sorrow that ever devastated his days.
 
 A Study in Personality 147 
 
 And then to these two lectures he added 
 a third, The Mystery of Life and its 
 Arts, which every one must read who de- 
 sires to spell the secret of Ruskin's hope 
 and the secret of his despair. It contains 
 some of the most intimate confidences he 
 ever published. He here shows himself 
 aghast at the differences of so many men 
 to the purpose and the effect of life. He 
 sees the steps of history thronged with 
 great figures, the poet, the priest, and the 
 artist, bringing down, like Moses from the 
 Mount, the very writing of God; and in 
 the face of this, mankind hurries heedlessly 
 and helplessly on its way, raking in the 
 dirt and straws of the street, with the 
 heavenly crown hanging within reach of 
 the oblivious hand. His own failure stares 
 him in the face. 
 
 I have had [he writes] what, in many re- 
 spects, I boldly call the misfortune, to set my 
 words somewhat prettily together; not without 
 a foolish vanity in the poor knack I had of 
 doing so; until I was heavily punished for
 
 148 Ruskin 
 
 this pride, by finding that many people thought 
 of the words only and cared nothing for the 
 meaning. 
 
 He had given, he says, ten of his best 
 years to proclaiming the merits of Turner, 
 and to sorting and making available for 
 public contemplation, Turner's work. All 
 this had been regarded with entire in- 
 difference. 
 
 I spent [he writes] the ten strongest years 
 of my life (from twenty to thirty) in en- 
 deavouring to show the excellence of the work 
 of the man whom I believed, and rightly be- 
 lieved, to be the greatest painter of the schools 
 of England since Reynolds. I had then per- 
 fect faith in the power of every great truth 
 or beauty to prevail ultimately. . . . Fortu- 
 nately or unfortunately, an opportunity of per- 
 fect trial undeceived me at once and for ever. 
 
 He found that the public entirely neg- 
 lected the drawings; a few people dawdled 
 in to glance at them, but that was all. His 
 years of work had all been lost. 
 
 For that I did not so much care; I had, at 
 least, learned my own business thoroughly.
 
 A Study in Personality 149 
 
 . . . But what I did care for was the to 
 me frightful discovery, that the most splen- 
 did genius in the arts might be permitted by 
 Providence to labour and perish uselessly, . . . 
 that the glory of it was perishable as well 
 as invisible. . . . That was the first mystery 
 of life to me. 
 
 Of course we are all at liberty to think, 
 and if we think, to say, that this is all 
 very unreal and fantastic and emotional 
 and unbalanced. What an outcry about a 
 parcel of drawings, scratches of ink and 
 blobs of colour! No one can object to the 
 Englishman who prides himself on his com- 
 mon-sense and his sturdy welfare calling 
 it all moonshine and nonsense. But not 
 by common-sense and sturdy welfare does 
 the world make progress. There were 
 plenty of good-humoured Sadducees who 
 doubtless felt even so about the Sermon on 
 the Mount. It is better to be on the side 
 of the heroes and of the saints; and even 
 if we cannot feel with them or see into 
 their meaning, we can at least abstain from 
 stoning them and decrying them. I do not
 
 150 Ruskin 
 
 myself see a hundredth part of what Rus- 
 kin saw in Turner. I think many of his 
 paintings grotesque and impossible. But 
 still I have no doubt that the victory is 
 rather with those who see and believe and 
 feel; and I admire with all my heart this 
 awful power, which prophets have, of 
 raging helplessly against the hard facts of 
 life, of knocking themselves blind and sense- 
 less against the stupidities and brutalities 
 of human nature. I can at least regret my 
 own indifference, and recognise it to be an 
 ugly, complacent, short-sighted thing. I 
 need not hold it up like a shield against 
 the darts of God, or make it into an image 
 for my delight and worship; and there is 
 something to me not only horribly pathetic 
 in the sight of Ruskin's tears and cries, but 
 something infinitely uplifting and inspiring 
 in the contemplation of them. I come idly 
 to see the fantastic struggles of some de- 
 mented person ; and I discover that they 
 are the irrepressible agonies of a martyr in 
 the flame.
 
 IV 
 
 IN the summer of 1869 Ruskin was work- 
 ing bis hardest in Italy, as I have said. 
 His mother was very anxious about him, 
 and implored him to come out of the heat 
 and take a rest; but he lingered on. On 
 the 14th of August, at Verona, he was pack- 
 ing up to go home, having finished his last 
 sketch, when he received a telegram an- 
 nouncing that he had been elected to the 
 Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford. 
 " Which will give me," he wrote to his 
 mother, " as much power as I can well use 
 and would have given pleasure to my poor 
 father and therefore to me once." 
 
 It gave him, no doubt, more pleasure 
 than he knew. It was not a question of 
 151
 
 152 Ruskin 
 
 gratified ambition. He was quite indif- 
 ferent to money and station; but it was 
 a sign that there were men of weight and 
 sense who believed in him and his work; 
 it gave him an accredited position, and 
 opened a door to him. He would be able 
 to affect, by direct teaching and personal 
 contact, the minds of the rising generation, 
 at their most generous and enthusiastic 
 stage; and Oxford too was very dear to 
 him; he had fallen, as all Oxford men do 
 more I think than Cambridge men un- 
 der the incomparable and indefinable charm 
 of that home of lost causes and mediaeval 
 dreams. Not that this is all that Oxford 
 stands for; but it has the particular touch 
 of idealism about it, such as surrounds the 
 dethroned monarch and the exiled claim- 
 ant, pursuing with Quixotic devotion some 
 unrealisable vision. To what extent Rus- 
 kin meant to lecture upon Art cannot be 
 stated. He had for some years been writ- 
 ing about half-a-dozen lectures a year, which 
 filled an annual volume. Now only twelve
 
 A Study in Personality 153 
 
 annual lectures were required of him. But 
 he planned, as he always did, a gigantic 
 scheme of art-teaching, which he could not 
 have carried out if he had lectured daily 
 for a dozen years. He proposed to revise 
 the whole of his theory of art, and to write 
 lectures which should begin with first 
 principles and ramify into every technical 
 branch of art, to conclude with an encyclo- 
 paedic history of art in general. But he 
 did not intend to drop any of his other 
 schemes. The result was that his work 
 finally and completely broke down both his 
 health and his mental powers. It must be 
 remembered that he was now a man of 
 fifty, conscious of failure, wrestling with 
 intense irritation at the general drift of 
 human society. He had six months before 
 his work began. Strained and overworked 
 as he was, he set to. Corpus Christi Col- 
 lege made him an Honorary Fellow, and 
 gave him a set of rooms; and on 8th Feb- 
 ruary, 1870, he appeared in his lecture 
 room to deliver his inaugural address.
 
 154 Ruskin 
 
 The most extraordinary scene followed. 
 It must be remembered that he was in many 
 ways the man of the hour. Every one knew 
 his brilliant and suggestive books, and his 
 schemes wild as they were thought of 
 social reform. His extraordinary charm of 
 personality, which soaked into all his writ- 
 ings and gave his readers a sense of in- 
 timate and individual contact with a man 
 of genius; his wealth, and the use he had 
 made of it; his amazing vehemence of 
 speech, his reckless daring of thought, had 
 all created a curiosity about him of which 
 he was hardly conscious. The place was 
 packed an hour before; the ante-rooms and 
 passages were blocked; there was a voci- 
 ferous and disappointed crowd in the street. 
 
 After a hurried conference, a friend 
 pushed his way to the desk, and announced 
 that the meeting would adjourn to the Shel- 
 donian Theatre. The great man, slim and 
 bent, with his piercing blue eyes, under 
 shaggy eyebrows, his long brown hair, his 
 thin whiskers, his grim mouth, stepped to
 
 A Study in Personality 155 
 
 the rostrum. His dress was even then old- 
 fashioned. A stiff blue frock-coat with a 
 light waistcoat and trousers; long loose 
 linen cuffs; high collars of the Gladstone 
 type; a bright blue stock tie, like an early 
 Victorian statesman; a silk gown which 
 he briskly discarded, to leave him free to 
 gesticulate, and the velvet cap of a gentle- 
 man-commoner. Such was the figure that 
 came forward. He had few gifts of formal 
 delivery. He began by reading a very ela- 
 borate passage in a very artificial cadence. 
 Then he would break off, and begin to in- 
 terpolate and extemporise with immense 
 vivacity and free gestures. Sometimes he 
 was dramatic in action. In his lecture on 
 birds, he strode about like a rook, he 
 swooped like a swallow. But grotesque as 
 the performance easily might have been, it 
 carried every one away by its eagerness 
 and sincerity. And his glance was of the 
 magnetic and arresting sort. Some of his 
 hearers confessed to the indescribable sen- 
 sation, like the kindling of the soul, which
 
 156 Ruskin 
 
 fell on them if his eyes seemed for a 
 moment to dwell upon them. 
 
 Whatever Ruskin felt, it was clear to 
 him from that moment that at Oxford, at 
 all events, he could get a hearing, and he 
 hurled himself into his work with intense 
 enthusiasm. He started a drawing-school 
 and endowed it. He showered down gifts 
 on the place, pictures, casts, engravings. 
 He gave endless parties and receptions. 
 He even enlisted a party of undergraduates 
 to help in an experiment of road-making 
 up at Hinksey. The road was made, and 
 was infamously inadequate for all pur- 
 poses of locomotion. And so the first years 
 sped busily away. 
 
 In letters written in 1871 and 1872 to 
 his friend Norton, he describes his lecture 
 work : 
 
 I am always unhappy, and see no good in 
 saying so. But I am settling to my work 
 here, recklessly, to do my best with it, feel- 
 ing quite that it is talking at hazard, for what 
 chance good may come. But I attend regu-
 
 A Study in Personality 157 
 
 larly in the schools as mere drawing-master, 
 and the men begin to come one by one about 
 fifteen or twenty already; several worth hav- 
 ing as pupils in any way, being of temper to 
 make good growth of. 
 
 And again: 
 
 I am, as usual, unusually busy. When I 
 get fairly into my lecture work at Oxford, I 
 always find that the lecture would come better 
 some other way, just before it is given, and 
 so work hand to mouth. 
 
 Perhaps I may mention here a remark- 
 able satire which was written at the end 
 of the seventies by a young Oxford man 
 who had just taken his degree, who has 
 since become famous in literature, Mr. W. 
 H. Mallock. 
 
 The book is an account of a party of 
 people who meet for a week-end visit at 
 a country-house, and discuss all sorts of 
 problems in life and art. Some of the most 
 famous men of the day, such as Huxley, 
 Matthew Arnold, Jowett, and Pater are 
 here depicted with inimitable ingenuity and 
 wit. Many of Mr. Mallock's happiest
 
 158 Ruskin 
 
 effects in the book are produced by intro- 
 ducing actual words or sentiments of these 
 great men in a grotesque context and with 
 absurd applications. Many of them were 
 probably hardly known to the author at 
 all; but Mr. Mallock had known and ob- 
 served Ruskin at Oxford; and Mr. Her- 
 bert, under which name Ruskin appears, is 
 undoubtedly the hero of the book. Porten- 
 tous as the paradoxes put in his mouth 
 are, extravagant as the emotions are which 
 he is made to express, though the sentiment 
 is fantastic and hyperbolical, yet one feels 
 that he is somehow pursued through the 
 book by the emotions of the author, and 
 that he alone is allowed to appear sincere 
 and impressive. I would recommend any 
 one who is interested in the striking fig- 
 ures of the time and their relation to each 
 other's thought, to read the book carefully. 
 One can often complete the picture of a 
 man by a contemporary caricature in a 
 way in which one cannot complete it by 
 subsequent panegyrics, however reverential.
 
 A Study in Personality 159 
 
 2 
 
 I must now return to other memorable 
 enterprises which all date from these years 
 of Oxford activity. It was now that Bus- 
 kin began to issue what is the most hetero- 
 geneous and yet characteristic book that 
 ever came from his pen, Fors Clavigera. I 
 hardly dare to recommend it to you; and 
 yet any one who desires to see the inner- 
 most side of Ruskin's heart and mind, must 
 make up his mind to wade through the 
 great volumes. 
 
 Let me attempt to describe the indescrib- 
 able. Fors Clavigera was a series of 
 letters addressed to the workers of Eng- 
 land, issued in monthly parts. It ran at 
 last into eight volumes. The title is what 
 is called in Alice in Wonderland a port- 
 manteau-word, crammed with symbolism. 
 Fors stood at once for destiny and courage ; 
 Clavigera means either club-bearing, or 
 nail-bearing, or key-bearing. The Club was 
 a symbol of action, the Nail of fate, and
 
 160 Ruskin 
 
 the Key was the key of heavenly mystery. 
 All this must be borne in mind. If one 
 asks what it was about, I can only reply 
 in the words of Aristophanes: xepl aou, xepl 
 IjxoO, xepl axavTWV xpay^aTWV, about you, 
 about me, about everything in the world; 
 but the general motive of the book is the 
 redressing of social misery and collective 
 poverty. 
 
 For my own part [he says in the first letter], 
 I will put up with this state of things, pas- 
 sively, not an hour longer. I am not an un- 
 selfish person, nor an Evangelical one; I have 
 no particular pleasure in doing good; neither 
 do I dislike doing it so much as to expect to 
 be rewarded for it in another world. But I 
 simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at 
 minerals, nor do anything else that I like, 
 . . . because of the misery that I know of, 
 and see signs of, where I know it not, which 
 no imagination can interpret too bitterly. 
 
 He preached a communism of wealth and 
 joy, and took up his parable against lux- 
 ury and selfishness, idle accumulation and 
 tyrannical oppression. The tide of elo-
 
 A Study in Personality 161 
 
 quence goes rolling on, like a fiery flow of 
 lava, full of endless digressions into auto- 
 biography and art, into poetry and legend 
 and romance; now telling the life-story of 
 a hero like Walter Scott, now drifting into 
 mysticism, now designing a new coinage, 
 passing from a plan for sub-alpine reser- 
 voirs to a description of Carpaccio's Sleep- 
 ing Princess. Sometimes there is a long 
 extract from Marmontel or Addison's Spec- 
 tator; and it is all full of that melancholy 
 humour, that caressing fondness, that mov- 
 ing pathos, that intense sadness that made 
 Kuskin the delight of the world, and yet 
 drove him raging into the wilderness. One 
 may be bored by Fors, one may lose one's 
 way in it, one may fall into hopeless irrita- 
 tion at the childish waywardness, the un- 
 practical inconsequence of the book. But 
 there is no book quite like it in the world, 
 because it is looking straight down into 
 the very current of a great and, alas, dis- 
 ordered mind. 
 
 Few men can ever have thought so
 
 1 62 Ruskin 
 
 rapidy, so intensely, with such momentary 
 concentration and yet with such wild dif- 
 fuseness as Ruskin; and fewer still have 
 the power of translating the vague dreams 
 and reveries of thought into such absolutely 
 limpid and beautiful words. So that it is 
 like standing by a clear mountain stream, 
 and seeing, through its swift ripples and 
 amber curves, the very pebbles over which it 
 flows and the ribbons of trailing water- 
 weed, all transfigured and glorified by the 
 magical enchantment of art. 
 
 And then too, as Fors went on, Kuskin 
 took to printing in it some of the letters 
 he received, both of sympathisers and op- 
 ponents. He was strangely candid about 
 the latter, and included letters of the most 
 personal and even abusive kind; but as he 
 often also printed his own replies, and as 
 he was a master of the art of humorous 
 invective, the impression given was as a 
 rule favourable to himself. Here is a good 
 instance. An impertinent critic wrote to 
 him, and in the course of the letter said:
 
 A Study in Personality 163 
 
 Since you disparage so much iron and its 
 manufacture, may it be asked how your books 
 are printed, and how is their paper made? 
 Probably you are aware that both printing 
 and paper-making machines are made of that 
 material. 
 
 Kuskin replied: 
 
 SIR. I am indeed aware that printing and 
 paper-making machines are made of iron. I 
 am aware also, which you perhaps are not, 
 that ploughshares and knives and forks are. 
 And I am aware, which you certainly are not, 
 that I am writing with an iron pen. And you 
 will find in Fors Clavlgera, and in all my other 
 writings, which you may have done me the 
 honour to read, that my statement is that 
 things which have to do the work of iron 
 should be made of iron, and things which have 
 to do the work of wood should be made of 
 wood; but that (for instance) hearts should 
 not be made of iron, nor heads of wood 
 and this last statement you may wisely con- 
 sider when next it enters into yours to ask 
 questions. 
 
 Fors Clavigera is very rich in incidental 
 judgments and characterisations; indeed it 
 is this that gives it its chief value. The
 
 164 Ruskin 
 
 matter of it is so discursive, that at times 
 it is only rescued from tediousness by its 
 extreme intensity of thought and its purity 
 of utterance. One may wish that Kuskin 
 could have applied himself more coherently 
 to definite points, but upon reflection one 
 is glad to leave the method entirely in his 
 own hands. In the first place, when he 
 treated a subject allegorically, he was ac- 
 customed to subdivide his material under 
 very elaborate headings. I think that this 
 was one of the things that recommended 
 his earlier writings to the stolid British 
 mind. The British mind cares much less 
 about ideas than about the arrangement of 
 ideas. It has a pathetic belief in the value 
 of correct information, and it will attempt 
 to assimiliate an idea which is communi- 
 cated in the guise of headings and subdi- 
 visions, because it believes that the subject 
 is being treated seriously, and that it is 
 somehow or other getting cash value for 
 its money. It is more concerned, for in- 
 stance, to know that the gifts of the spirit
 
 A Study in Personality 165 
 
 are sevenfold, and that there are seven 
 deadly sins, than to realise the nature of 
 sin and of grace. But Ruskin's headings 
 are very misleading. They not only do not 
 cover the whole ground, but they trespass 
 on each other's ground. There are plenty 
 of cases where Ruskin will divide a subject 
 into heads, and not only will he omit ob- 
 vious subdivisions, but four or five of his 
 headings will prove to be almost identical. 
 It is an ironical proof of the turn of the 
 Anglo-Saxon reader for the book-keeping 
 theory of literature, that it accepted Rus- 
 kin's art-teaching, much of which was 
 fantastic and inaccurate, because it was 
 conveyed under the form of subdivisions. 
 Whereas when he became painfully and 
 feverishly in earnest, and wrote as he felt, 
 the public became unable to follow his argu- 
 ment, and thought it vague and disjointed. 
 
 Moreover, it seems to me that Ruskin's 
 effect on the world was the effect of a 
 personality and not the effect of a reasoned 
 philosophy; and there is no doubt that one
 
 1 66 Ruskin 
 
 gets far nearer to the mind of Ruskin and 
 to his ideas in Fors than one ever does in 
 Modern Painters. Much of Modern Paint- 
 ers consists of brilliant attractive thoughts, 
 born of the intellect rather than of the 
 heart, which came lightly and fancifully, 
 and were swiftly and gracefully set down. 
 But in Fors it is as though one saw some 
 awful spiritual combat proceeding, like the 
 wrestling of Jacob by night with the angel 
 at Penuel, whose form he could not see and 
 whose nature he could not guess, whether 
 he meant to test his strength, or to over- 
 come him and leave him maimed. And just 
 as the angel, though he was an angel of 
 light, made the sinew of the halting thigh 
 shrink at his fiery touch, so Ruskin too 
 emerged from the conflict a shattered man ; 
 and to myself, I will frankly confess, it is 
 just this heart-breaking conflict, this appall- 
 ing struggle with mighty thoughts and dread- 
 ful fears, that made at once the tragedy and 
 the glory of Ruskin's life, because it broke 
 his pride and humbled his complacency,
 
 A Study in Personality 167 
 
 and crowned him with the hero's crown. 
 For let me say once and for all, that under 
 all his irony and humour, under his un- 
 balanced vehemence and his no less unbal- 
 anced sorrow, Kuskin's work, if not severely 
 logical, was neither eccentric nor irrespon- 
 sible. Its soundness, its ultimate sanity, 
 was confirmed and not depreciated by 
 subsequent events. 
 
 But in spite of all this it must be frankly 
 confessed that Fors is a difficult work to 
 comprehend. Kuskin seems at times to be 
 following no definite line of thought; yet 
 one of the delights of it is the great variety 
 of true and beautiful judgments on all sorts 
 of points connected with art and literature 
 and morality. Let me give a single extract, 
 where he is dealing with the moral novelists 
 of the nineteenth century, as a specimen 
 of characterisation which is as suggestive 
 and as true as it is bold and humorous. 
 
 Miss Edgeworth [he says] made her moral- 
 ity so impertinent that, since her time, it has 
 only been with fear and trembling that any
 
 i68 Ruskin 
 
 good novelist has ventured to show the slight- 
 est bias in favour of the Ten Commandments. 
 Scott made his romance so ridiculous, that, 
 since his day, one can't help fancying helmets 
 were always pasteboard and horses were al- 
 ways hobby. Dickens made everybody laugh, 
 or cry, so that they could not go about their 
 business till they had got their faces in 
 wrinkles; and Thackeray settled like a meat- 
 fly on whatever one had got for dinner, and 
 made one sick of it. 
 
 I don't say that this is a fair or a gen- 
 erous or a complete criticism. But it is 
 hideously clever, and touches the weak- 
 nesses of the mighty with a sure hand. Yet 
 by this kind of levity he lost friends, who 
 thought that he could not be in earnest 
 when he trifled with their cherished beliefs ; 
 though it is inconceivable that any human 
 being can have overlooked the mortal and 
 deadly earnestness that runs through the 
 whole; and if Ruskin did lose a few pre- 
 cisians and unimaginative persons at the 
 time, he gained and will gain a host of 
 admirers and lovers by his gay frankness,
 
 A Study in Personality 169 
 and the sense of charming vivacity that 
 
 runs through the book. 
 
 Ruskin had, before the date of which I 
 am speaking, made one or two attempts to 
 put his principles into practical shape. He 
 had been left a few small houses in Mary- 
 lebone by his father, and he had put them 
 in charge of a lady-pupil of his, Miss 
 Octavia Hill, whose name has since be- 
 become famous as a philanthropic worker on 
 similar lines. His point was that a good 
 landlord could, if he abjured high profits, 
 give some fixity of tenure, make the houses 
 comfortable, and provide a little ground for 
 recreation. It is generally calculated that 
 such property should bring in, owing to its 
 insecurity as an investment, at least 10 
 per cent. But Ruskin took 5 per cent., 
 and spent the margin on improvements. At 
 this time he had not developed his later 
 heresies about the sinfulness of all usury. 
 I will not go into that question, because it
 
 170 Ruskin 
 
 is a complicated one, and because Rus- 
 kin as he often did adopted a principle 
 upon insufficient and inadequate grounds. 
 He did not reflect that all interest is ulti- 
 mately due to the multiplying power and 
 the stored natural products of the earth, 
 and that the basis of all increment is that 
 you can dig things like coal out of the 
 earth on the one hand, by which the avail- 
 able commodities of the earth are increased, 
 and that if you sow a grain of wheat, a 
 dozen grains are the result. The question 
 is not of course as simple as that; but while 
 it may be contended that all capital and 
 all increment alike are the property of the 
 community, and ought not to be appro- 
 priated by any one individual, that is not 
 the same thing as saying that all interest 
 on capital received by private persons is 
 wrong. 
 
 Kuskin had a very painful correspond- 
 ence with Miss Octavia Hill at a later 
 date, which is all printed in Fors. Some 
 criticisms w r hich she had made on his un-
 
 A Study in Personality 171 
 
 practical grasp of business vexed him, and he 
 accused her of treachery, and of discourag- 
 ing would-be adherents. She amply vindi- 
 cated herself; but the gap was not bridged, 
 though he ultimately parted with the 
 whole of his small house property to Miss 
 Hill, and ten years later frankly admitted 
 his error. He tried too the experiment of 
 a small tea-and-coffee shop, with a fantastic 
 care of details, such as the painted sign 
 and the old china jars in the window. The 
 business paid its expenses and produced a 
 fair profit. But it is difficult to say how 
 much of this was due to Ruskin's pres- 
 tige. Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, had a 
 sharp lesson in this respect, when he found 
 that a pair of very indifferent shoes, which 
 he made in order that he might earn a wage 
 by manual work, were kept under a glass 
 case as curiosities to be shown to visitors. 
 And then too Ruskin made an experiment 
 about his books. It must be remembered 
 that his fortune was melting away like 
 snow in a thaw. But he hated bad paper
 
 172 Ruskin 
 
 and bad print, he could not bear the sys- 
 tem of discounts and trade commissions, so 
 he withdrew his earlier works from circula- 
 tion, and made it as inconvenient as pos- 
 sible for every one concerned to get the 
 books, and as difficult as possible for any 
 incidental profit to be made out of them. 
 But the public has the art of scenting out 
 and getting what it wants; and in spite of 
 his precautions the books were bought 
 indeed the profits which Ruskin received 
 on his books gave him an income, when all 
 his fortune was gone, of something like 
 4000 a year; so that he was a rich man 
 to the end of his days. But it does not by 
 any means follow that it was a fair trad- 
 ing arrangement; indeed, it was only made 
 possible by his increasing popularity, and 
 cannot be cited as an economic precedent. , 
 And then at last he made his great ex- 
 periment. He began in 1871 to ask for 
 definite adherents to help him in carry- 
 ing his ideas to practice. His aim was to 
 fight the spirit of commercialism, which
 
 A Study in Personality 173 
 
 he believed was at the root of half the pre- 
 valent evils. He wanted men and women 
 to join with him in a serious attempt to 
 live a simple life he never preached or 
 practised asceticism in any form to intro- 
 duce higher aims and a taste for purer 
 pleasures. He thought that the reclaiming 
 of waste land might give employment and 
 healthy work. He did not believe that po- 
 litical agitation would do anything; but 
 thought that if all those who had held the 
 same sort of creed as himself and owned 
 the same hopes, would come out of their 
 conventional position in a base and hide- 
 bound society, the body thus created would 
 become a force which would have to be 
 reckoned with. His idea was a Socialistic 
 one, that capital, the means and material 
 of labour, should be in the hands of Gov- 
 ernment that is in a central body to whom 
 authority was to be delegated; and so he 
 founded a company or Guild, the Guild of 
 St. George, which was to hold property for 
 the benefit of its members. Every member
 
 174 Ruskin 
 
 was to assent to a comprehensive little 
 creed, and to do some sort of work for his 
 living; to obey the authority of the officers 
 of the Guild, and to contribute a tithe of his 
 income to a central fund. The fund was 
 to buy land for the members to cultivate ; to 
 have a common store of valuable property; 
 to prefer manual labour to machinery; to 
 use wind and water power for mills and 
 factories, not steam; to give fair wages, to 
 found museums, to train refined taste, and 
 to give healthy opportunities of recreation. 
 He amused himself with all sorts of de- 
 tailed enactments, pretty absurd fancies, 
 which brought discredit on the scheme. 
 Thus no wine was to be drunk which was 
 not ten years old; a new coinage was to 
 be designed ; the members w y ere to wear cos- 
 tumes indicative of their rank and occupa- 
 tion, and to wear jewels which were to be 
 uncut, except agates. 
 
 Then he selected a comprehensive little 
 library to include all that he thought it 
 good for a man to read; such books as the
 
 A Study in Personality 175 
 
 Economicus of Xenophon, for a manual of 
 household life, and Gotthelfs Ulric the 
 Farmer,, from a French version which he 
 loved, because his father had been used to 
 read it alone to him as a boy. 
 
 He began by giving the Guild a tenth of 
 his fortune, which was still a large one. 
 The tithe came to 7000, and in three years 
 the rest of the civilised world contributed 
 236. He took a cottage near Sheffield, 
 and stored some fine things there, pictures 
 and minerals. The first land held by the 
 Guild was a farm of thirteen acres at 
 Abbeydale, near Sheffield, which was bought 
 by the Guild and taken over by a knot of 
 enthusiasts, who knew nothing of farming, 
 but were earning a living in other ways. 
 It was a ludicrous failure. They employed 
 a bailiff, who absorbed the profits. The 
 land, bought at nearly 200 an acre, proved 
 worthless : it became a tea-garden, and Rus- 
 kin was roundly abused for the failure. 
 Beside this, the Guild had a cottage at 
 Scarborough, two acres of moorland at
 
 1 76 Ruskin 
 
 Barmouth, and a wood in Worcestershire. 
 One or two local industries were started in 
 the Isle of Man and in the Lakes, but the 
 whole experiment was a failure, and not 
 even a failure of the colossal and tragic 
 kind, but a petty and dismal failure, so 
 that one hardly knows whether to laugh or 
 cry over it all, at its vast designs and 
 beautiful outlines, and its very scrappy and 
 grotesque performances. 
 
 We may ask why a man whose genius 
 was so great, whose view of the world was 
 so noble, whose principles were so just and 
 in many ways so sensible, and whose in- 
 fluence was so potent, should have had to 
 suffer this ghastly fiasco? Well, in the first 
 place Kuskin mistook his powers and his 
 opportunity. A prophet must be content 
 to be a prophet. He must not claim a 
 close hold over details those must grow 
 up naturally out of his ideas when they 
 are accepted. Many of Ruskin's ideas are 
 taking shape and working themselves out 
 on practical lines. But in addition to his
 
 A Study in Personality 177 
 
 ideas it must be remembered that be bad 
 in one sense a practical mind, in tbat be 
 loved precision of detail in everything, and 
 desired concrete expression of bis dreams. 
 But be did not fully grasp the principles of 
 economics, and be did not understand hu- 
 man nature. He was lacking in imagina- 
 tive sympathy. He could not believe that 
 there were plenty of robust sensible and 
 virtuous people in the world who did not 
 value art at a pin's bead, and who desired 
 to be comfortable in a commonplace way. 
 One may wish that human nature were dif- 
 ferent; one may love great ideas, and de- 
 sire peace and beauty to prevail, and yet 
 grasp the fact that all human beings are 
 not built on the same lines. All the charm- 
 ing details of Ruskin's Utopia were simply 
 an expression of his own pure and dainty 
 preferences, and be made the mistake of 
 wishing to impose them upon others, or 
 rather of believing tbat people only required 
 to be told what was beautiful to desire it. 
 It was this intense and stubborn dogma-
 
 1 78 Ruskin 
 
 tism, this sense of Tightness in his own 
 tastes and preferences, that was at the root 
 of all his bitter failures. By his glowing 
 words and by his own pure example he was 
 sowing seed fast. But he desired to see 
 an immediate harvest, and this the prophet 
 cannot hope for or if he does hope for 
 it, he is destined to horrible disappointment. 
 To me the details of Kuskin's schemes are 
 infinitely charming and pathetic; but I 
 should resent any compulsion in such a 
 matter, while the whole situation seems to 
 me as unutterably tragic as any situation 
 I know in literature or life. This sensitive, 
 high-minded, enthusiastic man, lashing him- 
 self into frenzy at the sight of the brute 
 forces of human stupidity and baseness, in 
 all their awful strength and solidity, find- 
 ing that human beings would neither be 
 charmed nor caressed nor laughed nor 
 scolded into agreement, is to me one of the 
 most august and pathetic figures that it is 
 possible to conceive beyond the reach in- 
 deed of human imagination. One is thrilled
 
 A Study in Personality 179 
 
 and awed and harrowed by the tragedies of 
 Shakespeare or the novels of Tolstoy. But 
 the whole of Ruskin's works and letters are 
 like a gigantic romance, with the difference 
 that, instead of being conditioned by the 
 imagination of a novelist, they are a vol- 
 ume straight from the awful hand of God, 
 where no obstacles are smoothed away by 
 happy coincidences, no wrongs conveniently 
 righted, but where one can see the fierce 
 conflict of elemental forces with a single 
 soul, as noble, as perceptive, as subtle, as 
 delicate as any spirit which was ever linked 
 to a human frame, fighting single-handed, 
 in sorrow and despair, against all the harsh 
 and strong facts of life not only facts that 
 wreck lives and darken homes, but the very 
 facts that seem to make for contentment 
 and delight. It is the dreadful bewilder- 
 ment that comes of trying to see where 
 and what God really is, and on which side 
 He is fighting, that makes the tragedy of 
 the situation; and though the surface may 
 be rippled by humour and absurdity, yet
 
 i8o Ruskin 
 
 the scene, if one views it fairly, is like the 
 picture drawn by Homer of Charybdis 
 the swiftly running tide, the shudder of the 
 moving deeps, till in the spin and eddy of 
 the roaring race, the depth is laid bare, 
 and the earth herself appears, black with 
 sand. 
 
 And here I will relate in a few words 
 what was probably the central fact in Rus- 
 kin's life a love that transformed itself 
 from a paternal affection into a consuming 
 passion; a love which was for years the 
 mainspring and comfort of his life, and 
 the frustration of which not only cost him 
 the deepest of all the sorrows he had to 
 endure, but caused the strain under which 
 his overburdened mind gave way. One 
 must not look too closely into an episode 
 like this; but it was to such an extent the 
 pivot of his life, it explained so much, it 
 accounted for so much, that it must be 
 known and it must be indicated.
 
 A Study in Personality 181 
 
 It was in 1858 that it began. It was at 
 Rheinfelden, in that year, that on a Sun- 
 day walk he gathered a purple orchis by 
 the roadside, and on coming home took 
 pencil in hand to sketch it. A trivial in- 
 cident enough! But it seems to have 
 brought home to him the ugly rigidity and 
 absurdity of his Sabbatarian training; and 
 he dated from that incident a train of 
 thought which led to his abjuring his old 
 Evangelical beliefs. A Sunday at Turin 
 a few weeks later, when he attended a little 
 Protestant chapel of Waldensians, put the 
 finishing touch. He heard the grim Puri- 
 tan doctrines of Calvinism and Predestin- 
 arianism preached with a fierce unction, 
 and the horror of it all came suddenly home 
 to him. He left the chapel converted " in- 
 side out," as he said. When he reached 
 home a few days later, in a very despond- 
 ent frame of mind, he received a letter from 
 a stranger in London, Mrs. La Touche, 
 an Irishwoman, a half-sister of Lord De- 
 sart, asking if he could find time to give
 
 1 82 Ruskin 
 
 her three children a few lessons in draw- 
 ing, and adding that she ventured to ask 
 the favour because she believed him to be 
 the only sound teacher of art. The frank- 
 ness of the request took his fancy, and he 
 went round to call, little thinking what 
 was in store for him. This was his de- 
 scription of what happened : " Presently 
 the drawing-room door opened and Kosie 
 came in, quietly taking stock of me with 
 her blue eyes as she walked across the 
 room; gave me her hand as a good dog 
 gives its paw, and then stood a little 
 back. ' I thought you so ugly,' she told 
 me afterwards. She didn't quite mean 
 that; but only that her mother having 
 talked much of my ' greatness ' to her, she 
 had expected me to be something like 
 Garibaldi or the Elgin Theseus; and was 
 extremely disappointed." 
 
 Kose La Touche was undoubtedly a very 
 charming and precocious child, extremely 
 beautiful, full of lively fancies, with mar- 
 vellous power of winning and returning
 
 A Study in Personality 183 
 
 love, with pretty half-mocking, half-caress- 
 ing ways, with a set of pet nicknames for 
 the people round her; just the sort of 
 child, with her wayward fancies and her 
 lavish affection, to win the heart of a sor- 
 rowful and lonely man. He wrote, long 
 after: "Rose, in heart, was with me al- 
 ways, and all I did was for her sake." One 
 of those relations grew up which are in- 
 tensely moving to think of, and even to 
 read of, but which can hardly bear to be 
 spoken about, with all the silly pretty 
 chatters, the little jokes and quarrels and 
 reconciliations, that are too intimate to 
 record, and yet which may play so intense 
 a part in daily life. Some of the letters 
 she wrote to him are preserved indeed he 
 carried her first letter to himself about with 
 him for years, enclosed in thin plates of 
 gold and some of his letters to her are 
 printed, in which one sees with irrepressi- 
 ble emotion how this man of middle-age, 
 in the forefront of the writers and workers 
 of the day, poured out his heart and mind
 
 1 84 Ruskin 
 
 to the girl and depended on her sympathy 
 and even her counsel. Such things cannot 
 be quoted, but they are intensely moving, 
 and to me even more than beautiful. She 
 was a child of ten when they first met, 
 and when she was eighteen the whole of 
 Ruskin's power of devotion was centred 
 upon her. He told her of his desire that 
 she should become his wife, but she could 
 give him no answer, and he agreed to wait 
 till she was twenty-one. " Did you see the 
 gleam of sunshine yesterday afternoon? " 
 Euskin wrote to Burne-Jones. " If you 
 had only seen her in it, bareheaded, between 
 my laurels and my primrose bank ! " But 
 she had no desire to change the old re- 
 lation, and, moreover, she had become deeply 
 devout on the Evangelical lines which he 
 had discarded. She published a little re- 
 ligious manual in 1873 called Clouds and 
 Light, and when he asked her for answer, 
 she told him frankly and sweetly enough 
 that she could not marry an unbeliever. 
 He plunged into work to deaden thought.
 
 A Study in Personality 185 
 
 In the autumn of 1874 lie heard that she 
 was dying; her precocious intellect and her 
 deep religious emotion had burnt the vital 
 spark out. The story used to be that he 
 went off at once to her, but that she re- 
 fused to see him unless he could say that 
 he loved God better than herself, and this 
 he w r ould not say. But the story is not 
 true. He saw her often, and was with her 
 to the last. She died in 1875, and his heart 
 was buried in her grave. 
 
 This is one of the little allusions he made 
 to the end of his hopes, in a letter to some 
 of his nearest friends: 
 
 I have just heard that my poor little Rose 
 is gone where the hawthorn blossoms go 
 which I 've been trying to describe all the 
 morning and can't get them to stay with 
 me. ... I have been long prepared, so you 
 need not be anxious about me. But the tree 
 branches look very black. 
 
 In 1874, before her illness, he wrote to 
 his old friend Miss Beever : " I wanted 
 my Eosie here. In heaven I mean to go
 
 1 86 Ruskin 
 
 and talk to Pythagoras and Socrates and 
 Valerius Publicola. I shan't care a bit 
 for Rosie there, she need n't think it. What 
 will grey eyes and red cheeks be good for 
 there?" That was it. He saw all round 
 him others happy and blest in wedded love, 
 refreshing their weary spirits and healing 
 the hurts of combat in the quiet peace of 
 home. Heaven seemed to heap upon him 
 the good things for which he did not care, 
 and to deny him what he desired and 
 needed most. Those who saw him sur- 
 rounded by love and care, honoured and 
 famous, rich and using his wealth gen- 
 erously for what was nearest to his mind, 
 marvelled that he could still carry about 
 with him a spring of secret sorrow which 
 indeed he did not allow to overflow, but 
 which yet poisoned all his happiness. Few 
 then guessed what it all meant, and how 
 the distracted work in which he indulged, 
 the irritable restlessness of brain and heart, 
 were but his brave attempts to forget. We 
 may lose ourselves in vain speculation as
 
 A Study in Personality 187 
 
 to what might have been the issue of it 
 all, could he but have gained what he de- 
 sired, or why so bitter a cup was forced 
 to his lips. But that is the story, and 
 not only cannot the influence of that love, 
 which began so brightly and gaily under 
 the tender lights and dews of dawn, and 
 which waxed into so hot and broad a noon 
 of passion, be overlooked and set aside ; but 
 it must rather be regarded as the one cen- 
 tral fact of Ruskin's inner life: it revealed 
 to him the worth and depth of love; and 
 in its agony of disappointment, its sharp 
 earthly close, it laid his spirit in the dust, 
 and condemned him to a solitude of pain, 
 the secret significance of which perhaps 
 came home to him in those hours of in- 
 communicable musing, when the music of 
 the world was dumb to him, and the light 
 of beauty sickened and died on tower and 
 tree.
 
 As life's sands ran out, and Ruskin's old 
 equanimity of work declined, the range and 
 sweep of his plans became more vast and 
 wide. He wrote humorously in 1875: 
 
 I begin to ask myself, with somewhat press- 
 ing arithmetic, how much time is likely to be 
 left me, at the age of fifty-six, to complete the 
 various designs for which, until past fifty, I 
 was merely collecting material. Of these ma- 
 terials I have now enough by me for a most 
 interesting (in my own opinion) history of 
 fifteenth-century Florentine Art, in six octavo 
 volumes; an analysis of the Attic art of the 
 fifth century B.C. in three volumes; an ex- 
 haustive history of northern thirteenth-century 
 art, in ten volumes ; a life of Sir Walter Scott, 
 with analysis of modern epic art, in seven 
 volumes; a life of Xenophon, with analysis of 
 188
 
 A Study in Personality 189 
 
 the general principles of education, in ten 
 volumes; a commentary on Hesiod, with final 
 analysis of the principles of Political Economy, 
 in nine volumes; and a general description of 
 the geology and botany of the Alps, in twenty- 
 four volumes. 
 
 He lectured a good deal in this year, 
 and studied Botany and Geology. But 
 since the Christmas in Venice of which I 
 have spoken, his writings took on a new 
 tinge. He read the Bible more diligently, 
 and, like many men whose opinions have 
 widened, felt its inspiration more deeply, 
 as his reliance on its literal and verbal ac- 
 curacy declined. At the same time he be- 
 gan to take up a distinctly antagonistic 
 attitude to science and the conclusions of 
 science. He did not shun the closest in- 
 vestigations of nature, but he thought that 
 he was bound to protest against the in- 
 creasing tendencies to materialism. He 
 became in fact a mystic; his faith 
 slipped from the bands of orthodoxy, and 
 became very much what Carlyle's faith
 
 19 Ruskin 
 
 was, a vague but intense Theism, which 
 recognised, as far as one can apply hu- 
 man terms to things so remote and abstruse, 
 a mind, a purpose, a w r ill at work behind 
 nature and man. It is of course the in- 
 soluble enigma, the realisation of a power 
 presumably all-originating and all-power- 
 ful, which is yet in a condition of combat, 
 and appears to thwart its own designs. It 
 is the old question of free-will in another 
 shape. There is little logical ground for 
 believing in free-will, and yet it is, so far 
 as experience and consciousness go, the 
 one indisputable fact of life. The difficulty 
 of course is this. If God is the origin of 
 all phenomena and all conditions, He 
 must have imposed upon Himself limita- 
 tions, because His law is not harmonious, 
 but obstructs itself. The moral sense is 
 at variance with the natural instinct. But 
 for all that Ruskin's faith was firm, if it 
 was not definite, and he put it in the 
 forefront of his teaching. He wrote from 
 Oxford :
 
 A Study in Personality 191 
 
 I gave yesterday the twelfth and last of my 
 course of lectures this term, to a room crowded 
 by six hundred people, two-thirds members of 
 the University, and with its door wedged open 
 by those who could not get in; this interest 
 of theirs being granted me, I doubt not, be- 
 cause for the first time in Oxford I have been 
 able to speak to them boldly of immortal life. 
 
 But it was a time of awful strain. His 
 Eose was dying, and he could not pledge 
 his belief even to her and to her dying 
 prayers. Yet he opened his heart to many 
 new friends. He became greatly attached 
 to the Duke of Albany, then at Oxford, and 
 went to stay at Windsor Castle with him. 
 He visited Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden, and 
 convinced himself that he had been wrong 
 in ever doubting his entire sincerity. He 
 cancelled a passage he had written in Fors 
 disparaging Mr. Gladstone's principles, and 
 inserted a note in the blank space to say 
 that the gap was a memorial of rash judg- 
 ment. He also formed a close friendship 
 with Mr. Gladstone's daughter Mary, now 
 the widowed Mrs. Drew. But things were
 
 192 Ruskin 
 
 going with him from bad to worse. He 
 felt the strain of his work, but could not 
 rest. He wrote a touching letter about his 
 sense of inadequacy and failure. It seems 
 strange that a man who was becoming one 
 of the foremost and most influential men 
 in England should feel thus; and no doubt 
 physical causes were largely responsible. 
 But all his practical enterprises seemed to 
 break down; and what he could neither 
 see nor measure was the steady growth of 
 his influence. He wrote: 
 
 My own feeling, now, is that everything 
 which has hitherto happened to me, and been 
 done by me, whether well or ill, has been fit- 
 ting me to take greater fortune more pru- 
 dently, and to do better work more thoroughly. 
 And just when I seem to be coming out of 
 school very sorry to have been such a fool- 
 ish boy, yet having taken a prize or two, ex- 
 pecting now to enter upon some more serious 
 business than cricket, I am dismissed by the 
 Master I hoped to serve, with a " That 's all 
 I want of you, sir." 
 
 He was working at a catalogue of Tur-
 
 A Study in Personality 193 
 
 ner's drawings, and at a number of Fors, 
 little guessing that it would be the last 
 he would write for seven dreary years ; and 
 he gave a very touching account of Turner's 
 last days, and of the sense of failure and 
 public indifference which embittered the 
 great painter's later years. He spoke of 
 Turner's youthful picture of Coniston, 
 veiled in morning mists; and went on to 
 tell of Turner's last prodigious efforts, and 
 of how his " health, and with it in great 
 degree his mind, failed suddenly, with a 
 snap of some vital cord." And then he 
 wrote the passage, the most beautiful and 
 pathetic which he ever penned: 
 
 . . . Morning breaks, as I write, along those 
 Coniston Fells, and the level mists, motionless 
 and grey beneath the rose of the moorlands, 
 veil the lower woods, and the sleeping village, 
 and the long lawns by the lake-shore. 
 
 Oh, that some one had but told me, in my 
 youth, when all my heart seemed to be set on 
 these colours and clouds, that appear for a 
 little while and then vanish away, how little 
 my love of them would serve me, when the 
 13
 
 194 Ruskin 
 
 silence of lawn and wood in the dews of morn- 
 ing should be completed; and all my thoughts 
 should be of those whom, by neither, I was to 
 meet more! 
 
 Then, as suddenly, his friends became 
 aware that in him too the strain and the 
 sorrow of his life had broken through the 
 bulwarks, and invaded the inmost fortress 
 of life and consciousness. His mind lost 
 its balance. It was hoped at first that it 
 was but a temporary affection, but it grew 
 worse day by day, and after a time of 
 horrible suspense to those about him, his 
 sudden and dangerous illness was an- 
 nounced. The chief feature of his state 
 was a continuous delirium, arising from 
 some obscure inflammation of the tissues of 
 the brain. Let me quote the beautiful and 
 tender words of one of his nearest friends, 
 Professor Collingwood, on the subject: 
 
 Let such troubles of the past be forgotten : 
 all that I now remember of many a weary 
 night and day is the vision of a great soul 
 in torment, and through purgatorial fires the
 
 A Study in Personality 195 
 
 ineffable tenderness of the real man emerging, 
 with his passionate appeal to justice and 
 baffled desire for truth. To those who could 
 not follow the wanderings of the wearied brain 
 it was nothing but a horrible or a grotesque 
 nightmare. Some, in those trials, learnt as 
 they could not otherwise have learnt to know 
 him, and to love him as never before. 
 
 The affliction took him quite unawares. 
 There had been definite premonitory symp- 
 toms. The only thing that might have 
 shown him where he was drifting was rapid 
 alternation of intense excitement, accom- 
 panied by vivid dreams and unnatural rest- 
 lessness, with periods of intense depression. 
 And here I will say a few words about 
 Ruskin's mental condition for the rest of 
 his life. He is often spoken of as having 
 been mad. That is not at all the case. 
 He had no fixed delusion, no insane 
 preoccupation. 
 
 He wrote, for instance, to Miss Gladstone 
 about one of his attacks: 
 
 I find it will be quite impossible for me to 
 come to Hawarden this autumn. I am very
 
 196 Ruskin 
 
 utterly sorry, and should only make you sorry 
 for me if I were to tell you the half of the 
 weaknesses and the worries which compel me 
 to stay at home, and forbid all talking. The 
 chief of all reasons being, however, that in my 
 present state of illness, nearly every word any- 
 body says, if I care for them, either grieves 
 or astonishes me to a degree which puts me 
 off my sleep, and off my work, and off my 
 meat. I am obliged to work at botany and 
 mineralogy, and to put cotton in my ears ; but 
 you know one can't pay visits while one 's 
 climbing that hill of the voices, even if some 
 sweet ones mingle in the murmur of them. 
 I 'm rather going down the hill than up just 
 now, it 's so slippery ; but I have n't turned 
 only slipped backwards. 
 
 Or again lie wrote, at a later date : 
 
 If a great illness like that is quite con- 
 quered, the return to the lovely world is well 
 worth having left it for the painful time; one 
 never knew what beauty was before (unless 
 in happy love which I had about two hours 
 and three-quarters of once in my life). I am 
 really better now than for some years back, 
 able every day for a little work, not fast, but 
 very slow (second Praet. is n't out yet, I 'm 
 just at work on the eleventh chapter), and
 
 A Study in Personality 197 
 
 able to take more pleasure in things than 
 lately. 
 
 For a good many years after this first 
 attack of derangement and delirium, he had 
 similar attacks, but never one so bad. They 
 were generally heralded by the same excite- 
 ment and the same depression; but when 
 they were over, he returned rapidly and 
 securely to his ordinary health; and in- 
 deed, as Professor Collingwood wrote, they 
 passed over him like storm-clouds leaving 
 a clear sky. Indeed he was in many ways 
 happier and more tranquil in the intervals 
 than he had been before. He knew per- 
 fectly well what had happened to him, that 
 he had been, as it is called, out of his mind. 
 But he spoke of it frankly and even humor- 
 ously, and described his insane fancies. He 
 never showed any morbidity about it, nor 
 did it in any way affect his relation to his 
 own circle or to his outside friends. It 
 just came and went as other illness might 
 come and pass away. He had fallen ill in 
 February. By May he was at work again.
 
 198 Ruskin 
 
 His friends, anxious to show their sympathy 
 and esteem, bought Turner's great picture 
 of the Spliigen for 1000 guineas, and gave 
 it him, to his great delight. 
 
 But there was a singular and notorious 
 adventure just ahead of him. He had taken 
 occasion in a number of Fors to dismiss the 
 works of Mr. Whistler with a contemptuous 
 paragraph. 
 
 I cannot here go into the main question. 
 There can be no doubt that Whistler was 
 in his way a very great artist, though a 
 very unequal one. Some of his portraits 
 are beyond praise. But it may be ques- 
 tioned whether his brilliant and impression- 
 ist experiments in colour in the pictures 
 such as the Nocturnes, and in particular 
 the Nocturne in Blue and Silver of old 
 Battersea Bridge, which was produced in 
 court, can be taken quite seriously. But 
 art is one of those things about which it 
 is impossible to argue. The pictures are
 
 A Study in Personality 199 
 
 beautiful in the eyes of trained critics, and 
 have a mysterious suggestiveness. Their 
 permanence cannot be foretold. The point 
 is that no tribunal can lay down whether 
 a particular picture is great and good art, 
 because so much depends upon its suggest- 
 ive effect. One might as well have a law- 
 suit about a lyric of Tennyson's. On the 
 other hand, in so far as the artist is a 
 tradesman, he may be affected by a damag- 
 ing statement of a critic, and deprived of 
 his means of livelihood. 
 
 Ruskin it seems, before his illness, anti- 
 cipated with unconcealed delight the pro- 
 spect of the trial. He wrote or said to Lady 
 Burne-Jones: " It's mere nuts and nectar 
 to me, the notion of having to answer for 
 myself in court, and the whole thing will 
 enable me to assert some principles of art 
 economy which I 've never got into the 
 public's head by writing; but may get sent 
 all over the world vividly -in a newspaper 
 report or two." The words complained of 
 were these. Kuskin had written that pic-
 
 20o Ruskin 
 
 tures ought not to have been admitted to 
 the Grosvenor Gallery in which the ill- 
 educated conceit of the artist so nearly ap- 
 proaches the aspect of wilful imposture. " I 
 have seen and heard much of cockney im- 
 pudence before now, but never expected to 
 hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas 
 for flinging a pot of paint in the public's 
 face." Euskin was too ill to be present at 
 the trial, but Whistler gave his evidence 
 with his unparalleled assurance and hu- 
 mour. He admitted that he had " knocked 
 off" a Nocturne in two days. The At- 
 torney-General said : " The labour of two 
 days, then, is that for which you ask two 
 hundred guineas? " " No," said Whistler, 
 " I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime." 
 
 Burne-Jones himself gave memorable evi- 
 dence. Bowen asked him if he thought one 
 of the Nocturnes a work of Art. 
 
 Burne-Jones. "No, I cannot say that it 
 is. It is only one of a thousand failures 
 that artists have made in their efforts to 
 paint night."
 
 A Study in Personality 201 
 
 Boiccn. " Is that picture in your judg- 
 ment worth two hundred guineas? " 
 
 Burne-Joncs. " No, I cannot say that it 
 is, seeing how much careful work men do 
 for much less. Mr. Whistler gave infinite 
 promise at first, which he has not since 
 justified. I think he has evaded the great 
 difficulty of painting, and has not tested 
 his powers by carrying it out . . . the 
 danger is this, that if unfinished pictures 
 become common, we shall arrive at a stage 
 of mere manufacture, and the art of the 
 country will be degraded." 
 
 Of old Battersea Bridge the Judge (Hud- 
 dleston ) said : " Are those figures on the 
 top intended for people? " 
 
 Whistler. " They are just what you 
 like." 
 
 Judge. " That is a barge beneath? " 
 
 Whistler. " Yes, I am very much flat- 
 tered at your seeing that." 
 
 The whole trial was merely farcical, and 
 the jury gave a verdict in Whistler's favour, 
 with damages one farthing. It is hard to
 
 202 Ruskin 
 
 see what else they could do but enter into 
 the joke. Both sides had to pay their own 
 costs, and Kuskin's friends subscribed to 
 pay his, which came to 385. Whistler 
 wrote to his solicitor to suggest that his 
 own supporters should do the same, add- 
 ing, " in the event of a subscription, I 
 would willingly contribute my own mite." 
 They were not subscribed for, and Whistler 
 went through the bankruptcy court. It is 
 said that he wore the farthing on his watch- 
 chain till the end of his life. 
 
 It is not a very dignified episode; and 
 nothing can really justify the tone of arro- 
 gant and malicious contempt which Ruskin 
 had used. It was a flash of his perverse 
 and irritable dogmatism. He had cracked 
 the literary whip so long and so loud, and 
 so many whips had been cracked at him- 
 self, that he had forgotten how much such 
 flourishes might hurt. 
 
 But further than that, one cannot acquit 
 Ruskin in the matter of having exhibited 
 an evil and a tyrannical temper. He was
 
 A Study in Personality 203 
 
 a man of very great distinction, and he 
 held a supreme and unassailed position in 
 the world of art. Single-handed he had 
 accomplished a great revolution; he had, 
 like Mahomet, broken the old idols of the 
 land, and he had established a new set of 
 idols in their place. He must have known 
 that his words would carry immense weight. 
 If he had made the position of the Pre- 
 Raphaelites secure, he ought to have re- 
 flected that he could do much to unmake 
 the position of a single artist. And then 
 the criticism was what the French call 
 saugrenu it was stupid, and it was ex- 
 pressed brutally and vindictively, consider- 
 ing the artists whom he had ignored and 
 the strange medley of painters whom he 
 had praised; considering too that there 
 were great tracts of art of which he knew 
 nothing, and that his life had been spent 
 in discovering painters of unrecognised 
 merit, the whole judgment was childish and 
 petulant. At this very time he was exalt- 
 ing to the skies Miss Kate Greenaway, an
 
 204 Ruskin 
 
 artist who had no particular technical dis- 
 tinction, but only a delightful knack of 
 catching the charm of childhood. 
 
 It may be urged in excuse that he was 
 at this time more conscious of failure than 
 of success; that he was in a state of ex- 
 asperated indignation against the prejudice 
 and the indifference of the world about 
 causes which he had passionately at heart. 
 And then too he loathed the cynical levity, 
 the touch of the mountebank which there 
 undoubtedly was about Whistler. He could 
 not believe that any great art could pro- 
 ceed from such a spirit. He was bound 
 indeed by his own principles to believe and 
 maintain this, though he had never taken 
 the trouble to find out that those principles 
 were not true. He could not see that there 
 might co-exist in a character like Whist- 
 ler's a great seriousness about art and a 
 superficial irony about life. He felt with 
 Burne-Jones that the point at issue was 
 moral rather than artistic, and the facile 
 impressiveness, the charming trickery of
 
 A Study in Personality 205 
 
 Whistler's art seemed to him wicked, per- 
 nicious, and degrading. But the episode 
 is intensely significant, because it tears 
 away the veil of courtesy and humour and 
 chivalry, the personal appeal which made 
 Ruskin's attitude to human beings so touch- 
 ing and so fascinating, and reveals the dog- 
 matic and self-righteous spirit which was 
 the root of all his troubles, and which I 
 personally believe was the reason why he 
 needed so heavy and persistent a chasten- 
 ing. The spirit of dogmatism, of intellect- 
 ual and spiritual pride, is, I make no 
 doubt, the most deadly and dangerous 
 quality in the world. The old allegory of 
 the fall of Satan and the rebel angels is 
 a vehicle of the sternest and hardest truth, 
 because it shows what is or may be the 
 last and deepest fault of the purest and 
 most exalted spirit. Euskin was by nature 
 a very noble and guileless character. His 
 intellectual energy saved him from all 
 grosser sins; but he had, and it would be 
 idle to conceal it, this one intolerable fault,
 
 206 Ruskin 
 
 which was hidden from him by the gener- 
 osity and fineness of his enthusiasms. He 
 knew he was right; and though this gave 
 much of what he said a great intensity and 
 driving force, because there are so many 
 natures in the world who are more desirous 
 of being commanded than of being per- 
 suaded, yet when it over-brimmed the cup, 
 it foamed itself away in rash and mistaken 
 judgments, which stained and encumbered 
 his message and left him weak and help- 
 less. I look upon Buskin's whole life as 
 the exorcising and casting out of that 
 demon. If, as I hold, the character, the 
 individuality, survives alike the memory 
 and the mortal frame and the frailer 
 elements, then one can see the need of 
 this sad process of chastening and cor- 
 recting; and not otherwise. No faith 
 can have vitality or hope which does 
 not hold that we are somehow the better 
 for our failures and our falls, however 
 much they may have devastated our life 
 and influence, with whatever shame and
 
 A Study in Personality 207 
 
 self-reproach they may have wasted our 
 days. 
 
 Few things are more unsatisfactory than 
 descriptions of places one has not seen. A 
 dozen scratches with a pen on a piece of 
 paper would give you a better idea of 
 Brantwood than a dozen elaborate para- 
 graphs. That is a humiliating fact for a 
 writer, and I have often wondered why it 
 is that words are so vague and powerless. 
 What is worse still, one is generally dis- 
 appointed in the appearance of a place of 
 which one has read an elaborate description. 
 I am in hopes that some of you may some 
 day take a pious pilgrimage to Brantwood, 
 and it is such a beautiful place that I am 
 riot much afraid that you will be disap- 
 pointed. You must imagine a long and 
 rather narrow lake the lake of Coniston 
 it looks on the map like an elongated 
 sausage with low hills on either side. 
 Suppose yourself going up the lake from
 
 208 Ruskin 
 
 the rather dreary and undulating country 
 that lies between its southern end and the 
 sea. About two miles from the upper end 
 we will pause. At the head of the water 
 lie the steep woods of larch and pine, of 
 Monk Coniston; to the left is a little scat- 
 tered village of stone or white rough-cast 
 houses terraced up the slope. Above them 
 rises the great mountain called the Old 
 Man, and the ragged long-backed height of 
 Wetherlam, huge green hills, with rolling 
 outlines, and outcrops of rock, their dark 
 hollows and quiet folds full, as I have often 
 seen them, of a soft golden haze. 
 
 On the right, under a long line of heath- 
 ery fells, their skirts covered with larch- 
 woods and oak-copses, about a hundred feet 
 above the lake, the big irregular white 
 house of Brantwood poises on the slope, 
 with green meadows below it to the water's 
 edge, commanding a wide view down the 
 lake and across to the Old Man. The house 
 lies embosomed in the thickets, among steep- 
 hanging close-grown copses, with long stems
 
 A Study in Personality 209 
 
 intertwined, and mossy grass under foot, 
 rich in spring with daffodils and hyacinths. 
 There are little climbing paths everywhere; 
 many dashing streams descend from the 
 moorland in pools and water-breaks, among 
 moss-grown stones, and the heathery bluffs 
 above are fenced from the wood by high 
 stone walls. 
 
 The house was hardly more than a cot- 
 tage when Mr. Kuskin first bought it, a 
 damp and ramshackle little place belonging 
 to Linton the engraver. He bought it for 
 1500, without even going to see it, and 
 it cost him several thousand pounds to 
 make it comfortable. It stands on a plat- 
 form partly hollowed out of the rock be- 
 hind; and the rooms which Mr. Euskin 
 added tower up behind the old low front. 
 So steep is the fall of the ground that the 
 big studio at the back of the house, four 
 storeys up, has a door which opens on the 
 wood above. The whole place has always 
 to me a half-Italian air about it, like a 
 
 villa among the chestnut woods of the 
 
 14
 
 210 Ruskin 
 
 Apennines. You approach it by a steep 
 little carriage drive, embowered in rhodo- 
 dendrons. As the house extended itself 
 backwards into the hill, it swallowed up 
 the ground space where a carriage could 
 turn; and so by an ingenious arrangement 
 the drive passes under the back of the house 
 itself, through a great stone-arched pas- 
 sage, very Italian in plan. It is all plain 
 rough-cast, with square windows, and 
 slated with thick blue country slate. The 
 comfort of it is that there is no attempt 
 whatever at style or taste; it is a house to 
 live in, not to look at. The only signs of 
 Gothic about it are a rather cockneyfled 
 octagonal turret at one corner, built to se- 
 cure a wide view over the lake, and a row 
 of little Gothic windows, with red stone 
 facings, in the dining-room added by Mr. 
 Ruskin. It has all the pleasing irregu- 
 larity of a big house which has grown out 
 of a small one, full of endless passages 
 and steep little staircases. When I last 
 visited it, Mrs. Severn, to whom it now
 
 A Study in Personality 211 
 
 belongs, kindly allowed me to explore the 
 whole domain, and I was taken round by 
 Baxter, Ruskin's valet, a cheerful, bald, 
 ruddy Irishman, who had the rare art of 
 showing me what I wanted to see without 
 appearing ever to have taken a visitor 
 round before. 
 
 The whole place is extraordinarily simple 
 and comfortable; only gradually does one 
 realise the amazing splendour and rarity 
 of the pictures which adorn the house. It 
 is kept almost exactly as it was when Rus- 
 kin died ten years ago, and I suppose that 
 the pictures must be worth over a hundred 
 thousand pounds. I cannot say what an 
 impression of what the Romans called 
 pietas, reverential affection and tenderness, 
 it gives to see the place preserved with 
 such loving care. To put it as plainly as 
 I can, the locking-up of so valuable a treas- 
 ure of art, which could be so easily dis- 
 persed, in so simple and unquestioning a 
 spirit, merely in order to leave the shrine 
 of a great man's life untouched, is an
 
 212 Ruskin 
 
 evidence of a loyalty as rare as it is 
 noble. 
 
 Let me give you two instances. The din- 
 ing-room contains a great Titian, a Tinto- 
 retto, a portrait of Raffaelle, probably 
 painted by himself, a portrait of Reynolds 
 as a boy, by himself, a portrait of Turner 
 as a boy, by himself. 
 
 But more moving still is the sight of 
 Ruskin's bedroom, just as it was. A tiny 
 room, with one window, an ugly grey paper, 
 drugget on the floor; a heavy clumsy ma- 
 hogany bed and old-fashioned mahogany 
 furniture; a big book-shelf of w r ell-used 
 readable books, poetry, novels, and bio- 
 graphies ; and on the walls, in very ordinary 
 frames, hung close together, some twenty 
 of the most magnificent Turner water- 
 colours in the world and among them a 
 little dreary water-colour painting by old 
 Mr. Ruskin, of Conway Castle, about which 
 his father used to tell Ruskin a story every 
 morning when he used as a little boy to come 
 in before breakfast to watch papa shaving.
 
 A Study in Personality 213 
 
 That is a moving place, that little room, 
 haunted, alas, with very heavy and shadowy 
 fears and sorrows, sacred if any room is 
 sacred, not to be visited with light-hearted 
 curiosity, but with the reverence due to 
 the sufferings of a noble spirit. When Mrs. 
 Severn first took me there, some years ago, 
 her kind eyes filled suddenly with tears 
 which she did not even try to dissemble, 
 and I am not ashamed to say that I was 
 no less moved, for I knew what her thoughts 
 must be. 
 
 Down below is the little low-ceiled study, 
 where Euskin worked, sitting at a round 
 table in the bow that looks out upon the 
 lake and the mountains. It was there that 
 he penned those intensely pathetic words 
 that I have quoted, the last he wrote before 
 he sank into the long seven years' silence. 
 
 The room itself has the same air of com- 
 fort, almost bourgeois cosiness, which is so 
 strong a note of the house. The mahogany 
 chairs are upholstered in a vivid emerald 
 green; there is a writing-table, which used
 
 214 Ruskin 
 
 every noon to be covered with letters set 
 out to dry, for Ruskin used no blotting- 
 paper. There are great presses for sketches 
 and manuscripts and minerals; endless pic- 
 tures of his own, in stacks: it is evidently 
 the room of a very hard-working and in- 
 dustrious man, who needed to refer to many 
 papers, and to have them in perfect order 
 close at hand. But anything more wholly 
 unsesthetic, more unlike the perverted idea 
 of Kuskin, cannot be conceived; domestic 
 peace and convenient simplicity are the 
 notes of the place. As the old valet said 
 to me, showing me a great mass of sketches 
 and notes, filling a pile of cardboard boxes, 
 made for the Stones of Venice " Yes, he 
 was the most industrious man I ever saw 
 in my life, was the Professor ! " 
 
 There are three pictures in the house 
 which I saw with great emotion. One was 
 a fine water-colour of Kuskin by Richmond, 
 when he was twenty-eight. It represents 
 him as a slim and graceful man, in white 
 duck trousers strapped beneath elegant
 
 A Study in Personality 215 
 
 boots, leaning forward as lie sits, with a 
 crayon in his hand. His wavy hair, his 
 bright complexion, his blue eyes have an 
 air of combined sweetness and confidence 
 which is very engaging; you feel in the 
 presence of a charming, buoyant, and very 
 positive young man, full of enjoyment and 
 delight, and quite capable of telling all the 
 world what to enjoy and admire. 
 
 Then there is a little sketch, by himself, 
 of himself at the age of fifty the same 
 face, a little dimmed and sharpened by life, 
 but with an air of vitality and alertness, 
 though possibly a touch of primness and 
 downrightness about it. 
 
 Then there is the grand picture of him 
 not long before the end, by Mr. Severn. 
 The hair is shot with silver, and he has 
 a long flowing white beard. The beard 
 greatly improved the solemnity and bene- 
 volence of his look. His mouth had been 
 injured by the bite of a dog when he was 
 a child, and had always a somewhat pugna- 
 cious expression.
 
 216 Ruskin 
 
 As Burne- Jones once wrote: 
 
 The hair that he has grown over his mouth 
 hides that often angry feature, and his eyes 
 look gentle and invite the unwary, who could 
 never guess the dragon that lurks in the bush 
 below. 
 
 But Kuskin had no illusions about his 
 own appearance. He wrote to M. Chesneau 
 in 1883: 
 
 Alas, those photographs you read so subtly 
 are not worth your pains. The Barbe de 
 Fleuve only came because I was too ill to shave ; 
 and all the rest of the face is saddened and 
 weakened by anger, disappointment, and vari- 
 ous forms of luxury and laziness. . . . Car- 
 peaux's would have been beautiful, had he 
 been fortunate in his youth; mine would have 
 been stronger had I been unfortunate in good 
 time! 
 
 The eyes of the portrait are still blue and 
 smiling, and the complexion has still that 
 porcelain clearness which comes of tem- 
 perate living and pure thoughts. But such 
 a look of patience and sadness in the wide-
 
 A Study in Personality 217 
 
 open eyes and great drooping eyebrows! 
 He sits sunk down in a chair, looking up 
 and out, as though there was indeed a dawn 
 of peace behind the cloud, of which he saw 
 the first faint radiance. 
 
 Yet it would be a great mistake to connect 
 only mournful or tragic memories w T ith 
 Brantwood. It was indeed, as Carlyle said 
 of Fox How, Dr. Arnold's house not many 
 miles from Coniston, " a temple of indus- 
 trious peace." Sorrowful and in a sense 
 embittered as the drift of Ruskin's thought 
 was, he had a great power of recuperation 
 and of immersing himself in his work. He 
 was probably happier than he knew; and 
 it is hardly possible to have a more beauti- 
 ful picture of happy and serious domestic 
 life than that lived by the circle at Brant- 
 wood. His cousin Joanna and her husband, 
 Arthur Severn, lived with him. The latter 
 is an accomplished artist and a man of great 
 social charm, while Mrs. Severn is, as I 
 have said, one of the people who, by rea- 
 son of extraordinary unselfishness, great
 
 2i8 Ruskin 
 
 practical power, devoted affection, and hu- 
 morous perception, radiate a kind of happi- 
 ness about them; their children were born 
 and grew up at Brantwood, so that Ruskin 
 had all the interests and affections of an 
 almost patriarchal circle. Then there were 
 great friends close at hand. The Miss 
 Beevers, who lived at the head of the Lake, 
 were clever, simple-minded, active, and sym- 
 pathetic women, whose relations with Mr. 
 Ruskin were sisterly rather than neigh- 
 bourly. Some of his most beautiful and 
 intimate letters were written to them. 
 Then the whole establishment was of a 
 tribal type the servants were as much 
 friends as servants; and Ruskin by his per- 
 sonal charm had a way of establishing 
 friendly relations with simple people. He 
 would visit the village school to talk to 
 the children, and his letters are full of 
 stories of the interests and sayings of the 
 girls, rather perhaps than of the boys, of 
 the farmers and herdsmen in the fells. As 
 life went on he became more tranquil but
 
 A Study in Personality 219 
 
 he had always lived rather a dual life, the 
 life of lonely reverie and a social life 
 as well, in which he just put aside his pri- 
 vate cares and displayed all his incompar- 
 able variety and charm of talk. He was 
 very fond of showing his treasures to in- 
 terested listeners; and the discursiveness 
 of mind which made his later public writ- 
 ings so hard to follow was an added charm 
 in his conversation. The people who came 
 in a solemn mood to Brantwood, as if they 
 were going to sit at the feet of a prophet 
 like Elijah in a cleft of the rocks, had the 
 nonsense taken very quickly out of them 
 at finding a courteous English gentleman 
 in the middle of a very cheerful family cir- 
 cle, and were almost scandalised when the 
 Professor, as he was called, instead of in- 
 dulging in scathing diatribes on the luxury 
 and selfishness of the age, spent the even- 
 ing in joining with more energy than 
 skill in the chorus of a nigger melody, or 
 clapping his hands with convulsions of 
 laughter at some topical comic song. A
 
 22O Ruskin 
 
 pompous disciple who called at Brantwood 
 and went away appalled at his hero's levity, 
 said sorrowfully afterwards to his friends: 
 " It was a great disappointment to find that 
 he is no true Ruskinian." One little tra- 
 dition which I heard on the spot is so 
 amusing that I cannot refrain from repeat- 
 ing it here. It was on the occasion of one 
 of his later birthdays, when a large deputa- 
 tion of his admirers, without giving any 
 notice of their intention, appeared at the 
 front door of Brantwood, sang a kind of 
 serenade to their idol, and then requested 
 to see him. Mr. Ruskin was unwell, and 
 not in a very benevolent mood. However, 
 he appeared, and the solemn disciple who 
 had charge of the proceedings came for- 
 ward, and in language which he believed 
 to be appropriate to the taste of the 
 prophet, said, " Master, was not that a right 
 jocund strain?" Mr. Ruskin replied: "I 
 
 x 
 
 am afraid I do not know anything about 
 
 / 
 
 that, and I am sure I am very much obliged 
 to you; but I have a particular desire to
 
 A Study in Personality 221 
 
 be left alone, and so I will wish you a 
 very good morning." 
 
 It has been sometimes alleged with ex- 
 traordinary absurdity that Ruskin was a 
 poseur. He had of course just as much 
 of the quality as is necessary for a man 
 whose work is that of a writer and lec- 
 turer and controversialist. He liked to ex- 
 press his opinion, and he had no objection 
 to expressing it in public. If you hold very 
 strong views on many matters of public 
 concern, and if you think it important that 
 other people should adopt your views, you 
 naturally wish to express them as effect- 
 ively as possible, and you use the arts 
 which all public performers must con- 
 descend to. But Mr. Ruskin never did con- 
 descend to use public arts, except the arts 
 of the accomplished pugilist. He was a 
 hard hitter of amazing dexterity. But he 
 did not hold or express his opinions because 
 he wished to enhance his own impressive- 
 ness or his own fame. Indeed, for years 
 and years he risked a very secure fame for
 
 222 Ruskin 
 
 the sake of unpopular causes and vision- 
 ary schemes; and he had a very strong 
 sense of his claim to independence, and 
 his right to live his life on his own lines. 
 
 And the life he loved was the kind of 
 life he lived at Brantwood simple, com- 
 fortable, and sociable. He saw a great 
 number of visitors, and he was not in the 
 least troubled by inconvenient shyness. 
 There was a perpetual succession of guests 
 of every kind; and his work over it was 
 all done as a rule by the time of the mid- 
 day meal he spent the rest of the day in 
 simple domestic recreations. He was fond 
 of woodmanship. His soft hat, his hedging- 
 gloves, and his chopper were very charac- 
 teristic signs of his presence, as they lay 
 on the hall table. There was a carpentering 
 woodshop, for framing and modelling; a 
 little fleet of boats lay in the miniature 
 harbour, the pier of which was built by 
 the young men who assisted him in trans- 
 lating Xenophon. There were innumerable 
 pet animals all about. Geological studies
 
 A Study in Personality 223 
 
 were always proceeding. There were ex- 
 periments going on on the hill for reclaim- 
 ing waste land; there were all sorts of wells 
 and water-courses contrived in the copse for 
 the moorland streams: heather and fern 
 were rooted up, and the scanty soil pre- 
 pared for a crop of oats, with the result 
 that in the next heavy rains not only were 
 the oats carried away, but the very field 
 itself, leaving nothing but the bare stone 
 hill behind. 
 
 And at home he was always willing to 
 read aloud, to play chess, to talk. Let me 
 add another little anecdote. There came 
 one day a distinguished American to stay 
 at Brantwood. To the surprise of the party 
 he became very ill at ease at dinner, and 
 appeared to be labouring under grave dis- 
 tress of mind; but as the evening went on 
 he recovered his spirits. However, the 
 thing had been so marked that Mrs. Severn, 
 with simple courtesy, asked him if any- 
 thing had occurred to vex him. He smiled 
 rather awkwardly, and said : " Yes, I was
 
 224 Ruskin 
 
 distressed at dinner to hear, as I thought, 
 our venerable host spoken of before his 
 face as * the cuss/ which is an undignified 
 and rather disagreeable term of our own." 
 The fact was that Ruskin was in his own 
 circle often called by the old abbreviation 
 of the word cousin " the coz," which need 
 hardly have disturbed the sensibilities of 
 his guest. 
 
 4 
 
 And now I shall ask your leave to give 
 a brief account of my one deeply treasured 
 sight of Kuskin. I was a boy at Eton, near 
 the top of the school. Everything was done 
 in a curiously independent fashion at Eton 
 in those days. I was President of a Liter- 
 ary Society which held meetings; but in- 
 stead of our lectures being arranged by 
 the authorities, the matter was left wholly 
 to ourselves. We invited our lecturers, 
 and left them, with the cheerful indifference 
 of youth, to shift wholly for themselves. 
 Sometimes we quartered them on a friendly
 
 A Study in Personality 225 
 
 master, sometimes we left them to provide 
 their own dinner and bed. On taking office 
 I wrote to half-a-dozen of the most eminent 
 men in England, requesting them to come 
 down and lecture to us. They must have 
 thought it very odd to be invited by a 
 schoolboy, but perhaps they did not wholly 
 dislike it. At any rate they most of them 
 accepted. Ruskin was a mere name to me 
 in those days. I had perhaps turned over 
 a volume or two of his works, and I ex- 
 pect thought them of little merit. Any- 
 how, he wrote to say he would come, and 
 that he would lecture on Amiens. And 
 then I think I had half-a-dozen of his let- 
 ters, very friendly and charming, sending 
 packets of drawings and plans which were 
 to be put in the library to be looked at 
 beforehand. I did not put them in the 
 library, and I doubt if I even acknow- 
 ledged the letters. We used to manage or 
 mismanage the whole affair, fill the 
 library with chairs, which were the pro- 
 perty of the Society, and issue the tickets. 
 
 IS
 
 226 Ruskin 
 
 I became aware that the proceedings 
 were going to be of some importance, 
 from the extreme anxiety on the part of 
 masters and masters' wives to get tickets. 
 'And I had several invitations transmitted 
 to me to be sent on to Mr. Kuskin, for 
 him to dine and sleep one in particular 
 from the Headmaster. These I sent on to 
 him, but he declined them all. He said lie 
 would drive over in the course of the even- 
 ing, and must go away again when the 
 lecture was over; and that he would like 
 a quiet room to sit in for a short rest be- 
 fore the lecture; but that he was ill, and 
 could not bear the strain of society. I ap- 
 pealed to the Headmaster; he arranged to 
 have a fire in a room called Chambers, in 
 College, where Master's meetings were held, 
 and where he interviewed offenders; and he 
 said he would send in a cup of coffee for 
 Ruskin. I thought no more of the matter. 
 About an hour before the meeting, I got 
 a message from the Matron to the effect 
 that a gentleman wished to see me. I went
 
 A Study in Personality 227 
 
 down, and there standing in the Matron's 
 room was the great man himself. I can 
 see him as if it were yesterday. He was 
 slim in form, but much bowed. He was 
 clean-shaven then, and wore his hair rather 
 long; his whole dress was very old- 
 fashioned to my eyes. He was dressed in 
 evening clothes, and I remember his low- 
 cut waistcoat, his high-collared coat, the 
 long linen cuffs that came half over his 
 hands, his white gloves. He had with him 
 bundles of papers, and I remember the 
 piercing look of his eyes. He looked worn 
 and melancholy he was on the verge of a 
 bad illness but his manner was delight- 
 fully courteous and natural. I took him 
 to Chambers, and he asked me to sit down 
 for a few minutes and talk. He seated 
 himself in the Headmaster's chair with his 
 elbow's on the arms, sipped his coffee, and 
 asked me some questions. He was vexed, 
 I remember, to find that I had not put his 
 pictures in the library, and expressed his 
 vexation rather pettishly; but he talked on
 
 228 Ruskin 
 
 very gently and kindly, asked me about tlie 
 Society and about the books we read and 
 I remember the pleasure which he ex- 
 pressed when he found I had read the whole 
 of Walter Scott ; then he said suddenly that 
 he must rest. It appeared to me rather an 
 affectation at the time. I did not know the 
 meaning of the word tired, except in con- 
 nection with football, and imagined older 
 people to be impervious to all such weak- 
 nesses. I can see the look of him as I left 
 the room, with his face bowed down over 
 his hand. Then I came back to fetch 
 him just before the lecture; and I shall 
 never forget the clear and beautiful tones 
 of his expressive voice, and the first lovely 
 paragraph which now stands at the begin- 
 ning of one of his books. The lecture was 
 quite informal. Indeed, for the only time 
 in his life, he had forgotten to bring his 
 MS. Sometimes he read a few words, 
 sometimes he talked; and he grew animated 
 every now and then, though at first he had 
 seemed weary and ill at ease. At the end
 
 A Study in Personality 229 
 
 he said a few words in reply to a vote 
 of thanks, shook hands with a few friends, 
 and gave me a little sign with his head. I 
 walked out with him. There was a closed 
 carriage at the door. He asked me to see 
 that the papers were put in the library for 
 reference, said a very cordial good-bye, and 
 drove quickly away.
 
 VI 
 
 BY 1881 Ruskin had apparently recovered 
 his health. Then he had another brain at- 
 tack, but emerged with renewed vigour, and 
 found abundance of new things to say. 
 
 " The moment I got your letter to-day," 
 he wrote to an old friend, " recommending 
 me not to write books ... I took out the 
 last proof of Proserpina and worked for 
 an hour and a half on it; and have been 
 translating some St. Benedict material 
 since, with much comfort and sense of get- 
 ting as I said head to sea again." He 
 took a long tour abroad, and finally was 
 able to resume his Professorship. Sir W. 
 B. Richmond retired in his favour. The 
 result was a more extraordinary concourse 
 230
 
 A Study in Personality 231 
 
 of listeners than ever. He lectured on the 
 Art of England. But though his lectures 
 contained some wonderful criticism, and 
 some beautiful eloquence there is a splen- 
 did and well-known passage on the art of 
 Rossetti yet he seemed to have lost the 
 power of connected thought; he discon- 
 certed his hearers too by producing the 
 sketches of amateur artists, and declaring 
 that no hand like them had been put to 
 paper since Lippi and Leonardo. At a lec- 
 ture, for instance, given in Kensington he 
 said : " I have never until to-day dared 
 to call my friends and my neighbours to- 
 gether to rejoice with me over my recov- 
 ered good or rekindled hope. Both in fear 
 and much thankfulness I have done so now ; 
 yet not to tell you of any poor little piece 
 of upgathered silver of my own, but to 
 show you the fine gold which has been 
 strangely trusted to me, and which before 
 was a treasure hid in a mountain field in 
 Tuscany." This majestic encomium was 
 simply to introduce some pen-and-ink draw-
 
 232 Ruskin 
 
 ings by a gifted amateur, Miss Alexander, 
 authoress of the Roadside Songs of Tuscany. 
 But his excitability was after this date 
 a dangerous and trying symptom of his 
 condition. A salient instance is his reply 
 to a question addressed to him by the 
 Liberal party at Glasgow University, when 
 he was asked in 1880 to stand for the Lord 
 Rectorship. He was asked the plain ques- 
 tion whether he was a supporter of Lord 
 Beaconsfield or Mr. Gladstone. He replied : 
 
 What, in the devil's name, have you to do 
 with either Mr. D'Israeli or Mr. Gladstone? 
 You are students at the University, and have 
 no more business with politics than you have 
 with rat-catching. Had you ever read ten 
 words of mine with understanding, you would 
 have known that I care no more either for 
 Mr. D'Israeli or Mr. Gladstone than for two 
 old bagpipes with the drones going by steam, 
 but that I hate all Liberalism as I do Beelze- 
 bub, and that, with Carlyle, I stand, we two 
 alone now in England, for God and the Queen. 
 
 And I may here perhaps add the famous 
 letter which he once wrote in reply to a
 
 A Study in Personality 233 
 
 request that he would subscribe to pay off 
 a debt on a chapel at Richmond : 
 
 SIR,, I am scornfully amused at your appeal 
 to me, of all people in the world the precisely 
 least likely to give you a farthing! My first 
 word to all men and boys who care to hear 
 me is : " Don't get into debt. Starve and go 
 to heaven but don't borrow. Try first beg- 
 ging, I don't mind, if it's really needful, 
 stealing! But don't buy things you can't pay 
 for!" 
 
 And of all manner of debtors, pious people 
 building churches they can't pay for are the 
 most detestable nonsense to me. Can't you 
 preach and pray behind the hedges or in a 
 sandpit or a coal-hole first? 
 
 And of all manner of churches thus idiotic- 
 ally built, iron churches are the damnablest 
 to me. 
 
 And of all the sects of believers in any 
 ruling spirit Hindoos, Turks, Feather Idola- 
 ters, and Mumbo Jumbo, Log and Fire wor- 
 shippers who want churches, your modern 
 English Evangelical sect is the most absurd, 
 and entirely objectionable and unendurable to 
 me! All which they might very easily have 
 found out from my books any other sort of 
 sect would! before bothering me to write it 
 to them.
 
 234 Ruskin 
 
 Ever, nevertheless, arid in all this saying, 
 your faithful servant, 
 
 JOHN ROSKIN. 
 
 But he could not understand why his 
 vehemence should be resented, or ridiculed 
 " the moment I have to scold people they 
 say I am crazy," he said pathetically. The 
 end of his public life was not far off. He 
 struggled through his Oxford lectures, and 
 was prevailed upon to give some readings 
 of his previous works in the place of three 
 rancorous and rambling discourses which 
 he had prepared. He continued to work 
 feverishly and unwisely, taking up one 
 thing after another and dropping them in 
 turn. A vote was passed at Oxford to en- 
 dow a physiological laboratory, and vivi- 
 section ; he resigned his Professorship at 
 once, and left Oxford for ever. He was 
 persuaded to begin his autobiography, to 
 put together scattered fragments of early 
 reminiscences which had appeared in Fors, 
 and this for a time restored him to tran- 
 quillity. The result is, as I have said, one
 
 A Study in Personality 235 
 
 of the most beautiful books lie ever wrote, 
 PrcBterita, in which, apart from all con- 
 troversy and schemes of reform, he traced 
 in limpid and delicious sentences the memo- 
 ries of his childhood. The stream had 
 run clear at last, and the book must stand 
 for ever as one of the finest monuments 
 of tender reminiscence with the dew of the 
 morning and of the evening upon it. And 
 he showed too in his book an art so per- 
 fect as to be absolutely oblivious of itself, 
 issuing in what seems an ingenuous ecstasy 
 of pure presentment. 
 
 But he was not able to finish it; he had 
 planned out the whole book. He went down 
 to Seascale and tried to work. " But now 
 he seemed," says Professor Collingwood, 
 " lost among the papers scattered on his 
 table; he could not fix his mind upon them 
 and turned from one subject to another in 
 despair, and yet patient and kindly to those 
 with him whose help he could no longer 
 use, and who dared not show though he 
 could not but guess it how heart-breaking
 
 236 Ruskin 
 
 it was." So he put it all aside, and wrote 
 one last chapter to record the truest com- 
 panionship of his life, " Joanna's Care." 
 
 The clouds swept down on him again. 
 And at last he saw that his work was done. 
 He was seventy, and he had more volumes 
 to his credit than any living English writer. 
 He determined to wait for the end, little 
 guessing how long that waiting would be; 
 he steadily refused every kind of work or 
 mental exertion, and was rewarded for it 
 by a tranquillity of life and spirit such as 
 he had never before enjoyed. He attended 
 to a little business, dictated a few letters, 
 and even allowed his early poems to be re- 
 printed. He had now given away the whole 
 of his capital, and his only income was 
 from his books, but that was a large one, 
 and enabled him to live as he wished, and 
 to exercise a large generosity as well. 
 Honour came to him strangely ironical 
 rewards and there now grew up about 
 him a mysterious reverence, for men began 
 to see through the vehemence and the fury
 
 A Study in Personality 237 
 
 of his later expression, to realise how 
 purely and generously he had lived, how 
 loftily he had schemed and thought, and 
 how great was his legacy to the world. 
 His eightieth birthday was the signal for 
 a great outburst of praise and congratula- 
 tions flowers, letters, telegrams, addresses 
 poured in. But he was past caring for such 
 things. He crept about quietly, strolled 
 in the open air, had a few letters read 
 to him, and even indicated replies. He 
 spoke little. Mr. Gordon Wordsworth, the 
 grandson of the poet, has told me how 
 in these latter days he used to go to see 
 the old man. He was received in silence 
 with a warm handshake and a smile. 
 He would begin to talk about anything 
 which he thought might interest Buskin, 
 particularly about foreign travel. " You 
 can imagine how I felt," he said, "venti- 
 lating my extremely crude ideas about pic- 
 tures and buildings to the great art-critic." 
 Ruskin used to nod and smile and then 
 suddenly he would kindle into definite
 
 238 Ruskin 
 
 interest, and let fall some quiet criticism 
 or memorable dictum. His mind seemed as 
 strong as ever, but remote, lost in some 
 incommunicable dream, and not easily to 
 be recalled. There was no trace of delu- 
 sion or wandering intellect; only he could 
 not be roused. He seemed, said Professor 
 Collingwood, " like the aged Queen Aud 
 in the saga, who rose late and went to 
 bed early, and if any one asked after her 
 health, she answered sharply." 
 
 Of Mr. Buskin's closing years at Brant- 
 wood Professor Collingwood gives us some 
 touching pictures in his Life. I will con- 
 tent myself with the following extract: 
 
 Walking out had become a greater weari- 
 ness to him, and he had to submit to the 
 humiliation of a bath-chair. To save himself 
 even the labour of creeping down to his study, 
 he sat usually in the turret-room upstairs, 
 next to his bed-chamber, but still with the 
 look of health in his face, and the fire in his 
 eyes quite unconquered. He would listen while 
 Baxter [his valet] read the news to him, fol- 
 lowing public events with interest, or while
 
 A Study in Personality 239 
 
 Mrs. Severn or Miss Severn read stories, novel 
 after novel; but always liking old favourites 
 best, and never anything that was unhappy. 
 Some pet books he would pore over, or drowse 
 over, by the hour. The last of these was one 
 in which he had a double interest, for it was 
 about ships of war, and it was written by 
 the kinsman of a dear friend. Some of the 
 artists he had loved and helped had failed 
 him or left him, but Burne-Jones was always 
 true. One night, going up to bed, the old man 
 stopped long to look at the photograph from 
 Philip Burne-Jones's portrait of his father. 
 " That 's my dear brother Ned," he said, nod- 
 ding good-bye to the picture as he went. Next 
 night the great artist died, and of all the 
 many losses of these later years this one was 
 the hardest to bear. 
 
 His life just touched the last year of 
 the century. On the 20th of January, 1900, 
 after an attack of influenza, he suddenly 
 failed, and fell softly asleep as the sunset 
 came out beyond the fells. 
 
 He was buried at Coniston ; and perhaps 
 of all the tributes he received in death the 
 truest and best was a little wreath of com- 
 mon flowers sent by the local tailor, with
 
 240 Ruskin 
 
 the words inscribed : " There was a man 
 sent from God, and his name was John." 
 
 Let me try then in a few words, now 
 that I have painted the outer portrait of 
 the man, to sketch the inner portrait of 
 the spirit, which is a far older and a far 
 more lasting thing than the mortal body 
 in which for a few years it is bound. 
 Ruskin came into the world gifted with 
 the most intense power of ocular percep- 
 tion and observation. That runs through 
 his whole work. In his delightful auto- 
 biography you can read how the little boy, 
 with no toys to speak of, spent hours in 
 counting the bricks of the opposite house- 
 fronts, and tracing the patterns of the car- 
 pet on which he crawled; and how delightful 
 to him was the sight of the pure stream of 
 water, that rose so mysteriously from the 
 ground when the water-cart man unlocked 
 the springs with his key, and filled his
 
 A Study in Personality 241 
 
 wheeled tank. And thus Ruskin kept all 
 his life long the power of looking into 
 things and seeing their smallest details; so 
 that when he says that he sees this and 
 that in a picture, which it is impossible for 
 ordinary eyes to detect, we may at least 
 be sure that he had looked longer at what 
 he is describing than we are ever likely to 
 do, and with a patience, as a German critic 
 once wrote, that verges upon frenzy. And 
 beside that he had an intense and sensuous 
 pleasure in forms and curves, in tints and 
 colours; across the texture of the world, 
 which seems so meaningless to some of us, 
 his swift brain traced subtle outlines and 
 viewless perspectives: and for him too the 
 whole of a scene flushed and glowed in a 
 way that we perhaps can hardly compre- 
 hend, or lost itself in weft of opalescent 
 mist and shadows of ethereal tincture. The 
 vocabulary of colour is employed from end 
 to end by Ruskin, and never either vaguely 
 or imaginatively. And then too he had the 
 same sort of an eye for words, so that the 
 
 1 6
 
 242 Ruskin 
 
 very winds and skies of earth breathed 
 themselves into music. That was his out- 
 fit. But beyond all that he had a brain 
 of incredible agility, which leapt in a flash 
 from what was beautiful to what was stern, 
 and, we may be thankful, from what was 
 solemn to what was humorous. There is 
 seldom any strain or tension about his writ- 
 ing; for he relieves it almost instinctively 
 just when the pressure becomes acute, by 
 a swift turn of irony or pathos which 
 refreshes the spirit. 
 
 He suffered perhaps as much as he gained 
 from the extremely secluded character of 
 his life. But I think his guarded child- 
 hood and boyhood were perhaps a benefit 
 to him. He did indeed concentrate his en- 
 ergies too much ; but he came into the larger 
 world, in spite of his inner dogmatism, with 
 a curiously beautiful sort of humility, an 
 eager desire to win, and a courtesy which 
 made him always put out his powers. Some 
 one once said of him that it was the most 
 touching thing in the world to see Buskin,
 
 A Study in Personality 243 
 
 when he was already a well-known man, 
 being snubbed and bidden to hold his tongue 
 by his old mother, and the gracious sweet- 
 ness with which he obeyed. But above all 
 things he had a temperament which is 
 called, and with what mistaken deprecia- 
 tion I will not stop to consider, a feminine 
 temperament. It meant in Ruskin's case 
 an extreme sensitiveness, an intense desire 
 to be in affectionate and emotional contact 
 with his circle; a pretty touch of vanity, 
 which was all the more harmless because 
 he so constantly confessed it and deplored 
 it; a great love of quiet, well-ordered, cosy 
 ways of life, and a generosity that , was 
 never ashamed of confessing its fault with 
 tears. His letters, in their tenderness, their 
 emotional quality, their caressing fondness, 
 are such as many a bluff and sensible man 
 may despise and dislike. But for all that 
 it is that kind of secret current of affection 
 that sets from father to child, from brother 
 to sister, from friend to friend, which binds 
 up the wounds of the world and makes
 
 244 Ruskin 
 
 renunciation a more beautiful thing even 
 than success. 
 
 And then because I do not mean this 
 to be a flattering portrait there was in 
 him what I have already described, a real, 
 deep-seated, hard belief in his own absolute 
 Tightness and justice; and I do not dis- 
 guise it. The greatest men of all have seen 
 clearly enough the eternal distinction be- 
 tween right and wrong, generous and mean, 
 kindly and cruel. But they have lost them- 
 selves more in sorrow than in anger at the 
 poison of sin, and have seen the beautiful 
 creature which lies, we dare to hope, within 
 the foulest and most ugly human manifes- 
 tation. But Ruskin did not look deep 
 enough for that. He talked too much 
 about scolding and punishing people. As 
 Lady Ambrose says in the New Republic, 
 at the conclusion of Mr. Herbert's great 
 harangue: 
 
 What a dreadful blowing-up Mr. Herbert 
 gave us last night, didn't he? Now that, you 
 know, I think is all very well in a sermon;
 
 A Study in Personality 245 
 
 but in a lecture, where the things are supposed 
 to be taken more or less literally, I think it 
 is a little out of place. 
 
 It is this, it may frankly and sorrowfully 
 be confessed, that spoils much of his work 
 the implication that if you do not agree 
 with him you are certainly stupid and 
 probably vicious. Some have said that he 
 learnt this from the Puritanism of his 
 father and mother, and their contempt for 
 weak-minded and disorderly people but it 
 is something far deeper than that. It 
 might have been a little fostered in the 
 still atmosphere of his childhood, by the 
 sight of a father and mother, whom he 
 knew to be kind and just, claiming to be 
 so certain in their condemnations. But if 
 he himself had not had a taste for fault- 
 finding, he would have grown to recoil 
 from it all the more at the nearer touch 
 of it for in the lives of great men it is 
 true to say that they often grow great, so 
 to speak, by contraries, and learn from 
 early influences quite as much what to
 
 246 Ruskin 
 
 mistrust as what to admire. I have often 
 wondered whether in those last broken years 
 of silence and musing, he was not often 
 being sorry in a childlike way for his 
 great fault, his own great fault, and per- 
 haps in that happy penitence which is 
 the joy of the angels. I would not make 
 light of this harsh strain in him, and if 
 in a sense it was the blemish in his mind, 
 it was at least the cause of the heavenly 
 and noble struggle which he fought out day 
 by day. 
 
 But no one could have gathered round 
 him, as Ruskin did, the almost passionate 
 affection, in which there was always some- 
 thing of compassion, of so many wise and 
 noble men and women; and one can for- 
 give, with that sort of forgiveness that is 
 three parts admiration, a fault which after 
 all was lit by generous fires, and which 
 was the shadow cast upon his words and 
 deeds by the blaze of spirit with which 
 he loved all that was true and pure and 
 beautiful.
 
 A Study in Personality 247 
 3 
 
 Now in dealing with this strange and 
 beautiful life, so sharply divided into sad- 
 ness and delight, this character at once so 
 noble and so narrow, so intense and yet so 
 yielding, I want to leave one point very 
 clearly in your minds. The interest of 
 Euskin's life is the interest of a person- 
 ality, and I want you to try to regard him 
 in that light, and not either as a prophet, or 
 a reformer, or an art-critic, or a writer. He 
 was all these things by turns they were 
 but the guises which this restless and ar- 
 dent temperament assumed. As a prophet, 
 he was unbalanced and unconvincing, be- 
 cause he had depth rather than width of 
 view. He did not see the whole problem. 
 He saw clearly enough into the hearts of 
 like-minded people, but he was essentially 
 a partisan, and condemned what he did not 
 understand as severely as he condemned 
 what he hated. He took, from his educa- 
 tion and his sheltered life, a meagre VICAV
 
 248 Ruskin 
 
 of the world. He had little sympathy with 
 robust strength, and wide tracts of human 
 nature, at its bluntest and soundest, were 
 entirely obscure to him. And thus his re- 
 probation was so extravagant that it made 
 no appeal, not even the appeal of shame and 
 terror, to those whom he inveighed against 
 most fiercely. Then too he did not even do 
 justice to his age; he overlooked one of the 
 best and strongest forces of the time the 
 resolute search for truth, the stern de- 
 termination of the scientific spirit not to 
 generalise till it has investigated. He went 
 wrong himself in every department of his 
 work, from his passion for generalisation 
 and his acquiescence in incomplete investi- 
 gation. What made his protests ineffectual 
 was that he believed himself to have a per- 
 fectly analytical mind. His mind was in- 
 deed analytical, when he applied it to 
 questions which he understood, and to work- 
 ers with whom he sympathised. But he 
 had no notion of just comparison, and when 
 his sympathy was not enlisted he could not
 
 A Study in Personality 249 
 
 even analyse. He had the power of putting 
 vague personal preferences into language 
 superficially exact, and this was a terrible 
 snare to him and to his followers, w r ho be- 
 lieved that they were getting logical rea- 
 sons when they were only getting instinctive 
 predilections. Yet I am far from saying 
 that as a prophet his work was thrown 
 away. He was no ascetic, as I have said, 
 and thus he was able to see the dangers 
 of the materialism that is not uplifted by 
 the concurrence of the soul. But he felt 
 that the invariable comfort in which he 
 lived to some extent invalidated his mes- 
 sage. " If I had lived in a garret," he once 
 wrote, " then I could have preached that 
 Queen Victoria should do the same." But, 
 as I have said before, he accepted with a 
 sort of unquestioning loyalty the precise 
 standard of material luxury in which he 
 had been himself brought up, and he re- 
 garded any extension or development of 
 this as base and degrading. Yet he was 
 here in the main right, because he saw that
 
 250 Ruskin 
 
 the bane of the age is its impatience of 
 simplicity, its worship of success, its pre- 
 ference of comfort, and its mistaking the 
 quality of pleasure. 
 
 As a reformer he made even worse ship- 
 wreck, partly because he was but little 
 acquainted with the precise condition of 
 affairs which he undertook to reform, and 
 partly because he tried to impose his own 
 private and quite unimportant tastes upon 
 the persons whom he claimed as disciples. 
 The men as a rule who have made disciples, 
 and have worked out an ideal of practical 
 life, like Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of 
 Assisi, Ignatius Loyola, have been men who 
 on the one hand claimed and practised an 
 abnegation of conventional comforts a 
 process which has a very distinct pleasure 
 for human beings but whose consistency, 
 personal charm, and authoritativeness sus- 
 tained and rewarded their followers. But 
 Ruskin made no sweep of comforts, no 
 simplification of conditions; he merely at- 
 tempted to forbid the luxuries for which
 
 A Study in Personality 251 
 
 he bad no taste, while his consistency was 
 incomplete and his demand for personal au- 
 thority small. He had not the gift of mak- 
 ing his personal approval the one supreme 
 reward coveted by his followers he could 
 not exalt himself into a little Deity; and 
 thus he was called Master mainly by men 
 who were not in personal touch with him. 
 He said once: "No true disciple of mine 
 can ever be a Ruskinian. He will follow 
 not me, but the instincts of his own soul 
 and the guidance of his Creator." But for 
 all that, though he had not the gift of the 
 maker of definite institutions, we must not 
 make the mistake of underestimating his 
 work as a reformer. He did see into the 
 weakness of commercialism, and he grasped 
 the fact that the only real socialism must 
 be based on individualism. He saw that 
 the mechanical theory of labour and of 
 trade competition was essentially degrad- 
 ing, because it did not evoke the gifts of 
 the individual, and rewarded shrewdness 
 rather than industry. And here he threw
 
 252 Ruskin 
 
 his whole weight into the right scale. His 
 grasp of economical details was unsound, 
 but his insight into true economical prin- 
 ciples was clear enough, because he saw that 
 the mistake made was to treat it all as an 
 exact and pure science, instead of a science 
 which must take account of psychological 
 principles. 
 
 As an art-critic he certainly established 
 a new tradition, and the very narrowness 
 of his technical knowledge was probably 
 one of the conditions of his success. He 
 was dealing with a nation which is not 
 innately artistic, which has a mild and 
 rather pathetic desire to care for art, a 
 nation which can produce, in painting, 
 landscapes of extraordinary beauty and por- 
 traits of wonderful animation and delicacy, 
 but which has failed in most other kinds 
 of delineation. And in architecture, which 
 was his other great province, he was deal- 
 ing with a nation which once, it seems, pos- 
 sessed a tradition of its own, and a power 
 of designing great buildings, but which had
 
 A Study in Personality 253 
 
 lost its firmness of conception and origin- 
 ality of design, and had become little more 
 than an accomplished copyist, or an in- 
 genious combiner of purloined detail. 
 
 In the region of painting, he persuaded 
 the languid coteries to abjure an academic 
 tradition of admiration, and a mawkish 
 tradition of presentation, in favour of a 
 different but still narrow scheme of pre- 
 ferences, and a servile acceptance of un- 
 questionable greatness. He gave Turner 
 an extravagant place, and he held out a 
 hand to that singular revolt known as Pre- 
 Raphaelitism, the impulse of which has 
 passed into the dignity of upholstery, and 
 has done little more than infect native art 
 with a precious kind of medievalism. 
 
 But here again he did great work. He 
 set the public thinking about art, and al- 
 most persuaded it that it cared for art. 
 He made art serious and he made it 
 respected; and here his teaching may yet 
 bear fruit, though it was disfigured by his 
 ethical bias, which confused the truth of
 
 254 Ruskin 
 
 things by trying to refer two perfectly 
 separate impulses the moral and the art- 
 istic to one basis. I myself believe that 
 the English feeling for art is a very placid 
 sentiment, with little that is passionate 
 about it; but though it has not yet at- 
 tained much vitality, it may develop in the 
 future: and even if Ruskin did not sow 
 the seed, he at least hoed up the fallow. 
 
 And then as a writer he can hardly be 
 said to have established a tradition, because 
 his art depended upon so intimate and per- 
 sonal a charm. I myself am thankful that 
 he did not establish a tradition in this 
 respect for while such a tradition is a 
 great sign of commanding influence in a 
 writer, it is a sign of a corresponding weak- 
 ness in his followers. Writers must learn 
 to express their thoughts in their own way ; 
 and it is better to borrow thoughts than 
 to purloin a medium. The art of literary 
 imitation is a very easy one, and needs 
 only a very second-rate gift. Small wonder 
 that we Englishmen, trained on so narrow
 
 A Study in Personality 255 
 
 a classical tradition, should be so prone to 
 rank literary imitation high. Boys who 
 have been taught that the best Latin verse 
 and prose is the most ingenious cento of 
 phrases, not imitated but transferred from 
 classical writers, may be excused if they 
 rank the gift of imitation above that of 
 forcible expression. I mean to discuss the 
 style of Buskin elsewhere, but I hold that 
 one of his supreme felicities was that his 
 mind was not cramped by a classical edu- 
 cation. I do not undervalue that education 
 for other purposes; it lends some exactness 
 of thought and some terseness of expres- 
 sion to practical minds. But Ruskin is 
 only one of the notable instances which go 
 far to prove that the greatest writers of 
 the century Keats, Walter Scott, Car- 
 lyle, Browning were men who hardly 
 came under classical influences at all; while 
 other great writers Wordsworth, Tenny- 
 son, Byron, and Shelley obtained no dis- 
 tinction in academical exercises; and the 
 few great writers whom our universities
 
 256 Ruskin 
 
 rewarded, such as Matthew Arnold, New- 
 man, and Pater, can hardly be ranked 
 among the leading literary influences of 
 the century. 
 
 And let me here add the strange and 
 somewhat whimsical summary which Rus- 
 kin gave of his own life-work, a short time 
 before he sank into the final silence: 
 
 For in rough approximation of date near- 
 est to the completion of the several pieces of 
 my past work, as they are built one on the 
 other, at twenty, I wrote Modern Painters; 
 at thirty, The Stones of Venice; at forty, Unto 
 this Last; at fifty the Inaugural Oxford Lec- 
 tures; and if Fors Clavigera is ever finished as 
 I mean it will mark the mind I had at sixty ; 
 and leave me in my seventh day of life, per- 
 haps to rest. For the code of all I had to 
 teach will then be, in form, as it is at this 
 hour, in substance, completed. Modern Paint- 
 ers taught the claim of all lower nature on 
 the hearts of men ; of the rock, and wave, and 
 herb, as a part of their necessary spirit life; in 
 all that I now bid you to do, to dress the earth 
 and keep it, I am fulfilling what I then began. 
 
 The Stones of Venice taught the laws of 
 constructive Art, and the dependence of all
 
 A Study in Personality 257 
 
 human work or edifice, for its beauty, on the 
 happy life of the workman; Unto this Last 
 taught the laws of that life itself, and its 
 dependence on the Sun of Justice; the In- 
 augural Oxford Lectures, the necessity that 
 it should be led, and the gracious laws of 
 beauty and labour recognised, by the upper, 
 no less than the lower, classes of England; 
 and lastly, Fors Glavigera has declared the 
 relation of these to each other, and the only 
 possible conditions of peace and honour, for 
 low and high, rich and poor, together, in the 
 holding of that first Estate, under the only 
 Despot, God, from which whoso falls, angel 
 or man, is kept, not mythically or disputably, 
 but here in visible horror of chains under dark- 
 ness to the judgment of the great day: and 
 in keeping which service is perfect freedom, 
 and inheritance of all that a loving Creator 
 can give to His creatures, and an immortal 
 Father to His children: 
 
 This, then, is the message, which, knowing 
 no more as I unfolded the scroll of it, what 
 next would be written there, than a blade of 
 grass knows what the form of its fruit shall 
 be, I have been led on year by year to speak, 
 even to this its end. 
 
 And now it seems to me, looking back over 
 the various fragments of it written since the 
 year 1860, Unto this Last, Time and Tide, 
 
 17
 
 258 Ruskin 
 
 Munera Pulvcris, and Eagle's Nest, together 
 with the seven years' volumes of Fors Cla- 
 vigera, that it has been clearly enough and re- 
 peatedly enough spoken for those who will 
 hear: and that, after such indexed summary 
 of it as I may be able to give in the remain- 
 ing numbers of this seventh volume, I should 
 set aside this political work as sufficiently 
 done; and enter into my own rest, and your 
 next needed service, by completing the bye- 
 law books of Botany and Geology for St. 
 George's Schools, together with so much law 
 of art as it may be possible to explain or 
 exhibit, under the foul conditions of the 
 age. 
 
 There is yet another point on which stress 
 must be laid, and that is Ruskin's incredi- 
 ble and dangerous industry; as he once 
 wrote: "Life without industry is guilt; 
 and industry without art is brutality." 
 Let us compare him with his great con- 
 temporary Carlyle, in whom long periods 
 of solid diligence alternated with long 
 stretches of mournful indolence. Carlyle 
 was a sayer of great truths, and I am not
 
 A Study in Personality 259 
 
 so mean as to try to undervalue Iris splen- 
 did service to Iris generation. But Carlyle 
 was not possessed by the intense desire to 
 do tangible and practical things for man- 
 kind, though he said that a solidly built 
 bridge was a finer and a holier thing than 
 the best book ever written ; and there is 
 truth in the humorous words of Fitz- 
 Gerald, that Carlyle had sat pretty com- 
 fortably in his study at Chelsea, scolding 
 all the world for not being heroic, and yet 
 not very precise in telling them how. But 
 the record of Kuskin's life and his busy 
 days is not like this. He was consumed by 
 a demon of activity. Consider the sort of 
 day which he used to spend in Venice, ris- 
 ing with the dawn, drawing, as he humor- 
 ously said, one half of a building while the 
 masons were employed in pulling down the 
 other half, taking measurements, noting 
 details, doing this for ten hours at a stretch 
 till the shadows had shifted; then going 
 back to write, read, and talk; and this not 
 once or twice a week, but day by day for
 
 260 Ruskin 
 
 months together. Remember the kind of 
 life he lived in Oxford, talking, lecturing, 
 working, teaching in his drawing-school, 
 and then going back to his home to work 
 and read, with an endless flood of letters 
 pouring in upon him day by day, which 
 he answered fully, patiently, courteously, 
 and humorously, never taking refuge be- 
 hind fixed phrases, but putting a part of 
 himself into every sentence he ever penned. 
 And all the while he was planning mu- 
 seums and arranging collections, while his 
 researches into natural things were not 
 merely a poetical contemplation or a dilet- 
 tante catching of effects, but hard discrimi- 
 nation and careful experiment. I do not 
 believe that there was ever a life lived of 
 such tremendous activity, and none of it 
 mechanical toil, but heart-wasting and 
 brain-consuming work. The wonder is not 
 that his brain gave way, but that it did 
 not collapse long before. Even a conversa- 
 tion was not an easy thing for Ruskin. 
 He was always willing to see and talk to
 
 A Study in Personality 261 
 
 strangers as well as friends; lie never was 
 absorbed or preoccupied, but he put his 
 heart into his talk; he never declined upon 
 impressive platitudes, but he turned on the 
 full strength of his mental current, what- 
 ever was his need of silence and rest. 
 
 He has by some been shamefully accused 
 of pose. The mischief of that criticism is 
 that there is something in it. " To the 
 vanity," he once wrote, " I plead guilty- 
 no man is more intensely vain than I am; 
 but my vanity is set on having it known 
 of me that I am a good master, not in 
 having it said of me that I am a smooth 
 author. My vanity is never more wounded 
 than in being called a fine writer, meaning 
 that nobody need mind what I say." 
 
 But of course it may be admitted that 
 in the case of all men who live for and in 
 performance, whether it be on sackbut or 
 dulcimer, on stage or in pulpit, with brush 
 or pen, it is impossible to eliminate a dash 
 of the essential mountebank the quality 
 which, reduced to its lowest formula, may
 
 262 Ruskin 
 
 be summed up in the words, " See me do 
 it ! " and the child who began by saying from 
 his nursery pulpit " People, be good," was 
 sure on occasion to say more than he knew, 
 and indeed had reason to be thankful if he 
 did not say more than he meant. 
 
 But the essence of the poseur is this, that 
 all that he does he regards from the point 
 of view, not of the effect it may have on 
 others, or for the share that he may take 
 in the service of the world, but that the 
 echo and reflection of his effectiveness may 
 come back to him from the mouths and 
 eyes of men, like the airy chords which 
 come back from precipice and crag at the 
 blast of some Alpine horn. The poseur does 
 not desire to be served, but to be known 
 to serve. It is his own content, and not 
 the content of others that he is in search 
 of. It is no happiness to him to have added 
 to the peace of the world, if he is unpraised 
 and unhonoured. No one can be unaware 
 of the comforting warmth of fame, earned 
 or unearned ; but that was not what Ruskin
 
 A Study in Personality 263 
 
 wanted. And it is a vile calumny to say 
 that he worked for his own honour and 
 satisfaction. He desired to increase and 
 multiply joy; he did increase it a hundred- 
 fold, and most when he was himself sor- 
 rowful even unto death. 
 
 I do not want here to disguise his faults : 
 he was exacting, suspicious, irritable, and 
 wayward. He had none of the bluff good- 
 humour, the sturdy dutifulness of the solid 
 type of Englishman, who does fine work 
 in the world. He could not bear to be 
 thwarted or opposed. He was dogmatic, self- 
 opinionated, and vain ; but these faults are 
 but the seams and channels in the weather- 
 worn crag, which would otherwise be but 
 a meaningless pyramid of stone. We ought 
 not to love the faults of great men or to con- 
 done them, but we may love them because 
 of their faults, and because of the gallant 
 fight they made with them, with an intensity 
 and a compassion that we cannot give to 
 statuesque and flawless lives. The whole 
 thing, in its enthusiasm, its guilelessness,
 
 264 Ruskin 
 
 its passion for all that is pure and beautiful, 
 is so infinitely noble, that I for one can but 
 regard it with an awe and a gratitude that 
 is half wonder and half shame wonder at 
 a thing so great, and shame that one can 
 be so far away from what a man may be. 
 
 5 
 
 And so one is brought back to the fact 
 that it was as a personality that Ruskin had 
 his effect on the generation ; and that per- 
 sonality I shall try to delineate, though of 
 all things in the world personality is the 
 hardest thing to estimate, for one simple 
 reason, that a character is not only, as is 
 often supposed, a mixture of ingredients, 
 like a salad or a stew, the net result of 
 which is grateful and savoury. It may be 
 looked at in that aspect, and it is true 
 enough that, in dealing with people for or- 
 dinary social purposes, one is justified in 
 regarding temperaments in this light, as 
 compounded dishes, where a certain bal-
 
 A Study in Personality 265 
 
 ance and proportion of qualities makes the 
 effect of a personality pungent or fragrant, 
 commonplace or repellent, as the case may 
 be. But when it comes to the deeper re- 
 lations of life, when one is concerned w r ith 
 loving and admiring people, being moved 
 by what they say or think, imitating them, 
 even worshipping them, there come in two 
 further qualities, which are not only a ques- 
 tion of blend and proportion, but two per- 
 fectly distinct things two qualities which 
 are difficult to disentangle and analyse, be- 
 cause they permeate other qualities, making 
 them on the one hand attractive and on 
 the other emphatic. And these two great 
 qualities are on the one hand charm, and 
 on the other moral force. It is very hard 
 to say what charm is, and in what it con- 
 sists. It is a thing which some people pos- 
 sess to an extraordinary degree, making all 
 that they do or say interesting and beauti- 
 ful, penetrating gesture and movement, 
 feature and voice, so that it all seems a 
 revelation of some secret and inner beauty
 
 266 Ruskin 
 
 of soul and mind. Yet this charm is in 
 itself and by itself a dangerous thing, for 
 it often coexists without any great degree 
 of moral force, and lives so much in its 
 own power of pleasing that it is often apt 
 to lead its owner to make any sacrifices if 
 only he can please. And thus because such 
 charm is as much felt by the evil and 
 sensual as by the high-minded and pure, it 
 sometimes falls a victim quite early in life 
 to gross and robust influences, and is car- 
 ried off captive over dark seas of experi- 
 ence, like some beautiful slave to serve the 
 passion of evil masters. 
 
 And then too there is a further kind of 
 charm, which is not a superficial charm, 
 but' the fragrance of a sweet-tempered, 
 simple, and peaceable character, which wins 
 regard and trust because it is modest and 
 trustworthy, reasonable and sympathetic, 
 and does not easily condemn or despise. 
 Such as these have a way of drawing out 
 and evoking the best in others, and are 
 loved partly on that account.
 
 A Study in Personality 267 
 
 Now Kuskin bad both of these kinds of 
 charm. It may again be stated that though 
 he was often, in his public utterances, vehe- 
 ment, bitter, and incisive, these qualities 
 did not appear in his private intercourse 
 or in his talk. He was in ordinary com- 
 panionship extraordinarily graceful and 
 winning, courteous and considerate. Not 
 only was his own talk flowing and suggest- 
 ive, and full of beauty both of thought and 
 word, but he had a power of comforting 
 and reassuring the shy and awkward, of 
 deftly taking up and embellishing the mur- 
 murs of embarrassed people, yet without 
 seeming to make them his own. And he 
 had too a delightful frankness, which made 
 his companions feel that he was saying what 
 he thought, and giving his best. In this 
 he was like Carlyle, who grumbled and ful- 
 minated, Heaven knows, in his writings, but 
 whose private vehemences and violences 
 were corrected by a glance both humorous 
 and tender, which took off the edge of his 
 incisiveness and sugared the bitter cup.
 
 268 Ruskin 
 
 And Ruskin too, in his public lectures, had 
 an incomparable atmosphere of grace and 
 pathos about him. His high, clear, and 
 delicate voice rose like the voice of the 
 wind; his vehement and brilliant gestures 
 amplified and interpreted his words; and 
 his flashing eyes, with their pale-blue light, 
 now indignant and now appealing, inter- 
 cepted and electrified the glances of his 
 hearers. There was little of the art of the 
 orator about him little of that voluminous 
 thunder which in men like Mr. Bright or 
 Mr. Gladstone dominated an audience and 
 kept them spell-bound, waiting on every 
 measured word. Compared to these the 
 eloquence of Ruskin had an almost femin- 
 ine quality; it was the music of the soul 
 that made itself heard, whether in the pas- 
 sionate enthusiasm for some work of deli- 
 cate grace or suggestive beauty, or the 
 poignant personal distress, the uncomforted 
 cry for faith and strength, which came with 
 such an appealing frankness from his lips. 
 And then of that other quality, which
 
 A Study in Personality 269 
 
 I have called moral force, which is like the 
 steam of the engine or the charge of the 
 gun that force of conviction which drives 
 a truth home into careless or indifferent 
 minds this he had in fullest measure. It 
 may be thought that part of Ruskin's sick 
 vision of the world, the insistence with 
 which the meanness, the stupidity, the in- 
 difference, the cruelty of humanity beat 
 upon him, came from within rather than 
 from without. And of course such melan- 
 choly as his does reach and react upon the 
 overstrung brain. One in Ruskin's frame 
 of mind selects, by an instinctive sadness, 
 those elements of experience and fact which 
 confirm his hopeless outlook; and thus his 
 sadness is deepened and fed. 
 
 But for all that he had the power, which 
 I have spoken of before, and which is a 
 power confined to the truest and noblest of 
 human spirits, that power of concerning 
 itself not with its own comfort and welfare, 
 but with the welfare of the world, and 
 grieving intolerably over evils which seem
 
 270 Ruskin 
 
 so unnecessary, and which yet are so im- 
 possible to prevent or to cure. The selfish 
 man, at the sight of suffering and misery, 
 asks brutally, " Am I my brother's keeper? " 
 or he shrugs his shoulders cynically at what 
 he does not approve, or even takes a secret 
 and complacent pleasure in the thought that 
 he enjoys immunity from such troubles, or 
 perhaps even congratulates himself on the 
 strength and prudence which have pre- 
 served him from such catastrophes. That 
 is the attitude of the Pharisee and the ty- 
 rant, and it is by that temper that the worst 
 evils of the world are propagated and 
 perpetuated. 
 
 But Ruskin, and such as Ruskin, cast 
 themselves with a blind fury of indignation 
 and anger into the fray. They are so sensi- 
 tive to all injustice and to all brutality, 
 that they lose themselves in scathing words, 
 and feverish phrases of horror and disgust 
 and despair. And then when the schemes 
 that seem to such prophets so simple and 
 so desirable, so effective in helping hu-
 
 A Study in Personality 271 
 
 inanity out of the mire, all break down and 
 incur ridicule and contempt, what wonder 
 if they fall into wretchedness and frenzy 
 at the thought of all the happiness which 
 men throw away for themselves, and the 
 happiness of which men deprive others 
 out of mere wantonness and carelessness? 
 It was here, I think, that the strength 
 of Buskin's message lay. Men who see 
 and feel as he did are the hope of the 
 human race, because they show that the 
 moral temperature is slowly but surely ris- 
 ing, and that the generous and noble im- 
 pulses of the conscience and the heart are 
 on the increase. And Ruskin had to my 
 mind one distinguishing mark of the true 
 prophet that he was no patriot. He was 
 concerned with human rather than with 
 national welfare. I am not decrying the 
 force of patriotism, or the part it plays in 
 the development of the human race. But 
 there is a nobler enthusiasm even than the 
 enthusiasm for race and nation; because 
 the triumph of patriotism must necessarily
 
 272 Ruskin 
 
 carry with it the quenching of the aspira- 
 tion of other nations, their defeat and 
 their discomfiture. It is only tyranny on a 
 larger scale. Ruskin no doubt miscalcu- 
 lated and misunderstood the nature of his 
 countrymen, the insularity and the isola- 
 tion which mark their conquering path. 
 But no one who cares for the larger hopes 
 of humanity can hope or dream that the 
 end is to be limited by national greatness. 
 That is not a popular vision in England, 
 unless it is accompanied by a proviso that 
 the seat of the federated government of 
 the world shall be in London, and that 
 English shall be the language of the hu- 
 man race. But Ruskin judged other na- 
 tions not according to their resemblance to 
 our own race, but by their virtue and 
 nobility. And it must be kept in mind that 
 he was, like all the greatest figures of our 
 late nineteenth century Tennyson, Brown- 
 ing, Carlyle a moralist before anything 
 else. England, said a great French critic, 
 is pre-eminent for the seriousness with
 
 A Study in Personality 273 
 
 which she has treated moral ideas in art; 
 and there is no disguising the fact that 
 morality and not art is our main concern. 
 Part of Ruskin's influence was due to the 
 fact that he based art on morality; and 
 there is little doubt that if he had preached 
 art as vehemently for its own sake, he 
 would have found but few listeners and 
 fewer disciples. 
 
 It is then as a personality and as a moral- 
 ist that we have to regard him; as a man 
 of clear vision, relentless idealism, and 
 kindling speech; who above all manifested 
 the splendid instinctive abnegation of pri- 
 vate happiness, not calculating loss and 
 gain in a spirit of barter, but finding con- 
 tentment impossible, while others were ill- 
 content; that spirit which is expressed by 
 a parable in the beautiful words of the 
 Song of Songs : " They made me the keeper 
 of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard 
 have I not kept." 
 
 And now I will say one last thing to 
 
 which all that I have said has been lead- 
 is
 
 274 Ruskin 
 
 ing a thing borne to me upon the winds 
 and waves of life, by grievous experience, 
 and, I am not ashamed to say, by sad self- 
 questioning. And this thing is confirmed, 
 in its height and depth, by the wonderful 
 life that we have been considering. No 
 saint or philosopher has ever done more 
 than guess, in fear and perplexity often, 
 and rarely in confidence or certainty, at 
 the meaning of our life, our pilgrimage. 
 So much of life, in spite of its glimpses of 
 joy and light, seems so aimless, so per- 
 plexed, so unaccountable, with its mys- 
 terious satisfactions, its disproportionate 
 sorrows. But the best and noblest of men 
 have seemed to see in it a chance, if we 
 are frank and candid in facing experience, 
 and if we are not dismayed by its shadows 
 or misled by its sunshine, a chance of hav- 
 ing something done for our spirits which 
 can be done in no other way. A good many 
 people start with a high-hearted belief in 
 life and its possibilities; and then like the 
 grain sown by the Heavenly Sower, many
 
 A Study in Personality 275 
 
 lives are withered by sensuality, or choked 
 by prosperity, or eaten up by evil influences, 
 or drenched by dulness; but whatever hap- 
 pens we are not meant to find life easy and 
 delightful; it is a discipline, when all is 
 said and done. But there is something 
 deeper than that. " Depend upon it," said 
 old Carlyle, " the brave man has somehow 
 or other to give his life away." We are 
 called upon to make an unconditional sur- 
 render. Unconditional, I say, because it 
 cannot be on our own terms. We cannot 
 reserve what we like, or choose what we 
 prefer. It is a surrender to a great and 
 awful Will, of whose workings we know 
 little, but which means to triumph, what- 
 ever we may do to hinder or delay its pur- 
 pose. We must work indeed by the best 
 light that we have. We must do the next 
 thing, and the kind thing, and the coura- 
 geous thing, as it falls to us to do. But 
 sooner or later we must yield our wills 
 up, and not simply out of tame and fear- 
 ful submission, but because we at last see
 
 276 Ruskin 
 
 that the Will behind all things is greater, 
 purer, more beautiful, more holy than any- 
 thing we can imagine or express. Some 
 find this easier than others and some never 
 seem to achieve it which is the hardest 
 problem of all. But there is no peace with- 
 out that surrender, though it cannot be 
 made at once; there is in most of us a 
 fibre of self-will, of hardness, of stubborn- 
 ness which we cannot break, but w r hich God 
 may be trusted to break for us, if we desire 
 it to be broken. And the reason why the 
 life of Kuskin is so marvellous a record, 
 is that we here see the unconditional sur- 
 render, of which I speak, made on the most 
 august scale by a man dear to God, start- 
 ing in life with high gifts and noble 
 advantages. 
 
 Will you bear with me if I entreat you 
 to discern this truth not in the life of Rus- 
 kin but in your own lives as well? Do not 
 think for a moment that I mean that life 
 ought to be a mournful metaphysic, with- 
 out light and energy and joy. The more of
 
 A Study in Personality 277 
 
 these that we have in our lives the better 
 for each and all. But if the light is 
 clouded, and the joy is blotted out, and 
 the energy burns low, it is a sign not that 
 we have failed, but that the mind of God 
 is bent still more urgently upon us. What 
 we may pray for and desire is courage, to 
 live eagerly in joy and not less eagerly in 
 sorrow; to be temperate in happiness, and 
 courageous in trouble; that we may say in 
 the words of Ruskin's great poet-friend, 
 whose splendid optimism still made the 
 great surrender 
 
 "What's Life to me? 
 Where'er I look is fire; where'er I listen, 
 Music ; and where I tend, bliss evermore."
 
 vn 
 
 THERE is a great deal scattered about 
 through Ruskin's various books of the de- 
 velopment of his literary style, and of the 
 various influences which helped to mould it. 
 His own account of the matter is very inter- 
 esting, not because it offers a key to the mys- 
 tery, but because it wholly fails to explain 
 anything or to account for anything. It is 
 rather as though a painter were to say what 
 kinds of brushes he used, and where he got 
 his colours; but the instinct by which the 
 artist knows that a blot of paint of a cer- 
 tain shape and in a certain juxtaposition 
 will produce the effect upon the eye of a 
 moss-grown stone, or of a tuft of meadow- 
 grass, this is the incommunicable and the 
 278
 
 A Study in Personality 279 
 
 inexplicable thing. It is the same \vith lan- 
 guage. We have all of us all the material 
 to work with which Ruskin had. The 
 thoughts are not wholly original or un- 
 familiar. We can most of us construct a 
 grammatical sentence, and it is in our 
 power if we choose to make lists of strik- 
 ing words. But what we cannot command 
 is the delicate ripple of mood, the ironical 
 emphasis, the contrast of humour and 
 pathos, the subtle insistence on the central 
 thought, the logical staircase that leads to 
 the peremptory climax. Then too comes in 
 the art of the coherent paragraph, the 
 parenthesis that refreshes and sustains the 
 thought, the melodious cadence of words, 
 the subtle alliteration. Kuskin had, first 
 of all, intensity of feeling, then great lucid- 
 ity of expression I do not feel that his 
 intellectual grasp is very great. He can, 
 or he could in earlier days, follow a definite 
 path, and pick his way very directly, to 
 the goal, avoiding the thoughts which are 
 not the exact ones that he needs, and w r hich
 
 280 Ruskin 
 
 tend by their similarity to the central 
 thought to confuse the less precise thinker; 
 but he had not the gift of a wide survey, 
 the power which very impressive writers 
 have of letting the whole body of thought 
 just influence and contribute to, without 
 distracting or blurring, the central point. 
 He had a splendid gift of picturesque illus- 
 tration, and in the earlier days a wonderful 
 power of metaphor of expressing one 
 thought in the terms of another, which is 
 the essence of the poetical gift. And then, 
 though he never mastered the limitations 
 of poetry he was indeed mastered by them 
 his poetical work gave him a great range 
 of vocabulary, and a matchless power of 
 amassing together words beautiful in them- 
 selves, and infinitely enhanced by their 
 contact with other words. 
 
 Pope was one of his masters, he says, for 
 absolute lucidity of expression, perfect bal- 
 ance and conciseness, and complete freedom 
 from anything otiose or disproportioned. 
 One knows too that he fell at one time
 
 A Study in Personality 281 
 
 under the influence of Hooker, and that 
 part of Modern Painters was written under 
 the sway of Hooker's stately deliberation 
 and his incomparable cogency of thought. 
 And further, he states that he owed much 
 to Dr. Johnson, in respect of clear and 
 just statement, orderly sequence, and har- 
 monious evolutions. 
 
 But he insists that he owed his vocabu- 
 lary, his sense of rhythm and cadence, the 
 solemnity and dignity of his vocabulary, 
 entirely to his study of the Bible. 
 
 Here is the passage in which he makes 
 the above statement: 
 
 I have above said that had it not been for 
 constant reading of the Bible, I might pro- 
 bably have taken Johnson for my model of 
 English. To a useful extent I have always 
 done so; in these first essays, partly because 
 I could not help it, partly of set, and well 
 set, purpose. 
 
 On our foreign journeys, it being of course 
 desirable to keep the luggage as light as pos- 
 sible, my father had judged that four little 
 volumes of Johnson the Idler and the Ram-
 
 282 Ruskin 
 
 blcr did, under names wholly appropriate to 
 the circumstances ; contain more substantial 
 literary nourishment than could be, from any 
 other author, packed into so portable com- 
 pass. And accordingly, in spare hours, and on 
 wet days, the turns and returns of reiterated 
 Rambler and iterated Idler fastened themselves 
 in my ears and mind ; nor was it possible for 
 me, till long afterwards, to quit myself of 
 Johnsonian symmetry and balance in sen- 
 tences intended, either with swordsman's or 
 pavior's blow, to cleave an enemy's crest, or 
 drive down the oaken pile of a principle. I 
 never for an instant compared Johnson to 
 Scott, Pope, Byron, or any of the really great 
 writers whom I loved. But I at once and for 
 ever recognised in him a man entirely sincere, 
 and infallibly wise in the view and estimate 
 he gave of the common questions, business, and 
 ways of the world. I valued his sentences not 
 primarily because they were symmetrical, but 
 because they were just and clear; it is a 
 method of judgment rarely used by the aver- 
 age public, who ask from an author always, 
 in the first place, arguments in favour of their 
 own opinions, in elegant terms; and are just 
 as ready with their applause for a sentence 
 of Macaulay's, which may have no more sense 
 in it than a blot pinched between doubled 
 paper, as to reject one of Johnson's, telling
 
 A Study in Personality 283 
 
 against their own prejudice, though its sym- 
 metry be as of thunder answering from two 
 horizons. 
 
 This is to a certain extent true; but the 
 truth lies deeper still; Ruskin did not 
 really find his style until he had finally and 
 effectually freed himself from all such in- 
 fluences. He began by having a rich and 
 sonorous vocabulary, a strong sense of bal- 
 ance and antithesis, preference for rolling 
 rhetoric and answering clauses. The ef- 
 fects are patent and indisputable; but it is 
 rhetoric, and sometimes almost bombast. 
 It is like a child playing with thunderbolts, 
 and finding it excellent fun. The sentences 
 smell of the platform and of the pulpit; 
 they are youthfully resplendent, and dog- 
 matic with the infallibility of inexperience. 
 One feels the writer is saying, " Here we 
 go," and half the joy of it lies, not in hav- 
 ing something to say, but in saying it so 
 loud and clear. Of course when all is said, 
 it is the work of a man of genius, but it 
 is hard, metallic, made-up writing. There
 
 284 Ruskin 
 
 are plenty of fine things said and trumpeted 
 out; but it is in no sense great work, ex- 
 cept in its fine vigour and peremptoriness, 
 and in the promise of mastery given by the 
 fervent analysis and boisterous energy. 
 
 Here is an instance of the measured 
 Johnsonian manner: 
 
 He who has built himself a hut on a desert 
 heath, and carved his bed, and table, and chair 
 out of the nearest forest, may have some right 
 to take pride in the appliances of his narrow 
 chamber, as assuredly he will have joy in them. 
 But the man who has had a palace built, and 
 adorned, and furnished for him, may indeed 
 have many advantages above the other, but he 
 has no' reason to be proud of his upholsterer's 
 skill; and it is ten to one if he has half the 
 joy in his couch of ivory that the other will 
 have in his pallet of pine. 
 
 In the following passage, which stood in 
 the first and second editions of Modern 
 Painters, but was cancelled in the third, 
 he describes the treatment of Venice by 
 certain great artists. He concludes: 
 
 But let us take, with Turner, the last and
 
 A Study in Personality 285 
 
 greatest step of all. Thank heaven, we are in 
 sunshine again, and what sunshine ! Not the 
 lurid, gloomy, plague-like oppression of Cana- 
 letti, but white, flashing fulness of dazzling 
 light, which the waves drink and the clouds 
 breathe, bounding and burning in intensity of 
 joy. That sky, it is a very visible infinity, 
 liquid, measureless, unfathomable, panting, 
 and melting through the chasms in the long 
 fields of snow-white, flaked, slow-moving va- 
 pour, that guide the eye along their multitudi- 
 nous waves down to the islanded rest of the 
 Euganean hills. Do we dream, or does the 
 white forked sail drift nearer, and nearer yet, 
 diminishing the blue sea between us with the 
 fulness of its wings? It pauses now; but 
 the quivering of its bright reflection troubles 
 the shadows of the sea, those azure, fathomless 
 depths of crystal mystery on which the swift- 
 ness of the poised gondola floats double, its 
 black beak lifted like the crest of a dark ocean 
 bird, its scarlet draperies flashed back from 
 the kindling surface, and its bent oar break- 
 ing the radiant water into a dust of gold. 
 Dreamlike and dim, but glorious, the unnum- 
 bered palaces lift their shafts out of the hollow 
 sea, pale ranks of motionless flame, their 
 mighty towers sent up to heaven like tongues 
 of more eager fire, their grey domes looming 
 vast and dark, like eclipsed worlds, their
 
 286 Ruskin 
 
 sculptured arabesques and purple marble fad- 
 ing farther and fainter, league beyond league, 
 lost in the light of distance. Detail after de- 
 tail, thought beyond thought, you find and 
 feel them through the radiant mystery, inex- 
 haustible as indistinct, beautiful, but never all 
 revealed; secret in fulness, confused in sym- 
 metry, as nature herself is to the bewildered 
 and foiled glance, giving out of that indis- 
 tinctness, and through that confusion, the 
 perpetual newness of the infinite and the 
 beautiful. 
 Yes, Mr. Turner, we are in Venice now. 
 
 Let me here frankly confess that to my- 
 self the style of the Modern Painters is 
 not wholly attractive. It is too argumenta- 
 tive and rhetorical, didactic rather than 
 persuasive, and the device grows mono- 
 tonous by which the thought gets gradually 
 infused by emotion, until it culminates in 
 one of those rich rolling sentences, which 
 break like a huge sea-billow, full of sound 
 and colour and motion. But the beauty of 
 the great sentences themselves is indis- 
 putable, the perfect certainty of touch, the 
 feeling that he is never mastered by his
 
 A Study in Personality 287 
 
 material, but has all the substance of lan- 
 guage at his command these qualities are 
 patent and. undeniable. But one feels 
 rather as Queen Victoria is recorded to 
 have said of Mr. Gladstone, that she dis- 
 liked her interviews with him because he 
 talked to her as if she were a public meet- 
 ing. There is a sense of being clamoured 
 at and overwhelmed, rather than of being 
 led and persuaded. And there is something 
 more than bitterness in Whistler's famous 
 criticism when he said that Ruskin was 
 possessed of "a flow of language that would, 
 could he hear it, give Titian the same shock 
 of surprise that was Balaam's, when the 
 first great critic proffered his opinions." 
 
 Ruskin wrote, as we know, with singular 
 ease, but at the same time he took immense 
 pains. He rose very early, and did his writ- 
 ing in the freshness of the day, and it was 
 his habit to read aloud at breakfast, to his 
 family or his fellow-travellers, what he had 
 written, for their approval rather than for 
 their criticism.
 
 288 Ruskin 
 
 The characteristics which I have men- 
 tioned mark all his earlier work. You. will 
 find them in his earliest papers, those ela- 
 borate studies of cottage architecture in 
 various countries, which he contributed 
 when hardly more than a boy to a maga- 
 zine: and this manner culminates in the 
 Stones of Venice, in which he showed the 
 ultimate development of this didactic and 
 rhetorical art. 
 
 Then we come to the middle manner 
 the later volumes of the Modern Painters 
 and the books like Sesame and Lilies. Here 
 the vehemence is a good deal abated; there 
 is a substitution, so to speak, of wood for 
 wind; the blare of the cornet is exchanged 
 for the softer melody of what the Greeks 
 called " the spittle-wasting flute." The 
 style has lost in hardness and gained im- 
 mensely in beauty. There is still a love of 
 balance and antithesis; but it is now more 
 a question of orderly sequence and struc- 
 ture the counterpoint is less visible. And 
 here I may say is the point at which the
 
 A Study in Personality 289 
 
 ordinary reader stops. The man of taste 
 and intelligence can perceive as a rule 
 the faults of the earlier manner, its gusty 
 eloquence, its sharp-cut melody. He can 
 detect the mellifluous beauty of the new 
 cadences, the more equable texture; if he 
 sees the art of it less, he is aware still 
 more subtly that it is there. And I would 
 not say a word to shake any one's faith in 
 the perfection of the art, or his admiration 
 of the more chastened mood. Irony, tender 
 and delicate enough, has taken the place 
 of trenchant censure or sharp sarcasm. 
 Kuskin allows himself to feel more in pub- 
 lic, to employ more intimate emotions, more 
 delicate mysteries of thought. A touch of 
 failure and suffering has laid its chasten- 
 ing hand upon the page; he is not less sure, 
 but he is less dogmatic; and he has learnt 
 that men must be persuaded rather than 
 commanded to believe. 
 
 Here are one or two instances of this fine 
 manner. The first is a very famous pas- 
 sage on Calais Church, of which he himself 
 19
 
 290 Ruskin 
 
 did not wholly approve, because he thought 
 that the word-painting of it distracted the 
 minds of his readers from more valuable 
 considerations. 
 
 I cannot find words to express the intense 
 pleasure I have always in first finding myself, 
 after some prolonged stay in England, at the 
 foot of the old tower of Calais church. The 
 large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; 
 the record of its years written so visibly, yet 
 without sign of weakness or decay; its stern 
 wasteness and gloom, eaten away by the Chan- 
 nel winds, and overgrown with the bitter sea 
 grasses ; its slates and tiles all shaken and rent, 
 and yet not falling; its desert of brickwork 
 full of bolts, and holes, and ugly fissures, and 
 yet strong, like a bare brown rock; its care- 
 lessness of what any one thinks or feels about 
 it, putting forth no claim, having no beauty 
 nor desirableness, pride, nor grace ; yet neither 
 asking for pity; not, as ruins are, useless and 
 piteous, feebly or fondly garrulous of better 
 days; but useful still, going through its own 
 daily work, as some old fisherman beaten 
 grey by storm, yet drawing his daily nets: so 
 it stands, with no complaint about its past 
 youth, in blanched and meagre massiveness 
 and serviceableness, gathering human souls to-
 
 A Study in Personality 291 
 
 gether underneath it; the sound of its bells for 
 prayer still rolling through its rents: and the 
 grey peak of it seen far across the sea, prin- 
 cipal of the three that rise above the waste 
 of surfy sand and hillocked shore, the light- 
 house for life, and the belfry for labour, and 
 this for patience and praise. 
 
 And the following is a piece which illus- 
 trates his ironical manner, a description 
 from the fourth volume of Modern Painters 
 of Claude's picture of the Mill: 
 
 The foreground is a piece of very lovely and 
 perfect forest scenery, with a dance of peasants 
 by a brook side ; quite enough subject to form, 
 in the hands of a master, an impressive and 
 complete picture. On the other side of the 
 brook, however, we have a piece of pastoral 
 life; a man with some bulls and goats tum- 
 bling headforemost into the water, owing to 
 some sudden paralytic affection of all their 
 legs. Even this group is one too many; the 
 shepherd had no business to drive his flock so 
 near the dancers, and the dancers will cer- 
 tainly frighten the cattle. But when we look 
 farther into the picture, our feelings receive 
 a sudden and violent shock, by the unex- 
 pected appearance, amidst things pastoral and
 
 292 Ruskin 
 
 musical, of the military; a number of Roman 
 soldiers riding in on hobby-horses, with a 
 leader on foot, apparently encouraging them 
 to make an immediate and decisive charge on 
 the musicians. Beyond the soldiers is a cir- 
 cular temple, in exceedingly bad repair; and 
 close beside it, built against its very walls, a 
 neat watermill in full work. By the mill flows 
 a large river with a weir all across it. The 
 weir has not been made for the mill (for that 
 receives its water from the hills by a trough 
 carried over the temple), but it is particularly 
 ugly and monotonous in its line of fall, and 
 the water below forms a dead-looking pond, 
 on which some people are fishing in punts. 
 The banks of this river resemble in contour 
 the later geological formations around London, 
 constituted chiefly of broken pots and oyster- 
 shells. At an inconvenient distance from the 
 water-side stands a city, composed of twenty- 
 five round towers and a pyramid. Beyond the 
 city is a handsome bridge; beyond the bridge, 
 part of the Campagna, with fragments of 
 aqueducts ; beyond the Campagna, the chain of 
 the Alps; on the left, the cascades of Tivoli. 
 
 The following passage is from The Seven 
 Lamps of Architecture: 
 
 An architect should live as little in cities as
 
 A Study in Personality 293 
 
 a painter. Send him to our hills and let him 
 study there what nature understands by a 
 buttress, and what by a dome. 
 
 There was something in the old power of 
 architecture, which it had from the recluse 
 more than from the citizen. The buildings of 
 which I have spoken with chief praise, rose, 
 indeed, out of the war of the piazza, and above 
 the fury of the populace: and Heaven forbid 
 that for such cause we should ever have to 
 lay a larger stone, or rivet a firmer bar in our 
 England ! But we have other sources of power, 
 in the imagery of our iron coasts and azure 
 hills; of power more pure, nor less serene, than 
 that of the hermit spirit which once lighted 
 with white lines of cloisters the glades of the 
 Alpine pine, and raised into ordered spires the 
 wild rocks of the Norman sea; which gave to 
 the temple gate the depth and darkness of 
 Elijah's Horeb cave; and lifted, out of the 
 populous city, grey cliffs of lonely stone, into 
 the midst of sailing birds and silent air. 
 
 And here is a wonderful word-cadence 
 from one of his later lectures at Oxford, 
 where he is speaking of the dove: 
 
 And of these wings and this mind of hers, 
 this is what reverent science should teach you : 
 first with what parting of plume and what
 
 294 Ruskin 
 
 soft pressure and rhythmic beating of divided* 
 air she reaches that miraculous swiftness of 
 undubious motion compared with which the 
 tempest is slow and the arrow uncertain; and 
 secondly what clue there is, visible, or con- 
 ceivable to thought of man, by which, to her 
 living conscience and errorless pointing of mag- 
 netic soul, her distant home is felt afar be- 
 yond the horizon, and the straight path, 
 through concealing clouds, and over trackless 
 lands, made plain to her desire, and her duty, 
 by the finger of God. 
 
 And here, as I have said, many firm be- 
 lievers part company with Buskin, as dis- 
 ciples have before now forsaken their 
 master. In Fors Clavigera, a reader, how- 
 ever faithful, is apt to be disconcerted by 
 the tense passion of emotion, the fantastic 
 changes and counterchanges, the inconse- 
 quent sequence of statements, the fiery 
 restlessness, the wild discursiveness, the dim 
 presence of something diseased and terrify- 
 ing in the background, that seems to cry 
 and weep. But I have no sort of doubt
 
 A Study in Personality 295 
 
 that in Fors Clavigera Ruskin reached a far 
 higher level of art than he had ever reached 
 before, because he was doing a thing which 
 is not, I believe, attempted elsewhere in 
 literature. He was thinking aloud. If any 
 of you will try an experiment in this pro- 
 cess you will find the incredible difficulty 
 of the task. You know how most of us in 
 idle moments, or perhaps even more in mo- 
 ments when we are officially supposed to be 
 occupied, lapse into a reverie, in which a 
 stream of thought it may be placid, it may 
 be vehement sweeps through the brain 
 from the flushed reservoir of the mind. 
 Suppose you check yourself suddenly in 
 one of these reveries. Try to put down in 
 words what you have been thinking of, and 
 as you thought it. You will find it to be 
 ludicrously impossible. Half the thoughts 
 have passed without clothing themselves in 
 any vesture of word, one thing has sug- 
 gested another, often enough by some trivial 
 similarity of superficial form. The whole 
 thing is evasive, elusive, irrecoverable. Yet
 
 296 Ruskin 
 
 it was exactly this which Ruskin did. He 
 had attained by native instinct and by enor- 
 mous industry a power of words to which 
 I hardly know any equal. Perhaps Brown- 
 ing might have attained it, if he had worked 
 in prose. But what is more wonderful still 
 is the kaleidoscopic variety of emotion- 
 serious, profound, indignant, tender, hu- 
 morous, menacing, severe, playful, ironical 
 moods which flash and twinkle like a rip- 
 pling sea. It is not merely the representa- 
 tion of a sustained mood, to which many 
 great writers have attained ; it is the repre- 
 sentation of moods as various, and trans- 
 itions as swift, as ever passed through a 
 human mind. The process by which the 
 very stuff of the soul here takes shape is, 
 I own, utterly incomprehensible to me, be- 
 cause it seems not so much different in 
 scope, as different in kind from anything 
 which any other writer has ever dreamed 
 of attempting. 
 
 And now, out of the deep upheaval of 
 thought, the wreck of all his old security
 
 A Study in Personality 297 
 
 and self-confidence, the devastating sadness 
 which laid its hand upon him, he devel- 
 oped a perfectly new manner of writing, 
 which seems to me to belong to a wholly 
 different and infinitely higher range of art. 
 He threw aside all that was frigid and 
 academical and formal; he retained the 
 lucid emphasis and the rich texture of lan- 
 guage. But instead of composing a stately 
 and impressive argument, he gained a new 
 art, that of thinking his thought into words. 
 Perhaps this testified to a certain lack of 
 mental concentration ; but the result is that 
 instead of seeing the mind in posture and 
 performance, you can look into it like a 
 clear stream, and w r atch every break and 
 ripple of the crystal tide. The result is 
 a kind of ease, which seems the most abso- 
 lutely effortless and spontaneous thing, and 
 yet it is a thing which none but the very 
 highest masters of style and expression have 
 achieved. Indeed I will say frankly that 
 I know of no writer in the world except 
 Plato who has achieved this. There are
 
 298 Ruskin 
 
 writers, like Scott and Thackeray, who got 
 the same command over their medium; but 
 theirs is a simpler task, because they deal 
 only with narrative and the play of definite 
 emotions. But Kuskin was moving in a 
 loftier and more complex intellectual re- 
 gion, that of reflective emotion, where the 
 very ideas are vague and mist-like, and the 
 task is rather to give a sense of the atmos- 
 phere of the mind rather than its definite 
 judgments and conclusions. 
 
 He reached then the height of his power 
 in Fors Clavigera, which achieves that 
 triumph of literary genius, the sense that 
 the reader is within the very four walls 
 of the writer's mind. Of course writing 
 may be used for many purposes, and among 
 these purposes are some that are achieved 
 best when all sense of personality is with- 
 drawn. But the real goal which lies be- 
 hind such art is that of self-revelation. It 
 is a great mistake to suppose that this 
 means that a writer should do nothing but 
 talk about himself. That is not the point
 
 A Study in Personality 299 
 
 at all indeed it is one of the surest ways 
 of avoiding the sense of personality. A 
 man may entertain you, point out his pos- 
 sessions, talk continuously and persistently 
 about his tastes and preferences, and yet 
 leave you knowing nothing of the spirit 
 within. But Kuskin admits you to the 
 inmost shrine of his spirit, where the soul 
 is naked and unashamed. You see the 
 pulsing blood and the palpitating heart. 
 Nothing is hidden from you, nothing forced 
 upon the view. And it all culminated in 
 the exquisite Prwterita, which for utter 
 frankness and directness has no equal. It 
 is not as though he were bidding you count 
 his wounds, share his vanished joys, com- 
 passionate his sorrows. He is far past all 
 that. His own heart has given him all the 
 comfort of which it is capable, and far 
 more pain than any faith or philosophy 
 can staunch or heal. Like the Ancient 
 Mariner or the Last Minstrel, he tells his 
 tale, in obedience to the primal law of 
 utterance. He looks for no reward or
 
 300 Ruskin 
 
 applause; he merely unburdens himself of 
 the awful, the mysterious secret of life. 
 
 Here is as much as I dare quote of a 
 letter in Fors Clavigera, entitled " The 
 Elysian Fields " : 
 
 1. My FRIENDS, The main purpose of these 
 letters having been stated in the last of them, 
 it is needful that I should tell you why I 
 approach the discussion of it in this so desul- 
 tory way, writing (as it is too true that I 
 must continue to write) " of things that you 
 little care for, in words that you cannot easily 
 understand." 
 
 I write of things you care little for, know- 
 ing that what you least care for is, at this 
 juncture, of the greatest moment to you. 
 
 And I write in words you are little likely 
 to understand, because I have no wish (rather 
 the contrary) to tell you anything that you 
 can understand without taking trouble. You 
 usually read so fast that you can catch nothing 
 but the echo of your opinions, which, of course, 
 you are pleased to see in print. I neither wish 
 to please nor displease you ; but to provoke you 
 to think; to lead you to think accurately; and 
 help you to form, perhaps, some different 
 opinions from those you have now. 
 
 2. Therefore, I choose that you shall pay
 
 A Study in Personality 301 
 
 me the price of two pots of beer, twelve times 
 in the year, for my advice, each of you who 
 wants it. If you like to think of me as a 
 quack doctor, you are welcome; and you may 
 consider the large margins, and thick paper, 
 and ugly pictures of my book, as my caravan, 
 drum, and skeleton. You would probably, if 
 invited in that manner, buy my pills; and I 
 should make a great deal of money out of 
 you; but being an honest doctor, I still mean 
 you to pay me what you ought. You fancy, 
 doubtless, that I write as most other political 
 writers do my "opinions"; and that one 
 man's opinion is as good as another's. You are 
 much mistaken. When I only opine things, I 
 hold my tongue; and work till I more than 
 opine until I know them. If the things prove 
 unknowable, I, with final perseverance, hold 
 my tongue about them, and recommend a like 
 practice to other people. If the things prove 
 knowable, as soon as I know them, I am ready 
 to write about them, if need be; not till then. 
 That is what people call my " arrogance." 
 They write and talk themselves, habitually, of 
 what they know nothing about ; they cannot in 
 anywise conceive the state of mind of a person 
 who will not speak till he knows ; and then tells 
 them, serenely: "This is so; you may find it 
 out for yourselves, if you choose; but, however 
 little you may choose it, the thing is still so."
 
 302 Ruskin 
 
 3. Now it has cost me twenty years of 
 thought, and of hard reading, to learn what 
 I have to tell you in these pamphlets ; and you 
 will find, if you choose to find, it is true; and 
 may prove, if you choose to prove, that it is 
 useful: and I am not in the least minded to 
 compete for your audience with the " opin- 
 ions " in your damp journals, morning and 
 evening, the black of them coming off on your 
 fingers, and beyond all washing into your 
 brains. It is no affair of mine whether you 
 attend to me or not; but yours wholly; my 
 hand is weary of pen-holding my heart is 
 sick of thinking; for my own part, I would 
 not write you these pamphlets though you 
 would give me a barrel of beer, instead of two 
 pints, for them : I write them wholly for your 
 sake; I choose that you shall have them de- 
 cently printed on cream-coloured paper, and 
 with a margin underneath, which you can 
 write on, if you like. That is also for your 
 sake; it is a proper form of book for any man 
 to have who can keep his books clean; and if 
 he cannot, he has no business with books at 
 all. It costs me ten pounds to print a thou- 
 sand copies, and five more to give you a pic- 
 ture; and a penny off my seven pence to send 
 you the book: a thousand sixpences are 
 twenty-five pounds; when you have bought a 
 thousand Fors of me, I shall therefore have
 
 A Study in Personality 303 
 
 five pounds for my trouble and my single 
 shopman, Mr. Allen, five pounds for his; we 
 won't work for less, either of us; not that we 
 would not, were it good for you ; but it would 
 be by no means good. And I mean to sell all 
 my large books, henceforward, in the same 
 way; well printed, well bound, and at a fixed 
 price; and the trade may charge a proper and 
 acknowledged profit for their trouble in retail- 
 ing the book. Then the public will know what 
 they are about, and so will tradesmen; I, the 
 first producer, answer, to the best of my power, 
 for the quality of the book; paper, binding, 
 eloquence, and all: the retail dealer charges 
 what he ought to charge, openly; and if the 
 public do not choose to give it, they can't get 
 the book. That is what I call legitimate busi- 
 ness. Then as for this misunderstanding of 
 me remember that it is really not easy to 
 understand anything, which you have not heard 
 before, if it relates to a complex subject; also, 
 it is quite easy to misunderstand things that 
 you are hearing every day which seem to you 
 of the intelligiblest sort. But I can only write 
 of things in my own way and as they come 
 into my head; and of the things I care for, 
 whether you care for them or not, as yet. I 
 will answer for it, you must care for some of 
 them in time. 
 4. To take an instance close to my hand:
 
 304 Ruskin 
 
 you would of course think it little conducive 
 to your interests that I should give you any 
 account of the wild hyacinths which are open- 
 ing in flakes of blue fire, this day, within a 
 couple of miles of me, in the glades of Bagley 
 wood through which the Empress Maud fled 
 in the snow (and which, by the way, I slink 
 through, myself, in some discomfort, lest the 
 gamekeeper of the college of the gracious 
 Apostle St. John should catch sight of me ; not 
 that he would ultimately decline to make a 
 distinction between a poacher and a professor, 
 but that I dislike the trouble of giving an ac- 
 count of myself). Or, if even you would bear 
 with a scientific sentence or two about them, 
 explaining to you that they were only green 
 leaves turned blue, and that it was of no con- 
 sequence whether they were either green or 
 blue; and that, as flowers, they were scientific- 
 ally to be considered as not in existence, 
 you will, I fear, throw my letter, even though 
 it has cost you sevenpence, aside at once, when 
 I remark to you that these wood-hyacinths of 
 Bagley have something to do with the battle 
 of Marathon, and, if you knew it, are of 
 more vital interest to you than even the Match 
 Tax. 
 
 5. Nevertheless, as I shall feel it my duty, 
 some day, to speak to you of Theseus and his 
 vegetable soup, so, to-day, I think it neces-
 
 A Study in Personality 305 
 
 sary to tell you that the wood-hyacinth is the 
 best English representative of the tribe of 
 flowers which the Greeks called " Asphodel," 
 and which they thought the heroes who had 
 fallen in the battle of Marathon, or in any 
 other battle, fought in just quarrel, were to 
 be rewarded, and enough rewarded, by living 
 in fields-full of; fields called, by them, Elysian, 
 or the Fields of Coming, as you and I talk of 
 the good time " Coming," though with perhaps 
 different views as to the nature of the to be 
 expected goodness. 
 
 And last of all he wrote the Prwterita. 
 Much of it was only gathered afresh from 
 the pages of Fors Clavigera. But here I 
 think that, in spite of age and shattered 
 health and broken mind, the art is at its 
 very highest. The brain gathers itself to- 
 gether for a last effort before the silence 
 falls. And here no doubt many readers 
 who cannot find their way through the be- 
 wildering tangle of Fors, can join hands 
 again ; because here again the mood is a 
 sustained one. It is like a man high on 
 a mountain range, seeing through a gap
 
 306 Ruskin 
 
 of ragged cloud and sweeping storm the 
 sunny spaces of the valley he has left be- 
 hind, and to which he may no more return, 
 tracing his happy wanderings by hedge and 
 stream, watching the smoke go up from 
 the chimneys of the house that has shel- 
 tered alike his radiant hopes and his quiet 
 dreams ; and seeing it all through a passion 
 of sadness and failure and disappointment, 
 which is too deep for any tear or sigh. 
 There are passages in Prceterita which seem 
 to me like wreckage sinking through the 
 sea-depths, leaving the rout and fury of 
 screaming wind and wide-flung billow, and 
 grounding at last softly and quietly upon 
 the unstirred sand, with no further to go, 
 no resurrection to dread. The cup of wrath 
 has been drunk, the last sad drops of the 
 potion wrung out; he has experienced in 
 life what others only experience in death, 
 and he can say with bowed head and fail- 
 ing lip, " It is over." 
 Here are two characteristic passages : 
 
 The first joy of the year being in its snow-
 
 A Study in Personality 307 
 
 drops, the second, and cardinal one, was in 
 the almond blossom, every other garden and 
 woodland gladness following from that in an 
 unbroken order of kindling flower and shadowy 
 leaf; and for many and many a year to come, 
 until indeed, the whole of life became au- 
 tumn to me, my chief prayer for the kindness 
 of heaven, in its flowerful seasons, was that 
 the frost might not touch the almond blossom. 
 
 And again : 
 
 My delight in these cottages, and in the 
 sense of human industry and enjoyment 
 through the whole scene, was at the root of 
 all pleasure in its beauty; see the passage 
 afterwards written in the Seven Lamps insist- 
 ing on this as if it were general to human na- 
 ture thus to admire through sympathy. I have 
 noticed since, with sorrowful accuracy, how 
 many people there are who, wherever they find 
 themselves, think only " of their position." 
 But the feeling which gave me so much hap- 
 piness, both then and through life, differed 
 also curiously, in its impersonal character, 
 from that of many even of the best and kindest 
 persons. 
 
 In the beginning of the Carlyle-Emerson 
 correspondence, edited with too little com- 
 ment by my dear friend Charles Norton, I
 
 308 Ruskin 
 
 find at page 18 this to me entirely disputable, 
 and to my thought, so far as undisputed, 
 much blamable and pitiable, exclamation of 
 my master's : " Not till we can think that 
 here and there one is thinking of us, one 
 is loving us, does this waste earth become 
 a peopled garden." My training, as the reader 
 has perhaps enough perceived, produced in 
 me the precisely opposite sentiment. My 
 times of happiness had always been when no- 
 body was thinking of me; and the main dis- 
 comfort and drawback to all proceedings and 
 designs, the attention and interference of the 
 public represented by my mother and the 
 gardener. The garden was no waste place to 
 me, because I did not suppose myself an ob- 
 ject of interest either to the ants or the butter- 
 flies; and the only qualification of the entire 
 delight of my evening walk at Champagnole or 
 St. Laurent was the sense that my father and 
 mother were thinking of me, and would be 
 frightened if I was five minutes late for tea. 
 
 I don't mean in the least that I could have 
 done without them. They were, to me, much 
 more than Carlyle's wife to him ; and if Car- 
 lyle had written, instead of, that he wanted 
 Emerson to think of him in America, that he 
 wanted his father and mother to be thinking 
 of him at Ecclefechan, it had been well. But 
 that the rest of the world was waste to him
 
 A Study in Personality 309 
 
 unless he had admirers in it, is a sorry state 
 of sentiment enough; and I am somewhat 
 tempted, for once, to admire the exactly op- 
 posite temper of my own solitude. My entire 
 delight was in observing without being myself 
 noticed, if I could have been invisible, all the 
 better. I was absolutely interested in men 
 and their ways, as I was interested in mar- 
 mots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If 
 only they would stay still and let me look at 
 them, and not get into their holes and up 
 their heights! The living inhabitation of the 
 world the grazing and nesting in it, the 
 spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, 
 to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and 
 wonder at it, and help it if I could, happier 
 if it needed no help of mine, this was the 
 essential love of Nature in me, this the root 
 of all that I have usefully become, and the 
 light of all that I have rightly learned. 
 
 Now the strange thing behind it all is 
 this and what I am about to say involves 
 a clear statement about the critical appre- 
 hension of the British public which must 
 not be confused with censure or contempt. 
 It is neither. It is simply a fact. Ruskin
 
 310 Ruskin 
 
 attained his position in the literary world, 
 and in the view of many worthy persons 
 maintains it now, by work that was not 
 only inferior, but was pervaded by gross 
 faults of dogmatism, erring knowledge, and 
 baseless judgments. His best work is still 
 to a great extent unappreciated and un- 
 praised, his genius hardly suspected. The 
 British public wanted correct information, 
 impressive argument, and conventional con- 
 clusions. What was the joy of that stolid 
 and pathetic clientele, when it found a man 
 who could bully them into thinking that 
 they cared about art, tell them exactly what 
 pictures to buy and what to neglect, give 
 eloquent reasons which made them believe 
 they had gone to the bottom of the matter, 
 and then the crowning joy of all tell 
 them with thunders of conviction that the 
 old moral law held good there as every- 
 where, that the bad man was the bad artist 
 and the good man the good artist. It was 
 a prodigious and colossal error ; but it went 
 straight to the heart of the nation; it con-
 
 A Study in Personality 311 
 
 firmed the Psalms of David and the law 
 of Moses; it fitted in, or so they thought, 
 with the teaching of the Gospel and St. 
 Paul. They were delighted when Ruskin 
 said : " In these books of mine, their dis- 
 tinctive character, as essays on art, is their 
 bringing everything to a root in human pas- 
 sion or human hope . . . every principle 
 of painting which I have stated is traced 
 to some vital or spiritual fact . . . and is 
 founded on a comparison of their influences 
 on the life of the workman, a question by 
 all other writers on the subject wholly 
 forgotten or despised." At such a state- 
 ment as this the enthusiasm of the public 
 knew no bounds, because not only did it 
 issue from a graduate of Oxford, and thus 
 had the stamp of academic culture, but it 
 was a conclusion worthy of a sermon, with 
 this additional advantage that it was not 
 a statement made by a clergyman from a 
 pulpit, and thus open to a suspicion of 
 professional motive, but made by a layman 
 in a book of art criticism, and was thus a
 
 312 Ruskin 
 
 confirmation of the most respectable sort 
 of morality, from a source which might 
 naturally have been liable to a charge of 
 dangerous Bohemianism. 
 
 It was this that gave Ruskin his author- 
 ity; though there were of course a few 
 who saw somewhat deeper and realised 
 that there were in the utterances of Rus- 
 kin a passionate emotion and a sincere 
 fidelity to truth, only obscured by nat- 
 ural dogmatism and a rigid Calvinistic 
 training. 
 
 And then came the years when he seemed 
 to throw aside wantonly and quixotically 
 all the influence he had gained, and to flour- 
 ish in the face of the public all sorts of 
 crazy fancies and impossible dreams. In 
 these years he was greatly discredited, 
 though at last the sale of his books w r ent 
 up by leaps and bounds. The most chari- 
 table hypothesis freely indulged was that 
 he was out of his mind. Nothing else could 
 account for such ludicrous sincerity and 
 such delirious schemes. But by this time
 
 A Study in Personality 313 
 
 many true spirits had discerned him rightly, 
 and saw that if he was fallen into a pas- 
 sion of irritability and disgust, he was 
 crazed not by disease but by the pressure 
 of desperate thoughts. Perhaps his Pro- 
 fessorship a little rehabilitated him in the 
 eyes of the outer public. And then he did 
 what is the most popular thing that one 
 can do in England, an act which sets the 
 crown upon any amount of even inefficient 
 endeavour: he grew old, and became a 
 public pet a grand old man. 
 
 There is something to smile at in all this, 
 no doubt; but there is food for something 
 more like tears. Perhaps the point is that, 
 with his best unrecognised and with his 
 secret misunderstood, he yet had gained a 
 hearing; and it may be that thus his real 
 influence will grow and bear fruit. But 
 the process is so gigantically stupid and 
 so outrageously coarse the sense that de- 
 risive notoriety can achieve what genius and 
 worth could not attain, is not without its 
 shadow. The horror of it is this, that the
 
 3H Ruskin 
 
 frenzied writings of his tortured mind 
 amused the public. They did not see that 
 he was being crucified. They thought his 
 agonised words the fantastic mockeries of 
 a man who had lost his temper on a gigantic 
 scale; and it was this that made them listen. 
 It is all a very dark business. But we 
 must try to put it all aside, and to stand 
 if we can with the faithful few that stood 
 helpless and distracted beside him in the 
 hour of his agony, rather than with those 
 that mocked him afar off, or that as they 
 passed by reviled him. 
 
 And last of all I must say one word 
 about his letters, because that is a very 
 real province of literary art. We are past 
 the time, and we may be wholly thankful 
 for it, when a man like Pope kept copies of 
 his letters, improved them, added footnotes 
 and introductions, and finally arranged that 
 they should be stolen from him in a friendly
 
 A Study in Personality 315 
 
 manner and published without his supposed 
 consent, and against his imagined wish, 
 though he had prepared alike beforehand 
 the theft and his own heart-broken protests. 
 But we have had many fine letter-writers 
 in England. To mention but a few, the 
 letters of Gray are models of delicate taste, 
 exquisite phrasing, and charming humour. 
 The letters of Charles Lamb are notable 
 for their tenderness, their good sense, and 
 their delicious extravagance. The letters 
 of Keats give the finest revelation I know 
 of the glowing heart and mind of a young 
 and splendid genius. The letters of Fitz- 
 Gerald are full of leisurely charm, gentle 
 pathos, and keen discrimination. The let- 
 ters of Carlyle have an intense and rugged 
 glow, and a marvellous individuality of 
 deeply-felt, contorted phrases, where the 
 words are driven in gangs, like fettered 
 slaves, to do their master's work. The let- 
 ters of Mrs. Browning reveal a passion and 
 a seriousness that cannot fail to inspire and 
 even to shame one's coldness. But I should
 
 3i 6 Ruskin 
 
 put Ruskin at the head of all. Like a great 
 coinage of a king, every tiniest token bears 
 his visible and noble imprint. All through 
 his life, a part of his day's work was writ- 
 ing letters; and he threw himself with his 
 utmost force and his sensitive sympathy 
 into the very mind and heart of his corre- 
 spondent. I have said before how his let- 
 ters to men of marked individuality bear 
 unmistakable traces, in their words and 
 phrases, of being transfused with the im- 
 agined thoughts of their recipients. And 
 then, too, every smallest letter that he 
 wrote was a part of himself. There are 
 two large volumes of them in the big edi- 
 tion of his works, and there must be hund- 
 reds more in existence. Only the other day 
 I stumbled upon a great collection of them, 
 written to a girl whom he had never seen, 
 and all growing out of one simple and 
 sincere question which she had asked him. 
 
 It was here that his extraordinary power 
 of transition helped him. He could pass 
 from simple gossip to deep pathos, from
 
 A Study in Personality 317 
 
 unaffected simplicity to pettish and ex- 
 travagant censure, from caressing tender- 
 ness to poignant irony. He never said less 
 or more than he thought and felt; but the 
 grace and beauty with which he invested it 
 all, was born of no effort or taking thought; 
 it was simply himself. One of my hearers 
 brought me the other day, after a lecture, 
 a dozen letters of Ruskin's that he had 
 picked up in a curiosity shop. There it was, 
 that whimsical and solemn charm a letter 
 of almost heart-rending sorrow, speaking of 
 his need for human affection, just salted at 
 the end out of sentimentality by a pungent 
 phrase of irony, in which he stood aside 
 and smilingly surveyed his own dismay. 
 Part of his mysterious attractiveness was 
 that he could speak so frankly of himself 
 and his failures, with such passionate sin- 
 cerity, and then make light of it all, as 
 the self-pity melted under humorous per- 
 ception. There is plenty of bitterness, but 
 no spite; abundant pettishness, but not a 
 trace of pettiness. Of course it is easy to
 
 3*8 Ruskin 
 
 call them egotistical; and I do not attempt 
 to deny that Ruskin took a deep interest 
 in himself we most of us do. But ego- 
 
 o 
 
 tism is the taking oneself solemnly and seri- 
 ously, with a gloomy and self -regarding 
 pomposity, and Ruskin never did that. He 
 was full of intense personal feeling, was 
 profoundly convinced of the worth and 
 significance of his message, sorrowed poign- 
 antly over his ineffectiveness, and the mis- 
 guided way in which he was misinterpreted. 
 But just when the shower is falling heavily, 
 till the world seems dissolved in wet, there 
 comes a gleam of dancing sunshine with a 
 tint of sapphire sky, which makes even the 
 slanting rain beautiful, and dashes a gleam 
 of gold upon drenched leaf and watery rut. 
 I should do him wrong if I insisted too 
 much upon his sorrow and heaviness, for 
 there was a strain of real gaiety about him, 
 which made him love all young and joyful 
 and light-hearted things. I will give two 
 or three of those letters in illustration of 
 all this :
 
 A Study in Personality 319 
 
 I knew you would deeply feel the death of 
 Dickens. It is very frightful to me among 
 the blows struck by the fates at worthy men, 
 while all mischievous ones have ceaseless 
 strength. The literary loss is infinite the 
 poetical one I care less for than you do. 
 Dickens was a pure modernist a leader of 
 the steam-whistle party par excellence and he 
 had no understanding of any power of an- 
 tiquity except a sort of jackdaw sentiment for 
 cathedral towers. He knew nothing of the 
 nobler power of superstition was essentially 
 a stage manager, and used everything for ef- 
 fect on the pit. His Christmas meant mistle- 
 toe and pudding neither resurrection from 
 dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching 
 of wise men, nor shepherds. His hero is 
 essentially the ironmaster; in spite of Hard 
 Times, he has advanced by his influence 
 every principle that makes them harder the 
 love of excitement, in all classes, and the fury 
 of business competition, and the distrust 
 both of nobility and clergy which, wide 
 enough and fatal enough, and too justly 
 founded, needed no apostle to the mob, but 
 a grave teacher of priests and nobles them- 
 selves, from whom Dickens had essentially no 
 word. . . . 
 
 And again:
 
 320 Ruskin 
 
 [The letters] of Emerson and Carlyle came 
 to me about a week since, and I am nearly 
 through them, grateful heartily for the book, 
 and the masterful index; but much dis- 
 appointed at having no word of epitaph from 
 yourself on both the men. 
 
 The Emerson letters are infinitely sweet and 
 wise: here and there, as in p. 30. vol. ii., un- 
 intelligible to me. C.'s, like all the words 
 of him published since his death, have vexed 
 me, and partly angered, with their per- 
 petual me miserum never seeming to feel 
 the extreme ill manners of this perpetual 
 whine; and, to what one dares not call an 
 affected, but a quite unconsciously false ex- 
 tent, hiding the more or less of pleasure 
 which a strong man must have in using 
 his strength, be it but in heaving aside dust- 
 heaps. 
 
 What in my own personal way I chiefly re- 
 gret and wonder at in him is, the perception 
 in all nature of nothing between the stars and 
 his stomach his going, for instance, into 
 North Wales for two months, and noting ab- 
 solutely no Cambrian thing or event, but only 
 increase of Carlylian bile. 
 
 Not that I am with you in thinking Froude 
 wrong about the Reminiscences. They are to 
 me full of his strong insight, and in their 
 distress far more pathetic than these howl-
 
 A Study in Personality 321 
 
 ings of his earlier life about Cromwell and 
 others of his quite best works; but I am 
 vexed for want of a proper Epilogue of your 
 own. . . . 
 
 How much better right than C. have I to 
 say, " Ay de mi " ? 
 
 I will only say one word in conclusion. 
 I would not persuade any one to try and 
 write like Ruskin, though he was probably 
 the greatest master of English prose, in his 
 variety, his copiousness, the lucidity, and 
 the perennial beauty of his expression ; but 
 just as one cannot live by bread alone, one 
 cannot write by imitation. It is a very 
 elementary literary exercise to parody a 
 style, and Ruskin lends himself easily to 
 parody. Indeed his style is so contagious 
 that if one reads him much and attentively, 
 one finds it hard not to write like him; 
 like him, I say, yet ah, how far away! 
 But every writer must find his own method 
 of expression, and no man can look 
 his best in borrowed clothes. The curva- 
 ture of the owner hangs indelibly about 
 them.
 
 322 Ruskin 
 
 But on the other hand, as I have tried 
 to show, there are few writers of whom the 
 word great can be used so incontestably. 
 While other writers have been like per- 
 formers in a great orchestra, spouting 
 melody from a silver-mouthed trumpet, or 
 drawing out the thrill and shiver of the 
 tense string, Ruskin seems to me like a 
 great organist, manipulating and combining 
 and hushing the huge house of sound, with 
 its myriad pipes and ranked ingenuities. 
 There is no writer and this is, I humbly 
 believe, the end and crown of art who 
 could express so perfectly, so sweetly, so 
 truly, the thought that rose swiftly and 
 burningly in his mind. He could flash out, 
 with a deft turn of his wrist, a stop of 
 shrill emotion, and keep a dozen moods all 
 in full play at once, combining and elud- 
 ing and charming, in a sequence at once 
 orderly and profound. We may read Rus- 
 kin then primarily for the glow and beauty 
 that he casts on life; but not forget that 
 half that thought must have been dumb,
 
 A Study in Personality 323 
 
 its deepest feeling and its lightest grace 
 unuttered, if it had not been for the art 
 which, through endless labour, widest sym- 
 pathy, and sternest purpose, gave him the 
 power to tell his secret so that all can un- 
 derstand. These are the two conditions of 
 art: that a man should have something in 
 him that is worth telling and making plain ; 
 and after that that he should spare no 
 trouble, despise no criticism, and yet be 
 disheartened by no rebuke, from saying the 
 thoughts of his heart as calmly, as clearly, 
 and as expressively as he can. 
 
 THE END
 
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